Edward Said on Orientalism:
Knowledge as Power
Some Notes in Progress
By Dr. John C. McDowell
In his celebrated study Orientalism, Edward Said makes the striking statement:
the literary-cultural establishment as a whole has declared the serious study of imperialism and culture off-limits. For Orientalism begins one up directly against that question – that is, to realizing that political imperialism governs an entire field of study, imagination, and scholarly institutions – in such a way as to make its avoidance an intellectual and historical impossibility. Yet there will always remain the perennial escape mechanism of saying that a literary scholar, a philosopher, for example, are trained in literature and philosophy respectively, not in politics or ideological analysis. In other words, the specialist argument can work quite effectively to block the larger and, in my opinion, the more intellectually serious perspective.
This passage weaves a rich tapestry of suggestion and possibility, all the more important for the fact that Said challenges the exclusion of certain potentially disruptive voices in the conversation. Orientalism, he maintains, is a discourse freighted with unacknowledged assumptions, assumptions that are culturally specific (belonging to the descriptions made by the western European imperial powers of the C19th and early C20th), that are imperialist (imposing a descriptive vision upon others, albeit in the main it is countenanced by the latter rather than violently imposed upon them, a program of ideological pacification that largely accounts for its durability), that derive from and subsequently enhance a positional privileging (the European imperial powers ‘civilise’ ‘primitive’ or under-developed regions), that are naturalised and therefore exist in a state of denial with regard to the constructed nature of these assumptions (naturalising ideologies, Terry Eagleton acknowledges, can admit only that ideology is something other people have), that reinforce compartmentalisation and therefore resist possibilities of genuine cultural and social exchange, and that are practically determinative (creative of certain possibilities for the shape of policy-making). This is a fruitful ideology not only in that it produces new sets of possibilities for acting, but also reinforces itself by producing an exclusive way for thinking. So Said declares that
Orientalism’s power and effectiveness … everywhere remind the reader that henceforth in order to get at the Orient he must pass through the learned grids and codes provided by the Orientalist. Not only is the Orient accommodated to the moral exigencies of Western Christianity; it is also circumscribed by a series of attitudes and judgments that send the Western mind, not first to Oriental sources for correction and verification, but rather to other Orientalist sources for correction and verification, but rather to other Orientalist works. … For the Orient (‘out there’ towards the East) is corrected, even penalized, for lying outside the boundaries of European society, ‘our’ world; the Orient is thus Orientalized, a process that not only marks the Orients as the province of the Orientalist but also forces the uninitiated Western reader to accept Orientalist codifications (like d’Herbelot’s alphabetized Bibliothèque) as the true Orient. Truth, in short, becomes a function of learned judgment, not of the material itself, which in time seems to owe even its existence to the Orientalist.
Furthermore, defining the good and its flourishing for the subjugated culture lies not in its own hands. Lord Cromer, Britain’s colonial governor of Egypt, gives expression to this perspective in the early twentieth century:
[T]he first question is to consider what these people … themselves think is best in their own interests …. But it is essential that each special issue should be decided mainly with reference to what, by the light of Western knowledge and experience tempered by local considerations, we conscientiously think is best for the subject race, without any real or supposed advantage which may accrue to England as a nation, or – as is more frequently the case – to the special interests represented by some one or more influential classes of Englishmen.
‘Our’ rule is for ‘their’ betterment. This is displayed in Arthur James Balfour’s House of Commons’ speech of 13th June 1910:
I think that experience show that they [the Egyptians] have got under it far better government [the imperial British] than in the whole history of the world they ever had before, and which not only is a benefit to them, but is undoubtedly a benefit to the whole of the civilised West. … We are in Egypt not merely for the sake of the Egyptians, though we are there for their sake; we are there also for the sake of Europe at large.
Balfour speaks then "of all the loss of which we have relieved the population and … all the benefits which we have given to them", and of Britain as exporting "our very best to these countries."
While far from seeking to create possibilities of exoneration for those involved "with this rather sordid experience of imperialism", what this nevertheless amounts to for Said is an account of modern European imperialism that cannot be susceptible to any easy demonisation through a "politics of blame". There is both the complicity of the subjugated in the imperialistic ideology and frequently the recognisable good intentions of the imperialists. As he argues elsewhere, modern empires
are systematic enterprises, constantly reinvested. They’re not simply arriving in a country, looting it and then leaving when the loot is exhausted. And modern empire requires, as Conrad said, an idea of service, an idea of sacrifice, an idea of redemption. Out of this you get these great, massively reinforced notions of, for example, in the case of France, the ‘mission civilisatrice.’ That we’re not there to benefit ourselves, we’re there for the sake of the natives … that these territories and peoples who beseech domination from us and that … without the English India [for instance] would fall into ruin.
There is a very real sense, then, in which this form of imperialism not only insidiously affects and ‘creates’ those who are subjugated by it, but also manufactures the very people who serve it. Reflecting on the Orientalism of Joseph Conrad, Said observes that "in the end it was a form of universal corruption", a dangerous temptation to be employed of oneself or others. This entails, Said argues, that "Orientalism is – and does not simply represent – a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world." Language itself is a highly organised and encoded system, and re-presents what is commonly circulated as ‘truth’, but truth as encoded and represented. Thus "Orientalism responded more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object, which was also produced by the West." In other words, while this ideology in some senses have a certain broad coherence with features of the world it purports to describe, it says significantly more about the world-views of its advocates. The world of the ‘Orient’ itself is largely rendered mute and thereby unable to resist or surprise the projects, images or mere descriptions devised for it. Abdel Malek annonces that
On the level of the thematic, [the Orientalists] adopt an essentialist conception of the countries, nations and peoples of the Orient under study, a conception which expresses itself through a characterized ethnist typology … and will soon proceed with it towards racism. … One sees how much, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the hegemonism of possessing minorities, unveiled by Marx and Engels, and the anthropcentrism dismantled by Freud are accompanied by eurocentrism in the area of human and social sciences, and more particularly in those in direct relationship with non-European peoples.
Listening to Strangers
Developing such a critical perspective on all this is a feat made possible for Said by serious attention to particularity – to the particularity of those described by this discourse of Orientalism and those who do the describing. In particular, Said is attempting to open time for listening to a multiplicity of previously silenced voices, voices drowned out by the controlling masternarrative. This movement of giving a certain sight to those "blind to other histories" in itself, then, is a form of resistance. Consequently, resisting the discursive hegemony becomes, then, it should be added, a morally significant matter that is shaped by the construction of alternative visions or ways of telling the story that more comprehensively incorporate and retain the distinctiveness of these voices. Incorporating these voices into the dominating masternarrative is an analysis characterised by a certain exteriority to what it describes.
Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West. … [And this is] a highly artificial enactment of what a non-Oriental has made into a symbol for the whole Orient. … The exteriority of the representation is always governed by some version of the truism that if the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and faute de mieux, for the poor Orient.
Consequently, the subverting morality of witness is a responsibility to open up the conversation in a way that resists the hegemony of monologue (and indeed even ‘dialogue’, according to John Milbank). And it does so not for its own sake, as if suspicion is to give way to cynicism, but for the sake of better integration.
What does need to be remembered is that the narratives of emancipation and enlightenment in their strongest form were also narratives of integration not separation, the stories of people who had been excluded from the main group but who were now fighting for a place in it. And if the old and habitual ideas of the min group were not flexible or generous enough to admit new groups, then these ideas need changing – a far better thing to do than reject the emerging groups.
Moreover, as the initial lengthy citation from Said declares, subverting this hegemony imposed and adopted is a task broader than what is made possible in the agencies of politically-trained and ideology-analysts. It is of a piece with the responsibilities to tell well the stories of our lives and those of others who claim to speak in our place, that the contemporary proliferation of specialisms cannot release the so-called amateur from responsibility to probe, interrogate and imagine matters differently. This claim can be broken own into the following two broad claims: in the first place, the matter is much too ethically important to be left to specialists, and thus cannot properly be dealt with at the rather thin and distorting hermetic level of the ‘history of ideas’; and in the second place, even those identified as specialists are not free from the formative operation of special ‘interests’. It is worth quoting Said again at some length on this:
[T]he determining impingement on most knowledge produced in the contemporary United States … is that it be nonpolitical, that is, scholarly, academic, impartial, above partisan or small-minded doctrinal belief. One can have no quarrel with such an ambition in theory, perhaps, but in practice the reality is much more problematic. No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a member of a society. These continue to bear on what he does professionally, even though naturally enough his research and his fruits do attempt to reach a level of relative freedom from the inhibitions and the restrictions of brute, everyday reality. For there is no such a thing as knowledge that is less, rather than more, partial than the individual (with his entangling and distracting life circumstances) who produces it. Yet this knowledge is not therefore automatically nonpolitical. … What I am interested in doing now is suggesting how the general liberal consensus that ‘true’ knowledge is fundamentally nonpolitical (and conversely, that overtly political knowledge is not ‘true’ knowledge) obscures the highly if obscurely organized political circumstances obtaining when knowledge is produced. … For if it is true that no production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim its author’s involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances, then it must also be true that for a European or American studying the Orient there can be no disclaiming the main circumstances of his actuality: that he comes up against the Orient as a European or American first, as an individual second. And to be a European or American in such a situation is by no means an inert fact. It meant and means being aware, however dimly, that one belongs to a power with definite interests in the Orient, and more important, that one belongs to a part of the earth with a definite history of involvement in the Orient almost since the time of Homer.