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EDWARD SAID ORIENTALISM: WESTERN REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ORIENT (1978)

"From Orientalism." Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory. Ed. Patrick Williams andLaura Chrisman. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester: Wheatsheaf, 1993. 132-149.

Said contends that the Orient, as much as the Occident, “is not an inert fact of nature" (132).It is, rather, an "idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery and vocabularythat has given it reality and presence for the West" (132). All this is not to say that theOrient is “essentially an idea, or creation with no corresponding reality” (132). However, whatSaid is interested in is the Orient as a “regular constellation of ideas” (133). Acknowledgingthat “ideas, cultures and histories cannot seriously be understood without . . . theirconfigurations of power being studied” (133), Said underscores that the discursiveconstruction of the East is possible because the relationship between Occident and Orient isan asymmetrical one, a "relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complexhegemony" (133). The “discourse about the Orient” (133) (for example, how Flaubert “spokefor and represented” [133] his Egyptian courtesan and, in the process, “produced a widelyinfluential model of the Oriental woman” [133]) was enabled because of a “pattern of relativestrength between East and West” (133).

Drawing on the Foucauldian notion of ‘discourse,’ rather than the familiar Marxistdistinction between ideology or ‘false consciousness’ and scientific knowledge, Said stressesthat Orientalism should not be thought of as a “structure of lies or of myths which, were thetruth about them to be told, would simply blow away” (133). Said’s point is that Orientalismis not merely some “airy European fantasy about the Orient” (133). It is, rather, a “systemof knowledge about the Orient” (133), a

created body of theory and practice in which . . . there has been a considerablematerial investment. Continued investment made Orientalism . . . an acceptedgrid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness, just as thatsame investment multiplied . . . the statements proliferating out fromOrientalism into the general culture. (133)

Said underscores Orientalism’s “close ties to the enabling socio-economic and politicalinstitutions” (133).

Said stresses that the discursive construction of the Oriental serves a vital purpose:it subtends the exclusionary process upon which European identity is predicated, that is, the"idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoplesand cultures" (133). The result is an "idea of Europe, a collective notion identifying 'us'Europeans as against all those non-Europeans" (134). The ‘Oriental world,’ in short, ‘emerged’out of the "unchallenged centrality" (134) of a "sovereign Western consciousness" (134).Significantly, these 'truths' were developed "according to a detailed logic governed not simplyby empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments and projections"(134).

Said is at pains to point out that discourse on the Orient must be understood in relationto the “period of extraordinary European ascendancy from the late Renaissance to thepresent” (134): the

scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader or the soldier was in, orthought about the Orient because he could be there, or could think about it,with very little resistance on the Orient’s part. Under the general heading ofknowledge of the Orient, and within the umbrella of Western hegemony overthe Orient during the period from the end of the eighteenth century, thereemerged a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the

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museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration inanthropological, biological, linguistic, racial and historical theses about mankindand the universe, for instances of economic and sociological theories ofdevelopment, revolution, cultural personality, national or religious character.(134)

In all this, Said draws on Gramsci’s distinction between civil and political society in which thelatter consists in state institutions (the army, police, the central bureaucracy, etc.) and theformer in voluntary affiliations like schools, families and unions. Culture, Said writes, is to befound operating within civil society “where the influence of ideas, of institutions, and of otherpersons works not through domination but by what Gramsci calls consent” (134). In anysociety, certain “cultural forms” (134) and “ideas” (134) predominate over others: the “formof this cultural leadership is what Gramsci has identified as hegemony” (134).

Said’s notion of Orientalism implies both the “general group of ideas overriding themass of material . . . shot through with doctrines of European superiority, various kinds ofracism, imperialism and the like” (135) and the particular works of “almost uncountableindividual writers” (135). Indeed, Said goes so far as to argue that no ‘knowledge’ is purelyobjective, disinterested, apolitical, value-free:

no one has ever devised a method for detaching a scholar from thecircumstances of his life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious orunconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mereactivity of being a member of society. (136)

Arguing that the “political societies” (137) of the imperial powers inevitably imparted to their“civil societies” (137) a “direct political infusion . . . where and whenever matters pertainingto their imperial interests abroad are concerned” (137), Said contends that the Britishcoloniser in the nineteenth century, for example, took an interest in British colonies “that wasnever far from their status in his mind as British colonies” (137). For Said, thus, the issue athand is determining the nature of the relationship between the “big dominating fact, as I havedescribed it” (137) and the “details of everyday life that govern the minute discipline of anovel or a scholarly text as each is being written” (137). The fact of imperialism, that is, theeconomic, political and military involvement of Europeans and, later, Americans in the Orientnecessarily shaped how seemingly apolitical institutions and individuals viewed the Orient.In short, like any discursive practice, Orientalism must be understood in relation to theimbalance of power, in this case, that which has existed between Europe and the rest of theworld for the last few centuries.

Said, however, rejects the notion that “‘big’ facts like imperial domination can beapplied mechanically and deterministically to such complex matters as culture and ideas”(137). Undoubtedly all discourse on the Orient was politically-motivated but, he contends,“it was the culture that created that interest, that acted dynamically along with brute political,economic and military rationales” (137). Orientalism is accordingly not a

mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture,scholarship or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts aboutthe Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious ‘Western’imperialist plot to hold down the ‘Oriental’ world. It is rather a distribution ofgeopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological,historical and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basicgeographic distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient andOccident) but also of a whole series of ‘interests’ which, by such means asscholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis,landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains;it is, rather than expresses a certain will or intention to understand, in some

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cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different(or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by nomeans in direct corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, butrather is produced and exists in uneven exchange with various kinds of power,shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial orimperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences likecomparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences),power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), powermoral (as with ideas about what ‘we’ do and what ‘they’ cannot do orunderstand as ‘we’ do). (137-8)

Said points out that most scholars would not deny that “texts exist in contexts” (138) andacknowledge the fact of “intertextuality, . . . the pressures of conventions, predecessors andrhetorical styles” (138). However, Said contends that most are unwilling to admit that“political, institutional and ideological constraints act in the same manner on the individualauthor” (138). In the same way that there is an “explicit connection ” (138) in classicphilosophers such as Locke “between their ‘philosophic’ doctrines and racial theory,justifications of slavery, or arguments for colonial exploitation” (138), nearly every nineteenthcentury (if not before) literary writer, he contends, “was extraordinarily well aware of the factof empire” (139). However, Said is at pains to argue that such political influences “wereproductive, not unilaterally inhibiting” (139) or restrictive. Said acknowledges that muchmaterialist criticism has been ‘vulgar’ (or “crudely iconoclastic” [139]) and has often failed tokeep up with the “enormous technical advances in detailed textual analysis” (139). Gesturingtowards the Marxist Base/superstructure model, he opines, too, that there has been littleserious effort to bridge the “gap between the superstructural and the base levels in textual,historical scholarship” (139). In the case of Orientalism, however, “political imperialismgoverns an entire field of study, imagination and scholarly institutions – in such a way as tomake its avoidance an intellectual and historical impossibility” (139).

It is in this light that Said views Orientalism as a “dynamic exchange betweenindividual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires – British,French, American” (139). From this point of view, the following question is the crucial onewhich continually presents itself to the Post-colonial critic in his or her study of colonialdiscourse: “How did philology, lexicography, history, biology, political and economic theory,novel-writing and lyric poetry come to the service of Orientalism’s broadly imperialist view ofthe world?” (140). In short, what sorts of “intellectual, aesthetic, scholarly and culturalenergies went into the making of an imperialist tradition like the Orientalist one?” (140). ForSaid, authors, both literary and non-literary, never operate in a vacuum. Indeed, the sameis true of both authors and critics (both are really interpreters). The crucial question for Saidis the “meaning of originality, of continuity, of individuality” (140) in the context which he hasdescribed above. Said’s basic premise is that “fields of learning, as much as the works of eventhe most eccentric artist, are constrained and acted upon by society, by cultural traditions,by worldly circumstance, and by . . . schools, libraries, and governments” (141). He refutesthe “mythology of creation” (141) which asserts that “artistic genius, an original talent, or apowerful intellect can leap beyond the confines of its own time and place in order to put beforethe world a new work” (141). The “work of predecessors, the institutional life of a scholarlyfield, the collective nature of any learned enterprise: these, to say nothing of economic andsocial circumstance, tend to diminish the effects of the individual scholar’s production” (141).Orientalism is, in brief, a “willed imaginative and geographic distinction made between Eastand West” (140). It is a “consensus” (141) which takes for granted “certain things, certaintypes of statement, certain types of work” (141). Orientalism, as a discursive practice, is a“cumulative and corporate” (141) enterprise closely linked to “traditional learning (the

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classics, the Bible, philology), public institutions (governments, trading companies,geographical societies, universities) and generically determined writing (travel books, booksof exploration, fantasy, exotic description)” (141). It is a "system of truths . . . in Nietzsche’ssense of the word" (142). It is a “school of interpretation whose material happens to be theOrient, its civilizations, peoples and localities” (142) whose seemingly “objective discoveries. . . are and always have been conditioned by the fact that its truths, like any truths deliveredby language, are embodied in language” (142). It is a “system of representations framed bya whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness,and later, Western Empire” (142), a “product of certain political forces and activities” (142).It is a “body of ideas, beliefs, clichés or learning about the East” (143). “As a culturalapparatus Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth and knowledge”(143). It is the deliberate "distillation of essential ideas about the Orient--its sensuality, itstendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardness--intoa separate and unchallenged coherence" (144) enshrouded in an appearance of objectivity.

Hence, Said makes a distinction between what he terms “manifest Orientalism” (144).(the “various stated views about Oriental society, languages, literatures, history, sociology,and so forth” [144] that were/are subject to change) and the more enduring and stable “latentOrientalism” (144)--an "unconscious (and untouchable) positivity" (144) about the Orientwhich served as a homogenising problematic or epistemological framework unifying variousOrientalist writers. Despite “manifest differences . . . in form and personal style” (144), therewas rarely any differences in their “basic content” (144): every one of these "kept intact theseparateness of the Orient, its eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, itsfeminine penetrability, its supine malleability" (144). The treatment of Orientals in this wayis analogous to that meted out to other “elements in Western society (delinquents, the insane,women, the poor) having in common an identity best described as lamentably alien" (145).