Abstract
This chapter reveals how Orientalism harmonizes the methodological conflicts that I trace throughout Said’s career so as to embody ‘the authority of literary criticism’—an understanding of literary criticism as political intervention. First, I discuss how through a series of theoretical gestures Said inhabits the position of the oppositional humanistic intellectual. Then, I gradually elaborate a threefold definition of Orientalism as (1) a discourse articulating a nexus of power/knowledge, (2) a phenomenon of perception, and (3) as the product of hegemony. Finally, I examine how Said grafts Foucault’s work on discourse to Antonio Gramsci’s ideas of power and agency in order to elaborate a theory of resistance in which intellectuals face the choice to either perpetuate Orientalism’s injustice or change society for the better.
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Notes
- 1.
For a discussion of the formative influence of Orientalism on the field of human geography, see Michael Frank’s “Imaginative Geography as a Travelling Concept” (2009). Frank discusses the importance of Bachelard in and on the method of Orientalism in order to argue that Said’s method is much closer to Bachelard’s than it is to Foucault’s (2009, 71). While Bachelard’s poetics of space does indeed serve as a way for Said to comprehend and illustrate Orientalism, attributing more theoretical weight to Bachelard than to Foucault distorts Said’s argument all too much.
- 2.
The imbalance of power is a condition of possibility not just for the production of Orientalist knowledge, but of knowledge in general. As Sara Mills makes clear in her introduction to the works of Foucault, the institutionalized imbalance between men and women in Western societies results in more studies about women; similarly, the economical imbalance between the working class and the middle class, results in more studies about the former than the latter; more about homosexuality than heterosexuality; and more about ethnic minorities than majorities (2003, 69). It is therefore fair to say “that the academic study within the human sciences has focused on those who are marginalised” (Mills 2003, 69).
- 3.
An earlier version of this argument which also discusses the influence of Gramsci on Orientalism will be published as “Resisting Orientalism: Foucault and Gramsci in Counterpoint” in Revisiting Gramsci’s Laboratory: History, Politics and Philosophy in the ‘Prison Notebooks’, eds. Franscesca Antonini, Aaron Bernstein, Lorenzo Fusaro and Robert Jackson (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).
- 4.
The work of Timothy Brennan is exemplary of this. Though he is one of the few critics to read Orientalism in relation to separate works both before and after its publication, producing some of the most poignant and thought-provoking criticism of Said’s Marxist affinities, his argument that “Orientalism is not Foucauldian” (Brennan 2006, 102) and that all of the book’s methodological weight should be attributed to such Marxist thinkers, rests too much on reading Said against the grain.
- 5.
Clifford’s criticism boils down to this: Said’s analyses undermine themselves because they are too humanist and hence not Foucaultian enough—a critique which has often been voiced by other critics (see Hart 2000, 74).
- 6.
Four years later, Aijaz Ahmad made the same remark about Said’s ambivalences about antihumanism and, hence, humanism in Orientalism. Most of it comes down to what Ahmad considers to be an “impossible reconciliation between that humanism and Foucault’s discourse theory” (1992, 164).
- 7.
Ahmad rightly points out that Said has difficulties trying to fit these complex close readings in the unidirectional ‘Orientalist’ mode (1992, 185–186). While this leads him to conclude that this is an inadvertent failure of Said’s method, my analysis demonstrates that this is precisely the point of such reading. What they emphasize is not only the complexity and variety of Orientalism as a discourse consisting of an innumerable collection of texts, but also the manner in which the individual field of play or direction of such texts does not always converge with the general sense of direction of Orientalism as a discourse. This divergence precisely makes resistance to Orientalism possible.
- 8.
Sartre polemically called Foucault’s air of neutrality and his precedence of structures over existence the final bulwark of the bourgeoisie against Marxism (1966). Though distinctly less sympathetic toward Marxism as a movement, Said seems to share Sartre’s argument of passivity.
- 9.
Again, the similarities between Said and Sartre are striking. In the second chapter of Qu’est-ce que la littérature? Sartre holds a sweeping plea for engaged literature, arguing that “[o]n n’écrit pas pour des esclaves. L’art de la prose est solidaire du seul régime où la prose garde un sens: la démocratie” (1948, 71–72). According to Sartre, one cannot write a good novel about antisemitism, fascism, or colonialism that purposefully thinks with the oppressing class, against the oppressed (1948, 70). I will not comment on whether this is true, but Sartre’s argument as an existential Marxist is that every author, every reader, every individual has the ethical duty to identify with the freedom of others while doing everything in their power to combat oppressing injustice.
- 10.
Brennan has recently argued that Said’s use of discourse differs from Foucault’s in that the former’s “does not preclude the idea of guilty agents of power, people with agendas and privileged interests, constituencies of active belief and policy, or the basic injustice of the operation that we should oppose on the grounds of human dignity” (2013, 18–19).
- 11.
Gramsci employs this aphorism to argue that even the slightest knowledge of the ensemble of relations—both genetically in the movement of their formation and synchronically at a given period as a system—leads to a better understanding of one’s own environment and subjectivity. This understanding is a source of agency for individuals because it is the basis to modify this ensemble of relations and thus one’s subjectivity. In this way an individual is able to shape power (Gramsci 1971, 352–353). Gramsci’s notions of knowledge and power differ from Foucault’s in that Gramsci believes man to be the subject of knowledge and thus an agent or locus of power. Foucault, on the other hand, dispenses with these ideas and considers man to be the object of knowledge that is produced by impersonal, diffuse, and abstract relations of power (1975, 32). Being conscious of one’s subjectivity and the relations of power that produce this subjectivity—insofar as this would be even possible according to Foucault—is never enough to change them and does not generate agency for individuals (see Daldal 2014, 166–167).
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Vandeviver, N. (2019). Disorienting Vision. In: Edward Said and the Authority of Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27351-4_5
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