#35: Orientalism

[extemporally]

Orientalism, by Edward Said.

When I first started university I saw a copy of this painting in an art book. It's fascinating - the shadowy focal black spot towards the bottom left hand corner, the sandy white mosque in the distance, the masses of unknown, indistinct faces in the middle ground. I was tasked to write a short story about that, and I wanted to write about two young adults (groan) using that painting to foreground their own emotional entanglements, in the British Museum. Much, obviously, as Occidental has been using the Oriental for the projection of their own anxieties about culture, empire and othering for centuries. I don't think I succeeded very well.

To wit: this is a TREMENDOUS book, obviously, and one I probably need to own my own copy of. As I type this I still haven't quite got through the entire book, I'm about sixty pages from the end, but I've decided to take my notes now. The biggest stumbling-block I experienced when reading this book was my unfamiliarity with the Oriental/ism Edward Said discusses: that is, the Arab world, rather than East Asia, where I suspect I would be on firmer ground. (On a tangent: I thirst for the East Asian /"Far East" version of this postcolonial text, where we get 'East Asia in the Anglo-American imagination' but also a critique of how modern states in Asia have co-opted the terminology of Asian cultural values to justify repressive state decision-making. OH LOOK KP TAN THAT'S YOUR NEXT BOOK). What there is, though, is thoughtful and exciting:

The four elements I have described - expansion, historical confrontation, sympathy, classification - are the currents in eighteenth-century thoguht on whose presence the specific intellectual and institutional structures of modern Orientalism depend. Without them Orientalism, as we shall see presently, could not have occurred. Moreover, these elements had the effect of releasing the Orient generally, and Islam in particular, from the narrowly religious scuritny by which it had hitherto been examined (and judged) by the Christian West. In other words, modern Orientalism derives from secularising elements in eighteenth-century European culture. One, the expansion of the Orient further east geographically and further back temporally loosened, even dissolved, the Biblical framework considerably. Reference points were no longer Christianity and Judaism, with their fairly modest calendars and maps, but India, China, Japan and Sumer, Buddhism, Sanskrit, Zoroastrianism, and Manu.

Edward Said's premise is simple: 'Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient'. 'I doubt that it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India or Egypt in the later nineteenth century took an interest in those countries that was never far from their status in his mind as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact - and yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism.' He doesn't really shy away from the point, which he repeatedly drives home throughout his unfolding history of Orientalism. Unsurprisingly, a common criticism made of the book after it was published, was... the entire premise. 'Have we all just been wasting our time then??' The positivist attachment to knowledge as classical, objective, untouched by politics is obviously something that Said critiques, sometimes to devastingly snarky effect:

Another illustration dovetails neatly - perhaps too neatly - with Kissinger's analysis. In its February 1972 issue, the American Journal of Psychiatry printed an essay by Harold W. Glidden, who is identified as a retired member of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, United States Department of State; the essay's title ("The Arab World"), its tone, and its content argue a highly characteristic Orientalist bent of mind. Thus for his four-page, double-columned psychological portrait of over 100 million people, considered for a period of 1,300 years, Glidden cites exactly four sources for his views: a recent book on Tripoli, one issue of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, the periodical Oriente Moderno, and a book by Majid Khadduri, a well-known Orientalist. The article itself purports to uncover the "inner workings of Arab behavior", which from our point of view is "abberant" but for Arabs is "normal".

My tutor once very lucidly pointed out that all language is a generalisation, but I think we can all admit this takes the cake.

Edward Said has also been influenced by Foucault, so this brief mention was delightful:

In Sacy's pages on Orientalism - as elsewhere in his writing - he speaks of his own work as having uncovered, brought to light, rescued a vast amount of obscure matter. Why? In order to place it before the student. For like all his learned contemporaries Sacy considered a learned work a positive addition to an edifice that all scholars erected together. Knowledge was essentially the making visible of material, and the aim of a tableau was the construction of a sort of Benthamite Panopticon. Scholarly discipline was therefore a specific technology of power: it gained for its user (and his students) tools and knowledge which (if he was a historian) had hitherto been lost.

*\o/* THE PANOPTICON, YEAH. (Not in a creepy sense or anything, um.) A summary, for my own benefit, of what I took from Foucault: Bentham's Panopticon is an apt metaphor for how surveillance and power operate in modern society. But the power that derives from surveillance is not restricted to surveillance, instead shaping structures, ways of thought, etc on its own turn. Therefore, Sacy's Orientalist achievements purport to fall under the category of 'discovery' (pre-discovery presumably being tabula rasa) when really, instead of rendering lost wonders visible, his efforts have constructed material knowledge on their own terms, which are expressions of, and shape, power.

Here, also:

The governing verb is show, which here gives us to understand that the Arabs display themselves (willingly or unwillingly) to and for expert scrutiny. The number of attributes ascribed to them, by its crowded set of sheer appositions, causes "the Arabs" to acquire a sort of existential weightlessness; thereby, "the Arabs" are made to rejoin the very broad designation, common to modern anthropological thought, of "the childish primitive". What Macdonald also implies is that for such descriptions there is a peculiarly privileged position occupied by the Western Orientalist, whose representative function is precisely to show what needs to be seen. All specific history is capable of being seen thus at the apex, or the sensitive frontier, of Orient and Occident together. The complex dynamics of human life - what I have been calling history as narrative - becomes either irrelevant or trivial in comparison with the circular vision by which the details of Oriental life serve merely to reassert the Orientalness of the subject and the Westernness of the observer.

BOOM. This is a long review, and I've only touched on the smallest aspects of it all, esp. the way the Oriental is made to perform its role, or offer it up for Western inspection, mostly because the Foucault mention excited me. I don't think I've got all of it yet? I really need to own my own copy of it, for sure. "Long" review over. Short review: THIS BOOK ROCKED. I've got Culture and Imperialism waiting for me back at home in, funnily enough, that bastion of CULTURAL (and otherwise) IMPERIALISM known as Oxford, UK. Stay tuned!