Orientalism

“I use the notion of strategy simply to identify the problem every writer on the Orient has faced: how to get hold of it, how to approach it, how not to be defeated or overwhelmed by its sublimity, its scope, its awful dimensions.”

Said’s method of comparative textual analysis looks at the strategic formation and location of each of the texts he discusses. This approach provides a way for examining the texts that make up the complex reaches of Orientalism. By pointing to the historical and social circumstances surrounding the texts, Said reasons that one can better understand Orientalism’s full spectrum of impact.

“Thus all of Orientalism stands forth and away from the Orient: that Orientalism makes sense at all depends more on the West than on the Orient, and this sense is directly indebted to various Western techniques of representation that make the Orient visible, clear, [and] ‘there’ in discourse about it.”

Said argues that Orientalism is based on Western knowledge production about the Orient. This production of knowledge presumes that each of its works brings the West closer to understanding the Orient. Despite the geographical expansiveness and diversity of the Orient, this production of knowledge always strives to condense the space into the most legible and concise terms for the West.

“The choice of ‘Oriental’ was canonical; it had been employed by Chaucer and Mandeville, by Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, and Byron. It designated Asia or the East, geographically, morally, culturally. One could speak in Europe of an Oriental personality, an Oriental atmosphere, an Oriental tale, Oriental despotism, or an Oriental mode of production, and be understood.”

The influence of canonical literary works on the popularization of the term “Oriental” is significant. Canonization speaks to works that have been granted lasting cultural value, suggesting that Orientalism as an intellectual and political force had something to do with the appraisal of the listed writers above. Their literary imagination, which utilized the figure of the “Oriental,” coupled with their cultural influence, contributed to a specific idea of what constituted an Oriental type and the Orient at large.

“You may renounce—or monopolize—or share. Renouncing would have been to place the French across our road to India. Monopolizing would have been very near the risk of war. So we resolved to share.”

Said discusses the bind of imperialist activity for European powers. European countries had a choice to either renounce their engagements with the Orient, monopolize it, or share their territories with other Western forces. Said states that the European powers knew that the first two actions would weaken their national forces, but the third option would permit them to grow their influence while maintaining political stability between Western nations.

“Can one divide human reality, as indeed human reality seems to be genuinely divided, into clearly different cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even races, and survive the consequences humanly?”

In this rhetorical statement, Said questions the Orientalist mode of establishing a Binary Opposition Between Orient and Occident, with the latter prevailing over the former in cultural and political influence. He reasons that the desire to demarcate difference takes on a more drastic turn in Orientalism, which extends the idea of difference into intellectual and political projects that have worked to the detriment of non-Western countries.

“In other words, this universal practice of designating in one’s mind a familiar space which is ‘ours’ and an unfamiliar space beyond ‘ours’ which is ‘theirs’ is a way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary.”

Said critiques the Western mindset of distinguishing itself from the East. Using possessive pronouns in this statement, Said refers to how the West views the world’s geography in proprietary terms. However, he expresses that geographical difference is arbitrary. For instance, the Orient is a product of Western fictive imagination that drew a geographical boundary around the Middle East and Asia.

“What is thus conveyed by the Bibliothèque is an idea of Orientalism’s power and effectiveness, which 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.”

Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque oriental is one of the seminal French Orientalist works that Said analyzes in the book. Using Bibliothèque oriental as an example, Said argues that Orientalist texts trained Western audiences to examine the Orient through Orientalist terms. It familiarized the West with an Orientalist representation of the Orient, posing as an objective account of an authentic cultural space.

“The Orient, in short, existed as a set of values attached, not to its modern realities, but to a series of valorized contacts it had had with a distant European past.”

This passage speaks to The Political Ramifications of Cultural Production. For Orientalist thinkers and writers, the Orient represented the past. In the Western imagination, it could never modernize in the same way as the West. As such, the West projected much of its anxieties and desire onto the idea of a European past embodied by the Orient. The Orient became a way for Orientalist thinkers and writers to reconcile their country’s political pasts or reconfigure Western approaches to biblical genealogies.

“A text purporting to contain knowledge about something actual, and arising out of circumstances similar to the ones I have just described, is not easily dismissed. Expertise is attributed to it. The authority of academics, institutions, and governments can accrue to it, surrounding it with still greater prestige than its practical successes warrant. Most important, such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe.”

Said notes the importance of paying attention to Orientalist texts produced by formalized academic study. Such study, especially if supported by academic institutions and governmental structures, lends credibility to the work and permits the dissemination of its ideas through the West. Thus, the positions of these works matter especially when it comes to Orientalist ideas that portray the Orient through a permanent and flattening Western gaze.

“Yet—and here we must be very clear—Orientalism overrode the Orient. As a system of thought about the Orient, it always rose from the specifically human detail to the general transhuman one; an observation about a tenth-century Arab poet multiplied itself into a policy towards (and about) the Oriental mentality in Egypt, Iraq, or Arabia.”

Said states that the ideology of Orientalism is about much more than the geographical zones of the Orient itself. The Orient is as much about its physical territories as it is fashioned by Western imagination. The “human” to “transhuman” transformation that Said describes is his way of depicting how Orientalist writing about the Orient has the power to shape policy involving the space.

“The Orient is watched, since its almost (but never quite) offensive behavior issues out of a reservoir of infinite peculiarity; the European, whose sensibility tours the Orient, is a watcher, never involved, always detached, always ready for new examples of what the Description de l’Égypte called ‘bizarre jouissance.’ The Orient becomes a living tableau of queerness.”

In these statements, Said points to the odd pleasure that the West experiences through its observations of the Orient. The Orient remains a perpetually foreign and strange place to the West. To the Orientalist, this oddity is intriguing enough to pursue further observation. This Orientalist fascination with the Orient also relies on the idea that the East is a fixed place, a “living tableau” in which all the elements of the space await the West to fashion it.

“The scope of Orientalism exactly matched the scope of empire, and it was this absolute unanimity between the two that provoked the only crisis in the history of Western thought about and dealings with the Orient. And this crisis continues now.”

According to Said, Orientalism is intricately tied to imperialism. While Orientalism began before Western colonial intervention in the Orient, competition between European powers over the East produced the crisis that Said describes. This crisis is a sense of urgency shared between Western powers to produce knowledge about the Orient and use such knowledge to enforce policies that normalize Western control.

“The West is the actor, the Orient a passive reactor. The West is the spectator, the judge and jury, of every facet of Oriental behavior.”

Orientalism makes it so that the West and the Orient are always opposed. However, this difference also reflects a power differential in which the West always dominates the East. The West is an active agent while the Orient can only respond to the former’s actions. As such, the West possesses the power to determine what constitutes the East.

“Science gives speech to things; better yet, science brings out, causes to be pronounced, a potential speech within things. The special value of linguistics (as the new philology was then often called) is not that natural science resembles it, but rather that it treats words as natural, otherwise silent objects, which are made to give up their secrets.”

Said describes the rise of scientific methods through emerging fields of philology and anthropology in the 18th and 19th centuries. During this time, scientific observation was used to produce naturalized and seemingly objective ideas about the Orient. For these fields, the Orient was always a place that held certain truths only Western scientific observation could reveal.

“The Orient was overvalued for its pantheism, its spirituality, its stability, its longevity, its primitivity, and so forth […] A swing of the pendulum in one direction caused an equal and opposite swing back: the Orient was undervalued. Orientalism as a profession grew out of these opposites, of compensations and corrections based on inequality, ideas nourished by and nourishing similar ideas in the culture at large.”

While the overvaluation of Orientalism and its undervaluation may be considered opposite actions, Said argues that these two poles represent the spectrum of valuations that Orientalism embodies. The Orientalist thinker can overvalue the Orient by imbuing it with virtues and sentiments that are a projection of Western longing. They can also devalue the Orient by diminishing its social and cultural capabilities. In either instance, the Orient is positioned as unequal to and dependent on the West for definition.

“The Orientalist can imitate the Orient without the opposite being true. What he says about the Orient is therefore to be understood as description obtained in a one-way exchange: as they spoke and behaved, he observed and wrote down.”

Orientalism always frames a disproportionate relationship between the West and the Orient. It permits only the West to create the image of the Orient but does not allow the Orient to respond with its own representation of the West. Thus, the Orient exists only for the West as a place to be studied and written about; it does not have intellectual or political autonomy.

“On the one hand, Orientalism acquired the Orient as literally and as widely as possible; on the other, it domesticated this knowledge to the West, filtering it through regulatory codes, classifications, specimen cases, periodical reviews, dictionaries, grammars, commentaries, editions, translations, all of which together formed a simulacrum of the Orient and reproduced it materially in the West, for the West.”

While European powers went to great lengths to travel and acquire knowledge about the Orient, they reserved their findings for the West alone. Said believes that as the West was always the intended audience for Orientalists, the idea of the Orient was a simulation of Western imagination. The West relied on texts based on acquired information about the Orient to develop what they considered to be the real Orient.

“In the system of knowledge about the Orient, the Orient is less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone’s work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all these.”

The production of knowledge about the Orient superseded its geographical identity. Orientalist thinking was concerned with the idea of the Orient beyond its spatial specificity. It turned to various writings about the Orient to define the space, rendering the physical space itself useless for defining the Orient.

“What was important in the latter nineteenth century was not whether the West had penetrated and possessed the Orient, but rather how the British and French felt that they had done it.”

Throughout Orientalism, Said compares British and French Orientalist projects to show their respective investments in the region. While their projects differed and they exercised different approaches to knowledge production and policymaking, they also shared similar attitudes and assumptions about the Orient.

“My point is that the metamorphosis of [an] […] innocuous philological subspecialty into a capacity for managing political movements, administering colonies, making nearly apocalyptic statements representing the White Man’s difficult civilizing mission—all this is something at work within a purportedly liberal culture, one full of concern for its vaunted norms of catholicity, plurality, and open-mindedness.”

While Orientalism was originally conservative, its modern forms embraced a liberal perspective that favored humanistic qualities like “catholicity, plurality, and open-mindedness.” Using Rudyard Kipling’s figure of the White Man as an example, Said demonstrates how liberal Orientalist projects believed in the necessity of Western intervention in all the cultures of the world. The liberal approach to Orientalism presumed that the Orient lacked the capability of self-governance and that they relied upon the West for guidance. Kipling’s White Man was tasked with the burden of saving the racialized Orient from itself. While this perspective presented itself as sympathetic to the Orient, it supported a view that was no different from early Orientalism, which was that the East was always inferior to the West.

“The representations of Orientalism in European culture amount to what we can call a discursive consistency, one that has not only history but material (and institutional) presence to show for itself.”

While Orientalism has taken on different forms throughout time, it possesses what Said calls a “discursive consistency.” Despite the production of many Orientalist texts, these projects seem to propagate the same values. The West is always positioned as opposite to the East, and the former always dominates the latter. These values remain consistent in Orientalism throughout time.

“There are grants and other rewards, there are organizations, there are hierarchies, there are institutes, centers, faculties, departments, all devoted to legitimizing and maintaining the authority of a handful of basic, basically unchanging ideas about Islam, the Orient, and the Arabs.”

In present-day Orientalism, Said remarks upon the proliferation of diverse institutions and structures for the formalized study of the Orient. He argues that Orientalism is a way of thinking that never alters its values over time, and the formalization of Orientalist study merely reproduces the same ideas about Islam, the Orient, and Arabs as it did during antiquity. However, in Orientalism’s present-day forms, the structures have become more complex and sophisticated.

“What the Arab cannot achieve himself is to be found in the writing about him. The Orientalist is supremely certain of his potential, is not a pessimist, is able to define his position, his own and the Arab’s.”

In Orientalism, the Arab never speaks about his position in Western works about him. Orientalist projects always purport to speak on behalf of the Arab or Oriental subject. As these projects have achieved historical and canonical value over time, they possess a certain authority that Oriental people do not have access to.