Orientalism

Said introduces the concept of textual attitude as a method of analyzing the power of the Orientalist lens in Western works about the Orient. The textual attitude of Orientalist projects refers to the level of authority with which the author writes about the Orient and the expertise granted to him by his Western audience. Said finds the automatic authority granted to Orientalist writing suspect. He writes, “There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority” and that it is, in fact:

formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces (20-21).

Thus, Said must critique not only the style and narrative devices of Orientalist works but also how works become canonized or achieve cultural status. By examining the textual attitude of Orientalist works, he identifies their influence on the page as well as in the historical and social circumstances surrounding the production of such knowledge.

As part of Said’s critique of textual attitude, he applies two methodological devices to his study: strategic location and formation. He describes strategic location as “the author’s position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he writes about” (20). This approach examines a text for the author’s bias, attitude, and investment in the Orient. It is coupled with strategic formation, which is a “way of analyzing the relationship between text and the way in which groups of texts, types of texts, even textual genres, acquire mass, density, and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large” (20). This method considers how the Orientalist imagination is propagated through social engagement with the text. It is especially invested in the power of the text’s material, persuasive influence, and the ways its ideas can accrue in the public sphere over time. Strategic location and formation are both essential methods for analyzing the textual attitude of Orientalist works as they challenge the naturalization of ideas and power imbued in Western projects.

Drawing from the psychoanalytic terms of latent and manifest content, Said applies their concepts and workings to Orientalism. Developed by the Austrian founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, latent and manifest content refer to, respectively, the unconscious and conscious ways of meaning-making in the human mind’s dream state. While manifest content or conscious thought reveals what is on the surface, latent or unconscious thought is always hidden or repressed from waking view. The latter is never apparent to the dreamer.

Applied to Orientalism, latency and manifestation refer to unconscious and conscious attitudes about the Orient that the West possesses. Latent Orientalism consists of Western ideas of dominance over the Orient, a sense of Eastern inferiority, and anxiety over the Orient’s threat to Western political stability. Meanwhile, manifest Orientalism represents the material and physical actions taken by Orientalists who are unaware of their unconscious imperatives. Manifest Orientalism is the production of knowledge about the Orient and the creation of administrative policies over the East.

“Latent and Manifest Orientalism” is the title of the first section of the third chapter of Orientalism. Said’s application of psychoanalytic theory to Orientalism in this section illustrates how Orientalist values remain unchanged over time, as notions of the Orient are always latent in the Western imagination.