At the time of its publication in 1979, Edward Said’s Orientalism was primarily intended as a cultural and literary critique. The relevance of the term, however, has extended beyond that and relatively concentrated around its political connotations, which was not the primary subject of the publication. The aim of this essay therefore is to articulate the infiltration of Orientalism in the realm of politics, with a subject focus on events.
By Jiayuan Wang
At the time of its publication in 1979, Edward Said’s Orientalism was primarily intended as a cultural and literary critique. The relevance of the term, however, has extended beyond that and relatively concentrated around its political connotations, which was not the primary subject of the publication. The aim of this essay therefore is to articulate the infiltration of Orientalism in the realm of politics, with a subject focus on events. Its main arguments are as follows: first of all that the politicised form of Orientalism in the foreign policy of the British empire and the United States towards the Middle East is derived from but different than the first-level orientalism presented by Said and requires further articulation of its working. In this process of mutation, a different form of power came to buttress the Orientalist narrative, and more moral and political paradigms come into play.
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This essay is
structured in three parts: The first part introduces and explains the main
claims of Said’s original theory of Orientalism. The second part builds on this
to develop a politicised form of Orientalism, which has significantly
contributed to policies, dilemmas and conflicts in Middle Eastern politics. I
examine the arguments of Zionism in the founding of the State of Israel
stipulated by the Balfour Declaration, the Bush doctrine on the War on Terror
following the events of 9/11, and also more generally academic literature
pertaining to a certain “clash of civilisation” argument.
One main
argument I am making here is that the Orientalist mentality tout court does not
constitute a moral or political malaise, and the critics who has spotted an
equal degree of so-called “Occidentalism” in Eastern practices certainly have a
point; but it is rather the second-order imperialist self-justification and
appropriation of such mindset that is problematic and politically disastrous.
And it is this difference that constitutes the most remarkable distinction
between Orientalism and many other forms of largely harmless “culturalisms”,
and shows that Orientalism cannot be reduced to an epistemic misunderstanding
but must be recognised as eventually a rhetoric weapon that induces conflicts
between the West and the Orient it depicts, and thus one of the
self-perpetuating mechanisms of imperialism in the 21st century.
Orientalism
in Exposition
In Said’s own
words, to speak of Orientalism is to speak mainly of “a British and French
cultural enterprise”, and thus necessiates unexcusably in large parts an
evaluation of the traces it has left in a vast bibliography of literature and
art in the Western tradition. But the task of investigation does not stop
there: Said’s thoughts in “Orientalism” is also, as he himself acknowledges,
greatly indebted to Foucault’s theory of knowledge and power and in continuity
with a grand tradition of structuralist narratives that most prominently
include post-colonialism and feminism. This means that “Orientalism” also
concerns itself with the exposition of a theory of “Orientalisation”, which is
the approach that has crafted the phenomenon. There are some key charateristics
that define the Orientalist approach:
The Orient is
first of all conceived as a passive construct. This passiveness is not only a
property on the “Oriental”, but manifests in the way it is known to the
external world. The Oriental object always displays a kind of “inertia”, which
is an inability of self-representation: Flaubert’s Egyption courtesan “never
spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history”,
and instead, “He spoke for and represented her. (Said 1979, p. 14). This
property recurs in Marx’s remarks in “the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte”: “Sie können sich nicht vertreten, sie müssen vertreten werden”
(Said 1979, p. 29). The representation of the Oriental is therefore always
premised on “exterioty”, its content observed from an external point of view,
laid bare by an external narrative which perpetually usurpes that of its own.
The other side of this passivity there is the ultimately self-regarding nature
of Orientalist narrative: “Orientalism responded more to the culture that
produced it than to its putative object” (Said 1979, p. 30).
The act of
“Orientalisation” is essentially an act of “othering”, an act of metaphysical
segragation that constructs intellectual and moral differences between the
peoples of the “Orient” and the “Occident”. But the Orient is not only part of
aesthetic fantasy but subject to the relations of power and dominance. Said
emphasises the political nature of such an act: “One ought never to assume that
the structure of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or myths
which were the truth about them to be told, would simply blow away” (Said 1979,
p. 14). In other words, Orientalism is more than a system of representation
clouded by epistemic misjudgments, but a self-conscious enterprise with
remarkable consistency and durability. Orientalist knowledge belongs to the
category of political knowledge that is infiltrated by mechanisms of power.
Power, here, is be understood in its Foucauldian definition: Power “is
everywhere” and “comes from everywhere”, it is “neither structure nor agency”
but a kind of ‘regime of truth’ that penetrates society (Foucault 1998, p. 63).
The resilience of the Orientalist enterprise could be explained by the power of
culture hegemony: In the end, “it is hegemony, or rather the result of cultural
hegemony at work, that gives Orientalism the durability and the strength I have
been speaking about so far” (Said 1979, p. 15).
The third
theme in Orientalism is to do with civilisation. The imagination of the Orient,
as a separate, distinct civilisation, has been marked by the West’s own
Auseinandersetzung with the concept. The traits that are deemed marks of the
civilised man are excluded from the Oriental races: The Oriental’s reasoning is
“of the most slipshod description”, his mind “just like the picturesque
streets” of the Orient, is “emminently wanting in symmetry” (Said 1979, p. 46).
In this description, it is because the concept of civilisation in Western
philosophy has been so indispensibly associated with the development of human
rationality, that this quality is deprived from his Oriental counterpart, who
presumably lives on the other side of civilisation. The Orient also sometimes
reflects the angsts of the bourgeois society in the distantiation of the
innocent and primitive state of existence, and in this depiction the
representation of the Orient is not always derogatory. In French Orientalism in
particular, for example in Le Bain Turc by Ingres, the Orient world is
surreally caricatured as almost a paradis perdu with a highly aestheticised and
eroticised state of life. This shows that although the Orientalisation of the
Orient is always distorted, it is not necessarily mal-intentioned.
Orientalism
Politicised
In the
Introduction to “Orientalism” Edward Said makes the following clarification:
“Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected
passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; not is it a large and
diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and
expressive of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to hold down the
“Oriental” world- it is rather a distibution of geopolitical awareness into
aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical and philological
texts.” I will not contend this observation about the scale and nature of
Orientalism, but will instead argue that this also reflects one of the
principle weaknesses about the form of Orientalism that Said developed. Said
himself acknowledges a mutation in the form of Orientalism in 20th Century
history: There has been a “British and French Orientalism”, the rise of “an
explicitly colonial-minded imperialism”, and at last an “American Orientalism
after the Second World War”, whose connections Said set out to “elucidate” (Said
1979, p. 26).
However,
subsequently, Said’s analysis of Orientalism in history and political practices
started out from and remained all the way down, through and through an analysis
of texts. Said’s effort devoted itself principally to a project of discourse
analysis, breaking down statements from prominent figures in imperial history
and political thought, but the scope and technique of this method remain
bounded within the realm of literary analysis and is lacking to constitute a
theory in political science. Malcolm Kerr made the following comment about the
book: “This book reminds me of the television program “Athletes in Action,” in
which professional football players compete in swimming, and so forth… In
charging the entire tradition of European and American Oriental studies with
the sins of reductionism and caricature, he commits precisely the same error”
(Kerr 1980, p. 544). Kerr’s comments are certainly harsh, but they have a point
in the observation of the inflexibility of Said’s methodology when navigating
in between the fields of literary criticism and political analysis.
Therefore, I
now attempt to consolidate this form of Orientalism by re-relating the theory
to political events and replenishing it with contemporary details.
One question
Said asked in the introduction to “Orientalism” is “whether discussions of
literature or of classical philology are fraught with-or have unmediated
political significance”. To imagine that a simple causal relation exists
between philological and political developments is inpractical, but
developments in the Middle Eastern policies of Western powers certainly have
shown continuity with the precedent forms of Orientalism found in European
literature and philology.
The Logic
of Zionism
The most
outstanding nature of colonialism is not about the exploration and
appropriation of resources in the economic interest of the coloniser, but the
construction of a political space dictated by eurocentric political agendas and
moral paradigms. The root of the Israeli-Palestine conflict traces to the
repatriation of Jews from their European residences to a Jewish state
constructed on Palestinian territories. The founding of the State of Israel,
obviously represented a superficial interest in the livelihood of the Jewish
population, but at its bottom was an episode triggered by events in the history
of Europe, namely the massacre and persecution of Jews on a historic scale, and
was most urgently a solution to a European dilemma. The Balfour Declaration of
1947 was motivated by two key agendas in British politics: first is the
settlement of a large number of stateless Jews in on a territory that does not
interfere with mainland Europe, and the second the existence of a regime that
is sympathetic to Western Europe in the Middle Eastern space. This way, rather
parodoxically, Zionism, which is an argument situated in Jewish history came
from an entirely British political motivation.
Zionism, then,
signifies the spillover of European history onto parallel “Oriental” history,
where the Middle East was thrust into a causal chain of political events that
do not have their origin in the Middle East. In context, it signifies a
unilateral stipulation that assumes on the Palestinian people for a share of
burden for the vindication of the crimes of European nations, that has been and
can only be rationalised by an eurocentric value mechanism that assymmetrifies
sovereignty of respective political spaces in Europe and the Middle East.
From an
Orientalist point of view, the Orient is not represented as the way it is, but
rather in relation to the Occident. The Orient is otherwise incomprehensible,
and irrelevant, unless it is defined by a set of properties that have their
roots on the anatomy of the “Occident”. In this case, Zionism views the potential
territory which was to become the State of Israel not as a neutral land that
was in fact at the time lawfully inhabited by a majority of Palestinian Arabs,
but primarily as a section of British Empire that was potentially appropriable,
reconstructible with respect to the British agenda. The territory was termed
“the Land of Israel” – defined solely in relation to the concept “Israel”, thus
its usefulness to the political demands of European nations at the time of
repatriating a large number of stateless Jews. The Zionist argument is thus,
distinctly Orientalist, in the sense that it involves a narrative where
European events and interests ubiquitously occupy the first person point of
view, and the relational meaning of the Middle Eastern political space came to
precede its immediate historical reality.
War on
Terror
My second
subject will be US foreign policy following the events of Semptember 11. My
argument here is that the War on Terror campaign represents both a discourse
continuum with the long-standing cultural enterprise of Orientalism and a new
form of political appropriation of it.
The War on
Terror campaign involved the dichotomisation of the entire Western Wertekanon
on an unprecedented scale. “The West”, which is in itself part of the
Orientalist construct, is now seen not only as to embody the values of liberty,
rationality, enlightenment, and the question of authority, but has gone further
to own these values: A society is “either against us or with us”, in other
words, they would have to be “with us” in order to share these traits. In my
opinion, this mutation is significant: prior to it Orientalism stayed on the
level of a system of representation with self-sustained forces of bias; but now
Orientalism becomes not just a manifestation of imperialism but its instrument,
and in this mutation, Orientalism is politicised. The politicisation of
Orientalism represents the evolution of a paragidm, and the recoating of it
with new contingencies: in this case, the geographical space and moral caricature
of the Orient have both been altered: Although some suppositions on the
Oriental character are still consistent with the classical stereotypes of
inertia, staticity, and backwardness, the former assumption of irrationality
has been replaced by the image of “the axis of Evil”, inability of calculation
and organisation replaced by allegedly a well-formed strategy to destroy the
Western civilisation and its freedoms.
If, in its
first degree, Orientalism is merely a phenomenon found in discourses in the
Western tradition, “a distribution of geopolitical awareness” into a variety of
literary and social scientific texts, then in its politicised form it becomes
the projector of such a distribution, a configurative mechanism itself. This
form of Orientalism is distinctly political because it allows the targeting,
antagonising, and alienating of the Orient based on its distorted rhetoric
representations, or rather misrepresentations. In Bush’s address to Congress on
20th of September, 2001, a typically Orientalist narrative was employed: “Al
Qaeda is to terror what the Mafia is to crime. But its goal is not making
money, its goal is remaking the world and imposing its radical beliefs on
people everywhere” (Bush 2001). The concept of Al-Qaeda has been construed out
of externally imposed normative judgments from the side of the US government,
and its own origins, rationales and motivations irrelevant. Bush went further
on to say: “They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of
speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other” (Bush
2001). Here, Orientalism is but an instrument in projecting political
antagonism to the effect of justifying a declaration of war.
One absurdity
that emerges in the War on Terror campaign is that while what it tries to
establish was a more certain than ever association between the “civilised”
values of rationality, question of authority, freedom of speech, diversity of
views and so on with US political culture, at the same time this association
itself is however taken for granted, is not questioned, is often propagated and
believed without ground, and this confidence has grown more and more in a
political culture of irrationality, ignorance, and xenophobia that is exactly
contrary to the enlightened self-caricature that it fosters. The politicisation
of Orientalism here involves at the same time a loss of consistency and a
radicalisation of its underlying political will to hegemony.
Linguistic
Imperialism
In my view the
form of politicsed Orientalism in US politics is part of a larger movement that
does not solely concern politicians but the broader academic sphere of
political science especially on the subject of development. The Modernisation
theory of development, which has its roots in inherently racist social
evolutionary theories and the Cold War campaign of polarising East and West
stereotypes, has found its new relevance with a number of scholars in recent
years. The gist of the modernisation theory of development is this: that
modernisation impacts not only on an economical and technological, but also on
an anthropological level, involving reorientation of values and affinities.
Thus these values and affinities themselves become a benchmark for the
demarcation between modernity and the unmodernised, between civilisation and
the uncivilised, and it becomes a requirement to instantiate a certain set of
values to modernise.
Lewis for
example in “the Clash of Civilisations” wrote: “Islamic fundamentalism has
given an aim and a form to the otherwise aimless and formless resentment and
anger of the Muslim masses at the forces which have devalued their traditional
values and loyalties and, in the final analysis, robbed them of their beliefs,
their aspirations, their dignity, and to an increasing extent even their
livelihood.” For Lewis, this is no less than “a clash of civilizations – the
perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our
Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of
both” (Lewis 1990, p. 48). Lewis’s approach involves the familiar act of the
assignment of traits according to an adversary framework that lies in the core
of Orientalism, and which is staggeringly mirrored in Bush’s “War on Terror”
address, where crude generalisation in the direction of religious conflicts was
employed: “They (Islamic terrorists) want to drive Christians and Jews out of
vast regions of Asia and Africa”, and “not merely to end lives but to disrupt
and end a way of life” (Bush 2001).
The scale of
generalisation is magnified towards the end of the speech: “This is not,
however, just America’s fight. And what is at stake is not just America’s
freedom. This is the world’s fight. This is civilization’s fight. This is the
fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom”
(Bush 2001). The state of War declared by the US government is a state of
violence, but captured in the same state of violence, the “Oriental” front of
belligerence is barbarised, while America stays firmly on the side of
civilisation. The main difference between the two dicourses, is that while
Lewis still acknowledges the antagonised Orient as a force of civilisation
fighting for its survival in what he admits as an “worldwide expansion” of its
Western counterpart, Bush’s use of the term “civilisation” has already excluded
the Orient from its parameters, and this is the essence of what I call
“linguistic imperialism”. Linguistic imperialism is postulation of the
ownership of the values and political virtues that one champions, so that it
enables to universalise contingent geo-political interests by equalising them
with universal philosophial concepts and moral paradigms. Linguistic
imperialism is politicsed Orientalism in its articulated form, and is the most
sophiscated and powerful out of all techniques employed in the hitherto history
of Orientalism.
Conclusion
So far, I have
sought to present Orientalism in its varied forms from a cultural norm found in
classical Western arts and discourses to a politised instrument of rhetoric
found in US foreign policy. I have emphasised the aspect of power and
structuralism inherent in the Orientalist enterprise, and have tried to argue
that the nature of Orientalism has undergone change in the process of its politicisation,
most conspicuously demonstrated in the War on Terror campaign. In short, my
discovery is that the politicisation of Orientalism signifies the state of
power when it is recapitulated from its dispersed and pervasive forms to
reconstitute episodic and sovereign acts that overtly voices coercion and
domination. In this transformation, the magnitude and sophiscation of the
Orientalist enterprise has grown.
I will now
finish by considering one major critique of Said, which is that he often
ignores or even commits himself the errors of “Occidentalism” when making the
accusations of “Orientalism” on the Europeans and Americans, which is a mindset
of prejudice and groundless assumptions towards Westerners that is equally
present in the Muslim population. A Pew Research Center report in 2006 titled
“The Great Divide: How Muslims and Westerners View Each Other”, which surveyed
Muslims living in European has found a rather concerning level of anti-Western
prejudice among European Muslims: 69 percent of those in Britain for instance
attributed three or more negative traits such as “greedy,” “selfish,”
“arrogant” or “immoral” to Westerners (Pew Research Centre 2006).
My short
response to this is that even if there is indeed “Occidentalism” as such, there
is no politicised form of Occidentalism that is on a par with politicised
Orientalism: Occidentalism might have commited the same error of an irrational
focus on structure and the overlook of individual agency in the making of
culture, and has thus produced the same picture of unjustified negative
stereotypes of the imagined “Other”. Said’s call for humanism, therefore should
apply to both culturalisms. However, politicised Orientalism is not a weakness
of observation but a weapon employed for clear defined targets. It does not
only contribute to misunderstanding and conflicts, but is used to induce them.
In the case of Orientalism, the awareness of this very “cultural and political
fact” (Said 1979, p. 21), is not followed by a correction or even denial of its
bias, but rather in the light of self-righteousnessness and hegemonic will,
further propagation and aggravation of it. The politicisation of Orientalism is
thus, in the end, a hijack of reason from the the discourse which is originally
founded on the celebration of the West’s relative advancement in the
flourishing of enlightened human rationality.
This is a student essay, originally published at E-International Relation's Website on Nov 1, 2015
References
Bush, G. W.
(2001). “Address to a joint session of Congress and the American people”.
Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Vol. 25, pp. [xviii]-[xxv].
Foucault, M.
(1998) The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge. London, Penguin.
Kerr, M.
(1980). “Review: Edward W. Said, Orientalism”. International Journal of Middle
Eastern Studies, Vol. 12, No. 4, Dec. 1980.
Lewis, B.
(1990). “The Roots of Muslim Rage”. The Atlantic Monthly (September 1990), pp.
47-60
Pew Research
Centre (2006). The great divide: how Westerners and Muslims view each other.
Washington.
Said, E.
(1979). Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1994
Written by:
Jiayuan Wang
Written at: Universität zu Köln, Germany
Written for: Edward Lloyd
Date written: March 2015
