Said's Definitions of Orientalism + Foucault & "Discourse"

Orientalism & Imaginative Geography:

From Edward Said’s book, Orientalism (NY: Vintage, 1978):

Unlike the Americans, the French and British--less so the Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portugese, Italians, and Swiss--have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western Experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. . . .

Definition #1:

It will be clear to the reader...that by Orientalism I mean several things, all of them, in my opinion, interdependent. The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient--and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist--either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she says or does is Orientalism. . . .

Definition #2:

Related to this academic tradition, whose fortunes, transmigrations, specializations, and transmissions are in part the subject of this study, is a more general meaning for Orientalism. Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) the “occident.”   Thus a very large mass of writers, among who are poet, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, "mind," destiny, and so on. . . . the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient . . despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a "real" Orient. (1-3,5)

Definition/Elaboration #3:

“The interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative meanings of Orientalism is a constant one, and since the late eighteenth century there ahs been a considerable –perhaps even regulated – traffic between the two..  Here I come to the third meaning of orientalism… Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient--dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.

Orientalism  is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident."  Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, "mind," destiny, and so on. . . .  the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient . . . .  Despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a "real" Orient” (2-3).

·         For example, take a line from Rudyard Kipling’s “Ballad of East and West” a poem about India/the Orient in 1895: “East is East, West is West / And never the twain shall meet….” 

·         In short, orientalism stipulates that the East/Orient is essentially different from the West/Occident.  Different in psychology, politics, rationality/mind, etc.   Or just in “essence.”

·         Orientalism (orientalist knowledge) does not necessarily imply a negative attitude towards these differences and the “orientals”: they can even be admired and revered.  But the knowledge and effect of this positive evaluation can still be orientalist, dubious, racist and so on.

·         The basic paradox of Said’s argument: no real, actual Orient exists (only specific places/peoples/cultures) and yet the world becomes orientalized. The knowledge and idea of the orient and orientals – while full of stereotypes, generalizations, falsehoods and so on -- has real effects in the world.  It is both false or untrue in a sense (in terms of much of what it says) but it also counts as the truth.   The discourse of orientalism has material, real, worldly effects.

·         What’s the point?  One is that orientalism prepares the ground for and later rationalizes colonial or imperial rule and intervention.  The other is that “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against  the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.”

Latent and Manifest Orientalism

“The distinction I am making is really between an almost unconscious (and certainly an untouchable) positivity, which I shall call latent Orientalism, and the various stated views about Oriental society, languages, literatures, history, sociology, and so forth, which I shall call manifest Orientalism. Whatever change occurs in knowledge of the Orient is found almost exclusively in manifest Orientalism; the unanimity, stability, and durability of latent Orientalism are more or less constant. In the nineteenth-century writers I analyzed in Chapter Two, the differences in their ideas about the Orient can be characterized as exclusively manifest differences, differences in form and personal style, rarely in basic content. Every one of them kept intact the separateness of the Orient, its eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability its supine malleability; this is why every writer on the Orient, from Renan to Marx (ideologically speaking), or from the most rigorous scholars (Lane and Sacy) to the most powerful imaginations (Flaubert and Nerval), saw the Orient as a locale requiring Western attention, reconstruction, even redemption. The Orient existed as a place isolated from the mainstream of European progress in the sciences, arts, and commerce. Thus whatever good or bad values were imputed to the Orient appeared to be functions of some highly specialized Western interest in the Orient. This was the situation from about the 1870s on through the early part of the twentieth century-but let me give some examples that illustrate what I mean. “ [206]

One last quote from Said for now:

AN ETHICAL POINT:

“One ought again to remember that all cultures impose corrections on raw reality, changing it from free-floating objects into units of knowledge. The problem is not that conversion takes place. It is perfectly natural for the human mind to resist the assault on it of untreated strangeness; therefore cultures have always been inclined to impose complete transformations on other cultures, receiving these cultures not as they are but as, for the benefit of the receiver, as the way they ought to be. Yet the Orientalist makes it his work to be always converting the Orient from something into something else: he does this for himself, for the sake of his culture; in some cases for what he believes is the sake of the Oriental” (Orientalism, 67). 

Said used the term Orientalism in three interdependent senses: 1) Orientalism as an academic field (while we now have Middle Eastern or China Studies, the term Orientalism was once a similar institutional designation); 2) Orientalism as a style of thought based upon distinctions made between “the Orient” and “the Occident”; 3) Orientalism as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”  He limited much of his study to the Orient of Near East or Islam as dominated by the European West (especially England and France) from the beginning of the 19th century until the end of WWII. He adds, however, that after WWII the United States moved into a similar position of domination, in both the Near and Far East.

The epigraphs Said uses at the beginning of Orientalism are:

“They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.”  —Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

“The East is a career.”  —Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred

          * “Career” here means not just a job but something more like a vocation  for Disraeli.

DISCOURSE

That thing or system of ideas and beliefs and words (the forms of “knowledge”), that sets limits upon and yet produces what one person is able to think or say or do in a given situation.  It is what makes you think or produces what you say or think.  It uses you as much as you use it. 

1.       For Michel Foucault (the famous theorist of the term), a "discourse" is a body of thought and writing that is united by having a common object of study, a common methodology or way of speaking about that object/thing, and/or a set of common terms and ideas. The concept of discourse thus allows Foucault to talk about a wide variety of texts, from different countries and different historical periods and different disciplines and different genres and to relate or group them into a single entity. For example, the "discourse" on blindness would include writings by schools for the blind, writings by doctors who work with vision and blindness, novels with blind characters, and autobiographies of blind people, as well as writing about blindness from other disciplines—or form poetry, film, the government and so on. Most simply: “discourse” in this sense is about both what is said and written and  what is done in reference to a particular keyword like “madness” or “colonialism” or “the Orient” and the “occident” (the “West”). 

2.       Discourse is about the use of knowledge and  ideas, including their influence on people, as much as the actual content or meaning of such ideas.  Perhaps the main use or function of discourse is that it produces what we think about a given subject or issue, such as what being a “woman” or “man” (a person with a gender)  means. Or put another way, it both enables and limits or sets barriers to what can be said or thought (or even done). The term “subject position” refers to this effect: that a given discourse works upon a given subject ( person) to produce what he or she can think or do in a given situation. One’s subject or “speaking” position is crucial for Foucault. 

3.      One takes up such a position according to the discourse; it chooses us rather than the other way around.  Discourse is about power, or in other words power and knowledge are indissolubly linked. Foucault often used the following expression to convey this: “power/knowledge” or in his French “savoir/pouvoir.”[1]  The question of who gets authorized or “credentialized” to speak is as important as what is said or thought.  There are explicit and implicit “rules” and strategies for speaking or thinking that  we need to focus on and that make up a “discourse.”

[1] savoir Verb, transitive (a) to know; ~ faire to know how to do; faire ~ qch à qn to let sb know sth

(b) (Slang) va ~ pourquoi! go figure!

pouvoir Verb, transitive (a) to be able to; je peux, je puis (frm) I can; I may (frm), I can, I am allowed to; je pourrais I could, I might, I may; je pouvais I was able to, I could