Page 251 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 21: Edward Said’s Crisis [In Orientalism]: Detailed Study

However, what Said is interested in is the Orient as a "regular constellation of ideas". Acknowledging Notes
that "ideas, cultures and histories cannot seriously be understood without . . . their configurations
of power being studied", Said underscores that the discursive construction of the East is possible
because the relationship between Occident and Orient is an asymmetrical one, a "relationship of
power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony". The "discourse about the
Orient" (for example, how Flaubert "spoke for and represented" his Egyptian courtesan and, in
the process, "produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman" was enabled because
of a "pattern of relative strength between East and West" .
Drawing on the Foucauldian notion of 'discourse,' rather than the familiar Marxist distinction
between ideology or 'false consciousness' and scientific knowledge, Said stresses that Orientalism
should not be thought of as a "structure of lies or of myths which, were the truth about them to be
told, would simply blow away". Said's point is that Orientalism is not merely some "airy European
fantasy about the Orient" . It is, rather, a "system of knowledge about the Orient", a created body
of theory and practice in which . . . there has been a considerable material investment. Continued
investment made Orientalism . . . an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western
consciousness, just as that same investment multiplied . . . the statements proliferating out from
Orientalism into the general culture.
Said underscores Orientalism's "close ties to the enabling socio-economic and political institutions".
Said draws on Gramsci's distinction between civil and political society, the latter consisting in
state institutions (the army, police, the central bureaucracy, etc.) and the former in voluntary
affiliations like schools, families and unions. Culture, Said writes, is to be found operating within
civil society "where the influence of ideas, of institutions, and of other persons works not through
domination but by what Gramsci calls consent" . In any society, certain "cultural forms" and
"ideas" predominate over others: the "form of this cultural leadership is what Gramsci has identified
as hegemony".
Said stresses that the discursive construction of the Oriental serves a vital purpose: it subtends the
exclusionary process upon which European identity is predicated, that is, the "idea of European
identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures" . The
result is an "idea of Europe, a collective notion identifying 'us' Europeans as against all those non-
Europeans". Said is at pains to point out that discourse on the Orient must be understood in
relation to the "period of extraordinary European ascendancy from the late Renaissance to the
present": the scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader or the soldier was in, or thought
about the Orient because he could be there, or could think about it, with very little resistance on
the Orient's part. Under the general heading of knowledge of the Orient, and within the umbrella
of Western hegemony over the Orient during the period from the end of the eighteenth century,
there emerged a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for
reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological,
linguistic, racial and historical theses about mankind and the universe, for instances of economic
and sociological theories of development, revolution, cultural personality, national or religious
character. The 'Oriental world,' in short, 'emerged' out of the "unchallenged centrality" of a
"sovereign Western consciousness" . Significantly, these 'truths' were developed "according to a
detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions,
investments and projections".
Said wonders whether Orientalism should be equated with the "general group of ideas overriding
the mass of material . . . shot through with doctrines of European superiority, various kinds of
racism, imperialism and the like" or the "much more varied work of almost uncountable individual
writers, whom one would take up as individual instances of authors dealing with the Orient" .
These are "two alternatives, general and particular, are really two perspectives on the same material",
Said contends, which he intends to apply conjointly the mass of material under investigation,
avoiding the possibility of "distortion" by steering his way between the extremes of "too dogmatic
a generality" and "too positivistic a localised focus". In so doing, he believes, he avoids the

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