Edward Said.

Segments from Orientalism.

 

1- Thesis:

My thesis is that the essential aspects of modern Orientalist theory and praxis (from which present day Orientalism derives) can be understood, not as a sudden access of objective knowledge about the orient, but as a set of structures inherited from the past, secularized, redisposed, and re-formed by such disciplines as philology, which in turn were naturalized, modernized, and laicized substitutes for (or versions of) Christian supernaturalism. In the form of new texts and ideas, the east was accommodated to these structures. Linguists and explorers like Jones and Anquetil were contributors to modern orientalism as a a field, a group of ideas, a discourse, is the work of a later generation than theirs. If we use the Napoleonic expedition (1798 – 1801) as a sort of first enabling experience for modern orientalism, we can consider its inaugural heroes – in Islamic studies, Sacy and Renan and Lane – to be rebuilders of the field, creators of a tradition, progenitors of the orientalist brotherhood. What Sacy, Renan and Lane did was to place Orientalism on a scientific and rational basis. This entailed not only their own exemplary work but also the creation of a vocabulary and ideas that could be used impersonally by anyone who wished to become an orientalist. Their inauguration of Orientalism was a considerable feat. It made possible a scientific terminology; it banished obscurity and instated a special form of illumination for the Orient; it legitimized a special kind of specifically coherent orientalist work; it put into cultural circulation a form of discursive currency by whose presence the Orient henceforth would be spoken for; above all, the work of the inaugurators carved out a field of study and a family of ideas which in turn could form a community of scholars whose lineage, traditions, and ambitions were at once internal to the field and external enough for general prestige. The more Europe encroached upon the Orient during the nineteenth Century, the more Orientalism gained in public confidence. Yet, if this gain coincided with a loss in originality, we should not a be entirely surprised, since its mode, from the beginning was reconstruction and repetition.

 

One final observation: the late- eighteenth century and nineteenth century ideas, institutions, and figures I shall deal with in this chapter are an important part, a crucial elaboration, of the first phase of the greatest age of territorial acquisition ever known. By the end of the World war 1 Europe had colonized 85 percent of the earth. To say simply that modern Orientalism has been an aspect of both imperialism and colonialism is not to say anything very disputable. Yet it is not enough just to say it; it needs to be worked through analytically and historically. I am interested in showing how modern Orientalism, unlike the precolonial awareness of Dante and d'Herbelot, embodies a systematic discipline of accumulation. And far from this being exclusively an intellectual or theoretical feature, it made Orientalism fatally tend towards the systematic accumulation of human beings and territories. To reconstruct a dead or lost Oriental language meant ultimately to reconstruct a dead or neglected orient; it also meant that reconstructive precision, science, even imagination could prepare the way for what armies, administrations, and bureaucracies would late do on the ground, in the Orient. In a sense, the vindication of Orientalism was not only its intellectual or artistic successes but its later effectiveness, its usefulness, its authority. Surely it deserves serious attention on all those counts.

 

2- On Flaubert (From:  Orientalism, 189 – 191)

 

Despite the energy of his intelligence and his enormous power of intellectual absorption, Flaubert felt in the orient, first, that "the more you concentrate on it (in detail) the less you grasp the whole." And then, second, that "the pieces fall into place of themselves." At best, this produces a spectacular form, but it remains barred to the Westerner's full participation in it. . On one level this was a personal predicament for Flaubert, and devised means, some of which we have discussed, for dealing with it. On a more general level, this was an epistemological difficulty for which, of course, the discipline of Oreintalism existed. At one moment during his oriental tour he considered what the epistemological challenge could give rise to. Without what he called spirit and style, the mind could "get lost in archeology": he was referring to a sort of regimented antiquarianism by which the exotic and the strange would get formulated into lexicons, codes, and finally clichés of the kind he was to ridicule in in the Dictionnaire dis idees recurs. Under the influence of such an attitude the world would be "regulated like a college. Teachers will be the law. Everyone will be in uniform. As against such an imposed discipline, he no doubt felt that his own treatment of exotic material, notably the Oriental material he had both experienced and read about for years, were infinitely preferable. In those, at least there was room for a sense of immediacy, imagination, and flair, whereas in the ranks of archeological tomes everything but learning had been squeezed out. And more than most novelists Flaubert was acquainted with organized learning, its products, and its results: these products are clearly evident in the misfortunes of Boubard and Pecuchet, but they would have been as comically apparent in fields like orientalism, whose textual attitudes belonged to the world of idees reurs. Therefore one could either construct the world with verve and style, or one could copy it tirelessly according to impersonal academic rules of procedure. In both cases, with regard to the orient, there was a frank acknowledgement that it was a world elsewhere, apart from the ordinary attachments, sentiments, and values of our world in the West.

In all of his novels Falubert associates the Orient with the escapism of sexual fantasy. Emma Bovary and Frederic Moreau pine for what in their drab (or harried) bourgeois lives they do not have, and what they realize they want to comes easily to their daydreams packed inside Oriental Cliches: harems, princesses, princes, slaves, veils, dancing girls and boys, sherbets, ointments, and so on. The repertoire is familiar, not so much because it reminds us of Flaubert's own voyages in and obsession with the orient, but because, once again, the association is made between the orient and the freedom of licentious sex. We may as well recognize that for nineteenth – century Europe, with its increasing embourgeoisement, sex had been institutionalized to a very considerable degree. On the one hand, there was no such thing as "free" sex, and on the other, sex in society entailed a web of legal, moral, even political and economic obligations of a detailed and certainly encumbering sort. Just as the various colonial possessions- quite apart from their economic benefit to metropolitan Europe – were useful as places to send wayward sons, superfluous populations of delinquents, poor people, and other undesirables, so the Orient was a place where one could look for sexual experience unobtainable in Europe. Virtually no European writer who wrote on or traveled to the orient in the period after 1800 exempted himself or herself from this quest: Flaubert, Nerval, "Dirty Dick", Burton, and Lane are only the most notable. In the Twentieth Century one thinks of Gide, Conrad, Maugham, and dozens of others. What they looked for often – correctly , I think  - was a different type of sexuality, perhaps more libertine and less guilt ridden; but even that quest, if repeated by enough people, could (and did) become as regulated and uniform as learning itself. In time "Oriental sex" was as standard a commodity as any other available in the mass culture, with the result that readers and writers could have it if they wished without necessarily going to the orient.

It was certainly true that by the middle of the nineteenth century France, no less than England and the rest of Europe, had a flourishing knowledge industry of the sort that Flaubert feared. Great numbers of texts were being produced, and more important, the agencies and institutions for their disseminiation and propagation were everywhere to be found. As historians of science and knowledge have observed, the organization of scientific and learned fields that took place during the nineteenth Century was both rigorous and all encompassing. Research became a regular activity; there was a regulated exchange of information, and agreement on what the problem was as well as consensus on the appropriate paradigms for research and its results. The apparatus serving Oriental studies was part of the secne, and this was one thing that Flaubert surely had in mind when he proclaimed that "everyone will be in uniform." An Orientalist was no longer a gifted amateur enthusiast, or if he was, he would have trouble being taken seriously as a scholar. To be an Orientalist meant university training in Oriental Studies (by 1850 every major European university had a fully developed curriculum in one or another of the orientalist disciplines), it meant subvention for one's travel (perhaps by one of the Asiatic societies or a geographic exploration fund or a government grant), it meant publication in accredited form (perhaps under the imprint of learned society or an oriental translation fund). And both within the guild of Orientalist scholars and to the public at large, such uniform accreditation as clothed the work of orientalist scholarship, not personal testimony nor subjective impressionism, meant science.

 

3- Latent and Manifest Orientalim ( From Orientalism, 205- 209).

 

On several occasions I have alluded to the connections between Orientalism as a body of ideas, beliefs, clichés, or learning about the east, and other schools of thought at large in the culture. Now one of the important developments in nineteenth century orientalism was the distillation of essential ideas about the Orient – its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardness – into a separate and unchallenged coherence; thus for a writer to use the word Oriental was a reference for the reader sufficient to identify a specific body of information about the orient. This information seemed to be morally neutral and objectively valid; it seemed to have an epistemological status equal to that of historical chronology or geographic location. In its most basic form, then, Oriental material could not really be violated by anyone's discoveries, nor did it seen ever to be revaluated completely. Instead, the work of various nineteenth – century scholars and of imaginative writers made this essential body of knowledge more clear, more detailed, more substantial – and more distinct form "Occidentalism." Yet, Orientalist ideas could enter more into alliance with general philosophical theories (such as those about the history of mankind and civilization) and diffuse world hypotheses, as philosophers sometimes call them; and in many ways the professional contributors to Oriental knowledge were anxious to couch their formulations and ideas, their scholarly work, their considered contemporary observations, in language and terminology whose cultural validity derived from other sciences and systems of thought.

 

The distinction I am making is really between am 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 unaniminity, 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 or from the most rigorous (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 above the 1870s on through the early part of the twentieth century – but let me give some examples that illustrate what I mean.

Theses of Oriental backwardness, degeneracy, and inequality with the west most easily associated themselves early in the nineteenth century with ideas about the biological bases of racial inequality. Thus the racial classification found in Couver's le Regne animal, Gobineau's Essai Sur l'inegalite des races humaines, and Robert knox's The Dark Races of man found a willing partner in latent Orientalism. To these ideas was added second order Darwinism which seemed to accentuate the "scientific" validity of the division of races into advanced and backward, or European-Aryan and Oriental-African. Thus the whole question of imperialism, as ut was debated in the late nineteenth Century by pro- imperialists and anti imperialists alike, carried forward the binary typology of advanced and backward races, cultures, and societies. John Westlake's Chapters on the Principles of International Law (1894) argues, for example, that regions of the earth designated as "uncivilized" ( a word carrying the freight of Orientalist assumptions, among others) ought to be annexed or occupied by advanced powers. Similarly, the ideas of such writers as Carl Peters, Leopold de Saussure, and Charles Temple draw on the advanced/backward binarism so centrally advocated in late nineteenth – century Orientalism.

Among with all other peoples variously designated as backward, degenerate, uncivilized, and retarded, the Orientals were viewed in a framework construced out biological determinism and moral political admonishment. The oriental was linked thus to elements in Western society (delinquents, the insane, woman, the poor) having in common an identity best described as lamentably alien. Orientals were rarely seen or looked at; they were seen through, analyzed not as citizens, or even people, but as problems to be solved or confined or – as the colonial powers openly coveted their territory – taken over. The point is that the very designation of something as Oriental involved an already pronounced evaluative judgment, and in the case of the peoples inhabiting the decayed Ottoman Empire, an implicit program of action. Since the Oriental was a member of a subject race, he had to be subjected: it was that simple. The locus Classicus for such judgment and action is to be found in Gustav le Bon's Les Lois Psychologiques de l' evolution des peoples (1894).

But there were other uses for latent Orientalism. If that group of ideas allowed one to separate Orientals from advanced, civilizing powers, and if the "classical" Orient served to justify both the Orientalist and his disregard of modern Orientals, latent Orientalism also encouraged a peculiarly (not to say invidiously)   male conception of the world. I have already refered to this in passing during my discussion of Renan. The Oriental male was considered in isolation from the total community in which he lived and which many Orientalists, following Lane, have viewed with something resembling contempt and fear. Orientalism itself, furthermore, was an exclusively male province; like so many professional guilds during the modern period, it viewed itself and its travelers and novelists: women are usually the creatures of a male power fantasy. They express unlimited sensuality, they are more or less stupid, and, above all they are willing. Flaubert's Kuchuk Hanem is the prototype of such caricatures, which were common enough in pornographic novels whose novelty draws on the Orient for their interest. Moreover the male conception of the world, in its effect upon the practicing Orientalist, tends to be static, frozen, fixed eternally. The very possibility of development, transformation, human movement – in the deepest sense of the word – is denied the Orient and the Oriental. As a known and ultimately an immobilized and unproductive quality, they come to be identified with a bad sort of eternality; hence, when the Orient is being approved, such phrases as "the wisdom of the East."

Transferred from an implicit social evolution to a grandly cultural one, this static male Orientalism took on a variety of forms in the late nineteenth century, especially when Islam was being discussed. General cultural historians as respected as Leopold von Rank and Jacob Burchhardt assailed Islam as if they were dealing not so much with an anthropomorphic abstraction as with a religio-politica culture about which deep generalizations were possible and warranted: In his Weltgeschichte (1881 – 1881) Ranke spoke of islam as defeated by the Germanic Romantic Peoples, and in his "Historische fragmente" (unpublished notes, 1893) Burckhardt spoke of Islam as wretched, bare, and trivial. Such intellectual operations were out with considerably more flair and enthusiasm by Oswald Spengler, whose ideas about a Magian personality (typified by the Muslim Oriental) infuse Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918 – 1922) and the "morphology" of cultures it advocates.

What these widely diffused notions of the Orient depended on was the almost total absence of contemporary Western culture of the Orient as a genuinely felt and experienced force. For a number of evident reasons the Orient was always in the position both of outsider and of incorporated weak partner for the West. To the extent that Western scholars were aware of contemporary Orientals or Oriental movements of thought and culture, these were perceived either as silent shadows to be animated by the orientalist, brought into reality by him, or as a kind of cultural and intellectual proletariat useful for the Orientalist's grander interpretative activity, necessary for his performance as superior judge, learned man, powerful cultural will. I mean to say that in discussion of the orient, the Orient is all absence, whereas one feels the Orientalist and what he says as presence; yet we must not forget that the Orientalist's presence is enabled by the Orient's effective absence. This fact of substitution and displacement, as we must call it, clearly places on the Orientalist himself a certain pressure to reduce the Orient in his work, even after he has devoted a good deal of time to elucidating and exposing it. How else can one explain major scholarly production of the type     we associate with Julius Wellhausen and Theodor Noldeke and, overriding ir, those bare, sweeping statements that almost totally denigrate their chosen subject matter? Thus Noldeke could declare in 1887 that the sum total of his work as an Orientalist was to confirm his "low opinion" of the Eastern Peoples. And like Carl Becker, Noldeke was a philhellenist, who showed his love of Greece curiously by displaying a positive dislike of the Orient, which after all was what he studied as a scholar.

 

 

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