Canter Bridge

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Ironically, the great Palestinian-American humanist scholar Edward Said wrote this essentially inaccurate book as a bold and pained cri du coeur two decades before the events of September 11th and the fresh entanglement by the West in the Middle East would render obvious its stature as required reading. One must not attempt to understand our world from the West without a careful listening to the late author’s cry.

That sound emerges from a life of `humanistic critique’ of the world’s uniform-izing powers, whether these take academic, governmental, economic, or religious form. Said hopes that the watchword of `liberation’ is in fact an unstoppable and developmental force in history, though he is more resigned than hopeful for results in his generation. `My goal in Orientalism‘, he explains, is to use humanistic critique to open up the fields of struggle, to introduce a longer sequence of thought and analysis to replace the short bursts of polemical, thought-stopping fury that so imprison us in labels and antagonistic debate whose goal is a belligerent collective identity rather than understanding and intellectual exchange.’

The truth, power, and heuristic value of Said’s argument lie in the contraposition of `individual’ with `collective’ identity. So does its error.

The author believes that generalization, labeling, identification of collective or typical behaviors, and the like fundamentally mislead. He is correct about many of them, perhaps most. Yet this fundamentally anarchist principal would make his own work impossible and does not fairly treat the many generalizations about peoples and their struggles that can rightly be made in order to facilitate rather than impede the kind of `understanding’ that Said so admirably desires.

In practice, Said is not so inflexible on this point as his theory might suggest. For this reason, he has given us a long book with a lot to say rather than a very short book with just one idea. This happy disconnect between theory and praxis is what makes his book-to say nothing of his body of work-so critical for `Western’ (pardon the generalization and collective identity) people who must somehow come to understand what it is like to be studied, discussed, historically located, conquered, fought, `liberated’, and studied again by people whose `positional superiority’ makes humanistic interaction as peers almost impossible.

Said’s `Introduction’ (pp. 1-28) is one of those rare prefatory pieces that actually do justice to the book that ensues. The reading of it is both a joy and a satisfactory orientation to follows.

The book itself falls messily into three discursive chapters: `The Scope of Orientalism’ (pp.31-110), `Orientalist structures and Restructures’, and `Orientalism Now’. In the first of these breathtakingly well-read pieces, we are reminded of the Baconian principle that `knowledge is power’. The kind of knowledge produced by the quasi-canonical views of `the Orient’ developed in colonizing Europe and inherited at a late date by an ascendant America is inextricably enmeshed in the exercise of power. It is not innocent knowing, but rather the systematic domestication of a reality that little matches the categories into which it is forced. This knowledge aspires to empirical obviousness, to objectivity, to the status of that which no reasonable (Western or enlightened Eastern) observe could deny. It is a reality in which the knower is indisputably on the side of imperial power and the known is a less fortunate entity over whom empire is justified in advance by the body of knowledge that is abbreviated as `Orientalism’. It is a schematized and theoretical knowledge based on very little interaction with the human objects that come under its purview. It is subordinating and hungry for a classical `fixed point’ in the history of the culture under analysis, a (hopefully) literary moment to which all other encountered aspects and real-time human representatives of that culture can be compared and found wanting.

Said argues that such knowledge is a form of paranoia. Illuminated by his anecdotal suggestion that most of our renowned Orientalists did not like the `Orientals’ they met, the claim of paranoia is too important an assertion to be skirted.

The author is particularly perceptive in his description of a `textual attitude’ in part IV (`Crisis’) of this first long chapter. For example, `It seems a common human failing to prefer the schematic authority of a text to the disorientations of direct encounters with the human. But is this failing constantly present, or are there circumstances that, more than others, make the textual attitude likely to prevail?’ For Said, there are such circumstances and Orientalism falls victim to both of them. First, `One is when a human being confronts at close quarters something relatively unknown and threatening and previously distant … A second situation favoring the textual attitude is the appearance of success’.

On the contrary, Said wants to name and thereby debunk the textual attitude with its false objectivizing, as he asserts in the programmatic statement of the book’s sprawling second chapter (`Orientalist Structures and Restructures’, pp. 111-197): `My thesis is that the essential aspects of modern Orientalist theory and practice (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 (versions of) Christian supernaturalism.’

In this chapter, the author makes his boldest claims about the human deficiencies of the Orientalists: `We are immediately brought back to the realization that Orientalists, like many other early-nineteenth-century thinkers, conceive of humanity either in large collective terms or in abstract generalities. Orientalists are neither interested in nor capable of discussing individuals; instead artificial entities, perhaps with their roots in Herderian populism, predominate. There are Orientals, Asiatics, Semites, Muslims, Arabs, Jews, races, mentalities, nations, and the like …’ In his signature asyndetic prose, Said describes the ironies that immerse the nineteenth-century European traveler to the Orient, who retains his `European power, to comment on, acquire, possess everything around it. The Orientalist can imitate the Orient without the opposite being true.’

It is the cumulative, multi-layered power of Orientalism that makes Said consider it a menace rather than an irritation: `Orientalism can thus be regarded as a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient … My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness.’ The academic is sometimes a na?ve and well-meaning complicit: `Formally the Orientalist sees himself as accomplishing the union of Orient and Occident, but mainly by reasserting the technological, political, and cultural supremacy of the West. History, in such a union, is radically attenuated if not banished.’

Further, it is the seepage of Orientalist perception out of the academy and into the realm of policy and political power that render it, for Said, a dangerous element and, so, worthy of attention from Said’s powerful pen. The author documents a number of examples in his final chapter.

The `Afterword’ included in this 25th-anniversary volume (pp. 329-352) was written in 1994 and provided Said the opportunity to respond to accusations of non-Western bias and (laughably) Islamic fundamentalism. Chiefly, his defense against allegations that he has been partial-in several meanings of the word-is that he had written `a partisan book, not a theoretical machine’. A charitable reading of this defense might well be enough to excuse the author the need to clarify so extensively what he did not intend to say. Yet there is enough truth in the allegation to wish that Said had lived long enough to do justice to his topic by authoring a work on how Muslims (how to avoid a generalization?) have conceived of the West in partial, schematized, and therefore distorted ways that preclude human engagement. Perhaps that was not his vocation. It would have made his body of work less partial and therefore truer.

To comment upon Said’s Orientalism is necessarily to indulge in the very type of generalization that he savages in its pages. Yet one can do so with readerly sympathy and even solidarity. His influential book is, in part, a `testament of wounds and a record of sufferings’. History certainly validates the need for such a work. He has provided it with more eloquence, passion, and learning than perhaps any other author who has or might have attempted the same task.

It is not difficult to intuit the causes of the dissonance and enmity that arise when Said’s view of the world engages with, say, the `civilizationism’ of Samuel Huntington or the `crisis of Islam’ espoused by Bernard Lewis (against whom Said directs an extended screed). In the former case, the typology must grate, in the latter the reference to a former, classical, and admirable Islam from which the Muslim peoples as we know them today have declined. Though the inevitable caricaturing of such brief description is self-evident, there is enough truth in the abbreviation to justify Said’s alarm, if not his disdain.

Probably, the lack of symmetry between the Huntington and Lewis schools on the one hand, and the Said approach on the other, creates a context where Said’s fundamentally inaccurate work can and does ring true. His voice is, to quote an Oriental prophet, not unlike that of `one crying in the wilderness’.

It is good to listen to such a voice, though not by shutting out all others. The confrontation of East and West has left victims. Said, before leukemia too early removed him from our company, took up their voice and spoke it without distraction.