Recently some charges of Orientalism have been floating about the blogosphere with regard to a particular thinker. I don’t care to get into the nuts and bolts of this discussion, but I do think it might be of value to raise some issues about some of the sociological, anthropological, and linguistic assumptions that might underlie this sort of charge. As the Wikipedia article on Orientalism succinctly puts it, “Orientalism implies essentializing and prejudiced outsider interpretations of Eastern cultures and peoples.” In response to this short definition, we might ask “what are the conditions for the possibility of Orientalism?” On the one hand, we are told that Orientalism is an essentializing interpretation of Eastern cultures and peoples; while, on the other hand, we are told that this interpretation is an outsider interpretation.
Beginning with the second criteria or feature characterizing the “phenomenology” of Orientalism, I think we should ask “who is the outsider?” When it is claimed that someone or some mode of discourse is an “outsider” mode of discourse we are implicitly claiming that an inside exists. Put otherwise, what we are suggesting is that cultural identities, cultural “types”, cultures themselves, exist. But is this a warranted assumption? Are we not every bit as much strangers or outsiders within our own culture as we are with respect to other cultures? Do we not wonder how to be Americans, English, Egyptian, Chinese, etc? Or put otherwise, in Lacanian terms, do we not find ourselves perpetually fraught with the hysteric’s question of what we are for the Other? Quoting Zizek quoting Hegel, the mysteries of the Egyptians were mysteries for the Egyptians. The mistake of the sort of culturalism presupposed by the charge of Orientalism is that it implicitly advocates a sort of immediate and non-mediated relationship to cultural identity such that insiders and outsiders actually exist. But if the aphorism that the big Other does not exist means anything, it is that there is no internally consistent and totalized set of signs and signifiers capable of defining a cultural identity and fixing one’s identity as a member of a group. Our encounter with our own cultural system is every bit as fraught and mysterious as our relation to the so-called “other”.
read on!
It was this fraught relationship between the symbolic and personal identity that Kafka so effectively investigated in both The Castle and The Trial. In both of those texts Joseph K’s identity– an identity marked only by an initial or an abbreviation –is entirely mysterious and his place within the social system or the symbolic order is entirely inscrutable. Joseph K’s plight is not extraordinary, but is characteristic of all social and cultural life. What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be a professor or a salesman or an engineer or an American or straight or gay or bisexual or a Christian or Muslim, etc., etc., etc. No matter where we look, we find these fraught and precarious identities where the essence of these identities remains in question and where our own performance of these identities perpetually remains fraught. Descartes gets a lot wrong in his substanlization of the subject, but when he writes that,
…still there are many other matters concerning which one simply cannot doubt, even though they are derived from the very same senses: for example, that I am sitting here next to the fire, wearing my winter dressing gown, that I am holding this sheet of paper in my hands, and the like. But on what grounds could one deny that these hands and this entire body are mine? Unless perhaps I were to liken myself to the insane, whose brains are impaired by such an unrelenting vapor of black bile that they steadfastly insist that they are kings, when they are utter paupers, or that they are arrayed in purple robes when they are naked, or that they have heads made of clay, or that they are gourds, or that they are made of glass. But such people are mad, and I would appear no less mad, were I to take their behavior as an example for myself.
This would all be well and good, were I not a man who is accustomed to sleeping at night, and to experiencing in my dreams the very same things, or now and then even less plausible ones, as these insane people do when awake. (Meditations, 18 – 19)
he hits upon something real and fundamental about the difference between the subject and the self. With the latter we have our sense of personal identity or those social roles and that personal identity that answer the question of who we are. Yet with the subject we have that which is in excess of any self, that which never quite fits with these roles we strive to fit ourselves into, such that the self is always in question and we never quite feel as if we are insiders within our own collective relations. As Sartre would so nicely put it a few hundred years later, “I am what I am not and am not what I am.” If the problem of inter-cultural communication is a false problem, then this is because it always presupposes self-contained cultural universes in which the subject is reduced to the self. Yet we are all translators and interpreters of our own culture such that no one ever quite knows what they are. It is for precisely this reason, it is for precisely the reason that identity is impossible, that communication is possible.
This brings me to the second component feature behind the charge of Orientalism: that it is an essentializing and prejudiced view of Eastern culture. This is certainly a serious problem, but ultimately I think it conflates, to employ a Levinasian distinction, the difference between the saying and the said. We can think of the said, especially in our own electronic culture, as being akin to the slime left behind by a snail after it’s made its way across the walk. The said is the trace of an encounter between two others… Two others that are other to each other and that are other to themselves. Since the path is already traversed it becomes possible to turn it into more of an object than it is, plotting fixed points along that trace in much the same way that Zeno treats space as infinitely divided after the arrow has traversed that space, declaring that motion is therefore impossible.
What is missed here is that speech is not propositional but dialogical. The saying, the act of saying, is not a fixed body of propositions, but is an ever dancing entanglement of two others encountering one an-other becoming other as a result of that endless encounter. The phenomenon of a prejudiced and essentializing relation to the other is not unique to relations between members of different groups, but is characteristic of all social interactions at both the intra- and inter-group level. In every encounter with an other we “punctualize” that other, ascribing them features and an identity, characteristics and a fixed essence. Yet in the encounter, these fixed identities are perpetually challenged and modified through the startling surprise of the other and our own relationship to ourselves. None of this is to discount the damaging or very real status of stereotypes, yet these stereotypes emerge in that place where there are no encounters with the other. Yet while these are very real phenomena, the error to be avoided is the belief that there is some saint-like view from nowhere where we would take ourselves to be immune from this or free of these aporia, and the error of believing that we exist in a state of cultural and social closure maintaining an immediate relationship with the signs and signifiers of our own cultural space. The imperative is to keep the encounter open and ongoing. Yet in doing so one is committing to an escape from fixed and sedentary identities where the one and the other produce something new in and through their encounter.
May 25, 2009 at 11:45 am
You start with Orientalism. You cite Descartes, mention Zizek, Lacan, and Kafka. You indirectly consider Levinas and go as far back as Zeno. Jeez, I even see Sartre (somewhat close to Camus who had at least addresses the issue at hand in The Stranger).
Your definition of Orientalism derives most immediately from wikipedia.
Wiki-freaking-pedia for crying out loud.
May 25, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Fantastic post.
The use of subject/self dichotomy does an enormous amount of good explanatory work here, and I think the key to negotiating our ethical duties in all of this comes from how one negotiates the phenomena you describe by saying, “Yet in the encounter, these fixed identities are perpetually challenged and modified through the startling surprise of the other and our own relationship to ourselves.”
Similar points are made with respect to the historical scholarship itself in Ibn Warraq and Daniel Varisco’s damning (Warraq’s is more damning) critiques of Said. A nice review that covers the analogous points at http://www.democratiya.com/review.asp?reviews_id=142 ; see especially the discussion of Goldziher and von Herder, the discussion of how reformers like Gandhi and Frederick Douglas found much inspiration in “orientalist” scholarship and political movements.
The essentializing version of the orientalist trope not only robs one of the ability to make important moral distinctions concerning how different people should interact (since on the essentializing version *any* attempt to interpret the other can be cast as pejoratively orientalist and hence worthy of dismissal), but also ends up having you beat up on the very people who do the most to open themselves and the rest of us up to the “startling surprise of the other and our own relationship to ourselves.”
A nice part of the review in this regard:
” Warraq quotes Goldziher explaining a spiritual moment he had in Cairo: ‘I became inwardly convinced that I myself was a Muslim. [In Cairo], in the midst of the thousands of the pious, I rubbed my forehead against the floor of the mosque. Never in my life was I more devout, more truly devout, than on that exalted Friday.’ To which, Warraq asks: ‘Does this sound like Said’s Orientalist? Is this why the most important Orientalist of all was given only three lines?’ “
May 25, 2009 at 5:02 pm
The quote about the Egyptians comes from Hegel, not Lacan.
May 25, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Thanks for the catch, Adam. I meant Hegel.
May 25, 2009 at 8:49 pm
An interesting post.
Edward’s Said’s Orientalism has been and still is an important work for me.
I like your thought that we need to avoid the belief we live in cultural closure. This would suggest that culture is more about fluidity than fixed identities.
I was wondering if I could push you more on your differentiation between the encounter and producing stereotypes? From what i understand in your post you seem to imply that the encounter is not where stereotypes are produced. Is this because stereotypes are at the level of the symbolic order? Not to be narcissistic, but in my own research I am researching the production of Caribbean stereotypes. My main argument is that we need to research the affective politics and experiences connected to these symbolic codings. For example, a Caribbean beach is often essentalised as a terrestrial paradise. But if we only critique the stereotypes, then we cannot critique/understand the material and bodily encounters, which is a reason why people are drawn to the beach. (I think Ian Buchanan makes a similar point in his book on Anti-Oedipus).
Sorry if I am getting off track. I think I am trying to say that critiquing Orientalism is not enough unless we explore the associated affects. My understanding of the encounter is where these affects would be experienced in non-representational and non-decomposable spaces.
May 28, 2009 at 12:13 am
Levi, hello – i really enjoyed this post. so nicely thought on so many fronts.
going after what may be an unimportant needle in the haystack, i am stumped by the following statement: “It is for precisely this reason, it is for precisely the reason that identity is impossible, that communication is possible.”
i am wondering what happens when the last word is changed from ‘possible’ to ‘needful’… is something lost? something gained?
thanks again for this post,
nikki
May 28, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Allow me to wonder how this post might look to someone reading it at Universitas Kebangsaan Malayu or at Gadjah Mada or at San Carlos. Its not that I don’t appreciate (or that they might not appreciate) the elegance of the argument.
Put another way, somewhat over 50 years ago, after having examined somewhat over 300 definitions of culture, A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn wondered whether its not so important what culture is and what culture does.
May 28, 2009 at 5:11 pm
[…] due to being swamped with other things. I apologize for this. Today, in response to my post on Orientalism, Jerry the Anthropologist writes: Allow me to wonder how this post might look to someone reading it […]
June 2, 2009 at 6:24 pm
I was interested in and admiring of Thoreau and Emerson as examples of something distinctly American…And I think I was also impressed by Nietzsche’s appreciation of Emerson to take a closer look at Emerson’s thinking.
One of the very peculiar things I’ve learned–and I don’t know what to do with it–is I now know Thoreau and Emerson’s nearly lifelong, daily study of the Vedas. I knew beforehand Schopenhauer was also a student of the Vedas.
Attempting to see something distinctly American in Thoreau and Emerson, I discover in them Indian philosophy (or religion, or science, perhaps.) What I had taken to be an interesting example of Nietzsche’s appreciation of the Other in Emerson, may be much less so (the Vedas influenced Schopenhauer who influenced Nietzsche, who sees something Other in Emerson, but maybe not.)
June 2, 2009 at 9:46 pm
“Yet while [stereotypes] are very real phenomena, the error to be avoided is the belief that there is some saint-like view from nowhere where we would take ourselves to be immune from this or free of these aporia, and the error of believing that we exist in a state of cultural and social closure maintaining an immediate relationship with the signs and signifiers of our own cultural space.”
I don’t know much about Christian saints, but the Buddhist bodhisattva is more or less a kind of saint in their very refusal of nirvana (literally “blown out”) and commitment to the flux of samsara – or, perhaps more accurately, in their commitment to the encounter with suffering, including their own. What you end up advocating toward the end of the post sounds aligned with this vision of saintliness.
So, like Zizek’s complaint about framing racism as a problem of tolerance, I wonder why the “saint-like view” is imagined to be “from nowhere where we take ourselves to be immune from this or free of these aporia.”
“What is missed here is that speech is not propositional but dialogical.”
1 Kings 3:16-28 is an excellent demonstration of this thought. The false mother treats Solomon’s judgement to cut the baby as a proposition, and can only affirm it as he stated it, while the true mother responds to Solomon. The false mother repeats Solomon, but the true mother actually engages him by contradicting his judgement.
June 4, 2009 at 2:17 pm
Your points about the non-self-transparency of cultures and subjects are all well taken, and no authentic inter-cultural discourse (artistic, philosophical, political, you name it) can take place without realizing these points. However, I think you make a basic error in making your discussion of Orientalism about COMMUNICATION instead of POWER. Said’s critique of Orientalism is a Foucaultian project after all, and what makes Orientalist discourses/practices kind of criminal is the way that they perpetuate the post-colonial cultural, economic, and political DOMINATION of people and countries in the “East” by those in the “West”.
I think that you’re using the Wikipedia article as a straw man for your own (very interesting) reflections on matters related-to-but-not-quite-identical-with Orientalism. However, it looks a little condescending (and against the spirit of your conclusion) to title a post “Orientalism” and use Wikipedia as your only partner in dialogue in defining “Orientalism”.
June 4, 2009 at 3:43 pm
PH,
I think a number of these points are addressed in my follow-up post on Orientalism. One significant point here would be that as an Actor-Network theorist in the tradition of Latour, I think concepts like the Foucaultian notion of power are pseudo-concepts that confuse short-hand descriptive terms with actors in a network. We need to understand these relations not in terms of abstractions like “power”– as if there could ever be an entity called “power” doing something –but in terms of actors making up networks. In other words, “power” is a reification of something that is far more complicated and heterogeneous.
June 4, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Some background is in order here as well. This post was written in defense of someone accused of orientalism who lives and teaches is a Middle Eastern country. Context is important here as this person is an actor in a network very different from the sort described by Said, and is becoming in a very different way in that network.
June 4, 2009 at 4:36 pm
The person’s geographic positioning in the world makes a lot of difference by adding some specificity. Can you say whether this person is potentially mobile?
June 5, 2009 at 10:07 pm
[…] 5, 2009 I’m sympathetic to Levi’s post QUESTIONING THE ORIENTALISM CHARGE. I’ve never really been on board with this movement (nor with the occasional digs at […]
January 3, 2011 at 11:58 am
Orientalism is just a Western tool used to marginalize the East. It has repeatedly been proven to exist throughout the West in it’s philosophies, ideas, books, films etc.
Orientalism is not an ‘accusation’, it’s a brute fact. The question of a defence does not arise.