ORIENTALISM: TWENTY YEARS ON

PATRICIA ALMÁRCEGUI

In 1978 Edward S. Said published Orientalism , a work which had a great impact on thought about the colonial discourse and which specifically influenced the debate on orientalism. In spite of the criticisms that the text received immediately, Said did not fully respond to them until 1984. The event was the Congress of Sociology of Literature was held at Essex University, where the first debate between the writer and his critics took place, later published under the title of Orientalism reconsidered (1985). Eleven years on, the discussion provoked by Orientalism was still continuing, and on the occasion of its re-publishing in 1995, Said published an epilogue in which he revised some of his arguments. Both in this epilogue and in the debate at Essex, Said altered his statements very little, but he was able to use his response to the critics to detail his arguments.

The 1978 publication did not appear detached from the political and cultural revisions that were going on at that time. The work fitted into the debate opened during the first third of the 20th century, on how the West had manipulated European knowledge about the rest of the planet, and into the critical review that needed to be applied to the methods with which the West had studied the Orient from 1945, the period of colonial dissolution. Authors such as Anouar Abdel-Malek and Jacques Berque formed part of the new approaches to orientalism, and their proposals could be united to the later statements by Said. The Orient had to be studied from a dynamic contemporaneous and participating perspective, (Abdel-Malek, 1963). And it was necessary to investigate its irregularities, minorities and to go further than just the picturesque, mysterious and aberrant, that is to say, the exterior (Berque, 1957).

Within this context, Orientalism analysed and denounced the ways in which Europeans had represented the Orient. The knowledge of the Other had been configured via these ways, and the resulting knowledge was purpose-built. The Orient was not an inert and passive object of nature, but a human construction created through generations of intellectuals, artists, writers and orientalists, providing the discourses with which the West had constructed its image of the Orient.

Said called these assumptions orientalism and defined the term using three characteristics. Firstly, he applied it to the academic discipline used to construct the field of knowledge regarding the Orient. Secondly, he used the term to describe the system of thought which ontologically and epistemologically distinguished the Orient from the Occident; a difference that had been forged over centuries and which is found in the works of such diverse and distanced authors as Esquilo, Dante, Flaubert and Marx... And finally, he employed it to denominate the projection of power by the West which sought to dominate, restructure and control the Orient in order to create a discourse that would be at the service of imperial and colonial power.

Of these three definitions, the first two were linked to the creation and textual construction of the Orient. The texts created a reality of the Orient, but did not allow its inhabitants the possibility of expression. The European textural representations were offered as forms with which the Orient was made to speak, but without granting it a voice. That is to say, through foreign and exterior discourses which obviated self-representation of the East. In this way, these texts went on to demonstrate the assumptions and doctrines of Europe itself, while at the same time they constituted the forms of the study of the Europeans, instead of representing the inhabitants of the Orient. For Said, the texts stood up as a source of other realities. Interweaved as they were in the vast network of relationships of the world – political, social, and cultural – they allowed an approximation and interpretation of many other situations (Said, 1983). He had drawn this consideration from the work of Foucault, one of the philosophers whom Said recognised as a source of his textual criticism. Foucault's work suggested how a determined cultural order could be studied from its discursive definitions, which are rife with habits, unwritten rules, and suppositions, and could therefore also be considered as sources of social knowledge.

The third definition puts one of the conceptual keys prominent in the edition of 1978 in evidence: orientalist ideology had been used to exercise dominance over the Orient. The culture and history could not be researched without studying its force, that is to say, its configuration of power. To believe that the Orient was created or orientalised by imaginative need was to miss the truth: the relation of the West and the Orient was a relationship of power and of complicated dominance (Said, 1978). In this way, the texts on the Orient and the orientalist academic discipline which gave them form appeared linked to a will of dominion and power.

In the same way, this academic discipline, which represented erudition, became proof of the authority, the discourses and affirmations of which were identified with truth. Divesting the text from its relationship with other disciplines, the discourse of the orientalist intellectual turned in upon itself more and more and became its own self-reference. Thus oriental studies were narrowed down until they became exclusive reduced enclaves appropriate only for orientalists. These assumptions were diametrically opposed to the idea that Said (1983) had of the intellectual: that he must act in the opposite way; he had the duty to critically interrogate himself and involve himself socially and politically in order to influence general society. In his orientalist discourse, the intellectual converted the Orient into an object which only benefited the image of its own culture. The whole Orient was homogenised in its values and images and was presented as a subject to be analysed and comprehended. This objectivity turned the Orient into a static and invariable area, as opposed to a dynamic and variable West.

With the development of these ideas, Orientalism put forward the need to question the studies and the representations of the Orient that had been generally accepted until 1978. Among the approaches which the work set forth, some were particularly eminent. On the one hand, it was essential to create a new way of speaking and approach to the Orient. On the other, Orientalism was offered as the response of a West which had never listened to the Orient (Said, 1995).

From the time of its publication the work stood out as one of the precursors of the theory of colonial discourse. At the same time, it introduced and developed the so-called cultures of the Other, or secondary studies (Turner, 1984), and recalled that in the oriental debate it was necessary to include decolonisation. However, paradoxically, the majority of criticisms of this text came from the fields of study that were being opened up. These criticisms can be grouped thematically around the following arguments.

Firstly, some Arab intellectuals, such as Sivan (1985), accused Said's theories of being excessively westernised; due to his choice of sources and interpretation of European texts. Others found his work related with a possible increase in the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam (Abaza and Stauth, 1990). Said answered them by saying that his work was neither anti-western nor, much less, a defence of Islam and the Arab world. On the other hand, the work was attacked as humanist and defending an ethic of the individual. Said replied that he did not wish his work to be merely a theoretical machine and described himself as a “residual humanist”, pointing to the influence of Vico in this aspect as definitive (Said, 1995).

The criticisms of his work regarding Foucault's assumptions were varied. For one, he was accused of a biased reading of the philosopher's ideas, which allowed him to interpret the works of authors as disparate as Esquilo or Chateaubriand from the same one viewpoint. As Macfie noted (2000), Foucault had never included capitalist and pre-capitalist authors in the same group. To be able to make his interpretation, Said added his own personal statements to the discursive statements of Foucault. Foucault generally believed that the author and his biography amounted to little, but that in the case of orientalism it was determinant (Said, 1978). On the other hand, Said went on, Foucault's concept of representation was limited, as it did not allow critical attention to go beyond what was written and reach a political appraoch. Foucault seemed more interested in observing how power acted, than in committing himself to trying to change the relationships of power in society (Said, 1983). Specifically, as he himself commented, he used Foucault's method as far as he deemed necessary to defend and organise his cultural assumptions (Said, 1995).

Another criticism of Said's assumptions was his vision of the Orient as something static and unmoving. This statement meant that it had to be thought of as a monolithic and homogeneous block, while at the same time being used as a synecdoche, in considering ‘that' Orient as an image of all the space that it represented. With this proposal, Said was applying the essentialist reading that he himself had denounced, and he omitted the hybridism and heterogeneity that were found existing within the colonial power (Babbha, 1984). Orientalism, according to Abaza and Stauth (1990), was a place of cultural exchange (intercultural and multicultural) until Said arrived and turned it into reductionism. He also forgot that there were other voices involved in these discourses, those who represented the resistance, opposition and contradiction to orientalism itself. Some years later, Said would alter his concept of the Orient to extend it and define it as a system of thought which tackled a heterogeneous, dynamic and complex human reality, (Said, 1995).

On the other hand, his 1978 concept of orientalism made the idea that another true and authentic Orient existed implicit. However, although this theory can be deduced, Said did not seem to express it directly (perhaps because he had no other alternative to the proposed idea of Orient). At the same time, the construction of orientalism encouraged thinking in binary terms. That is to say, westernism also had to exist. Therefore another concept, this time the West, was also considered as a homogeneous notion, and of lacking heterogeneity. As Rodinson said (1980), westernism was not a response to orientalism. In summary, Said was dichotomising and therefore essentialising the concept of a continuum: Orient and West (Clifford, 1995).

It was perhaps the work integrated in the Subaltern Studies that completed and remedied some of Said's proposals. Having allowed himself to be influenced by this source, it was from its lagunae that Said's project of cultural theory grew and from which he extended his work to redefine the concept of culture, opening up the way for the new cultural studies. Some of the integral parts of those studies alleged that Said had not taken into account all the hybridisations, eclecticisms, and promiscuities which form a part of a culture. Oral declarations, women authors, non-urban discourse, in short, representations of aspects excluded and forgotten by the controlling forces, had also to be analysed under the post-colonial assumptions. Said himself recognised the value of the studies of these researchers in 1995. In recent years, some cultural essays have linked the subaltern studies only with a desire for power. Certain critics will venture (Robins, 2000), that these studies have been configured as “another type of power”, a western form of instituting the cultural models of the periphery.

Another invective against Said was constituted by the paradox whereby Orientalism could not escape from the criticisms that the author had made against orientalism. Some of the assumptions that he denounced in his work were being applied by his own words to elaborate his thesis. Said also biased and monopolised his representations. He employed instruments of theoretical western tradition to criticise that very tradition. He principally used texts from the 18th and 19th centuries, of Anglo-Saxon and French tradition. He omitted any text which did not belong to the literary genre. He limited his statements to the Middle East and omitted the Maghreb, India, and the Pacific. He avoided social and economical interpretations of the texts. That is to say, he obviated the very assumptions that he had been defending since his work Beginnings (1975). Every author and every work must be interpreted from many different viewpoints, so that every reading and every interpretation creates a new value of the work. However, Said knew how to make the most of literature from journeys to the Orient for the basis of his studies of its representations, not in vain did he draw the knowledge of this geography from the works of travellers who portrayed the world through their discourses. Travel permitted a recognition of heterogeneity and the complexity of the world; the traveller was capable of crossing borders, traversing territories and, in short, abandoning pre-established positions (Said, 1991).

Said's intellectual training for the writing of this type of work was also called into question. Some attacked it as being insufficient inits referral the fields of Islam, Arab history and the orientalist disciplines (Lewis, 1982). Others noted the contradiction in the transformation of the words orientalism and orientalist, drawn from a literary field and compared in a post-colonialist and post-nationalist context (Mackenzie, 1995). Finally, it was surprising that a textual critic who dealt with themes corresponding to a philosophical or Arabist training should influence, or at least to be heard in, such disparate fields as anthropology or history of art.

Another of the comments on his assumptions concerned the close relationship which Said established between imperialism and orientalism. The approaches in the orientalist debate had become too close to imperialism. And orientalism could not be considered only as the intellectual justification that Europe needed to culturally and economically dominate the Orient, as Said had defended in 1978. The attention given to imperialism in Orientalism , which it had seemed was to become the basis of the work, was left un-developed and was established as the principal axis of the theories until the publication of Culture and imperialism in 1992. Again, Said was dealing with a theme that had been the subject of research since the 1960s.

Said's statements were also attacked as being ideological. In his explanations he vacillated between what could be considered as truth and what pertained to his ideology (Mackenzie, 1995). According to Rodinson (1994), Said preferred to ideologically interpret the cultural representations rather than analyse them.

Finally, there were some authors who pointed out how the representations of the Orient went further than the political cultural discourse that constituted orientalism. The description of the time and space permitted the creation of a modern aesthetic and narrative forms which escaped political interpretation (Daunais, 1996). Also, there were other interpretations of the cultural history of orientalism which coloured it with eclecticism, as were the different languages used to discuss it, and music, theatre and architecture (Mackenzie, 1995).

In short, Orientalism demanded a reconsideration of the studies of orientalism. Today it would not be possible to form an analysis of this discipline without considering the discussion provoked by Said's work. His publication made it possible to question the most conservative, romantic and idealistic ideas of orientalism. The criticisms were various. And perhaps one of the more reasonable, which designated orientalism as homogeneous and the unnecessary response to westernism, was the inconsistency of Said's assumptions as the oriental debate continued. On the other hand, there were other dialogues between the Orient and the West which had not been codified as a relationship of dominion and power. The Orient was a construction, but also a construction of desire. A place in which to project our imagination, which often escaped a need for power. The desire referred to an otherness and the cultures had the need to produce an inverse ghost to be offered as a negative model, a counter-model, which, as a part linked to its source, could never be separated from its model. The West needed the Orient in order to define itself. And created a negative image of the Other into which it could project its fears and anxieties. The Orient became a concept to be negatively defined with regard to the Other, but also, and this would seem to have disappeared in Orientalism , an image which invited reflection about itself.

Said's work was curiously constructed on a paradox. When the thesis that he defended was applied to his own work, its ambivalence emerged, as did its need to be transformed. So that Said was almost bound to reply to his critics and amend his proposals. And this he did. However, his responses were justified in a way that ought to be queried. Said referred to himself as an answer. That is to say, he turned to his personal experiences, and to the effort involved in the construction of his identity, his condition as an exile, his belonging to two cultures, himself as an interstitial intellectual, as a response to the lagunae in his work.

At the same time, the conceptual failures that were attributed to him were due more to the contextualising of his work within the theory of cultural relativism, than to insufficient intellectual training. On the other hand, it is curious that less attention has come from the field of orientalism (or at least that fewer works have been published) on Orientalism . Probably this discipline perceived straight away the lagunae which have been pointed out throughout this article. A more detailed revision on his part, the labour of which was criticised in the end by Said, although it would have meant giving more importance to the work, would also have been necessary to continue the oriental debate.

The recent geopolitical events, the analyses which have accompanied them, and the recent opinions of specialists and other critics over the conflicts and relations with the Orient show to what degree it is still necessary and obligatory to read Orientalism . The system of interpretations of the Other still has to be questioned. Although Orientalism , Culture and imperialism and Said's assumptions are being reviewed, the fear produced by the strangeness and unknown nature of the Other can be questioned from the light that Said shed on studies of the representations of the Orient. Representations which continue still today closer to an imaginary culture constructed through the centuries than to that of the reality in which these were made. Possibly one of the merits of Orientalism has been that it brings us closer to the Other, whatever may be the geography to which it belongs and obliges us to interpret.

In short, it is a case of taking advantage of those times in which spaces begin to be shared and in which constructions and knowledge can be finally brought face to face, in order to go beyond ideological exclusions and to develop a view which permits the Orient and the West to be integrated into a common context that they have already shared for centuries.


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