Said-Orientalism赛义德东方主义

Orientalism Reconsidered Author(s): Edward W. Said Reviewed work(s): Source: Cultural Critique, No. 1 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 89-107 Published by: University of Minnesota Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354282 . Accessed: 28/01/2013 17:56 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . University of Minnesota Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cultural Critique. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded on Mon, 28 Jan 2013 17:56:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Orientalism Reconsidered Edward W. Said T here are two sets of problems that I'd like to take up, each of them deriving from the general issues addressed in Orientalism, of which the most important are: the representation of other cultures, societies, histories; the relationship between power and knowledge; the role of the intellectual; the methodological questions that have to do with the relationships between different kinds of texts, between text and con- text, between text and history. I should make a couple of things clear at the outset, however. First of all, I shall be using the word "Orientalism" less to refer to my book than to the problems to which my book is related; moreover, I shall be dealing, as will be evident, with the intellectual and political territory covered both by Orientalism (the book) as well as the work I have done since. This imposes no obligation on my audience to have read me since Orientalism; I mention it only as an index of the fact that since writ- ing Orientalism I have thought of myself as continuing to look at the problems that first interested me in that book but which are still far from resolved. Second, I would not want it to be thought that the license afforded me by the present occasion is an attempt to answer my critics. Fortunately, Orientalism elicited a great deal of comment, much of it positive and instructive, yet a fair amount of it hostile and in some cases (understandably) abusive. But the fact is that I have not digested and understood everything that was either written or said. Instead, I have grasped some of the problems and answers proposed by some of my critics, and because they strike me as useful in focussing an argu- 89 This content downloaded on Mon, 28 Jan 2013 17:56:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 90 Edward W. Said ment, these are the ones I shall be taking into account in the comments that follow. Others - like my exclusion of German Orientalism, which no one has given any reason for me to have included - have frankly struck me as superficial or trivial, and there seems no point in even re- sponding to them. Similarly, the claims made by Dennis Porter, among others, that I am ahistorical and inconsistent, would have more in- terest if the virtues of consistency (whatever may be intended by the term) were subjected to rigorous analysis; as for my ahistoricity that too is a charge more weighty in assertion than it is in proof. Now let me quickly sketch the two sets of problems I'd like to deal with here. As a department of thought and expertise, Orientalism of course refers to several overlapping domains: firstly, the changing his- torical and cultural relationship between Europe and Asia, a relation- ship with a 4000 year old history; secondly, the scientific discipline in the West according to which beginning in the early 19th century one specialized in the study of various Oriental cultures and traditions; and, thirdly, the ideological suppositions, images, and fantasies about a currently important and politically urgent region of the world called the Orient. The relatively common denominator between these three aspects of Orientalism is the line separating Occident from Orient, and this, I have argued, is less a fact of nature than it is a fact of human pro- duction, which I have called imaginative geography. This is, however, neither to say that the division between Orient and Occident is un- changing nor is it to say that it is simply fictional. It is to say- emphatically - that as with all aspects of what Vico calls the world of nations, the Orient and the Occident are facts produced by human beings, and as such must be studied as integral components of the social, and not the divine or natural, world. And because the social world includes the person or subject doing the studying as well as the object or realm being studied, it is imperative to include them both in any consideration of Orientalism, for, obviously enough, there could be no Orientalism without, on the one hand, the Orientalists, and on the other, the Orientals. Far from being a crudely political apprehension of what has been called the problem of Orientalism, this is in reality a fact basic to any theory of interpretation, or hermeneutics. Yet, and this is the first set of problems I want to consider, there is still a remarkable unwillingness to discuss the problems of Orientalism in the political or ethical or even epistemological contexts proper to it. This is as true of pro- This content downloaded on Mon, 28 Jan 2013 17:56:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Orientalism Reconsidered fessional literary critics who have written about my book, as it is of course of the Orientalists themselves. Since it seems to me patently impossible to dismiss the truth of Orientalism's political origin and its continuing political actuality, we are obliged on intellectual as well as political grounds to investigate the resistance to the politics of Orien- talism, a resistance that is richly symptomatic of precisely what is denied. If the first set of problems is concerned with the problems of Orien- talism reconsidered from the standpoint of local issues like who writes or studies the Orient, in what institutional or discursive setting, for what audience, and with what ends in mind, the second set of prob- lems takes us to a wider circle of issues. These are the issues raised initially by methodology and then considerably sharpened by ques- tions as to how the production of knowledge best serves communal, as opposed to factional, ends, how knowledge that is non-dominative and non-coercive can be produced in a setting that is deeply inscribed with the politics, the considerations. the positions, and the strategies of power. In these methodological and moral re-considerations of Orien- talism, I shall quite consciously be alluding to similar issues raised by the experiences of feminism or women's studies, black or ethnic studies, socialist and anti-imperialist studies, all of which take for their point of departure the right of formerly un- or mis-represented human groups to speak for and represent themselves in domains defined, politically and intellectually, as normally excluding them, usurping their signifying and representing functions, overriding their historical reality. In short, Orientalism reconsidered in this wider and libertarian optic entails nothing less than the creation of new objects for a new kind of knowledge. But let me now return to the local problems I referred to first. The hindsight of authors not only stimulates in them a sense of regret at what they could or ought to have done but did not; it also gives them a wider perspective in which to comprehend what they did. In my own case, I have been helped to achieve this broader understanding by nearly everyone who wrote about my book, and who saw it - for better or worse - as being part of current debates, conflicts, and contested interpretations in the Arab-Islamic world, as that world interacts with the United States and Europe. Certainly there can be no doubt that in my own rather limited case - the consciousness of being an Orien- tal goes back to my youth in colonial Palestine and Egypt, although the 91 This content downloaded on Mon, 28 Jan 2013 17:56:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 92 Edward W. Said impulse to resist its accompanying impingements was nurtured in the heady atmosphere of the post-World War II period of independence when Arab nationalism, Nasserism, the 1967 War, the rise of the Pales- tine national movement, the 1973 War, the Lebanese Civil War, the Iranian Revolution and its horrific aftermath produced that extraor- dinary series of highs and lows which has neither ended nor allowed us a full understanding of its remarkable revolutionary impact. The interesting point here is how difficult it is to try to understand a region of the world whose principal features seem to be, first, that it is in perpetual flux, and second, that no one trying to grasp it can by an act of pure will or of sovereign understanding stand at some Archime- dean point outside the flux. That is, the very reason for understanding the Orient generally and the Arab world in particular was first, that it prevailed upon one, beseeched one's attention urgently, whether for economic, political, cultural, or religious reasons, and second, that it defied neutral, disinterested, or stable definition. Similar problems are commonplace in the interpretation of literary texts. Each age, for instance, re-interprets Shakespeare, not because Shakespeare changes, but because despite the existence of numerous and reliable editions of Shakespeare, there is no such fixed and non- trivial object as Shakespeare independent of his editors, the actors who played his roles, the translators who put him in other languages, the hundreds of millions of readers who have read him or watched perfor- mances of his plays since the late sixteenth century. On the other hand, it is too much to say that Shakespeare has no independent existence at all, and that he is completely reconstituted every time someone reads, acts, or writes about him. In fact Shakespeare leads an institutional or cultural life that among other things has guaranteed his eminence as a great poet, his authorship of thirty-odd plays, his extraordinary canon- ical powers in the West. The point I am making here is a rudimentary one: that even so relatively inert an object as a literary text is commonly supposed to gain some of its identity from its historical moment interacting with the attentions, judgements, scholarship, and perfor- mances of its readers. But, I discovered, this privilege was rarely allowed the Orient, the Arabs, or Islam, which separately or together were sup- posed by mainstream academic thought to be confined to the fixed status of an object frozen once and for all in time by the gaze of Western percipients. Far from being a defense either of the Arabs or Islam - as my book This content downloaded on Mon, 28 Jan 2013 17:56:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Orientalism Reconsidered was taken by many to be - my argument was that neither existed except as "communities of interpretation" which give them existence, and that, like the Orient itself, each designation represented interests, claims, projects, ambitions, and rhetorics that were not only in violent disagreement, but were in a situation of open warfare. So saturated with meanings, so overdetermined by history, religion, and politics are labels like "Arab" or "muslim" as subdivisions of "The Orient" that no one today can use them without some attention to the formidable polemical mediations that screen the objects, if they exist at all, that the labels designate. I do not think it is too much to say that the more these observations have been made by one party, the more routinely they are denied by the other; this is true whether it is Arabs or Muslims discussing the meaning of Arabism or Islam, or whether an Arab or Muslim disputes these designations with a Western scholar. Anyone who tries to suggest that nothing, not even a simple descriptive label, is beyond or outside the realm of interpretation is almost certain to find an opponent saying that science and learning are designed to transcend the vagaries of interpretation, and that objective truth is in fact attainable. This claim was more than a little political when used against Orientals who dis- puted the authority and objectivity of an Orientalism intimately allied with the great mass of European settlements in the Orient. At bottom, what I said in Orientalism had been said before me by A.L. Tibawi, by Abdullah Laroui, by Anwar Abdel Malek, by Talal Asad, by S.H. Alatas, by Fanon and Cesaire, by Pannikar, and Romila Thapar, all of whom had suffered the ravages of imperialism and colonialism, and who, in challenging the authority, provenance, and institutions of the science that represented them to Europe, were also understanding themselves as something more than what this science said they were. Nor was this all. The challenge to Orientalism and the colonial era of which it is so organically a part was a challenge to the muteness imposed upon the Orient as object. Insofar as it was a science of incor- poration and inclusion by virtue of which the Orient was constituted and then introduced into Europe, Orientalism was a scientific move- ment whose analogue in the world of empirical politics was the Orient's colonial accumulation and acquisition by Europe. The Orient was therefore not Europe's interlocutor, but its silent Other. From roughly the end of the eighteenth century, when in its age, distance, and rich- 93 This content downloaded on Mon, 28 Jan 2013 17:56:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 94 Edward W. Said ness the Orient was re-discovered by Europe, its history had been a paradigm of antiquity and originality, functions that drew Europe's interests in acts of recognition or acknowledgement but from which Europe moved as its own industrial, economic, and cultural develop- ment seemed to leave the Orient far behind. Oriental history - for Hegel, for Marx, later for Burkhardt, Nietzsche, Spengler, and other major philosophers of history - was useful in portraying a region of great age, and what had to be left behind. Literary historians have further noted in all sorts of aesthetic writing and plastic portrayals that a trajectory of "Westering," found for example in Keats and Holderlin, customarily saw the Orient as ceding its historical preeminence and importance to the world spirit moving westwards away from Asia and towards Europe. As primitivity, as the age-old antetype of Europe, as a fecund night out of which European rationality developed, the Orient's actuality receded inexorably into a kind of paradigmatic fossilization. The origins of European anthropology and ethnography were constituted out of this radical difference, and, to my knowledge, as a discipline anthropology has not yet dealt with this inherent political limitation upon its supposedly disinterested universality. This, by the way, is one reason Johannes Fabian's book, Time and The Other: How Anthropology Constitutes Its Object is both so unique and so important; compared, say, with the standard disciplinary rationalizations and self-congratulatory cliches about hermeneutic circles offered by Clifford Geertz, Fabian's serious effort to re-direct anthropologists' attention back to the dis- crepancies in time, power, and development between the ethnograph- er and his/her constituted object is all the more remarkable. In any event, what for the most part got left out of Orientalism was precisely the very history that resisted its ideological as well as political encroach- ments, and this repressed or resistant history has returned in the various critiques and attacks upon Orientalism, which has uniformly and polemically been represented by these critiques as a science of imperialism. The divergences between the numerous critiques made of Orien- talism as ideology and praxis, at least so far as their aims are concerned, are very wide nonetheless. Some attack Orientalism as a prelude to assertions about the virtues of one or another native culture: these are the nativists. Others criticize Orientalism as a defense against attacks on one or another political creed: these are the nationalists. Still others This content downloaded on Mon, 28 Jan 2013 17:56:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Orientalism Reconsidered criticize Orientalism for falsifying the nature of Islam: these are, grosso modo, the fundamentalists. I will not adjudicate between these claims, except to say that I have explicitly avoided taking stands on such mat- ters as the real, true, or authentic Islamic or Arab world, except as issues relating to conflicts involving partisanship, solidarity, or sym- pathy, although I have always tried never to forsake a critical sense or reflective detachment. But in common with all the recent critics of Orientalism I think that two things are especially important - one, a rigorous methodological vigilance that construes Orientalism less as a positive than as a critical discipline and therefore makes it subject to intense scrutiny, and two, a determination not to allow the segregation and confinement of the Orient to go on without challenge. My own understanding of this second point has led me to the extreme position of entirely refusing designations like "Orient" and "Occident," but this is something I shall return to a little later. Depending on how they construed their roles as Orientalists, critics of the critics of Orientalism have either reinforced the affirmations of positive power lodged within Orientalism's discourse, or much less frequently alas, they have engaged Orientalism's critics in a genuine intellectual exchange. The reasons for this split are self-evident: some have to do with power and age, as well as institutional or guild defen- siveness; others have to do with religious or ideological convictions. All, irrespective of whether the fact is acknowledged or not, are political - something that not everyone has found easy to acknowledge. If I may take use of my own example, when some of my critics in particular agreed with the main premises of my argument they tended to fall back on encomia to the achievements of what one of their most dis- tinguished individuals, Maxime Rodinson, called "la science orien- taliste." This view lent itself to attacks on an alleged Lysenkism lurking inside the polemics of Muslims or Arabs who lodged a protest with "Western" Orientalism, despite the fact that all the recent critics of Orientalism have been quite explicit about using such "Western" cri- tiques as Marxism or structuralism in an effort to override invidious distinctions between East and West, between Arab and Western truth, and the like. Sensitized to the outrageous attacks upon an august and formerly invulnerable science, many accredited members of the certified pro- fessional cadre, whose division of study is the Arabs and Islam, have disclaimed any politics at all, while pressing a vigorous, but for the 95 This content downloaded on Mon, 28 Jan 2013 17:56:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 96 Edward W. Said most part intellectually empty and ideologically intended, counter- attack. Although I said I would not respond to critics here, I need to mention a few of the more typical imputations made against me so that you can see Orient