Said, Orientalism, Introduction

 

We began, as per usual, with questions:

1)      Can we further specify the relation of orientalism to originality, continuity, and individuality (pg 15)?

2)      What does Said mean by authority vis-à-vis his two methodological devices of strategic location and strategic formation (pg 20)?

3)      How would we compare/contrast Said’s methodological approach with that of subaltern studies, esp. with Spivak?

4)      How would we compare/contrast Said’s methodological approach with that of Foucauldian genealogy and/or discourse analysis?  How does Said’s focus on Foucauldian discourse line up with Foucault’s own category of discourse?

5)      What is Said’s idea of “internal consistency” as an object of study (pg 5) and how does he situate it in relation to “redoubtable durability” as a companion object of study (pg 6)?

6)      Said is explicit that his methodology relies ion a set of historical generalizations (pg 4).  Are these generalizations reliant upon his methodology or do they serve to set up the deployment of it by functioning as a kind of starting point for analysis?

 

We then moved to discussion:

Relation of Orientalism to Orient is “a kind of intellectual authority over the Orient within Western culture” (19).  Strategy, authority, hegemony.  “Authority can, indeed must be analyzed” (20).

Is Said descriptive of authority?  Is he unmasking authority?  What is Said’s analytical-philosopihcal relationship to the authority he is studying?

Orientalism as an authority (12).  What Orientalism is has to do with how Orientalism is situated with respect to subjects.  Said offers a notion of strategic configuration.  There is a contrast here between two forms of strategic location:

Strategic location #1: I am person of identity x, vis-à-vis

Strategic location #2 (Said): a granular analysis of what form Orientalism has taken from/within specific trajectories.

Study of how the West has conceived of the Orient.  The focus is on representations (21), moreso than truth.

This leads to analysis of “formidable structure of cultural domination” (25) and the dangers of this.

This is clearly not Freudo-Marxism.  Is it closer to cultural studies?

Looking at this as a book from the 1970s, it makes some initiating moves in terms of its ethics and its politics.  Said establishes much of what we today often take for granted.

What for Said is the scope of Orientalist discourse?

A study of consistency in relation to durability/stability.  There is a connection between consistency, stability, and power that Said (similar to Foucault) is here studying.

 

 

In terms of comparison…

 … with Foucault….

Like Foucault, Said is interested in the productive rather than “unilaterally inhibiting” role of discourse and hegemonic systems (14).

Said is more explicitly focused on the “imprint of individual writers” (23).  This imprint gets studied through the “strategic location” of individual authors (20).  We can distinguish…

                Discourse/author [but without an overemphasis on hermeneutic analysis (e.g., 14)]

                Practice/document

Said seems to be both descriptive and normative, in contrast to Foucault’s more straightforwardly descriptive approach.