Philosophy.Com

Edward Said: due consideration

Edward Said is dead.
A recent interview.

The debate Said launched about the relationship between the Western world and the East, and how the West sought to transform aspects of its imagination into power over the East through the process of Orientalism is still alive. Thus, our current Western understandings of Islam are structured by a history of racism, colonial interests and antipathy.

My intellectual relationship to Said's texts has less to do with his Palestinian writings, and more to do with his earlier texts on Orientalism. I sort of code Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis into Orientalism on the grounds that Huntington argues that the underlying problem for the West is Islam, not Islamic fundamentalism.

So I'm not that suprised by the conservative rejection of Said's work. It's pretty predictable, given that Said maintains that Orientalism is alive and entrenched in the culture of the Anglo-American liberal democracies. This enframes Islam as being responsible for bin Laden and other terrorists who hijack their religion whilst the sterotype of militant Islam is used as a justification for wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, and for threatening wars against Iran and Saudi Arabia. Hence, this conservative reaction at Winds of Change. The link is courtesy of Bargarz.

Winds of Change is hostile to Said. The text says that:

"Said was not interested in advancing scholarship, but only anti-Western polemical screeds, being mostly content with hurling vitriolic and malicious invective against past and present Orientalists, such as Silvestre de Sacy and Bernard Lewis."

Winds of Change gets to this point in 3 easy steps. First it defines scholarship in a quasi-Popperian manner. This is interpreted as:

"...pursuing knowledge in a systematic, scientific manner is good scholarship. There is an excellent reason for this - the frontiers of human understanding are advanced only by modifying or discarding theories that fail to explain reality in favour of those that do. In other words, it takes a theory to beat a theory. In intellectual circles, this has become the obvious standard against which the quality of scholarship is held."

Having set up the criteria for good scholarship Winds of Change then says that nowhere did:

"...Said introduce a new way of thinking about the Arab world; nowhere did he provide an alternative, superior theory and framework that contained none of the alleged defects of Orientalist theories."

And ipso facto Said was not doing scholarship. Hence it can only be politics or polemics. And that deductive argument proves what is assumed in the first place: namely, that the academic left has dumped scholarship for politics. Such is the way that academic gatekeeping works.

I say conservative because Winds of Change uses Popper to reject deconstruction (note the scare quotes) and the field of post-colonial studies (note the scare quotes again) without even considering whether the humanities work in a different way to the social sciences. Hence the humanities are reduced to a quasi-science without any attempt at providing a justification for the move. There is philosophical chasm here and it cannot be ignored or glossed over by gatekeeeping. The chasm needs to be addressed.

Keith Windschuttle is more aware of the philosophy involved in such a reductionist move. He sees the entry of the discourse of Orientalism into Australia through the art institution--Windschuttle mentions the Art Galley of NSW's exhibition Orientalism:- Delacroix to Klee. The exhibition was curated by an Australian scholar and a catalogue was produced that fits comfortably and easily into the literature on Orientalism and art.

So we can judge what Windschuttle has to say about the philosophical chasm. We will show that the chasm is not bridged at a philosophical level.

Windshuttle starts in a scholarly manner. He acknowledges that Edward Said looms large over the current cultural landscape due to Orientalism, and that he holds sway over the literary criticism of the nineteenth-century novel as a result of Culture and Imperialism. So he acknowledges that Said is an influential intellectual figure.

Windshuttle then says that in Orientalism Said makes three claims:

"The first is that Orientalism, although purporting to be an objective, disinterested, and rather esoteric field, in fact functioned to serve political ends. Orientalist scholarship provided the means through which Europeans could take over Oriental lands......

His second claim is that Orientalism helped define Europe's self-image. It has less to do with the Orient than it does with our world. The construction of identity in every age and every society, Said maintains, involves establishing opposites and Others.....

Thirdly, Said argues that Orientalism has produced a false description of Arabs and Islamic culture. This happened primarily because of the essentialist nature of the enterprise, that is, the belief that it was possible to define the essential qualities of Arab peoples and Islamic culture. These qualities were seen in uniformly negative terms, he says. The Orient was defined as a place isolated from the mainstream of human progress in the sciences, arts, and commerce."

Windschuttle acknowledges the antecendents of Orientialism. The content is there in the earlier texts of the French Coptic socialist author Anwar Abdel Malek and the notion of discourse in work of Michel Foucault, the French poststructuralist. Windshuttle also acknowledges that Said scores some hits. But none of these, says Windschuttle, "...are sufficient to sustain Said?s thesis. It is not difficult to show that each of his three main claims about Orientalism is seriously flawed."By seriously flawed Windschuttle means that the three claims are untenable. Orientalism is built on a house of cards. WindshUttle says that:

"Said's whole attempt to identify Oriental Studies as a cause of imperialism does not deserve to be taken seriously .... nowhere else does Said provide an analysis of the thoughts and reasons of the imperial decision-makers at the time they actually entered upon Europe?s Oriental adventures. At most, Said establishes that Orientalism provided the West with a command of Oriental languages and culture, plus a background mindset that convinced it of its cultural and technological advance over Islam. But these are far from sufficient causes of imperial conquest since they explain neither motives, opportunities, nor objectives...Apart from Foucault's grandiose hypothesis that knowledge always generates power, Said provides no support at all for his contention that colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, because he fails to cite evidence about the actual causal sequence that led to the annexation of any of the territories occupied by England or France in the nineteenth century."

The assumption here is that Said is doing history as social science and providing causal explanations of particular events, namely European colonialism. But Said comes up short with empirical evidence and so he fails.

Is the assumption plausible? No. We return to the philosophical chams mentioned above. Said is concerned with meaning not explanation. He is constructing the interpretive meaning of a diverse range of texts into a particular discourse---what Windshuttle calls a background mindset---not citing evidence for the actual casual sequence. This is history as the interpretation of texts and not history as a postivist social science. There's the chasm.

Windschuttle says Said's second claim has just as little to recommend it. He says:

"The notion that Western culture has needed an ?Other? to define its own identity derives from the structuralist version of Freudian theory that became prominent in France in the 1960s...This is a central concept of Said?s thesis but, unfortunately, it leads him into a direct contradiction with one of his core methodological dicta: his rejection of essentialism. In the afterword to the 1995 edition of Orientalism, he ... says [his] own approach is ?explicitly anti-essentialist.? It is difficult, though, to reconcile this assertion with the way he characterizes Western identity. He argues that, from its origins, the West?s self-concept was defined by its opposition to Asia...the claim that every culture needs to be defined by an Other... is not an historical statement at all, but an epistemological assumption derived from structuralist theory... Europeans do not primarily draw their identity from comparisons with other cultures. Instead, identity comes from their own heritage... Western identity is overwhelmingly defined by historical references to its earlier selves, rather than by geographical comparisons with others. To claim otherwise is to deny the central thrust of Western education for the past one thousand years."

We encounter another philosophical divide. Said is not working with a a self-identity of a self-contained thing. He is working with a revised--non essentialist---Hegelian relational identity, in which identity comes through the ongoing development of relationships. The classic example is Hegel's old Master/Slave dialectic in the Phenomeology of Spirit. Wha this means is that the West defines itself in relation to Islam; ie., to what it is not. There is a long historical and mostly antagonistic relationship between Western nations and Islamic ones. Windshuttle is assuming the former analytic-empiricist conception of identity is the only conception of identity. Hence he is displacing continental philosophy from Hegel to Foucault, rather than engaging with it.

Windshuttle says that the third component of Said's thesis, the allegedly false essentialism of Orientalism not only contradicts his own methodological assumptions, but is a curious argument in itself. Windschuttle is making two points here. He says that it is a curious argument because going "back to the origins of a culture to examine its founding principles is hardly something to be condemned." True. But origins is not the only pathway since there is also the structural relationship between the West and Islam as civilizations. Maybe we can redescribe this origins/stucture conflict in terms of needing to work with the historical development of the relationship between the West and Islam and the Oriental discourse.

On the second methodological point Windschuttle says that:

"Said would be right to complain were Western ideas about Islamic peoples confined solely to stereotypes derived from their founding texts and early history. But it is simply untrue that the whole body of Oriental scholarship has made this kind of mistake....Anyone who takes the trouble to read the one book he favors, [Maxime Rodinson?s] Islam and Capitalism, will find it actually tells a different story... A large section of the book is a debate with, and critique of, those Western economists and their Muslim allies who do not, in fact, see the Arabs as having an inherent incapacity for trade, but instead regard these societies as capable of adopting capitalist commerce and industry. He discusses in some detail the work of six economic commentators who expressed views of this kind between the 1910s and the 1950s. Though Rodinson agrees there are many observers who share the assumptions identified by Said, and though his main aim is to see Islam adopt socialism, the evidence of his book is a clear refutation of Said's sweeping generalization about Orientalist economics. "

Now I have not read this section of Orientalism for a long time. But I read the effect of Rodinson's Islam and Capitalism differently to Windschuttle. I interpret Rodinson's text differently, in the sense that this text creats a rupture with the discourse of Orientalism---it transgresses the limits of this discourse by recovering the diverse voices that were contrary to the discourse of Orientalism. The power/knowledge regime of Orientalism creates resistance and different readings --it is not monolithic as Windschuttle assumes. That the field has always included a multiplicity of issues coming under the jurisdiction of many general disciplines does not negate the existence of a particular discourse of Orientalism.

What I have tried to show is the failure of a philosophical engagement across a philosophical chasm. It is an old and familiar story: both sides on either side shouting past each other. None of this is to suggest that one side is right and the other wrong: it is to show the lack of engagement at the level of assumptions: one that basically derives from Windschuttle's embrace of David Stove; his empiricist conception of the accumulation of knowledge based on bits of empirical data to counter the relativism of truth; and his disdain and contempt for a "subjective" hermeneutics.

And, in the last part of his article, Windschuttle does not go on to engage at a philosophical level. Instead he turns his attention to attacking Said's politics. But he has another go at Said herein relation to Culture and Imperialism for those interested.

It really feels like the revisiting the 1960s all over again with this conservatism. Windschuttle has gone back to there to find the tools to fight the academic left and more particularly the poststructuralist enemy who killed history and are now engaged in a total critique and indictment of Western culture.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at September 28, 2003 07:49 PM | TrackBack