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Imo the problem with the article, and perhaps if it is a faithful representation of the original idea of orientalism, is that it is incoherent. >As Said argued, Orientalism’s failure was “a human as much as an intellectual one; for in having to take up a position of irreducible opposition to a region of the world it considered alien to its own, Orientalism failed to identify with human experience, failed also to see it as human experience.” Alright, but considering the rest of continental philosophy and post-modern thought it is a literal impossibility to do this ever, even with one's own culture and even with one's previous and future selves. How can it be an indictment on anyone to not have done something that one is actually unable to do? If, in the 19th century, before Amazon and YouTube, and Instagram, and Facebook, you lived in England, in a village where most people barely even ever travelled farther than the next village over, and you came into contact with radical alterity how else could you be expected to respond. And as, again according to post-modern philosophy (say Baudrillard in this case) you get closer to this difference you actually start changing it so it becomes more and more like you. So you are either in this state of being orientalist, or in a state of intense globalization, and someone making a critique from this moral high road of globalization about this bucolic, parochial state of the orientalist is probably someone similar to a policy wonk referring to a basket of deplorables, which is just another kind of power-knowledge relation, which is what the critique is meant to make clear in the first place. To think about Foucault's preface to Anti-Oedipus, the problem is we can never really escape from this stuff. And the problem with ever even making a statement such as this is that it is incoherent in the sense that one never comes away clean, basically because always and already the claim of tu quoque can be leveled. I mean sure it doesn't strictly speaking invalidate the claim there is this power relation, but when we're so stuck in the middle of them all the time in every way, as Foucault said, the strategic adversary becomes fascism itself, not the historical fascism, but our love of power and how it causes us to act everyday, and how it makes us love it even as it dominates us. And that is very difficult to uncover if you're leveling a claim of inappropriate relation to any one group, because the problem is our humanity, not the content of our relations or historically contingent facts. Putting names to faces makes it opaque, because the reality is any human occupying a similar role would act inappropriately, so what you do is you attack the role not the name. It may be that Said does that. I have never gotten around to reading the book, but just going off of the confused article posted, I just felt there was a sort of mishmash without a really clear and distinct thesis, and that what the facade was hiding in a metaphorical sense was paving stones to be thrown in the next revolution, rather than an attempt to end violence or power relations altogether. |