Orientalism

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Discussion on Edward Said's Orientalism

• Student 1: Found it interesting how Balfour's attitude reflects European arrogance, degrading Egyptians by claiming Europeans know them better than they know themselves. This ignores contributions from the Islamic and Asian worlds to math and science.

• Instructor: Balfour and Cromer are key figures referred to as orientalists. The attitude is to be unpacked and deconstructed.

• Student 2: Defines orientalism as constraints and limitations on thought or knowledge, viewing the Orient as intellectually inferior. Applied to the mandate system where Western powers took over the Ottoman Empire, thinking it couldn't govern itself.

• Instructor: Thought is conditioned by knowledge and its production, influencing intellectual experts, administrative bodies (political and economic), and cultural production. This creates a dynamic in constructing the "other" (the Orient), including Arab peoples and Egypt. It raises the question of what it means to "know them better than they know themselves".

Key Concepts in Said's Analysis

• Assumptions regarding ethics, knowledge, and their role in fostering a sense of Western superiority.

• "Western" as more than a geographic designation; it carries a symbology and culture. Using Hobsbawm's language, it has a mythology, ascribing power, personage, image, and status through storytelling.

• Construction of the East is intertwined with the construction of the West.

• To define the "other," one takes a position of power, aligning with the "masculine" as opposed to the "feminine".

• Questioning if this is a natural position or a construction. One knows oneself by knowing who they are not, emphasizing how they are better or more powerful.

• Power flows in both directions, influencing the construction of both the Orient and the Occident (West).

Edward Said's Background and Intellectual Influences

• Edward Said was a Palestinian Christian and a prominent philosopher, political figure, and essayist. He died while the instructor was in graduate school.

• Falls under the umbrella of critical theory, influenced by neo-Marxism and Michel Foucault.

• Focuses on the production of knowledge and how knowledge is power. Authoritative knowledge carries power dynamics and regulates through the reproduction of knowledge.

Reproduction of Knowledge

• Occurs in institutions.

• Connecting Freud to Said: How does knowledge specific to the ego (the reality principle balancing the pleasure principle) relate to the proper relationship between oneself and others?

• How well do you know yourself? Are you bustling, enlightened, or romantic?

• Are you a member of the nation, in good standing, or of a particular ethnicity or race? Are you powerful or weak?

• The production and reproduction of knowledge: Is every will to know also a will to power?

• The statement "to know who these people over there are better than they know themselves" is a statement of power. It implies they can't even govern or conduct themselves, reinforcing a power dynamic.

The West's Perceived Advantage

• What gives the West the advantage in knowledge, according to orientalists like Balfour and Cromer?

• Is it knowledge of Newtonian physics or calculus? Knowing of something versus knowing something are different.

• The constant duration of discourse is produced and reproduced through what means?

Connections Between Hobsbawm and Said

• How does one get to orientalism through nationalism? How did warring identities transform into a super identity (European vs. others)?

• Through the education system and universities.

• One learns the knowledge of who they are not only in universities but also in primary and secondary school.

• National belonging is reinforced through football stadiums, national culture, music, and economic strength.

• Local elites and intellectuals play a role, along with cultural production and reproduction.

• Ancient vs. modern Egypt: It matters only insofar as they're not like what they used to be, influencing the treatment and understanding of the country.

• The orientalist discourse is a national discourse applied to those other than the nation.

The Imperial Project

• The move from liberal nationalism to ethno-nationalism is tied to the imperial and colonial projects.

• Is being stronger (militarily or physically) the same as being superior?

• Asserting dominance and superiority over others.

• Armed prophets prevail, armed with weapons but also with a sense of manifest destiny, innovation, and advanced techniques.

• Does this connect with moral might? Does might make right?

The Breakdown of Universalist Principles

• The idea that the West is superior because it's enlightened (through the Enlightenment, scientific revolution, philosophical revolution, and industrial revolution) is organized under universalist principles.

• But this breaks down under institutional pressures or conveniences.

• Universalism finds expression in the state, which is always particular and never universal.

• Governing techniques create a nation, giving the state a soul, flesh, and blood through nationalism.

• National culture is created out of desire and aggression and is consciously constructed until it becomes second nature to subsequent generations, fading the echoes of its construction.

• This creates a seemingly natural union with a common language, culture, religion, and themes. The constructed ethnicity forgets its origins and feels incredibly natural.

From Pride to Ascendancy

• With that feeling comes a sense of pride and specialness, quickly fetishized into "better".

• Nation-states compete for ascendancy, including empire, colonies, imperial wealth, and dominance over others.

• Superiority is proven by constructing a narrative of inferiority or otherness based on nature. This discourse becomes ascendant because it reproduces knowledge, and that knowledge becomes power.

Knowledge as Power

• How does that knowledge become power at home (in the West) and abroad (in the East)?

• Earlyangelist perspective: Several steps are involved.

  • The first step is that the West is doing the talking about the East instead of listening to the East about itself.

  • Middle men such as Lord Colomer speak for the East despite not speaking or understanding the language.

  • Assumptions are already present that they are somehow inferior which is part of the overall discourse.

  • Even authoritative knowledge is not enough because the assumption is that the Eastern world doesn't have have power.

• Knowledge counts as cultural knowledge count as the right information to have.

  • The example of Egypt being associated with only the Pyramids even though they happened thousands of years ago and more recent historical figures are not represented in the collective understanding.

  • Cultural production informs people what to think of a country.
    Examples provided were:

    • 9/11

    • Cold War

    • Watergate

Orientalism - The West and the East to showcase superiority of the West by describing inherent values of each place (i.e, the West has enlightenment) and each place's borders.

Irrationality vs. Domination

• What is it to look at another culture without even having an attempt to speak their language and to call it irrational? What is it aiming at, this attitude? - Domination.

• It's not even trying to understand.

• If there's language, if there's any form of human organization, any form of organization in terms of economy, in terms of settled places, in terms of hierarchies, in terms of some kind of political order, there is rationality.

• But the rationality is not the same as the rationality in this place or in that place.

• If you have no concern to understand that rationality, if you have no concern to understand it, then you have no concern for subordinating yourself to yourself to it or somehow finding a place where you fit.

• To understand something is to understand where you fit.

Moral Superiority and Cultural Production

• If you see it as irrational and you can justifiably call it irrational, then you can also justifiably not subordinate yourself to it.

• You have denied it any legitimate claim to a legitimate to a monopoly of legitimate violence.

• You have preempted having to deal with the authority of that place by simply saying that it has no reason in and of itself.

• What is the position of moral superiority?

• To impose reason upon it. You're saving people. You're actually doing it a favor.

• Cultural production isn't merely the cultural production of the Orient. It isn't merely the cultural production of what counts as the heaps, but it's also the cultural production of the West superiority.

• Justifying the West superiority, by saying "we in the West get to know who we are if we can say they are them, they are other, they are this way."

Colonization of the Inner Self

• It's not merely a country occupying another country. Colonization is about occupying the inner self.

• The production of knowledge is, oh, these people are inferior. These people are bad. These practices are backwards, they become part of the, in a sense, domestic production and reproduction of that culture. How do these people who are now on the receiving end of that, how do they possibly reimagine themselves?

Overarching Discourse and the Production of Self

• When one does discourse analysis in the Foucaultian sense, which is exactly what Said is doing, one isn't just talking about the words that are spoken, but the signs and symbols everywhere that are met.

• Everything from travel brochure, everything from a play or song in terms of just food courts and where people go to eat or what things are celebrated in terms of that culture, what things are reproduced in you know, ginseng gift shops or whatever, all the way up through the classrooms, the academy, political authority, and even institutions like, let's say, the UN, World Bank, IMF, so on and so forth that then solidify those kinds of, frankly, prejudices and biases into truth, into the knowledge necessary to interact with these parts of the world.

National Consciousness and Decolonization

• According to someone like Franz Fennen, was not only to destroy the colonizer and it's institutions, but in a sense, to destroy the colonies.

• Need to be reborn in a sense of national consciousness to speak and act for themselves.

• To be spoken for seems innocuous until people say, no, this is what they are.

Soft Power and Collaboration

• Student: Is this, like, an early form of soft power that was being used pretty much? Because heavy handed taking over is hard power, but in a way, they're showing their influence through just, hey, we're better.

• Instructor: To a certain degree, the answer is yes. Right? Cultural imperialism and its reproduction is not so different from the kind of hardcore kind of material imperialism that you see at the origins. It is. The ideational side is the side of consciousness production.

• Local elites are validated by colonial rule and play up the authority of that colonial rule for their own ambition, for their own gain. So they become the local justifiers and and kind of reproducers of the larger colonial project in order to gain prestige and and money at whatever cost of themselves.

Contemporary Examples and Inherent Nationalism

• There were comments by the vice president about China, saying it was a country of peasants. Is that fairly accurate in terms of Said's analysis of orientalism?

• The problem is not necessarily a thing of the past and can be applied to things such as Islamophobia in today's politics.

• Anti Semitism with pro-Palestinian international student protests

• Christopher Browning writing pieces on Mass murder and anti-semitism.

Ethic of Responsibility and the Other

• Is orientalism inherent in nationalism? Is orientalism merely a face or a variant of the one in other distinction?

• Here are the people who practice an ethics of responsibility, and then there's everybody else who wants something else over and against the legitimacy of the state. They're the other.

• That aggression never goes away, that aggression needs an outlet.

• The only outlet for people to feel love is by knowing who the Other is and being able to be violent with who don't receive love from either the State or a group involved (nationalism) that want to harm and threaten US.

Patriotism vs. Nationalism

• Student: Where would you say that if they are different, but where would patriotism differ from nationalism?

_Key Points:

• Intellectual distinctions can be made on how love for your own group can lead to othering a different group of people.

• With regards to Hobsbawm, the apogee of second World War showed that mass murder and violence have never been seen before due to historical racism.

Love vs. Hate

-Mass murder and hate occurs out of love of ones country. Since people want to be okay and angry, want to be scornful, want to be hateful etc

• Intellectual celebration can then be utilized for things far more aggressive such as mass murder

The Limits of Otherizing

• Both sides are justifying violence because they love out of love, or is there always an oppressor, and is there always an other?

  • Discourse can be applied by both sides such as the Soviet Union vs the United states

  • France against Germany

Process of Construction

• Those things are a process of construction and deconstruction in order to construct power.

  • Ontology

Othering and Aggression

• Is it possible to not construct the other and simply all be part of a universal human family? From the free perspective, that is not possible.
  Such as the French and the German

• The third way isn't working out because of human nature

• There's no choice but to be ego. However, that doesn't stop intervening with construction aggressive toward other human beings.

Constructing Nations

• Everything is just mass hysteria to allow people express themsevles socially in power.
  Especially on level of Nations State.

The ego is always a loser and is always the id trying to let itself out

The only good for us is if they act and think like us which is because they're irrational and we always express freedom due to enlightenment.

The Three Philosophers:

Freud It's human nature

Said It's construction. Social Construction must have people dress up

Hobsbawm Minerva sees nationalism fade for what's better