Said, Orientalism. Notes

Orientalism  Edward Said

Said takes a structuralist approach to global politics and culture. He divides the world into the Occident and the Orient. Essentially West and East.

The Orient exists for the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the West. It is a mirror image of what is inferior and alien ("Other") to the West.

Said argues that every encoder of a text pertaining to the orient assumes what he calls an Oriental Precedent, ie some previous knowledge of the Orient to which s/he refers and on which s/he relies.

Orientalism is "a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases.

Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar and the strange ‘us and them’.
Said argues that writers like Flaubert, Nerval etc were constrained in what they could say or experience or say about the Orient – the decoders are further constrained by the encoders representation. It is not a conspiracy theory as such but a hegemony derived from an information imbalance.

The Oriental is the person represented by such thinking. The man is depicted as feminine, weak, yet strangely dangerous because poses a threat to white, Western women. The woman is both eager to be dominated and strikingly exotic. The Oriental is a single image, a sweeping generalization, a stereotype that crosses countless cultural and national boundaries.

Once conventional depictions of others become a hyper-real representation then how does an encoder make a representation without reference to a previous representation?

Ultimately then Said argues that every European who spoke of the orient was consequently a racist, an imperialist and almost totally ethnocentric.

Nietzsche once said that ‘truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are’