Is the Formula of 'Professor of
Terror', a Hoax?
(This
paper was presented at the Students Seminar on 21st January 2004 at the
P.G. Department of English, Ravenshaw
College, Cuttack.)
The most remarkable
thing I found in Orientalism, the reputed revolutionary text by
Edward Said -- more famously dubbed as the ‘Professor of Terror’ since
1999 by the rightwing American magazine Commentary – is the point
where he talks of the power-relationship of the knowledge of the Orient
with the socio-political and ‘culturally hegemonic imperial projects’ of
the West. Said at first in his book distinguishes between two types of
knowledge – ‘true’ and ‘political’. He points out the consensus working in
academia the idea that ‘true’ knowledge is non-political. Rather he argues
that the supposedly apolitical scholarly works we involved in ‘interest’
and geo-political power relation, and hence the texts are un-detachable
from power relation of political, cultural, intellectual, and moral
domains.
And this he relates to
all the interpretations done by the Oriental scholars and discoverers, and
forms a kind of conclusion that “Orientalism” is born out of the imperial
projects of the West, where when the next phase of Orientalists or
scholars try to form any ontological statement about the Orient, they only
contribute to the process of what he terms as ‘orientalisation of the
Orient’. He then raises the methodological question on the procedures of
interpretations which were used by the Orientalists like Renan, Sacy etc.
and were based on ontological interpretations of the East. He sees these
methodologies as a threat to the process of de-colonization movement of
the present day where the attempt is made to bring ‘minor’ or ‘subaltern’
voice to a position of equality with the ‘major’. He sees it as a threat
because he finds these methodologies as some kind of machineries that turn
the supposed discoverers of the Orients in to the inventors.
And with this he comes
to explain his own position as the most recent articulator of the Orient
and talks of how he has used a new methodology in his text Orientalism.
After this short introduction to Said’s Orientalism now I feel
it is time that I articulated the aim of this paper. My aim in this paper
is to examine, whether Said is successful in applying his new
methodology in his text? Whether the belief of Said that his procedure
to articulate about Orient is totally free from the faults which Said has
charged against the other methodologies and scholarly interpretations of
the East or the Orient, used by the Orientalists before him? And last ,
but not the least , that is he really contributing to the part of the
world wide movement of de-colonization to mend the gap between the
‘Occident’ and the ‘Orient’?
Said from the very
beginning emphasizes that Orient is not just a fixed geographical fact,
but it is necessarily an idea that has some social, geographical and
cultural dimensions attached to it and is centered round the geographical
locations of Middle- East centered Asio-African region with varying
circumference for different western eyes. Said’s conformation of ‘Orient’
as an imaginative product of Western mind and as a set of myths and lies,
helps him to proceed in his aim of unraveling the imperial projects that
were engaged in creating these myths. And here he shows how power
relationship between knowledge and the imperial designs for a cultural
hegemony of the non-Western ‘other’ works. The first phase of
consciousness of the Orient ( at this point I mean European West) came
through the consciousness of Christianity about another religious power in
the ‘East’. ‘After Mohammad’s death in 632 A.D. , the military and later
cultural and religious hegemony of Islam grew enormously […] Christian
authors witnessing the Islamic conquests had scant interests in the
learning , high culture and frequent magnificence of the Muslims, who were
as Gibbon said, “ coeval with the darkest and most slothful period of
European annals” […] For Europe Islam was a lasting trauma […] a constant
danger’ (Said, 1995,p.59) . This consciousness of the West about the
‘Orient’, then became the part of a process where one culture sees the
growth of other culture as a threat to its own existence and interprets it
in terms of religious hegemony. This mode of power-relation of knowledge
of the Orient was supported with militaristic hegemony of the ‘Other’ even
centuries after French and British imperial designs like that of Napoleon
in Egypt and East India Company in India and its neighboring ‘Orient’
areas. Whereas Napoleon planned a cultural invasion of the Egypt 9 along
with the regular physical attempt to dominate it) and for which he engaged
scholars in Egypt to use modern rhetoric as an weapon to conquer the
Muslim minds, in India, East India Company carried out such plans under
William Jones who convened the inaugural meeting of Asiatic Society of
Bengal in 1784, and through which the West attempted ‘to rule and learn’
and then ‘to compare Orient with Occident’ (Said, 1995,p.78), so that a
claim by the British can be made that an English man knows ‘ the Orient
more and better than anyone else’ (Said, 1995,p.78). Such a project
continued through modern times through Renan and Sacy. And these
methodologies by the Western scholars , (along with some other personal
impressions of the Orient by some well known individuals and authors like
Flaubert in the terms of the erotic and exotic richness of the Orient ) as
thus seen by said as an ontological approach to the Orient, that suffers
more or less with some fault due to some kind of preoccupation of mind –
either shaped by imperial political designs or personal preoccupations
with some ancient myths and individual opinion formed on the basis of some
kind of sensations of mind received in terms of physical or imaginative
aspects of the Orient. So, Said sees danger in such kind of approach to
the Orient, as it contributes in ‘orientalising the Orient’. And to solve
this he adopts historical generalization methodology in his book
Orientalism, where he slips from the ontological aspect to the
epistemological aspect – he begins to stress on ‘how’ the concepts of
Orientalism, Orient, Oriental came to be a part of consciousness than
‘what’ exactly they are. He believed that his articulation is the way out
of the problem of contributing to the Orientalising process.
As it is a ‘re-reading
of the canonical cultural works , […] to re-investigate some of these
assumptions, going beyond the stifling hold on them of some version of the
master slave relationship’ (Said, 1995,p.353). But in my opinion we can
see Said’s text as another addition to the chain of contribution to the
process of cultural hegemony. What I am talking here can be more clear if
we refer to Trinh T. Minh-ha’s remark.
Trinh T. Minh-ha in her
quasi poetic book Woman, Native, Other, refers to the raise of the
new form of assigning marginality, especially in case of the ‘Third-World
woman’. T Minh-ha’s point is somewhat related to the fact that the process
of ‘advertisement’ is itself a kind of contribution to the sense of
‘marginality’. Though Minh-ha’s references are to the ‘Special Third World
Women’s reading, workshops, meetings and seminars’ that goes on advertise
the gap between the Third world and western world woman – where the
‘difference’ is expressed in the remarks ‘It is as if everywhere we go, we
become someone’s private zoo’ (Trinh, 1989, p.82) . Now ours is a case
which can be viewed in the light of these observations. In fact nearly all
post colonial and subaltern studies involve this problem. Here we see that
Said’s attempt was to make us conscious about the crisis by choosing a
path of indirectness, where he can safely make us aware of it, without
contributing to the crisis. But what we see that the process of making us
conscious is a part of the process that brings again the very same problem
, because after publication of Orientalism in 1978, it became a
‘source-book’ ( as Spivak terms it) for modern subaltern studies and there
by contributing to the process of learning the Orient.
One may argue that by
sleeping unto the epistemology from ontology, Said has started a process
of ‘unlearning’ the Orient, but then my answer is – knowledge is always a
part of binary opposition of its presence and absence. If once a reference
is made that a process of ‘unlearning’ is to be made for the Orient, then
there also underlies a consciousness about the fact of ‘learning’. It is
very similar to Hegel’s master-slave relationship, where after freedom the
slave in his attempt to be equal , does everything that his master used to
did , and thus there underlies the fact that even after freedom the slave
needs the identification of the ‘ex-master’ to define his own. He is in
need to explain what his ‘master’ was like, so that he can prove that he
is no longer like his ‘master’ and is therefore equal. So, we see the
process of modern de-colonization is in fact a process of re-inscribing
the colonization or the concept of the ‘major’ at the centre.
This fact is important
in our discussion, because many of the postcolonial theorists consider
Said’s Orientalism a representative of one phase of their
discipline. For instance Leela Gandhi, in her book Postcolonial Theory
refers to this aspect of Said’s Orientalism and gives example of
Spivak, who ‘has recently celebrated Said’s book as the founding text or
source-book through which marginality itself has acquired the status of a
discipline […]’ (Gandhi, 1999, p.65).Again we can view Said’s work as the
voice of a subaltern,( and therefore his work is historical too ) . His
attempt to make the world conscious of the true crisis , in which
Orientalism now exists , is seen as his act of ‘survival’ on the behalf of
his Palestinian race(and that’s why his work has been considered as a
‘source-book’ ).
Thus we see that though
Said’s attempt is to bridge that gap between the ‘major’ and the ‘minor’;
the ‘Occidental cannon of consciousness’ and the ‘Oriental cannon of
consciousness’, he has not succeeded in reaching this goal as he in fact
contributed to the process of learning the Orient more, and thus raised
some more questions –
After ‘unlearning’ the
dominant mode called Orientalism, what should we learn? Or is the concept
of learning to be discarded, because knowledge necessarily entails power
relationship? And the most important question that arises is that when
Orientals themselves are involved in inventing or more precisely speaking
‘orientalising the Orient’ is there any solution?
In the conclusion of my
paper I want to add that it is not that, Said was not aware of this very
problem – to make it more clear, he was rather sure of it and this is why
he never saw his Orientalism as a part of ‘response to Western
dominance which cultivated in the great movement of de-colonization all
across the Third World’ (Said, 1993, p.xii)
But whether he sees
Orientalism as what others see it or not, doesn’t matter as it has
already contributed to the process of ‘orientalising the Orient’ against
his wish. And this fact can not be denied, that anymore attempt to solve
the tangle of complexities that involves with the Orientalism, will simply
strengthen the crisis. In the same manner, perhaps my paper is also an
addition, to that very process of ‘learning’ the Orient and hence
contributes to the crisis. But the cause I can use to explain my position
behind this whole affair that includes the writing of this paper, is some
what near to what Said has thought himself – that ‘the writer is obliged
to accept that he (or she) is part of the crowed, part of the ocean, part
of the storm, so that objectively becomes a greater dream like perfection,
and unattainable goal for which one must struggle in spite of the
impossibility of success’ (Said, 1993, p.27).
References:
Gandhi, Leela
Postcolonial Theory, Oxford University Press, New Delhi,1998
Said,
Edward Orientalism, Penguin publishers,
Harmondsworth, 1995
(First published 1978)
Said,
Edward Culture and Imperialism, Chatto &
Windus, London, 1993
Trinh T. Minh-ha
Woman, Native, Other, Indian University Press,
Cambridge
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