Orientalism

Edward W. Said, 1978

(October 2012)

There’s a type of person. A certain type of person. You know who I mean, the type that’s heard about ‘books furnishing a room’ and taken that to mean that books are more important for what they look like and what signals having them is supposed to send out than the words and ideas they contain. Wankers, in other words.

I’ll admit to a certain failing in that regard myself. It’s not that I’ve ever bought a book just to stick it on the shelf in the hope of making me look smarter. Every book I’ve ever bought, every unread book in my house, I fully intend to read at some point in the future; with the excusable exception of a Dan Brown I was unable to tactfully refuse when a relative pressed it on me. Life’s just too fucking short.

Anyway, everything on my shelves is there in good faith. I meant to read them when I bought them, and genuinely think that I really will get round to all of weightier tomes at some point before I die. But Pratchett is just so much funnier than Plato and the more intellectual, more difficult stuff keeps getting pushed to the bottom of the pile.

However, I refuse to become one of those people, so I’m going to embark on a (very slow) ‘back-to-basics’ campaign wherein I actually read those smartypants books, instead of just having them there and relying on summaries and quotations from them in other more accessible works. Given I’ve been throwing the ‘Orientalism’ label about a bit recently, Professor Said’s up first.

This work has achieved some serious political influence and so it’s easy to forget that, at its core, it’s primarily a work of literary criticism. And some fairly recondite literature at that. It’s not an easy read, and I’m having a hard time deciding how much of that is inherent and how much is due to the passage of time (again).

It’s been a few years since I did my ‘Theories and Methodologies of the Social Sciences’ modules, but the initially striking thing about Orientalism is the vehemence with which Said was fighting battles which, in the contemporary social sciences at least, seem to have been won so long ago the results are pretty much taken as given. I’m more up on my physical science history than its social science counterpart, so it may be that this work was a key player in winning those wars. I couldn’t say, but there a large parts concerning the constructed nature of knowledge (i.e. that data are produced, not discovered) and the role of the academy as mediator that seem so obvious now as to be redundant. If you filleted out those now archaic arguments, this book would be about half the length, so for once relying on those summaries in other works might not have been so foolish.

However, the other 50% is perhaps more relevant now than ever. It’s another book that I could have chosen a hundred illustrative quotes from. This is the 2003 edition with a preface from the author written just before his death, and obviously after the Twin Towers came down. It’s scary just how little changed between one edition and the next.

A lot of this reminded me of how Japan views its relationship with The West, or even just Abroad: seeing it as a single, unchanging, monolithically homogenous ‘other’. The difference of course being in the power relationships and the extent that ‘other’ is to be studied (not understood), managed, or subjugated.

So a dense book that flips between the redundant and the vital. Annoyingly, it does so fairly unpredictably so it’s never entirely safe to start skimming (though this is of course my own failing, not the book's). Even more annoyingly, Said regularly drops in pretty substantial quotes in untranslated French*, which I could just about get the gist of but certainly didn’t help with the smooth transition of ideas from page to thought.

One of those books that alternates between making you feel much, much smarter and very, very stupid.

*Not even translated in the footnotes.