En5232: week 2

1
En5232 week 2

• Ideology and Orientalism

2
Three Levels of Ideology values,
brainwashing, and experience

• Ideology
• Ideas and value arranged into a structure
• ideologies include Marxism, Calvinism,
  Keynesianism, etc conscious programs
• false consciousness or mere rhetoric
• Marxs German ideology brainwashing explains
  why people act against their interests
• Orientalism is at once overt and covert
  sedimentation and system extend and amplify
  effects
• ideology as dyslogistic signifier ideology is
  what you call someone elses system of values
• All experience is ideological

3
Experience ideology

• If our experience of the world is mediated by
  unconscious value systems, then our experience,
  and not secondary descriptions, are
  ideology-laden
• Althusser ideology the imaginary resolution
  of real contradictions (after Lacan)
• Art, literature, music, architecture help us
  paper over conflicts and contradictions

4
Lacans triad

• Imaginary, symbolic, and Real
• Lacans Real and Jamesons History
• Totality vs our specific/partial narratives of
  existence
• Form (eg literary form) socially agreed-upon
  alternatives to the Real
• Hence, not only is literature inherently
  politicalso is reality (as opposed to the Real)

5
Ideology vs. Ideologies

• At values level, one might distinguish
  Democrat and Republican in American politics
• Focusing on such differences might paper over
  rapidly increasing gap between riches and poorest
• Electoral pseudo-democracy (the argument might
  go) is the imaginary resolution of real (social,
  political) contradictions
• To the degree that we do not question
  delimitation of choices, electoral rituals
  legitimize political system promote hegemony

6
Hegemony (Gramsci influence)

• Violence is expensive compared to hearts and
  minds or soft power
• When a value-system is internalized to such a
  degree that resistance is eccentric (if not
  unthinkable), hegemony has been achieved
• Said discusses moments of rupture, eg. October
  War or postwar decolonization
• rupture allows attack on mind-formd manacles
  work of liberation

7
Questions and review?
8
Orientalism

• Said defines Orientalism 3 ways
• Orientalism is a profession
• Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches
  the Orientand this applies whether the person is
  an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or
  philologisteither in its specific or general
  aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she
  does is Orientalism.(2)

9
O. as a value structure

• Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an
  ontological and epistemological distinction made
  between the Orient and (most of the time) the
  Occident. (2)
• Said comments frequently on contemporary Area
  Studies scholars who refer to the Arab mind

10
Orientalism as style

• Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the
  corporate institution for dealing with the
  Orientdealing with it by making statements about
  it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by
  teaching it, settling it, ruling over it in
  short, Orientalism as a Western style for
  dominating, restructuring, and having authority
  over the Orient. (3)

11
Foucault as influence discourse

• My contention is that without examining
  Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly
  understand the enormously systematic discipline
  by which European culture was able to manageand
  even producethe Orient politically,
  sociologically, militarily, ideologically,
  scientifically, and imaginatively during the
  post-Enlightenment period. (3)

12
Is Orientalism necessary?

• Intersubjectivity
• Meconnaisance
• If we do not have direct access to reality, we
  must deal with mediated fictions.

13
The Power Differential

• My point is that Disraelis statement about the
  East refers mainly to that created consistency,
  that regular constellation of ideas as the
  pre-eminent thing about the Orient, and not to
  its mere being, as Wallace Stevenss phrase has
  it.To believe that the Orient was createdor, as
  I call it, Orientalizedand to believe that
  such things happen simply as a necessity of the
  imagination, is to be disingenuous. The
  relationship between varying degrees of a complex
  hegemony, and is quite accurately indicated in
  the title of K. M. Panikkars classic Asia and
  Western Dominance. (5)

14
Orientalism dominance machine

• Orientalismis not an airy European fantasy
  about the Orient, but a created body of theory
  and practice in which, for many generations,
  there has been a considerable material
  investment. Continued investment made
  Orientalism, as a system of knowledge about the
  Orient, an accepted grid for filtering through
  the Orient into Western consciousness, just as
  that same investment multipliedindeed made truly
  productivethe statements proliferating out from
  Orientalism into the general culture. (6)

15
Culture is part of the machine

• Culture, of course, is to be found operating
  within civil society, where the influence of
  ideas, of institutions, and of other persons
  works not through domination but by what Gramsci
  calls consent. In any society not totalitarian,
  then, certain cultural forms predominate over
  others, just as certain ideas are more
  influential than others the form of this
  cultural leadership is what Gramsci has
  identified as hegemony

16
Self-contextualization Said vs. both Marxists
and Formalists

• Perhaps it is true that most attempts to rub
  cultures nose in the mud of politics have been
  crudely iconoclastic. But there is no getting
  away from the fact that literary studies in
  general, and American Marxist theorists in
  particular, have avoided the effort of seriously
  bridging the gap between the superstructural and
  the base levels in textual, historical
  scholarship on another occasion I have gone so
  far as to say that the literary-cultural
  establishment as a whole has declared the serious
  study of imperialism and culture off limits. (13)

17
Said insists he is a humanist

• a humanistic study can responsibly address
  itself to politics and culture. (15)
• Of course, he is arguing against the liabilities
  of a narrow/ blinkered humanism
• Separating himself from certain strands of
  post-structuralism who disparage the
  Enlightenment, humanism, etc

18
America?

• p17 the American Oriental position since World
  War II has fitI think, quite self-consciouslyin
  the places excavated by the two earlier European
  powers.
• p18 I wish to show how all these earlier
  matters are reproduced more or less in American
  Orientalism after the Second World War.
• Assuming reproduction--so does Saidism
  constrain us/ determine our understanding?

19
ES denies we are trapped in the discourse

• p325. But in conclusion, what of some
  alternative to Orientalism? Is this book an
  argument only against something, and not for
  something positive? Here and there in the course
  of this book I have spoken about
  decolonializing new departures in the so-called
  area studies...
• p325. How does on represent other cultures?
  What is another culture? Is the notion of a
  distinct culture (or race, or religion, or
  civilization) a useful one, or does it always get
  involved with self-congratulation (when one
  discusses ones own) or hostility and aggression
  (when one discusses the other)?
• p326. I would not have undertaken a book of this
  sort if I did not also believe that there is a
  scholarship that is not as corrupt, or at least
  as blind to human reality, as the kind I have
  been mainly depicting. The trouble sets in when
  the guild tradition of Orientalism takes over the
  scholar who is not vigilant, whose individual
  consciousness as a scholar is not on guard
  against idées reçues all to easily handed down in
  the profession.

20
Questions, responses?
21
Macfie (first 1/3)

• What kind of book is this?
• How is it organized? What do the parts add? What
  do they represent?
• Part I
• Part II V
• Part III
• Part IV VII

22
Discussion for next week (about 30 minutes each)

• I Donald P. Little
• II David Kopf or Sadik Jalal al-Azm
• III Bernard Lewis
• Be ready to
• 1 Summarize the argument briefly
• 2 Describe the rhetorical strategy
• 3 Identify the significance of the section and
  open to discussion (set up questions)

23
Discussion and Reading for 4th Wk

• Discussion (30 minutes each, led by students)
• Aijaz Ahmad
• John MacKenzie
• Richard King
• Said Orientalism Reconsidered 345-61

24
Said reading, week 3

• Review Part VI of Macfie
• Read the preface and introduction to Orientalism
  carefully and compare with Macfie sections
• Consider why Said made a larger impact on
  cultural studies than Abdel-Malek and Tibawi
• what intellectual strategies?
• what stylistic components?
• what doesnt Said do that the others do?

25
In closing

• Sign-up for discussion (weeks 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)
• Topics open to discussion leaders please
  coordinate among yourselves
• approaches not limited to analysis of orientalism
• consider relation between Ideology and
  ideologies in particular text?
• self/other dialectic in relation to aesethetic
  effects?
• consideration of reception of book, ideas?