Summary
Michel Foucault’s notion, as described in The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discipline and Punish, which Said employs to identify Orientalism: a systematic discipline of statements, institutions and limits on what can be thought and said about its object, rather than a set of opinions about it (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.12 / printed p.3).
Details
- Examined as a discourse, Orientalism made the Orient not a free subject of thought or action: it is the whole network of interests inevitably brought to bear on any occasion when the Orient is in question, and the discipline by which European culture managed and even produced the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.12 / printed p.3).
- Orientalism as discourse does not stand in a direct corresponding relationship with political power in the raw; it is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with power political, intellectual, cultural and moral (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.21 / printed p.12).
- Said’s departure from Foucault within the notion: individual writers have a determining imprint on the discursive formation, so his analyses employ close textual readings of single works against the collective body of texts (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.32-33 / printed p.23-24).
- The sheer knitted-together strength of Orientalist discourse — its ties to enabling socio-economic and political institutions and its durability — is what must be grasped about it, more than its truth or falsity as a description of the Orient (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.15 / printed p.6).
Related pages
Orientalism (1978), Michel Foucault, Orientalism, Exteriority