All social objectivity is constituted through power and exclusion.

Evidence

I have long maintained that Said’s apt and overdue critique of Orientalism has been wrongly fetishized in his person and politics; what is important is his criticism of a particularly nasty mode of knowledge production. Long before he wrote his groundbreaking Orientalism, before Michel Foucault unearthed the relationship between knowledge and power, a sustained tradition in the sociology of knowledge had already shown that the creative consciousness of the individual is socially formed and collectively cadenced—and thus without a socially predicated prejudice and power no mode of knowledge is possible. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 484 (#expands, via linked claim)

But if it is true that the connection between a consciousness and life does not distort the nature of the “abstract moment of self-consciousness” which remains there, immersed, always capable of being discovered, is the case the same for objectivity? In other words, since we know that a consciousness is before being known, then is not a known consciousness wholly modified by the very fact that it is known? Is “to appear as an object for a consciousness” still “to be consciousness”? It is easy to reply to this question: the very being of self-consciousness is such that in its being, its being is in question; this means that it is pure interiority. It is perpetually a reference to a self which it has to be. Its being is defined by this: that it is this being in the mode of being what it is not and of not being what it is. Its being, therefore, is the radical exclusion of all objectivity. I am the one who can not be an object for myself, the one who can not even conceive for myself of existence in the form of an object (save on the plane of the reflective dissociation—but we have seen that reflection is the drama of the being who can not be an object for himself). This is not because of the lack of detachment or because of an intellectual prejudice or of a limit imposed on my knowledge, but because objectivity demands an explicit negation: the object is what I make myself not-be whereas I myself am what I make myself be. I pursue myself everywhere, I can not escape myself, I reapprehend myself from behind. Even if I could attempt to make myself an object, I would already be myself at the heart of that object which I am; and at the very center of that object I should have to be the subject who is looking at it. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 694 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Wars, like genocides, often aim to rearrange existence, and not merely to create it ex nihilo. Yet, this cannot be the full account of Orientalism; such an account would merely commit the relatively minor sin of reductionism. The grave sin of this account is the elimination of the possibility of an inverse dynamic of power, of a complexity in the central domains that generates, as it has proven to do over millennia, a multiplicity of opposing forces within even the most hegemonic central domains. Domains of power, in their very nature, must encompass force fields that often coordinate both their operations and their thrust in favor of the central paradigms governing a particular order, but they are not born, nor can they be nourished, without opposing force fields. This is no more conceivable or possible than a body in which all the organisms work in unison and toward an undivided balance of health. For if this were to be the case, no organism will ever die. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 272 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• recurring: this claim recurs 3 times within its source
• XREF: connects to: All knowledge production is socially formed and power-laden — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 484; Oppositional forces are inherent to every structure of power; The for-itself radically excludes all objectivity by its own mode of being — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 694 (+1 more)

Related

• All knowledge production is socially formed and power-laden (similarity 0.80)
• Every domain of power necessarily generates opposing forces within itself. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• All knowledge production is socially formed and power-laden #expands (0.90) — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 484
• Oppositional forces are inherent to every structure of power #complicates (0.75)
• The for-itself radically excludes all objectivity by its own mode of being #complicates (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 694
• Every domain of power necessarily generates opposing forces within itself. #complicates (0.75) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 272