Binary opposition dichotomies structure Western discourse about the Orient

Evidence

Kissinger’s method in the essay proceeds according to what linguists call binary opposition: that is, he shows that there are two styles in foreign policy (the prophetic and the political), two types of technique, two periods, and so forth. When at the end of the historical part of his argument he is brought face to face with the contemporary world, he divides it accordingly into two halves, the developed and the developing countries. The first half, which is the West, “is deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer, that knowledge consists of recording and classifying data—the more accurately the better.” Kissinger’s proof for this is the Newtonian revolution, which has not taken place in the developing world: “Cultures which escaped the early impact of Newtonian thinking have retained the essentially pre-Newtonian view that the real world is almost completely internal to the observer.” Consequently, he adds, “empirical reality has a much different significance for many of the new countries than for the West because in a certain sense they never went through the process of discovering it.” — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 141

Categorization

• DEFINE: Binary opposition is introduced here as a core discursive mechanism — the West/developed/post-Newtonian half versus the developing/Orientalized half.
• XREF: Connects directly to Saussurean structuralism and the binarism that later critical theory on race and postcolonialism builds on; also links forward to how Islamophobia discourse constructs West vs. Muslim world. — connects to: the MOC “The Tongue of Power: When Language Becomes the Battlefield of Empire”
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 141