Imperial consciousness erases the Orient’s concrete particularity by overlaying it with European plans.
Evidence
In all the visions of the Orient fabricated by Orientalism there is no recapitulation, literally, as entire as this one. For Lamartine a pilgrimage to the Orient has involved not only the penetration of the Orient by an imperious consciousness but also the virtual elimination of that consciousness as a result of its accession to a kind of impersonal and continental control over the Orient. The Orient’s actual identity is withered away into a set of consecutive fragments, Lamartine’s recollective observations, which are later to be gathered up and brought forth as a restated Napoleonic dream of world hegemony. … Its geopolitical reality has been overlaid with his plans for it; the sites he has visited, the people he has met, the experiences he has had, are reduced to a few echoes in his pompous generalizations. The last traces of particularity have been rubbed out in the “résumé politique” with which the Voyage en Orient concludes. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 458
Categorization
- DEFINE: Illustrates the core Orientalist operation: political vision reducing a real geopolitical region to fragments that European planning reconstitutes. Contrast with Lane’s scientific-grid absorption of identity — a distinct but parallel erasure mechanism.
- XREF: Parallels the Lane contrast from earlier in Orientalism (human identity disappearing into scientific classifications) and prefigures Said’s later claims about the Orient as a textual/European construct.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 458