Narrative history counters Orientalist vision as will to power
Evidence
Moreover, narrative is the specific form taken by written history to counter the permanence of vision. Lane sensed the dangers of narrative when he refused to give linear shape to himself and to his information, preferring instead the monumental form of encyclopedic or lexicographical vision. Narrative asserts the power of men to be born, develop, and die, the tendency of institutions and actualities to change, the likelihood that modernity and contemporaneity will finally overtake “classical” civilizations; above all, it asserts that the domination of reality by vision is no more than a will to power, a will to truth and interpretation, and not an objective condition of history. Narrative, in short, introduces an opposing point of view, perspective, consciousness to the unitary web of vision; it violates the serene Apollonian fictions asserted by vision. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 605
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- XREF: The ‘will to power’ framing plugs directly into Foucault/Nietzsche vocabulary the field’s later biopolitics readings assume.
Related
- Orientalist scholarship constructs narrative order over the Orient’s supposed nonhistory. (similarity 0.79)
- Orientalism’s influence owed more to narrative breadth than to its theses (similarity 0.78)
- Orientalist writing is pre-eminently a visual regime of expert and beholding self. (similarity 0.78)