Orientalist science fails to recognize the will to power feeding its claims

Evidence

What such science or knowledge never reckoned with was its own deeply ingrained and unself-conscious bad innocence and the resistance to it of reality. When Bouvard plays the scientist he naively assumes that science merely is, that reality is as the scientist says it is, that it does not matter whether the scientist is a fool or a visionary; he (or anyone who thinks like him) cannot see that the Orient may not wish to regenerate Europe, or that Europe was not about to fuse itself democratically with yellow or brown Asians. In short, such a scientist does not recognize in his science the egoistic will to power that feeds his endeavors and corrupts his ambitions. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 320

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s toolkit on how colonial knowledge-production (biopolitics, race-thinking) launders its own interestedness; the ‘bad innocence’ concept parallels Said’s later arguments about expertise masking power.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 320