Orientalist vocabulary can override and censor direct human sympathy

Evidence

That Marx was still able to sense some fellow feeling, to identify even a little with poor Asia, suggests that something happened before the labels took over, before he was dispatched to Goethe as a source of wisdom on the Orient. It is as if the individual mind (Marx’s, in this case) could find a precollective, preofficial individuality in Asia—find and give in to its pressures upon his emotions, feelings, senses—only to give it up when he confronted a more formidable censor in the very vocabulary he found himself forced to employ. What that censor did was to stop and then chase away the sympathy, and this was accompanied by a lapidary definition: Those people, it said, don’t suffer—they are Orientals and hence have to be treated in other ways than the ones you’ve just been using. A wash of sentiment therefore disappeared as it encountered the unshakable definitions built up by Orientalist science, supported by “Oriental” lore (e.g., the Diwan) supposed to be appropriate for it. The vocabulary of emotion dissipated as it submitted to the lexicographical police action of Orientalist science and even Orientalist art. An experience was dislodged by a dictionary definition: one can almost see that happen in Marx’s Indian essays, where what finally occurs is that something forces him to scurry back to Goethe, there to stand in his protective Orientalized Orient. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 398

Categorization

• XREF: This is the mechanism — labels/vocabulary overriding lived sympathy — that the Islamophobia readings will assume when discussing how discourse pre-empts individual judgment. Connects to Milgrom-style argument that institutions (here, vocabulary) constrain individual response.
• DEFINE: Illustrates the core Orientalist operation: a dictionary definition functioning as a ‘censor’ that dislodges an experience, later codified as the field’s central claim that discourse precedes and shapes perception of the Other.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 398