Representations are purposeful deformations operating within specific historical settings

Evidence

The representations of Orientalism in European culture amount to what we can call a discursive consistency, one that has not only history but material (and institutional) presence to show for itself. As I said in connection with Renan, such a consistency was a form of cultural praxis, a system of opportunities for making statements about the Orient. My whole point about this system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Oriental essence—in which I do not for a moment believe—but that it operates as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting. In other words, representations have purposes, they are effective much of the time, they accomplish one or many tasks. Representations are formations, or as Roland Barthes has said of all the operations of language, they are deformations. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 697

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the core concept that Orientalism is a discursive consistency with material presence, not mere misrepresentation,
• XREF: Directly scaffolds the reader’s stated purpose: this discourse-as-productive-system concept is the foundational claim later Islamophobia readings build on — connects to Foucault’s discourse and Barthes’ mythologies. — connects to: History as storying yields representational fields enabling identity-based agency — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 233; Representation distorts the concept by temporalizing and spatializing its logical moments — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 661
• QUESTION: Said explicitly brackets off ‘misrepresentation of some Oriental essence’ — worth chasing how later postcolonial critics (e.g. the critique of Said’s own essentialism) picked up this thread.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 697