Said’s account of knowledge and power stays horizontal rather than structural

Evidence

Considering that such a task is “most important of all,” it is striking that Said would, first, not say anything else about it throughout the book (nor, to my knowledge, in any other writing of his), not even an allusion or intimation (although he does acknowledge that this task is “left embarrassingly incomplete in this study” ). Second, Said would see this all-important task as defined in terms of knowledge and power, however “complex” it may be. Said’s complexity here is horizontal, not vertical, not because it was limited to the superstructures of political, colonialist, and economic discourse (which are indispensable to any analysis), but because these superstructures are not, as he himself said of Orientalist discourse, “merely decorative” (25). — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 324

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Hallaq’s ‘horizontal’ vs ‘vertical’ distinction for Said’s treatment of power — horizontal stays at discursive superstructures, vertical would reach into structural modernity.