Said’s anti-positivism secretly depends on positivist truth criteria

Evidence

In the introduction from 2003 to Orientalism, 21, Said makes the following statements: “The things to look at are style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some great original. The exteriority of the representation is always governed by some version of the truism that if the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job.” A few lines later, he says: “Another reason for insisting upon exteriority is that I believe it needs to be made clear about cultural discourse and exchange within a culture that what is commonly circulated by it is not ‘truth’ but representations” (his emphasis). … How can “historical and social circumstances” of the Western text and the supposed inability of the Orient to “represent itself” be extricated from “truth” or a version thereof? More generally, against what criteria can representation or misrepresentation be evaluated? Said’s insistence on (mis)representation as enclosed and judged by “style, figures of speech,” and “narrative devices” internal to the text belies a latent yet ever-present reference to something outside these texts (otherwise, the entire project of Orientalism in fact becomes utterly unintelligible). — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 629

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This is a genuine philosophical trap in postcolonial theory: any critique of misrepresentation presupposes access to what the thing really is. Hallaq’s pinning of Said’s latent positivism is densely argued.
• XREF: connects to: Scientific truth rests on a dialectical proof rule and a metaphysical non-deception rule — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 216; Said’s own critique reproduces the fixed Occident-Orient essentialism it attacks — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 747