Said’s method cannot simultaneously hold realist historical grounding and non-mimetic discourse theory

Evidence

The notable feature of this approach is Said’s desire to combine very familiar emphases in literary-critical ways of reading (‘style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances’) with a postmodernist emphasis on ‘representations as representations’. One of those ways of reading presses us towards the problematic of realism and mimesis, the other in the direction of non-mimetic, discursive ‘truth-effects’. It would be unimaginably difficult, if not altogether pointless, I should have thought, to refer a representation to its ‘setting’ and ‘the historical and social circumstances’ of its production and dissemination without raising, in some fundamental way, the issues of its ‘fidelity’ and ‘correctness’, for, it is usually with reference to ‘historical and social circumstances’ that worthwhile distinctions between a representation and a misrepresentation are customarily made. I shall take up elsewhere this crucial issue of the primacy of representation, as well as Said’s inability to make up his mind whether ‘Orientalist Discourse’ is a system of representations, in the Foucauldian sense, or of misrepresentations, in the sense of a realist problematic. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 341

Categorization

• QUESTION: Ahmad promises to take up ‘the primacy of representation’ elsewhere — worth tracking through the rest of the book.
• XREF: connects to: Invoking representational circumstances forces the realism question discourse theory evades; Said’s self-divided method generates confusions reproduced in Colonial Discourse Analysis

Related

• Said’s self-divided method generates confusions reproduced in Colonial Discourse Analysis (similarity 0.94)
• Invoking representational circumstances forces the realism question discourse theory evades (similarity 0.89)
• Said’s Orientalism concerned representation, not colonial discourse reception (similarity 0.83)
• Said’s account makes colonialism an effect of discourse, not material power. (similarity 0.83)
• Representations are necessarily embedded in culture, language, and politics, never pure truth. (similarity 0.81)
• Said’s own theory of representation contradicts his book’s accumulated negative detail about Orientalist depictions. (similarity 0.81)
• Said’s Orientalism shaped a field mainly through emotive impact (similarity 0.81)
• Said’s Orientalism deploys incompatible Foucauldian and humanist origin-stories simultaneously. (similarity 0.81)
• Said’s anti-positivism secretly depends on positivist truth criteria (similarity 0.80)
• Said’s Foucauldian ‘will to power’ discourse operates without imperialist agency or design. (similarity 0.80)
• Said’s critique of Orientalism never explained how discourse connects to colonial power (similarity 0.80)
• Decontextualized quotations undermine the coherence of a unified Orientalist discourse (similarity 0.80)
• Said’s era-spanning generalizations misuse Foucault’s historically bounded concept of discourse (similarity 0.79)
• Said’s one-directional account of Orientalism is a deliberate discursive strategy, not scholarly error. (similarity 0.79)
• Said’s critique reified Orientalism as a category masking deeper structures (similarity 0.79)