Said’s own Orientalism framework reduced knowledge to a balance-of-power politics

Evidence

When speaking of Orientalism as “a system of representations” produced “by a whole set of [European] forces,” Said says, “If this definition of Orientalism seems more political than not, that is simply because I think Orientalism was itself a product of certain political forces and activities” (202–3). Note here how the European “whole set of forces,” a categorical attribution, is elided into and reduced to “political forces and activities,” not the political as an epistemic formation. But elision and reduction have a short traveling span. “My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness” (204). Note also that the explanation does not transcend the balance of power in international relations or beyond their discursive manifestations. Nor does colonialism appear as a distinct category of analysis; nor still do genocide, other forms of collective atrocity, social and cultural engineering, and totalistic transformation of indigenous traditions. If anything, Said is not sure that the narrative of colonialist destruction of native lands and peoples is wholly accurate, standing without a good measure of “mythmaking.” — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 137

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels critiques of Foucauldian power analysis that fail to account for the epistemic/epistemological formation — similar to the critique of simplistic pendulum-swing readings in other fields.