Said’s theory contradicts itself by denying writers any determining imprint.

Evidence

In a striking and oft-quoted statement, Said says, “Unlike Michel Foucault, to whose work I am greatly indebted, I do believe in the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism” (23). Yet, nowhere in his Orientalism does Said proffer an instance of a writer whose work left a “determining imprint,” not even in the cases of H. A. R. Gibb and L. Massignon, who receive, in relative terms, perhaps the most favorable treatment from his scathing pen. Nor is this imprint—assuming “otherwise” in Said’s language to be intelligible—more than a veneer under which the author, in practical terms, suffers death, for Orientalism is peppered with statements confirming that authors, no matter how much they try, inevitably succumb to the imperatives of national “ambience” or the “guild” rules of their discipline (271). In Said’s narrative, all Orientalists, including Gibb and Massignon, stand squarely within the Orientalist tradition, and nowhere does he allow for textual space that shows, in genuine ways, their “determining imprint.” All one gets out of his otherwise brilliant analysis of their writings is that they had a generic imprint, one that characterizes any scholar by virtue of being a “guild” scholar, but one that is hardly “determining.” For what is meant by “determining,” as Said used it in explicit reference to Foucault, is the ability to change, or markedly contribute to a change (what Foucault called an “analogy” and “difference”) in, the paradigmatic structure of a particular discursive formation, just as Foucault himself and others before him—including Kant, Marx, and Freud—have had their definitive “determining imprint.” For Said, Orientalism has a definite, transhistorical character, “a corporate identity” (202), and since all those who wrote on the Orient were Orientalists, they necessarily and squarely belonged to that paradigmatic identity. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 60

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s author-function and the death-of-the-author debates in poststructuralist theory. — connects to: Said’s work embodies the contradictions of the literary theory tradition — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 68
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Said’s own methodology differ from his stated commitments, and does Hallaq apply the same litmus to other theorists?