Said’s twin claims about Orientalism rest on an unresolved tension.

Evidence

Robert Young has perceptively argued that “Said’s most significant argument about the discursive conditions of knowledge is that the texts of Orientalism ‘can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe’ [Orientalism, 94]. At the same time his most important political claim is that as a system of learning about the Orient, Orientalism … can be seen to have justified colonialism in advance as well as subsequently facilitating its successful operation. Said’s wish to make both these points poses, however, a major theoretical problem: on the one hand he suggests that Orientalism merely consists of a representation that has nothing to do with the ‘real’ Orient, denying any correspondence between Orientalism and the Orient … while on the other hand he argues that its knowledge was put in the service of colonial conquest, occupation, and administration. This means that … Orientalism as representation did have to encounter the ‘actual’ conditions of what was there, and that it showed itself effective at a material level as a form of power and control. How then can Said argue that the ‘Orient’ is just a representation, if he also wants to claim that ‘Orientalism’ provided the necessary knowledge for actual colonial conquest?” — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 612

Categorization

• QUESTION: The Young critique poses a genuine theoretical puzzle worth resolving: is there a coherent way to hold both that Orientalism is pure representation and that it was materially effective in colonial power?
• XREF: connects to: Said holds incompatible Foucauldian and humanist periodizations of Orientalism at once. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 663