Said conflated power relations with communication, which Foucault insists are distinct

Evidence

By resorting to a concept of performativity, I intended to bring Said to the reality of modernity, or modern reality, one that involved and could not have evolved outside certain deep structures of thought, epistemic sovereignty, segregation, fragmentation, cultural engineering, colonialism, and especially genocide, in all of its forms. Said seems to have overlooked Foucault’s important insistence that it is “necessary” to “distinguish power relations from relationships of communication that transmit information by means of a language, a system of signs, or any other symbolic medium. No doubt, communicating is always a certain way of acting upon another person or persons,” but the effects of power “are not simply an aspect” of communication. “Power relations [and] relationships of communication … should not therefore be confused.” — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 31 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

In language, bourgeois coldness condenses as an indifference towards every interaction, which stems from the fact that no instance of speech, regardless of its substance, is presumed to be any different from any other. … Communication is itself shot through with the coercive principle of like for like even when it presents itself as non-coercive and free from domination, given that ‘[t]he word communication itself implicitly contains a neutralization which makes it appear to refer to nothing more than that some people communicate something to others, inform them of something, regardless of the fact that in the forms of this communication the entire historical relationships of power are constitutively contained’. The hypocrisy of communication, ‘what is deceptive about dialogue’, results from the ideology of free togetherness ( freies Miteinander). — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 996 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Said conflates power relations with communicative discourse — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 31; Communication is never neutral but embeds constitutive historical power relations — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 996

Broader Connections

• Said conflates power relations with communicative discourse #corroborates (0.97) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 31
• Communication is never neutral but embeds constitutive historical power relations #complicates (0.78) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 996