Said conflates power relations with communicative discourse

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

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The core methodological claim: Orientalism-as-discourse (Foucault’s communicative plane) must be analytically separated from actual violent power—genocide, colonial engineering—and Said’s text erases that distinction, which is the whole stakes of Hallaq’s reorientation.
• DEFINE: Hallaq’s ‘performativity’ concept is defined here as the bridge that brings Said to the material realities of modernity’s violence.
• XREF: connects to: Communication is never neutral but embeds constitutive historical power relations — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 996; Performative utterances create states of affairs rather than merely describing them. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 83