Said treated Orientalist discourse as false representation, not as performative enactment

Evidence

What is worth emphasizing in Austin’s conditions of felicity and Foucault’s concept of juridicality is neither linguistic propositions nor discourses themselves—a common misconception—but rather the force or power that gives discourses their constituting effects, that is, their power to enact reality. In some sense, the entirety of Said’s Orientalism rehearses the theme that what the Orientalists said about the Orient was their own creation, that it was as much a misrepresentation as it was a representation, which is to say that discourse for Said remained bound by the dichotomy of truth and falsity, the very position against which Austin militated. It also remained, in the final analysis, bound by its formalistic, nonperformative structures. … For Said, language is “a highly organized and encoded system, which employs many devices to express, indicate, exchange messages and information, represent, and so forth” (21, emphasis mine). Note that none of these qualifiers is performative, and all belong to language as constatives. Attaching undue importance to language as a representationalist tool, Said engaged Orientalist discourses as false representations of the Orient. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 127 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Said presents colonial figures as products of Orientalist discourse rather than material interests — Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm, Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse, 24; Orientalist representation is purposive deformation, not mere misrepresentation; Said treated language as representation rather than as performative enactment. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 127 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Said treated language as representation rather than as performative enactment. #expands (0.93) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 127