Scholarly beginnings are acts of delimitation, not neutral starting points

Evidence

A major lesson I learned and tried to present was that there is no such thing as a merely given, or simply available, starting point: beginnings have to be made for each project in such a way as to enable what follows from them. Nowhere in my experience has the difficulty of this lesson been more consciously lived (with what success—or failure—I cannot really say) than in this study of Orientalism. The idea of beginning, indeed the act of beginning, necessarily involves an act of delimitation by which something is cut out of a great mass of material, separated from the mass, and made to stand for, as well as be, a starting point, a beginning; for the student of texts one such notion of inaugural delimitation is Louis Althusser’s idea of the problematic, a specific determinate unity of a text, or group of texts, which is something given rise to by analysis. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 78

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Althusser’s ‘problematic’ as a methodological tool: a determinate unity of a text group produced by analysis.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 78