Scholarly criticism can refine a field without changing its structural function.

Evidence

Said’s contribution to Orientalism, however strong the resistance to it may have been, is a case in point (in fact, resistance to Keynes was much more vehement, widespread, and robust than Said faced). It exposed the problems of the humanities in forceful ways, leading to the training of a new generation of scholars who have rearticulated the means by which the “Orient” is to be studied. The field of Near Eastern and Islamic studies (a new name for “Oriental Studies”) is nothing but a more sophisticated version of its former self, largely due to Said’s influence. Its intellectual composition today has no doubt grown in refinement, but all this has not changed its location and function on the scholarly grid. Nothing in the props of the system that produced such discourses was interrogated by Said, and nothing fundamental has in fact really changed. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 341

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the learned pattern from Communication as Culture and The Social Control of Impersonal Trust about how institutions absorb critique and preserve their function. — connects to: Academism is best countered by critiquing its procedures, not breaking them — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 2286; A critic’s flawed work can still catalyze clarifying one’s own thinking.; Scholarship can advance feminist knowledge without claiming a feminist identity.