Textually-derived Orientalist knowledge systematically substitutes for and precedes direct encounter

Evidence

The point in all this is that for Napoleon Egypt was a project that acquired reality in his mind, and later in his preparations for its conquest, through experiences that belong to the realm of ideas and myths culled from texts, not empirical reality. His plans for Egypt therefore became the first in a long series of European encounters with the Orient in which the Orientalist’s special expertise was put directly to functional colonial use; for at the crucial instant when an Orientalist had to decide whether his loyalties and sympathies lay with the Orient or with the conquering West, he always chose the latter, from Napoleon’s time on. As for the emperor himself, he saw the Orient only as it had been encoded first by classical texts and then by Orientalist experts, whose vision, based on classical texts, seemed a useful substitute for any actual encounter with the real Orient. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 206

Categorization

• XREF: Core scaffold concept: the textual construction of the Orient precedes and shapes colonial practice — directly reusable in later Islamophobia readings on representation.
• SEED: Echoes the reader’s own Grafting & Growth piece: just as trees are known through infrastructure rather than encounter, the Orient is known textually before it is known empirically.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the Orientalist always chooses the conquering West at the crucial instant — a structural complicity built into knowledge-production itself — is the load-bearing insight of the whole book.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 206