The philological laboratory gave Orientalism scholarly coherence while binding it to power

Evidence

His laboratory was the platform from which as an Orientalist he addressed the world; it mediated the statements he made, gave them confidence and general precision, as well as continuity. Thus the philological laboratory as Renan understood it redefined not only his epoch and his culture, dating and shaping them in new ways; it gave his Oriental subject matter a scholarly coherence, and more, it made him (and later Orientalists in his tradition) into the Occidental cultural figure he then became. We may well wonder whether this new autonomy within the culture was the freedom Renan hoped his philological Orientalist science would bring or whether, so far as a critical historian of Orientalism is concerned, it set up a complex affiliation between Orientalism and its putative human subject matter that is based finally on power and not really on disinterested objectivity. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 380

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘laboratory’ as the mediating apparatus through which Orientalist scholarship claims objectivity while actually exercising cultural authority.
• XREF: The claim that scholarly apparatus produces authority rather than disinterested knowledge prefigures Foucault’s power-knowledge and will recur in Islamophobia critiques of think-tank ‘expertise’.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 380