The sociology of knowledge preceded and grounds Said’s critique of Orientalism

Evidence

I have long maintained that Said’s apt and overdue critique of Orientalism has been wrongly fetishized in his person and politics; what is important is his criticism of a particularly nasty mode of knowledge production. Long before he wrote his groundbreaking Orientalism, before Michel Foucault unearthed the relationship between knowledge and power, a sustained tradition in the sociology of knowledge had already shown that the creative consciousness of the individual is socially formed and collectively cadenced—and thus without a socially predicated prejudice and power no mode of knowledge is possible. Said and his Orientalism have now become such iconic references that neo-Orientalists and their native informers think they need only knock him down a few pegs in order to be free to resume their inanities—because they have no clue as to where the power of the case against the Orientalists originates. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 484

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Mannheim, Scheler, Marx’s German Ideology, and the knowledge-power genealogy that later surfaced in Foucault and Said. — connects to: Said’s Orientalism replaced Marxism with Foucauldian Discourse Theory
• SEED: Possible essay angle: the lost pre-1978 tradition of the sociology of knowledge that Said’s Orientalism eclipsed.

Related

• Said’s Orientalism rested on a pre-existing sociology-of-knowledge tradition. (similarity 0.96)
• Said’s Orientalism overshadowed the sociology-of-knowledge tradition it drew on (similarity 0.90)
• Orientalism’s triumph caused a collective amnesia about earlier knowledge-power theory (similarity 0.87)
• All knowledge production is socially formed and power-laden (similarity 0.87)
• Said’s critique of Orientalism relies on the same modernist assumptions that produced it (similarity 0.83)
• Said’s Orientalism replaced Marxism with Foucauldian Discourse Theory (similarity 0.82)
• Said borrowed only Foucault’s schematic features, losing his subversive critique (similarity 0.81)
• The sociology of knowledge predates Said and Foucault by decades. (similarity 0.81)
• Said’s critique reified Orientalism as a category masking deeper structures (similarity 0.81)
• Fields of knowledge are constrained by society, culture, and institutional power (similarity 0.81)
• Said held that Orientalism cannot be corrected by factual research because it is power. (similarity 0.80)
• Foucault held that all knowledge is a product of discourse bound up with power. (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism was a project of power and culture, not merely an academic enterprise (similarity 0.80)
• Generalizing knowledge-power critique would erase Orientalism’s special status (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism reduced multifaceted Muslim societies to a single doctrinal Islam (similarity 0.80)