The valuation of metropolitan address drives the discourse-and-techniques emphasis

Evidence

What brings about such inflationary tendency in Said’s language here is probably the great importance he attaches to the very act of ‘addressing the metropolis at the very heart of the Western centre’, and it is probably this need to be ‘at the very heart of the Western centre’ which accounts for the emphasis on ‘the techniques, the discourses, the very weapons of scholarship’; if ‘addressing the metropolis’ is what one does, then one had better have those ‘techniques’, those ‘discourses’ (In all fairness to Guha, though, it should be pointed out that he moved permanently to ‘the Western centre’ some years after writing the said book.) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 867