Value-free area studies masks the ideological claim that the knower does not constitute knowledge

Evidence

Good. But how does one know the “things that exist,” and to what extent are the “things that exist” constituted by the knower? This is left moot, as the new value-free apprehension of the Orient as something that exists is institutionalized in area-studies programs. Without tendentious theorizing, Islam is rarely studied, rarely researched, rarely known: the naiveté of this conception scarcely conceals what ideologically it means, the absurd theses that man plays no part in setting up both the material and the processes of knowledge, that the Oriental reality is static and “exists,” that only a messianic revolutionary (in Dr. Kissinger’s vocabulary) will not admit the difference between reality out there and in his head. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 761

Categorization

• XREF: This is the constructivist rejoinder at the heart of the reader’s scaffolding: the ‘things that exist’ are partially constituted by the knower — directly anticipating how Islamophobia scholarship treats ‘Islam’ as a constructed object. Connect to Said’s larger Orientalism argument and to later construction-of-the-Other readings. — connects to: Empirical-analytic sciences secretly carry a technical cognitive interest masked as value-freedom. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2423
• DEEPTHINKING: The pressure here — that refusing tendentious theorizing produces a static, ‘existing’ Orient that only a messianic revolutionary can see through — is a dense, load-bearing epistemological point about how ostensible neutrality institutionalizes the very distortions it denies.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 761