A note on Orientalism

So, I divorced literary theory from critical theory a bit last time. But I did so not to knock at the latter so much as show how literary theory is really doing something else, something less critical in the sense that people have been lately been referring to this--that is, negatively, and with its Kantian overtone. This isn't to say that ideology critique isn't also what we do in literary studies sometimes or even often. It's just that this necessarily takes the form of an extended meditation and analysis (or reading), that, because it has to pass through its object and really explicate it, can really only be something like dismissing conditions of possibility if it's done superficially. And, yes, there's probably a lot of superficial stuff. But there is that in all sorts of disciplines, and you can't dismiss critique by equating its most superficial performance with its most accomplished work, unless through that very Kantian maneuver. Regardless, the relationship of literary criticism to critique in general is not a simple one (critique has so many valences, and even if you mean it in the "proper" sense--and which applies, in the Latourian area from which this talk comes, primarily to critical sociology--the import of what you're saying starts to apply to the other significations), and the similarity of the words shouldn't make us think so.

It gets a little more complicated with the rise of critical theory and postmodernism, which sought to really play on this similarity of words and tie literary analysis with critique (and even reading itself into something like critique): it's a way to make criticism in any form (qua close attention to something) seem relevant, after all. However, we shouldn't forget the reasons in America that this desire for relevance was sought. It wasn't just opportunism. Certainly the way it proceeded was a bit suspect, since it also attempted to beat American philosophy (for one) to death. But this was already a dead horse, in many ways, and philosophy's renewed relevance in America might be attributed, in some way, to the slight pressure of this postmodern challenge, which, along with new (and perhaps much more heavy) pressure from the sciences, allowed it to develop its Continental aspects--though of course it did this mostly through internal changes, with much infighting, negotiation, and thinking and reading (the sort of unbelievable fixed positions of someone like a Dreyfus or a Schacht or Searle seem symptomatic of the sort of struggles they went through).

But this is why I once said critical theory is primarily the politicization of other disciplines. Here I just wanted to show that it also politicizes literary studies--and sort of undo the general sense that this critical theorizing started and ended here, or didn't become something with its own agenda. The particular way this politicization occurs--and I should be clear that when I say this I mean that literary studies isn't apolitical, just that it might have other possibilities for politics than the critical one--has generally put people like me in an awkward position, and my interest in literary theory is first and foremost one of trying to figure out how we can negotiate the legacy of literary theory in its relationship with this critical tendency, such that it doesn't all end with the situation we're currently in. This is a situation where last generation of readers has put the next generation in an untenable position, having pissed off everyone through its too-radical-but-strangely-not-radical-enough attempts to change the system by making this theory map directly onto with a critical-political project much larger than any particular field (which end up mainly just collapsing into a weak and less political attempt to deal with increasing "professionalization" or the compartmentalizing of literary studies--see John Guillory's good Bourdieuvian account of this).

But I also wanted to do this all in order to show that critical theory isn't something to be avoided. It just has its particular purpose, which I'd like to make clear is distinct from the purpose of literary criticism. This doesn't mean either that critical theory means "forgetting literature," as some people (Jonathan Culler, though reluctantly) have put it--cultural studies (which we can say is something like a side-by-side critical adventure which we can't quite reduce to the theorization, along with AfAm, Feminist, PoCo, more explicitly Marxist studies, and Queer Studies) certainly doesn't do this, though it sees literature primarily as taking place beside other media, and I see no reason to say critical theory does this either.

So--the general field of things sufficiently stratified or differentiated (and I'd rather insist on this stratification than in the way it's now all organized)--I'd like to suggest that one can jump into critical theory when necessary or even when not (though I'd personally show more hesitance to do so than in former times and not ask whether there were other ways to articulate what I'd say). One can even do so as a literary theorist (or, for that matter, as a literary historian). And I'd like to show the relevance of that particular jump (which can again be made by architecture students, philosophers, etc. etc.) by just presenting again a little contribution to the little spat around an essay by Harman, which I dealt with perhaps a little too roundly a while ago (though not, I think, as roundly as others). It comes up again as a sort of afterthought in Paul Ennis' next-to-last post explicating the essay in question. The posts are excellent by the way (here they are: 1, 2, 3, 4, and again 5), mostly because they show what I thought was obvious but I guess needs more stress (in a way that makes me for the first time doubt the supposed ubiquity of phenomenology as the main background against which most Continental philosophy works), which is that there's a lot of phenomenological ways into the issues discussed and that Harman is in a way making a contribution to them as well: as Paul says early in the first post, "in order to understand Harman's metaphysics one also needs to understand his motivations and these are tied to an overcoming of the overcoming-of-metaphysics in Heidegger." Anyway, as I suggested last time I spoke of this, going through all this as Paul did was one of the most helpful ways to address the larger concerns that dealt with the internal aspects of Harman's project.

But then there was that issue of Orientalism. Paul addresses it, as he nears the end of Harman's essay:

Harman makes an important claim next: “We must ignore the usual connotations of sensuality and fix our gaze on a more primitive layer of the cosmos” (Collapse II, 206). Here I think we can go some way to dispelling the idea that Harman is projecting sensuous qualities upon exotic objects – at least from the strictly philosophical mode. The question of the aesthetic employment of exotic metaphors is a different issue to be addressed later in the round-up. Within the orientalist lens one might also question the notion of a “primitive layer” but this too is a major theme of Western philosophical thinking from Schelling to Heidegger (and already problematic for Jacobi in his depiction of German idealism as a step toward emptiness/nothingness).

It's the last point that was the issue, as I gathered, but in a way had to also deal with that "aesthetic employment of exotic metaphors," though only vaguely. To recapitulate, Harman was accused of Orientalism, or Orientalistic thinking--and that you can't really be "accused" of this will be my point below--for asking us to fix our gaze in the way he does in Paul's quote: on "a more primitive layer."

Now, its the last sentence of Paul's here that will probably give us only cold comfort, since it doesn't really oppose the charge of Orientalism as--to whoever is interested in such charges--show it is more diffuse than ever! In short, making the primitive in this sense into a theme which is traditional doesn't really combat the charge and sounds like an argument from authority (which doesn't have much clout, however sensible it may indeed be).

What does oppose this charge is, however, the critical theory of Orientalism itself as formulated by Edward Said! In other words, it is the charge of Orientalism or Orientalisticity or Orentialisticalismicality which is precisely not proceeding along the lines which Said (alongside his literary theory and literary criticism) developed--as the parties involved to their credit said was the case. And so far from attributing the attack to an interested critical theorist, a critic critiquing, say, we should really understand how critical theory actually, in this case, comes to help philosophy figure out what's going on and, indeed, defend itself.

For, as my quote from Paul was meant to show, it doesn't always have the resources with which to account for things. That's no essential fault--as over-interested people might have said in the past--but just the sign of a place where it can turn to others, and others can be ready to help out.

So in a comment on Paul's blog, I made my contribution, and I'll make it again in more detail here: I said that Orientalism, for Said (one can find this in the first pages of his book), is more of a locus for the operation of power, not a one way dynamic with good and bad sides. So this is why you can't accuse someone of Orientalism. Orientalism is not something like a property of a thought or a taint upon it. Rather, Orientalism is a thoroughfare. Or, more vividly put, Orientalism is like a panopticon. And Said does this because he thinks that seeing orientalism as some taint of exoticization which needs to be expunged from whatever someone says--according to the weak and reactionary protocols of political correctness--are missing what is really at issue. One can always link exoticization with anything. The issue is larger, more collective or more widespread than that, but also has less to do with the character of the ideas themselves as the linkages to the relations between East and West that are the most hard to pin down. And so the concepts, as such, are not good or bad, either because they are old concepts that have come from something like a tradition of oppressing the Near or Far East, or because they carry their exotic flavor. This is because because the association of exoticization with the Orient, and the use of concepts in such a tradition, is the symptom of a more complex dynamic actually playing out between East and West--one that doesn't simply produce the oppression of the former or work in one way, and which never really stops if the concepts in which we see it most manifested disappear.

You see how this relies on Foucault's employment of that nice structuralist notion of discourse (Said himself says this). Now, you can disagree with this, with Foucault's ontology or whatever you want to call it, all you want. You can say it's too based on language (and I'd agree with you), but that's not enough. It's not enough here, because the theory allows us to begin to understand what is going on. Just because we knock away at that the notion of discourse (or language) doesn't mean we can't see how it helps us here, because at least negatively it shows us there can't be anything like a one-to-one correlation of concepts with political or social ramifications. Philosophy has a hard time arguing when this fact comes to the fore, because it means it has to creep past the interior of the concepts, just beyond their edges, and show their formative requirments--in short their historical character. Harman has actually been pretty good about trying to historicize his own concepts, at least on the personal level (I've never heard a person so frankly admit exactly when they really figured out Husserl before, as he does in Prince of Networks)--and philosophy, as history of philosophy as an area of study grows, is no doubt getting better in general in this area. But here we have a critical theory that works pretty well, and so why not use it? It doesn't always have to entail some agreement at bottom with the whole "system," and the efficacy of the notion doesn't always fall away with an attack at its foundations--simply because it might not so philosophically be "based" on such foundations.

It's also a theory that is trying, primarily, to get beyond the alleged crudeness of the Marxist way of going about this, which is through ideology. I think, though, we might see the Foucauldian notion of discourse against this Marxist background, almost as a modification of it rather than anything radically different than it--along with Derrida's much maligned talk about Western metaphysics. What's going on there is some attempt to not just dismiss philosophical concepts as tie them to the tendencies that shape them, their typical directions. If this then has ramifications on the interior, as it were (I'm using a poor conceptual scheme here, as if concepts were black boxes, but whatever--that's Latour's contribution). I think fundamentally, too, it is in this Postcolonial context (as it is called) that the arguments are the best: that is, I find Derrida's talk about Western metaphysics most convincing when it comes out of his attempt to deal with the historical ramifications of France's relation to Algeria--as I think it often does (and not just because he was Algerian). I think of what Foucault does as addressing a similar--though perhaps less starkly drawn--set of relations. Orientalism works too by trying to map the dynamics--not just in philosophy--that obtain at this crossroads. It might not be the best way to go about this, but in this case I think it works, in the sense that the theory makes us grasp how quickly we are moving from something like the content of the philosophy to statements about its general contours, by way of invoking the Orient itself (these large concepts often do too much work, as some people, in other situations, point out well). This is what Said was trying to account for with Orientalism--which is not one such big concept so much as the name for a dynamic which we can trace.