Power and Knowledge In Edward Said's Orientalism - Book Report/Review Example

Power and Knowledge in Edward Said's Orientalism 2007 In Arab-American community of the USA, Edward Said embodied the Power of Knowledgeopposing the evil forces and oppression. His Orientalism deals with the issue of distorting the truth as far as the culture of the Muslim world and Islam are concerned in the modern western society. Now that the opposition between the East and the West has become "the main conflict of the humankind" (as it is interpreted by the mass media and politicians), Said's views become especially topical. Said's defending of the Arab people, including the Palestinians, were closely related to his firm belief that violence is evil and meaningless, whereas the human rights and justice should always be a priority. Basically, E. Said proposed to view the western policy towards the East as colonial, imperial discourse created by means of manipulating knowledge - that is why the problem of interrelation between knowledge and power in Said's work is very important. All in all, Edward Said's views may be called unique because he is not only interested in politics from a scientific viewpoint - he, in fact, makes politics use the results of research, that is - scientific knowledge. He clearly shows that he is far from both politicization of thinking and ensuring the "neutrality" of scientists. His intellectual is politicized, yet it happens not because he makes science a servant of politics, but - and this is important for the understanding of the scholar's system of beliefs - because politics for Said is the ally of science as far as the freedom of thinking and autonomy of scientific activity are concerned. The core of E. Said's approach is to de-crown the myth of Orientalism being a homogenous theory based on clearly defined concepts. According to him, Orientalism "is a style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and (most of the time) 'the Occident'. Thus a very large mass of writers, among who are poet, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, 'mind', destiny, and so on". Said interprets events rather than openly states his opinion, and this certainly correlates with "the death of the author" theory proclaimed by post-modernism. The minimised role of author ensures the collision and interrelation between different, often polar opinions, in E. Said's Orientalism; and it is a great step towards "polylogic" knowledge as opposed to monologic. For Said, monologic knowledge is associated, above all, with the West, but at the same time with the Eastern counter-attack against this monologism using the same monologic principles. That is why, the western expansion towards the East, which is obviously the embodiment of power and domination, is inseparable from knowledge. Said proves that metaphysically, comprehension (the process of intellectual capturing) is related to occupation, and personal enrichment in the form of becoming more open-minded and widening of one's scope - to imperialistic ambitions of the West. My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient's difference with its weakness. . . . As a cultural apparatus Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth, and knowledge (Said 1995, p. 204) It is not a coincidence that we mentioned Said's idea about the interrelations between science and politics. In his Orientalism, science, and at the first place the science that serves political needs of the country, is associated with the West, same as power. He therefore attempts to discover a complicated system of ties existing between science (knowledge) and power, and to show to what extent power may need knowledge, and at the same time to what extent knowledge may be a form of power. This problem is not new, of course, and it has long ago been pinpointed by the representatives of French post-structuralism, e.g. R. Bart, J. Derrida, and surely, M. Foucault who paid particular attention to the problem of interrelation between knowledge and power. Still, Said's approach differs significantly from that of M. Foucault - whereas Foucault takes into consideration institutions (the surveillance systems utilised by governments and other authorities (that helped obtain knowledge), controlling and forcing mechanisms as the embodiment of power)), Said analysed ethno-social aspects of the problem. Above all, he analysed social and cultural context of the interrelations between power and knowledge: My whole point about this system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Oriental essence - in which I do not for a moment believe - but that it operates as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting. (Said 1995, p. 273). E. Said views Orientalism as the reflection of Western desire to seize the East. He includes the concept of hegemony into the system of relations between knowledge and power, and he clearly shows how the images of East are created by the western Orientalism. The scholar claims that the western world intentionally substituted the newly coined term "Orient" for the geographical name (the East), and this term bears certain cultural and political connotations. As a result, the history and culture of an immense region of the world with its rich traditions has been "reconstructed" by Orientalism. I doubt if it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India or Egypt in the later nineteenth century took an interest in those countries which was never far from their status in his mind as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact - and yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism. (Said 1995, p. 11) There is no direct dictate, of course, on the part of those representing political power; vice versa, the ideas of Orientalism are introduced subtly and imperceptibly, gradually becoming the common knowledge - and that is how the power reveals itself. All in all, throughout the book, E. Said emphasized the idea that even a sincere interest to the East in terms of its culture and traditions (knowledge) can eventually transform into political oppression (power). Works Cited Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Penguin, 1995. Read More