I would like to start with a few conclusions of the readings we have done so far. It seems the subject is dead. We have gone from the author as individual creator of the text, to a decentering of the subject, and finally the death of the author. I have no difficulty with the notion that authors are created by other texts. Authors do not write in a vacuum; they write as members of an historic moment of a particular society to which we can never return. Therefore, the author as she/he was at the time of writing is dead, but I don’t think we can eliminate the writer completely from the equation. I see the position of the author as somewhat synechdocical: the individual whose identity is always in flux represents society or a collective subconscious that is also always altering and vice versa. Human beings experience the world individually through the body and the psyche, and these experiences collectively produce societies, which in turn affect individual lives differently.

In other words because subjects, texts and readers are always in a process of becoming, they cannot be given a fixed identity or meaning. In this sense, they/we are part of the continuous performance of the sign – ad infinitum.

 The author is not dead.

Recognizing the Other and Examining Hegemonic Relationships

In Orientalism, Edward Said defines Orientalism as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient”, and argues that Western cultural identity developed by distinguishing itself from the Orient as if the latter were a second, inferior self. He further claims that in Western academia Orientalist doctrines continue to reinforce essentialist views of the Orient that imagine an ontological and epistemological distinction between the West and the East. As a result, Orientalism has come to represent a hegemonic relationship in which the binary of East versus West serves as a Western “corporate institution” for control over a fictitious East. This imagined East nevertheless exists in a very real form as a relationship between Occident and Orient based on power, domination and complex hegemony. Said cites Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony in civil society, where the influence of Orientalist ideas persists by consent rather than imposition, to explain the continued strength of Orientalism as a system of discourse. He calls for a new discursive strategy that recognizes the individuality of nations while impartially examining the general hegemonic relationships between states.

 Possible Problems with the text, Orientalism:

•  Most importantly for me, Said does not write a lot about the resistance of the colonized Other. What about the resisting subject as part of colonial discourse? The colonized nations occupy a non-static space in colonial history from which they have articulated resistance thereby forcing the colonizer to respond in different ways. Does he have a theory of resistance?

• This brings me to the ways in which the marginalized have resisted their oppression. While not sufficient to counterbalance hegemonic texts, they have always had their own texts. Also, whether through corridos, Yoruba chants or rap, they have challenged the West by making use of the spoken word. (Don’t forget visual art, theatre, music, etc…) In other words, the colonized subjects have a conception of themselves that is outside of the Orientalist panopticon.

• Has the binary opposition between West and East always been a fixed feature of Western discourse? Is history not a little bit more complicated? I am thinking, for example, of the French vs. English relationship with their colonial subjects, and the savage vs. the noble savage etc… Said seems to homogenize the West. However, you can argue that despite the differences within hegemonic discourse, the ‘other’ is always inferior.

• Said does not discuss in detail the role of capitalist expansion in the creation of Orientalist texts. In other words, aside from the literary canon of the West, other forces contributed to the creation of the inferior Other.

In sum, while I see the very obvious logic in Said’s argument, perhaps colonial power was not always imposed from above. The more nuanced history of colonization suggests that hegemonic discourse originated from various sources above, below, inside and outside many discourses of power and resistance. Which brings me to . . .

The Anonymous Babble

Foucault’s position regarding knowledge and power informs Said’s theory of Orientalism. As we have seen, the position of the author as the sole source of meaning is challenged from Saussure, Lacan and Althusser to Derrida for whom language constructs or invents the subject. So for Said the Western texts of a variety of disciplines produce knowledge about the Orient that constructs the Other. However, while Said seems to focus on individual Western authors whose works have collectively contributed to Orientalist power structures, Foucault denies the existence of ‘true’ authors. Furthermore, although he welcomes the shift in focus (a la Barthes) from writer to text, he challenges the notion of a work per se which attributes a false coherence to individual works.

Barthes may have claimed that the author is dead, but Foucault explains that the name of an author functions differently at different moments in history, proving that cultural norms determine our understanding of the author’s connection to a particular text.

Foucault’s association of a text’s recognition of ownership with prohibition and punishment, for example, points to how relationships of power are inherent in socio-political and cultural discourse.

Moreover, he claims that names such as Freud and Marx are “founders of discursivity” in that their writings are perpetually modified to inform new discursive practices, unlike scientific texts whose original authority remains unchallenged. In other words, Freud and Marx are the invisible originators of ever-changing discourses, which modify the original discursive practice as they return to it. (But what are they returning to? When we discuss Freud’s psychoanalysis, what are we discussing?) Thus for Foucault, eliminating the study of an author will allow a more objective analysis of how the text ‘performs’ reality/ies.

Final thoughts:

According to Foucault, the only subject is language itself. He is interested in how the text operates within a culture (mostly European it seems). This is wonderful for interdisciplinary studies and coincides with Said’s notion of Orientalist texts that come from a variety of disciplines. However, if there is no subject, no self, then individual voices of ‘othered’ societies have no agency.

Therefore, while I can see how the Orientalist vision in texts has constructed unequal power relations between peoples, I think that the world has always been made up of more than the two cardinal directions (East and West). Also, texts are produced by societies and individuals alike, the Palestinian-American intellectual voice of Edward Said writing of Orientalism, or that of the African-American feminist, bell hooks, on transgender, for example.