Revisiting Orientalism:

The Orient in the making

In this week’s column, we further examine how this compartmentalisation of knowledge has been resourcefully dealt with by Edward Said in Orientalism.

Said cites the contemporary illustration to show how the polarisation between the West and East has been used in the area of diplomacy and policy making. Said observes, “A contemporary illustration or two clarify this observation perfectly. It is natural for men in power to survey from time to time the world with which they must deal. Balfour did it frequently. Our contemporary Henry Kissinger does it also, rarely with more expressed frankness than in his essay “Domestic Structures and Foreign Policy”.

The drama he depicts is a real one, in which the United States must manage its behaviour in the world under the pressures of domestic forces on the one hand and of foreign realities on the other. Kissinger’s discourse must for that reason alone establish a polarity between the United States and the world; in addition, of course, he speaks consciously as an authoritative voice for the major Western powers, whose recent history and present reality have placed it before a world that does not easily accept its power and dominance.

Kissinger feels that United States can deal less problematically with the industrial developed west than it can with the developing world. Again, the contemporary actuality of relations between the United States and the so-called Third World (which includes China, Indochina, the Near East, Africa and Latin America) is manifestly a thorny set of problems, which even Kissinger cannot hide.”

Demarcation

According to Said, the crux of Kissinger’s analytical method is to divide the world into two halves; developed and developing countries and the demarcation was made on the basis of Newtonian revolution; the nations that underwent Newtonian revolution and the nations that had not gone through it. In other words, what he seeks to state is that West is cleverer than the East.

Said observers, “Kissinger’s method in the essay proceeds according to what linguists call binary opposition. That is, he shows that there two styles in foreign policy (the prophetic and the political), two types of technique, two periods, and so forth. When at the end of the historical part of his argument he is brought face to face with the contemporary world, he divides it accordingly into two halves, the developed and the developing countries. The first half, which is the West, ‘is deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer, that knowledge consists of recording and classifying data-the more accurately the better.’

Kissinger’s proof for this is the Newtonian revolution, which has not taken place in the developing world. ‘Cultures which escaped the early impact of Newtonian thinking have retained the essential pre-Newtonian view that the real world is almost completely internal to the observer’. Consequently, he added, ‘empirical reality has a much different significance for many of the new countries than for the West because in a certain sense they never went through the process of discovering it.’

Unlike Cromer, Kissinger does not need to quote Sir Alfred Lyall on the Oriental’s inability to be accurate; the point he makes is sufficiently unarguable to require no special validation. We had our Newtonian revolution; they didn’t. As thinkers we are better off than they are. Good; the lines are drawn in much the same way, finally, as Balfour and Cromer drew them. Yet, sixty more years have intervened between Kissinger and the British imperialists.”

Biases

Said points out that Kissinger indirectly, reaffirmed aged-old biases against the orient justifying Western dominance over the Orient in the guise of proposing the construction of a world order before it is demanded by a worldwide crisis.

“Numerous wars and revolutions have proved conclusively that the pre-Newtonian prophetic style, which Kissinger associates both with ‘inaccurate’ developing countries and with Europe before the Congress of Vienna, is not without success. Again unlike Balfour and Cromer, Kissinger, therefore, feels obliged to respect this pre-Newtonian perspective, since ‘it offers great flexibility with respect to temporary revolutionary turmoil’. Thus the duty of the men in Post-Newtonian (real) world is to ‘construct an international order before a crisis imposes it as a necessity’; in other words, we must still find a way by which the developing world can be contained. Is this not similar to Cromer’s vision of a harmonious working machine designed ultimately to benefit some central authority, which opposes the developing world? ”

What is obvious is that the distinction drawn by Kissinger is almost similar to the orthodox one made by Orientalists who separate Orientalists from Westerners.

Said observers, “Kissinger may not have known on what fund of pedigreed knowledge he was drawing when he cut the world up into pre-Newtonian and post-Newtonian conceptions of reality. But his distinction is identical with the orthodox one made by Orientalists, who separate Orientals from Westerners. And like Orientalism’s distinction Kissinger is not value-free, despite the apparent neutrality of his tone.

Thus such words as ‘prophetic’ , ‘accuracy’, ‘internal’, ‘empirical reality’ and ‘order’ are scattered throughout his description, and they characterise either attractive, familiar, desirable virtues or menacing, peculiar, disorderly defects. Both the traditional Orientalists, as we shall see, and Kissinger conceive of the difference between cultures, first, as creating a battlefront that separate them, and second as inviting the West to control, contain and otherwise govern ( through superior knowledge and accommodating power) the Other. ”