DISCUSSION

Orientalism and After

Nivedita Menon
AIJAZ AHMED begins his critique of
Edward Said[ E P W ,July 25] by recognising
Said's "beleaguered location in the midst of
imperial America'. However, as he goes on
to say, 'Suppression of critieism... is not
the best way of expressing solidarity' [PE
98].
This response to Ahmed's immensely
stimulating essay takes heart from that statement, for I am in solidarity with what I
believe to be the vision which animates both
his critical reading of Said as well as his
polemics against the intellectual formation
which can loosely be categorised as 'postmodern'. 1 That is, a vision of the revolutionary alliance of 'theory' and 'practice' effecting a radical transformation of structures
of powera vision of justice, equality,
democracy. At the same time, it is the confidence that this vision is shared in some way
or the other by Said and Foucault and even
by that 'reactionary anti-humanist' Derrida
(PE 107] that moves me to take issue.
with Ahmed, who closes off entirely the
possibilities of reading the discourse of postmodernism as emancipatory critique. It is
indeed no coincidence that orientalism as
well as the general intellectual trends which
put into question the notion of a transcendental subject have come into prominence at this historical moment. However,
while Ahmed links these trends with the
'global offensive of the right', positing them
as serving the purposes of international
capital [PE 107] it is equally possible to
argue that they are attempts precisely to cope
with and understand the steady erosion,
specially since the 70s, of the revolutionary
project as it was once conceived.
There is no more the comforting certainty
that the 'progressive' position on any issue
can be read off in a straightforward manner from a clearly delineated body of theory.
The explosive multiplicity of identities makes
every act of political intervention an exercise fraught with contradiction at various
levels. Of necessity each such act must
negotiate these levels with the understanding
that identities are constituted around nodal
points that shift and dissolve constantly. In
the Indian context, a few examples will suffice to illustrate the impossibility of defining the 'progressive' or 'revolutionary' project once and For all: feminists protesting the
Muslim Women's Bill in 1986 finding themselves on the same plat form as the BJP and
the consequent toning down of feminist
demands for a uniform civil code in the face
of BJP's support for it; secularists appalled
at the ban on Satanic Verses coming to terms

Economic and Political Weekly

with its significance in the context of

minority identity in an increasingly communalised political space; radicals ambivalent about the rank populism and inadequacy of job reservations in an economy
rapidly cutting off employment opportunities, readjusting their understanding in
the face of upper caste hysteria over the very
reservations they had been ambivalent
about.
In other words, the 'we' that could once
refer unproblematically to 'secularists' 'communists', 'feminists' or 'nationalists' is a
fragmented, tenuous, shifting 'we' a we that
must stake out its ground afresh at every
step. Ahmed refers to what he calls Said's
strategic deployment of 'we' and 'us' to 'refer
in various contexts to Palestinians, third
world intellectuals, academics in general,
humanists, Arabs, Arab-Americans and the
American citizenry at large' [PE 101]. He
clearly suggests a slipperiness in using 'we'
and 'us' in this shifting fashion. And yet, is
Ahmed himself not present in three of these
'we's, aren't most of us (and here I mean 'we
who read EPW)? These are not even
necessarily mutually contradictory categories
that Said posits himself as being part of,
unlike the 'we's that constituted themselves
in the three instances discussed above.
It is precisely because terms like secularism
and nation no longer offer themselves to us
in a form we recognise that we find the old
certainties not just inadequate but counterproductive Is it only Said and postmodernists who express a growing ambivalence
about nation and nationalism' [PE
109]indeed, are they the only ones who
should? At this historical juncture, how are
Indians who would term themselves part of
a 'progressive' and 'democratic' 'we' to imagine their nation, given, for example, the
communal identity overshadowing every at
tempt at regional autonomy? The commitment to a rejuvenated federal structure is
itself poised on the knowledge that on the
Babri Masjid issue, the only bulwark against
an openly Hindu communal party running
a democratically elected state government
appears to be the central government; can
we disown the ambiguity in this position?
How are Africans to imagine their nations,
when national boundaries are arbitrarily
drawn colonial creations but national liberation was won precisely on the basis of those
boundaries, leaving a tangled legacy of tribal
and ethnic identities which continues to unfold itself? T h e most sweeping statements
about 'nation' and 'state' as coercive identities, complains Ahmed of Said, 'are fre-

September 26 1992

quently delivered alongside resounding affirmations of national liberation' [PE 109].

It would be more fruitful to see this not so
much as a contradiction as a productive tension whose resolution can only be at the cost
of fixing identity arbitrarily at one point or
the other. Ahmed himself is not free of ambivalence On the one hand, he argues that
Said holds colonialism entirely responsible
for all the ills of the third world, absolving
indigenous elites of blame entirely [PE 108].
On the other, he is indignant at Said's 'fervent' defence of Rushdie against the Islamic
world [PE 113]. In other words, when Said
does indicate 'our' culpability; Ahmed is uncomfortable, and justifiably, in my opinion,
given that Islam is the new bogey of the
west.2 Ambivalence and paradox are not
impurities that can be cleansed from our
thinking, they are inscribed in human identification and activity. With the proliferation
of ethnic, religious, tribal, racial and caste
identities, not to mention the dislocation in
class positions generated by structural
transformations of capitalism, it has become
increasingly clear that the revolutionary project cannot be fixed along are axis without
a refraction of its emancipatory potential.
We only have to think of Zulu nationalism
in South Africa, the break-up of the
Soviet Union along 'national' lines, or of
Afghanistan today to recognise the enormous significance and necessity of maintaining the tension between different understandings of what constitutes a nation.
Ahmed consistently reads Said's argument
in such a way that any complexity is reduced to self-contradiction, To take one pivotal
example, Ahmed argues that Said offers
three mutually incompatible definitions of
orientalism, as (a) 'an' interdisciplinary area
of academic knowledge (and in this sense
necessarily a modern discipline, Ahmed
points out); (b) a mentalitytraversingg r e a t
many centuries' and (c) taking the late 18th
century as a rough starting point, as a
western style for having authority over the
orient [PE 103]. These three definitions are
picked out from two pages of Orientalism
and placed in quick succession one after the
other, each starkly contradicting the next.
Dante and Aeschylus are mentioned as examples in the second definition. Ahmed
points out, 'five lines before the 18th century is identified in the third definition as
a roughly defined starting point' [PE 104].
Going back to Said himself, we find his
statement at the outset that by orientalism
he means 'several things, all of t h e m . . .
interdependent'. The first, which he says is
the most readily accepted definition, is the
academic one, and certainly in this sense it
is a modern discipline, as Ahmed points outRelated to this is what Said calls a more
general meaningthis is the second defini-

2133

tion, in which a much broader field is

posited, 'Orientalism as a style of thought
based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the
"Orient" and (most of the time) the "Occident". It is this particular understanding that
can accommodate thinkers from Aeschylus
to Marx, and Said acknowledges that considerable methodological problems arise
from such a broad understanding. From the
interaction between the first meaning (what
Said calls the 'academic') and the second (the
'imaginative'), the third meaning is arrived
at, something 'more historically and
materially defined' than the other two,
which he posits as starting roughly in the late
18th century [1979: 2-3]. Later, as Said
recapitulates his argument, it becomes even
clearer what the links are between the three
definitions which appear entirely contradictory when isolated from their context
'Orientalism is not only a positive doctrine
about the orient that exists at any one time
in the West' (the second definition) 'it is also
an influential academic tradition' (the first)
'as well as an area of concern defined by
travellers, commercial enterprises, governments...'(the third) [1979: 203]. At other
points Said explicitly refers to the orientalism
starting in the 18th century as 'modern
orientalism', thus differentiating it from the
other understanding that can accommodate
both Dante and Marx [1979: 22, 203).
This is not to suggest that Said's argument
is beyond criticism, which indeed it has faced
often enough. A familiar and justified attack, for example, is the one made on the
historicism inherent in Orientalism (which
is why it is all the more surprising that
Ahmed lumps him with the 'anti-humanisms
. . . propagated now under the signature of
anti-empiricism, anti-historicism...') [PE
107]. However, this essay is not intended to
interlock with Ahmed's reading of Said in
as detailed a textual analysis as his and I use
the above discussion only to illustrate that
Ahmed's response to any ambiguity, paradox
or equivocality is to condemn it as incoherent and self-contradictory, 'Orientalism
and After' is used here as a point of entry
into current debates on the validity of the
post-modern project in general. I would
point to three significant areas of concern
suggested by Ahmed's critique(a) the
question of the relationship between
'discourse' and 'reality', (b) whether
representation is always and only
'misrepresentation in the post-modern
understanding, (c) the source and location
of resistance if 'discourse.' is conceived as
monolithically as Ahmed argues it is in Said
(and Foucault).
(a) When Ahmed is 'surprised' by the
word style' in Said's third definition of
orientalism ('a western style for dominating
the orient) [PE 105] he foregrounds the issue
of discourse -as- language, the backbone of
Marxist critiques of discourse analysis. In

2134

Said writing, Ahmed holds, imperialist

ideology 'appears to be an effect mainly of
certain kinds of writing' [P 104]. Again, in
the context of an essay in which Said mentions anti-imperialist intellectuals like Cabral
and Fanon, Ahmed notes disapprovingly
that what appears to be important is
Cabral's 'discursive position, not that he
launched and led the armed struggle' [PE
110].

The contention is that there is a material

reality which exists outside and prior to
discourse to which discourse can only refer.
For example, Michele Barrett .distinguishing
between .the two, writes, 'Virginia Woolf
once said, "a republic might be brought into
being by a poem"... Yet however colossal
the material effects of this poem, they would
have no bearing on the question of whether
the poem itself had a material existence'
[1980: 89]. Certainly there is a sense in which
'discourse' can be understood as speech or
language generally, but the sense in which
the social space is understood to be discursive is entirely different. Such an understanding sees human activity to be in dynamic
interaction between linguistic and nonlinguistic performances which cannot be
separated from each other. The totality of
human activity cannot in other words, be
labelled as either linguistic or non-linguistic,
it includes both elements within itself. For
example, persons cooking are performing
'real' activity in the material world, but they
read recipes whose directions are followed.

or they remember instructions given to them

verbally. These two aspects of the performance, the linguistic and non-linguistic, cannot be separated from the totality which
makes up the material activity of cooking.
This totality is what is meant by 'discourse'.
Thus it is possible for Foucault, for example, to write of Marx having revealed 'an
entirely new discursive practice on the basis
of political economy' [1972: 188].
Natural objects such as stones would continue to exist if we did not think about them,
but their being as 'stones' is derived from
a process of narrativisation. It is only within
particular classificatory systems which have
been historically constructed that the objects
we call 'stones' are 'stones' as opposed to
trees' or 'mud'. Or indeed, that they are 'objects' at all, as opposed to being 'people'. In
all the ways that human beings interact with
the world, no object is experienced except
in a discursive formation. Discourse and
reality cannot therefore be posited against
each other. 3
Cabral's 'discursive position', then, is not
derived simply from his ideas as expressed
in his writing but refers to the complex
articulation by which Cabral is constituted
as a resisting subject in a colonial situation,
as a writer, a poet, a revolutionary.
Moreover, these points of identity formation
do not exhaust all possible configurations
by which Cabral could experience himself
as a subject, but in the context of the field
covered by Said and Ahmed, these particular

Economic and Political Weekly

September 26, 1992

configurations are foregrounded.

Regarding Ahmed's discomfort with
'questioning the very facticity of facts', what
this discussion has attempted to establish is
that n o fact presents itself to us innocent of
narrative structures which give it the meaning it has for us. To that extent, it may reflect
not nihilism, but a critical self awareness if
historians do 'start putting the word "fact"
in quotation marks' [PE 107).
(b) Ahmed understands Said's position to
be based on the assumption that 'representation is always-already a misrepresentation'
[PE 108]. This accusation is made at several
points, directed both at Said as well as postmodern positions in generalthe Nietzschean position of all representations being
misrepresentations' [PE 109] or "Said's
equivocation on this key question is delivered
in what appears to be a precise formulation,
namely, that the line between a representation and a misrepresentation is always very
thin' [PE 107]. This is a caricature of the
post-modernist understanding of representation, perpetrated by, among others, no less
a philosopher than Habermas who, in The
Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity,
criticises 'Derrida's purposely paradoxical
statement that any interpretation is inevitably a false interpretation and any
understanding a misunderstanding...' 4 As
Derrida points out in response; he has never
made such a statement. What he has said
about representation/misrepresentation is
far from being a nihilistic denial of
meaning'The relation of "mis" (misunderstanding, mis-interpreting, for example) to that which is not "mis" is.. .that of
a general possibility inscribed in the structure of positivity, of normality, of the "standard". All that I recall is that this structural
possibility must be taken into account when
describing so-called ideal normality... or
interpretation, and that this possibility can
be neither excluded nor opposed' [1988: 157].
If representation is understood to refer to
a reality which it tries to approximate as
closely as possible, then indeed a misrepresentation is clearly recognisable by its
deviation from the real. But what if the very
distinction between representation and
reality is understood to be discursively constituted? The argument therefore, is not that
the line between representation and misrepresentation is very thin but that both are
implicated within a discursively constituted
context outside which the distinction itself
between the two breaks down. Having said
this, it clearly follows that within a context,
it is possible to speak of something being
misunderstood or misinterpreted. However,
this claim cannot be made on the authority
of some reality but only with reference to
the context itself.
Let me illustrate by taking up an instance
where I would claim that Ahmed has misrepresented Said's argument. Discussing
Said's essay, 'Figures, Configurations,

Economic and Political Weekly

Transfigurations' [1990] Ahmed quotes a

'damning' judgment on non-European
literatures. He is astonished that 'the author
of Orientalism, no less', should in this essay,
claim that it is (in Said's words) 'a mistake
to try to show that the "other" literatures
of Africa and Asia' can be studied as
'respectably' as European literatures which
he characterises as 'high', 'autonomous' and
'aesthetically independent' [1990: 13-14;
quoted by Ahmed PE 114]. One would have
thought, Ahmed goes on, that 'the whole
point of orientalism was that these literatures
are not autonomous, that they were too complicit in colonialism to be spoken of primarily in terms of high aesthetics' [PE 114].
Indeed one would have expected precisely
such a line of argument from Said and yet,
on reading 'Figures', the passage referred
to is discovered, exactly as Ahmed has
quoted it. Where then, is the alleged misrepresentation?
This instance is illustrative precisely of the
question of context determining meaning.
On following the entire line of thinking
behind the quoted passage, Said's argument
appears to be that in studying non-European
literatures, two points must be kept in mind.
First, that any such study must be intimately
linked with slavery, colonialism and racism.
These literatures can only be discussed in the
context of their 'embattled circumstances' in
post-colonial societies or as subjects taught
in metropolitan centres where they are
relegated to 'secondary spots' on the curricular agenda Second, and this is what
Ahmed calls the 'damning' passage, Said
argues that it would be tantamount to putting white masks on the black faces of nonEuropean literatures if, in an attempt to
combat their marginalisation, their value
was asserted in terms of their being as
autonomous and aesthetically satisfying as
European literatures. The implication is that
such an approach would not only beg the
question of the 'autonomy' of European
literatures (which the concept of orientalism
has decisively problematised) but would
depoliticise non-European literatures, render
invisible their 'more obviously wordly affiliations to power and polities'.
Here we have a group of words which in
their immediate materiality as sign, present
no ambiguity. There is no suggestion that
cither reading has distorted the order of
words or made omissions, and yet each
reading can claim that the other is a
misinterpretation. Given the discursive
universe of Said's writing and political activity, and more specifically of the broad
argument in 'Figures', I would argue that
Ahmed has misread Said. 'This comprehension of the sign in and of itself, in its immediate materiality as a sign
is. the in
dispensable condition of all hermeneutics
and of any claim to transition from the sign
to the signified. When one attempts, in a
general way, to pass from an obvious to a
latent language, one must first be rigorous-

September 26 1992

ly sure of the obvious meaning. The analyst

for example, must first speak the same
language as the patient Thus, none other
than Derrida, accused of various crimes
against clarity and understanding [1990(a):
32-33).
What I am arguing is that Ahmed has
misunderstood the obvious meaning itself of
the passage from Said because he is reading
it in the context, not of Said's manifest line
of argument, but of his own understanding
of the post-modern project he sees as latent
in Said's work. Since this project, for
Ahmed, is reactionary, elitist and spawned
by the needs of advanced capitalism, even
the surface meaning of the passage for him
is entirely different.
At this point a further move is necessary,
that of recognising the new reading offered
to be further open to reinterpretation. Each
new interpretation is poised in its turn on
a moment of undecidability, it is an interpretation with a 'mis' inscribed in its structure There can be no point at which this play
of meaning is decisively halted. Nor does it
follow from this that each interpretation is
as valid as every otherone takes a position
clearly by offering an interpretation at all,
and by affirming that within the discursive
universe in which one functions, this interpretation is the most 'correct' or even the
only one possible. Further, one does attempt
to demonstrate that this particular context
or discursive universe is one which renders
visible the widest range of meaning. It is
precisely this process of legitimating and
authorising discourses that gets foreground'
ed once we suspend the notion of some
ultimate truth or reality against which
representations can be measured. Relativism
is thus a false problem. As Richard Rorty
points out, 'The philosophers who get called
relativists are those who say that the grounds
for choosing between... opinions are less
algorithmic than had been supposed' [1982:
166-67 ].5
Ahmed argues that 'worthwhile distinctions between a representation and a misrepresentation' are made with reference to
'historical and social circumstances' [PE
105]. Surely 'historical and social circumstances' do not exist in the 'real' world
to be merely discovered by historians?
Whether people killing one another is understood as 'communal riot' or 'property
dispute' or an instance of 'class war' is not
inscribed in the killings themselves. Where
a news report sees 'Hindus' and 'Muslims',
a Marxist analyst sees, say, displaced
handloom workers in conflict with the rising trading class. Is either understanding
'false'? To align all meaning through a preestablished grid imposes order only at the
expense of rendering invisible the polyvalence inherent in human interaction. At
the same time, it bears repeating that in this
instance both the journalist and the Marxist analyst share a context in which they
would agree on the fact that killings had occurred, and would contest say, government
efforts to deny it. The boundaries of discur-

2135

sive universes are not clear and impermeable

as Ahmed argues but are fuzzy and realign
themselves constantly. Ahmed charges Said
with not addressing the question, 'as any
Foucaultian would, whether or not statements and their authors, can actually circulate so very freely between discursive
fields...'
[PE 115. note 10]. However,
Foucault questions precisely this kind of
reification of discourses. The divisions between discourses, he argues, 'are always
themselves reflexive categories. . . (O)f
course, they also have complex relations with
each other, but are not intrinsic, autochthonous and universally recognisable
characteristics' [1972; 22], Symbols and
meanings do constantly get displaced from
one discourse to another in social and
political interaction. Hence, for example, the
entirely different significance of the demand
for a uniform civil code within feminist
discourse and within Hindu communal
discourse
(c) Ahmed quotes Said's disowning of
Foucault in The World, the Text and the
Critic, pointing to its uncanny similarity
with his own critique of Said. This passage
charges Foucault with not making 'even a
nominal allowance for emergent movements,
and none for revolutions, counter-hegemony
or historical blocs' (quoted PE 109]. This is
a familiar criticism, and one that is linked
to the charge of anti-humanism, for where
there is no continuous revolutionary subject,
it is argued, there can be no resistance.
Ahmed uses the adjective 'reactionary' with
'anti-humanism' more than once in his essay,
and anti-humanism is presented as antihuman, almost. And yet, it is humanism as
an a historical essence that is being rejected
by these strands of thinking, not the notion
of human beings as actors. As Laclau points
out, the attempt is to demonstrate that the
validity of humanist values is constructed by
'particular discursive and argumentative
practices' that have a recent history. 'This
history of the production of "Man" ... has
been one of the great achievements of our
culture; to outline this history would be to
reconstruct the various discursive surfaces
where it has taken placethe juridical,
educational, economic and other institutions..... The "human being", without
qualification, is the overdetermined effect of
this process of multiple construction' [1990:
125]. In other words, as recently as three centuries ago, the idea of human beings as
bearers of rights in their own capacities did
not exist. And when we direct attention to
the process by which human beings in this
sense were created, we come up also against
the ways in which 'humanism' is constantly
under threat, along the lines of gender, race,
class, caste and so on. What is called antihumanism therefore, is a double movement.
On the one hand, it points to the historical
and contingent nature of the identity of
'human beings' as 'equal' with the 'right' to
fulfil their potential equally, while affirming the ideal of this vision. "Nothing seems

2136

to me less outdated' writes Derrida, 'than

the classic emancipatory ideal' (1990(b):
971]. On the other hand, rejecting the notion of some ahistorical essence which could
be called 'humanism' means foregrounding
the perpetual threat to the vision of the
'classic emancipatory ideal'. Thus there is a
very strong sense in which anti-humanism
can be understood as a theory of resistance,
but its fulcrum is not a unified subject, nor
is the emancipatory ideal to be realised once
and for all. Emancipation itself must be
recognised as disaggregated, split along different axes, just as identity is not just a
positive conglomerate of different subject
positions but an ever temporary and contingent construction, forming anew at the
intersections of shifting subject positions. As
Joan Scott puts it, 'subjects are produced
through multiple identifications, some of
which become politically salient for a time
in certain contexts....... (T)he project of
history is not to reify identity but to understand its production as an ongoing process
of differentiation... subject to redefinition,
resistance and change' [1992: 19].
Does it follow that 'resistance can always,
only be personal, micro and shared only by
small, determinate numbers of individuals
who happen, perchance, to come together,
outside the so-called "grand narratives" of
class, gender, nation? [PE 109] Ahmed's
formulation suggests that the only conception of resistance that emerges from this
understanding is that of futile scrabblings
of finite groups at the base of a vast and omnipotent discourse of power But when
power itself is conceived of as discontinuous
and shifting, 'revolution' becomes multiple.
The 'so-called grand narratives' do not roll
on, majestic and unimpeded, 'outside' the
chaotic and flurried activity of disintegrated
post-modern individuals. On the contrary,
rejecting grand narratives renders visible the
plurality of subjects and legitimises the
multiplicity of sites of resistance. To accept
that the democratic project is open to
perpetual redefinition at innumerable and
unpredictable points is in fact to radicalise
the understanding of democracy itself.
It still remains to respond more fully to
Ahmed's reading of Said but I will not attempt that task here; however, it may be that
a critical engagement with 'Orientalism and

After' has rearticulated some elements of

current debates in ways which make visible
further spaces of contestation.

Notes
[SarahJoseph's comments on this essay helped
me clarify the argument. Special thanks to
Farida Khan for generous assistance with word
processing facilities.]
1 Without going into the debates about structuralism, post-structuralism and postmodernism and the extent to which these
have features which overlap or differ, I am
using the term 'post-modernism' for the purposes of this essay, to refer to the strands of
thinking that problematise a unified and
essential notion of identity and historicise
humanism.
2 Said himself does display a sensitivity to this
aspect particularly in 'Figures, Configurations Transfiguration', an essay Ahmed
discusses later.
3 The discussion in this section is inspired by
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's
response to Norman Geras, 'Post-Marxism
without Apologies' in Ernesto Laclau, New
Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time
[100-103].
4 Quoted by Derrida in Ltd Inc [157].
5 Quoted by Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections
[104].

References
Barrett, Michele [1980], Women's

Oppression

Today, Verso, London.

Derrida, Jaques [1988], Ltd Inc, Northwestern
University Press, Evanston.
[1990(a)], 'Cogito and the History of
Madness', Writing and Difference,
(translated by Alan Bass), Rout ledge,
London.
[1990) j, 'Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority', Cardozo Law Review,
Vol II, Nos 5-6.
Foucault, Michel [1972], The Archaeology of
Knowledge, (translated by A M Sheridan
Smith). Pantheon Books, New York.
Laclau, Ernesto [1990], New Reflections on the
Revolution of Our Time, Verso, London.
Said, Edward [1979], Orientalism, Vintage
Books, London.
-[I990], 'Figures, Configurations, Transfiguration', Race and Class, Volume 32, No 1.
Scott, Joan [1992], 'Multiculturalism and the
Politics of Identity', October 1961.

Economic and Political Weekly

September 26, 1992