Recently I have grappled with the concept of dualism, noting in an essay about my epistemological commitments in LIS that many of the intellectual histories I consulted structured the dominant ways of knowing in given periods as binary oppositions.1 In part because of my disappointment with/in our strange, historical moment, characterized by the hyper-tribalist politics of us-versus-them (and attendant, uncritical worldviews that cast reality in either/or terms); as well as my belief that given a methodological or theoretical dichotomy, we tend to adhere to one side/pole and dismiss the other in a “quasi-political” act that can lead to what I called “unproductive theoretical violence or epistemic totalitarianism,”2 I sought in the essay to trouble the utility of binaries as modes of categorization and analysis. Instead, I argued for a mix of different, even divergent critical approaches as I reflected upon the sort of research I want to conduct in the field of LIS.
At the risk of devoting too many words in this post’s limited space, I begin with this exposition because binarism is not just a noteworthy, but in fact a fundamental dimension of Orientalism (1978), wherein Said posits that binary oppositions lie not only at the heart of Orientalism, but also the colonial-imperial project itself. This feature is perhaps unsurprising. That is, generally we think of it as one of the foundational texts of postcolonialism, but whether we regard the arguments in Orientalism as informed by a (then still nascent) poststructural tradition, or even something more akin to critical theory, in both approaches dichotomies are fundamental.3 And to the extent that LIS scholars Michelle Caswell, J.J. Ghaddar, and David J. Hudson locate the theoretical underpinnings of their work in postcolonialism and critical race theory (described often as an “offshoot” or “branch” of critical theory), it follows that binary oppositions also play a key role in their arguments. In this blog post, briefly I consider some of the ways dichotomies figure in Orientalism and select writings by these LIS scholars, thereby extending my consideration of the efficacy and utility of binary oppositions, and ultimately alighting upon a significant detail: Whereas the uncritical imposition of binaries on given phenomena can lead to the kind of myopia I describe above, identifying tensions, conflicts, and contradictions between oppositions that structure ideologies and systems can be a generative space from which to critique and challenge them.
Said describes the contours of Orientalism throughout his introduction and first section of chapter 1, whose title, “Knowing the Oriental,” introduces a central tenet: Orientalism is a discourse and mode of representation predicated upon the collection, organization, and production of knowledge about the Oriental subject that allows for and justifies a specific kind of cultural domination. Said describes his work as “greatly indebted” to Foucault in this formulation early in the introduction, including not only the Foucauldian concept of discourse but also of knowledge-power, and to be sure, power (i.e., “imperial might’ that “[lurks] everywhere behind the pacification of the subject race”4) is a crucial component here that justifies colonial-imperial authority. Indeed, Said locates the origin of one of three forms of Orientalism in Napoleon’s 1798 invasion and subsequent occupation of Egypt, though simultaneously he makes clear that power as manifested in martial superiority is antecedent to and supportive of an intellectual dimension, where the French army’s “invasion … was in many ways the very model of a truly scientific appropriation of one culture by another, apparently stronger one.”5
Here too Said reiterates and clarifies the fundamental dichotomy upon which Orientalism is built (“For with Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt processes were set in motion between East and West that still dominate our contemporary cultural and political perspectives”6), expanding upon this notion on the following page in his description of a third form of Orientalism that delimits “thought about the Orient”:
For Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure
promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange
(the Orient, the East, ‘them’). This vision in a sense created and then served
the two worlds thus conceived. Orientals lived in their world, ‘we’ lived in
ours. The vision [i.e., a knowledge system that informs representation(s)] and
material reality propped each other up, kept each other going.7
Thus, Orientalism’s fundamental dichotomy of West/East corresponds with and engenders secondary oppositions (e.g., Europe/the Orient, us/them, the familiar/the strange), including—contra Balfour’s (lowercase “d”) declaration in a June 13, 1910 address to British legislators reprinted at the head of the chapter—more invidious binaries like superiority/inferiority, honorable/dishonorable, strong/weak, rational/irrational, peaceful/bellicose, etc.8
Notably, Said draws explicit attention to “binary opposition[s]” in discussing Kissinger’s 1966 essay “Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy,” and specifically the polarity between developed/developing (sic.) countries expressed therein, foreshadowing “The Latest Phase” of Orientalism taken up in the fourth section of the third chapter. Here Said describes a particularly American, imperial version of Orientalism in the latter half of the twentieth century that replaced the earlier, French/English colonial project, characterized as much by the policy and administrative (i.e., knowledge) work of the “social scientist and the new expert” in Middle East and Near Eastern area studies as by military interventions and adventures, and through which the logic of Orientalist binaries is re-presented and reproduced to similar ends, and with much the same effect:
When one uses categories like Oriental and Western as both the starting and end
points of analysis, research, public policy … the result is usually to polarize
the distinction … and limit the human encounter between different cultures,
traditions, and societies. In short, from its earliest modern history to the
present, Orientalism as a form of thought for dealing with the foreign has
typically shown the altogether regrettable tendency of any knowledge based on
hard-and-fast distinctions as ‘East’ and ‘West’: to channel thought into a West
or an East compartment. Because this tendency is right at the center of
Orientalist theory, practice, and values found in the West, the sense of
Western power over the Orient is taken for granted as having the status of
scientific truth.9
Indeed, much of Said’s method can be described as identifying and breaking down this binary logic that structures Orientalism (as represented, for example, in C19 British literature), ideally to “[eliminate] the ‘Orient and ‘Occident’ altogether,” including by “undertaking studies in contemporary alternatives Orientalism” and demonstrating to “formerly colonized peoples … the dangers and temptations of employing this [culturally dominant] structure upon themselves or upon others.”10
Again, in several ways, we read in the work of Caswell, Ghaddar, and Hudson not dissimilar permutations of Said’s critique of Orientalism specifically, and binarism generally. In the three articles I considered for this post, each identifies a postcolonial theoretical orientation (indeed, Hudson and Caswell even cite Orientalism among many other references), and in each case, the authors identify, describe, and trouble implicit and explicit binary oppositions that structure their respective subjects: “universalist versus national cultural property frameworks” as they relate to disputes about the custodianship of Baath Party records in the aftermath of the Second Gulf War (Caswell); national guilt/national triumph, preservation/destruction, memorialization/oblivion, and colonial interests/indigenous rights around records related to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Ghaddar); and the racialized presumptions about the difference(s) between the minority and majority world as reproduced in international information inequality discourse(s) in LIS (Hudson). Perhaps more explicit than some considerations in the sections of Orientalism considered here is the extent to which the later authors describe tensions, conflicts, and contradictions between oppositions. In so doing, they transmute select binaries into fecund sites where the binaries’ truth claims are challenged, and the dominant ideological presumptions that shape them surfaced.11
Near the conclusion of his article, Hudson makes an important distinction between the “phenomena to which we refer and the conceptual frameworks through which we refer.”12 As much as Orientalism and the articles by Caswell, Ghaddar, and Hudson themselves, this notion is one I find helpful in reconciling my skepticism of theoretical dualisms mentioned at this post’s outset with what I regard as productive challenges to the binaries by which reality is constructed. At the same time, these works, especially the LIS articles, also serve to underscore my understanding that a critical theoretical orientation interested in emancipation and transformation (whether that is decolonizing LIS work or related kinds of deconstruction) requires a constant reflexivity, attendance, and openness to research methods and conceptual frameworks that will work best (i.e., shed the most light on) given subjects and phenomena—including a willingness to adapt or work beyond them when existing methods and frameworks don’t.
Notes
1. Mike Garabedian, “Constructive” Criticism: On (F)using Critical Theory with Pragmatism Toward a Theory of and Approach to Library and Information Studies Research” (unpublished paper, December 9, 2022), typescript: 1.
2. Garabedian, 2.
3. For poststructuralists, the
sign/signifier dichotomy of Saussurean linguistics is a blueprint for all
manner of binary oppositions, wherein one of the two terms perforce is regarded
via a secondary binary as positive, good, superior, dominant, etc. (and the
other negative, bad, inferior, subordinate, etc.); while critical theorists
seek via the negative dialectics of immanent critique to identify ideological
paradoxes and contradictions (i.e., oppositions) in order to collapse the truth
claim of a given concept.
4. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 22, 37.
8. The first two
dichotomies here come from remarks by Balfour and the writings of Cromer Said reprints
on pages 32 and 38–39; the third is noted on page 40; and the latter two are from
the series of qualities in the final paragraph of the chapter, on page 49.
9. And of course, two upshots
of this constructed, “radical difference” are to “[create] a battlefront that separates
them … and [to invite] the West to control, contain, and otherwise govern
(through superior knowledge and accommodating power) the Other.” Said, 45, 48.
10. It should be noted that formalist and postpositivist approaches to literary criticism and cultural studies were still dominant enough in 1978 that Said is compelled (via a “tertiary troubling” of Marx’s base/superstructure dichotomy) to justify these transformative, emancipatory, socially ameliorative goals: “Too often literature and culture are presumed to be politically, even historically innocent; it has regularly seemed otherwise to me, and certainly my study of Orientalism has convinced me (and I hope will convince my literary colleagues) that society and literary culture can only be studied and understood together.” Said, 27.
11. Notable, too, are the transformative goals of Caswell’s, Ghaddar’s, and Hudson’s research: Whereas in 1978 Said regards transforming the status quo as more aspirational than anything—a nod and a hope that the work will lead to the eradication of Orientalism—these later authors, in some ways Said’s successors, clarify via imperatives and by framing their research as critical interventions that a primary objective of their work is in fact to effect amelioratory change.
12. David J. Hudson, “On Dark Continents and Digital Divides:
Information Inequality and the Reproduction of Racial Otherness in Library and Information Studes,"Journal of Information Ethics, 25, 1 (Spring 2016): 74.
References
Caswell, Michelle. “‘Thank You Very Much, Now Give Them Back’: Cultural Property and the Fight Over the Iraqi Baath Party Records.” American Archivist 74 (Spring/Summer 2011): 211- 240.
Garabedian, Mike. “Constructive” Criticism: On (F)using Critical Theory with Pragmatism Toward a Theory of and Approach to Library and Information Studies Research.” Unpublished paper, December 9, 2022, typescript.
Ghaddar, J.J. “The Spectre in the Archive: Truth, Reconciliation, and Indigenous Archival
Memory.” Archivaria 82 (Fall 2016): 3–26.
Hudson, David J. “On Dark Continents and
Digital Divides: Information Inequality and the Reproduction of Racial Otherness in Library and
Information Studies.” Journal of Information Ethics, 25,
no. 1 (Spring 2016): 62–80.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978.
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