The alternative is to vote negative to construct the ballot as a counter-script against the orientalist discourses of the affirmative. This is key to generating space for subjectivities outside of the construction of the West.

But Orientalism, as a symbolic revolt, was not just about the critique, deconstruction and exposure of ideological and epistemological Eurocentric frameworks that monopolised the realm of discursive production. Appropriating Michel Foucault’s postulation that power is everywhere and that it is diffused and embodied in discourse, knowledge and “regimes of truth”, Said presents the second mode of critique; namely, Orientalism as the ontological nature, structure and a priori condition of power. In this sense, knowledge or the historical materialisation of specific Nietzschean truths were a form of power and power could only be deciphered through critiquing its manufactured meta-narrative and mapping out the transmutation and movement of its anthropomorphisms, metaphors and metonymies. Said demonstrates this through examining Sylvester de Sacy’s role in the Dacier Report (1802). Conducted for examining the state of Orientalist learning, the report was commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte. Said writes: The importance of the Tableau historique for an understanding of Orientalism’s inaugural phase is that it exteriorizes the form of Orientalist knowledge and its features, as it also describes the Orientalist’s relationship to his subject matter. In Sacy’s pages on Orientalism … he speaks of his own work as having uncovered, brought to light, rescued a vast amount of obscure matter. Why? In order to place it before the student. For like all his learned contemporaries Sacy considered a learned work a positive addition to an edifice that all scholars erected together. Knowledge was essentially the making visible of material, and the aim of a tableau was the construction of a sort of Benthamite panopticon. Scholarly discipline was therefore a specific technology of power …(1978, 127).3 Elsewhere in his analysis of Arthur James Balfour’s speech in the House of Commons on the 13 June 1910, Said declares: England knows Egypt; Egypt is what England knows; England knows that Egypt cannot have self-government; England confirms that by occupying Egypt; for the Egyptians, Egypt is what England has occupied and now governs; foreign occupation therefore becomes “the very basis” of contemporary Egyptian civilization; Egypt requires, indeed, insists upon British occupation (1978, 34). In other words, Said postulated that Orientalism exuded epistemic violence through its inherent relation with European colonial power. And, in turn, European colonial power could only dominate the region through Orientalism functioning as a technique and instrument of power. Here then Said’s third definition of Orientalism, drawing from the two previous epistemological definitions, demonstrates the intrinsically dialectical relation between knowledge and power. Said posits Orientalism is also: (3) The corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient Collectively Said conceptualises Orientalism as epistemological (both as a corpus of scholarly writings and a historical system of thought) and ontological (as in the nature of being, the structure and condition of power). Read critically, for Said the synthesis of Western power and knowledge had a singular ontological and teleological purpose; namely, the thingification or subjectivation of the colonized Oriental subject. This point is best demonstrated by William D. Hart’s analysis of Orientalism: In his description of discourse, Said appropriates Foucault’s ideas of discipline and power/knowledge. By discipline, Foucault [and by default Said] means those methods of modern punitive power that establishes meticulous control over the body, assuring its constant subjection by imposing a relation of “docility-utility”. Discipline, that is, makes human bodies docile and useful [thingifies], and advertises their availability for political, economic, and cultural uses of many kinds (2000, 70). And what of the latter Said’s “voyage in” and the powerful transformative attempt by the native to “write back” in the metropolis? Can this “contrapuntal reading” (Said 1994a, 288, 79), allow a discursive space where the native-intellectual, halfinvolved and half-detached (Said 1996), rejects the “hail” and the Althusserian “quadruple system” of interpellation (Althusser 1969)? Does the deliberate attempt in Said’s words to “enter into the discourse of Europe and the West, to mix with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten history” (Said 1994, 260) effect this equation? This latter Said, moving away from Foucauldian discursive formation and utilizing Gramsci’s hegemony or direzione culturale [cultural direction], envisions social space alike a Bourdieuean field. Revalorizing culture, political space becomes an arena where subjects engage in competent action and deploy different modes of capital and strategies in order to advance their position within the framework of a shared system of meaning (Bourdieu 1977). In this sense, Said announces in Culture and Imperialism (1994a) that “… no matter how apparently complete the dominance of an ideology or social system, there are always going to be parts of the social experience that it does not cover and control. From these parts very frequently comes opposition both self-conscious and dialectical” (Said 1994, 289). Accordingly, Said posits that the “new receptivity to both liberation movements and post-colonial criticism” not only challenges the “monopoly of discourse by Eurocentric intellectuals and politicians” (Said 1994, 316), but also creates a new form of subjectivity residing at a “median state” whereby power’s Manichean dichotomies are obscured.