The formation of West powers form a hierarchy system with unequal status to certain materials. The ability to retaliate from natives is blown out of proportions by Euro centrists and is the dehumanization of East.

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 (Said 2001, 69). 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 developing 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, half involved 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 Social Epistemology 715 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. More and more the denizens in charge of the production of the old Eurocentric-Orientalist discourse found themselves positioned in deflating hierarchical superordinate and subordinate circuits and micro-sites of power with unequal access to material resources and capital. Sites that were mere nodes within fields which were, in turn, engaged in brutal melees with other homologues fields (both socio-political and geographical) over imposing dominant principles of classification. Nevertheless, the latter Said’s celebration of the end of the monopoly of the Eurocentrist and the capability of the native-intellectual to resist/write back was somewhat premature and exaggerated—as attested by events such as nine-eleven and the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the rise of xenophobia, racism, and Islamophobia. This more relational and ubiquitous capillary power, whilst decentralising and dividing the process of discursive production into spaces of positions, always ensured the maintenance of the status quo and the superiority of positions of position-takings favorable to power.