SAID 'S PHILOSOPHY DOES NOT SUGGEST SOLUTIONS

SAID 'S PHILOSOPHY DOES NOT SUGGEST SOLUTIONS

1. FOCUSING ON SOLUTIONS TO IMPERIALISM IS SUPERIOR TO JUST CRITIQUING

Sšnke Zehle, Department of Comparative Literature, SUNY Binghamton, "Review of Arturo Escobar. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World", May 1997, Accessed May 23, 2000, http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/9905/escobar.html

Ultimately, however, I think that Escobar's text leaves much room for more optimistic projections and accounts of successful negotiations, while insisting that accommodation within existing practices of development cannot address the fundamental questions of growth-orientation, with its consequences of both increasing and feminizing poverty and a further commodification of natural "resources." Following Foucault's critique of the "repressive hypothesis," he frequently repeats that critique is not so much a matter of identifying mechanisms of "repression" which associates liberation with freedom from such influences, but a concern with the production, institutionalization, and professionalization of knowledges and their "obvious" intelligibility in conjunction with practices that (often violently) stabilize their truth-value at the expense of alternative knowledges and practices. This approach must not reinscribe a cultural purity (and a nostalgia for "lost knowledges") into the analysis of "vernacular" culture. On the contrary, Escobar insists, "the question arises...how to understand the ways in which cultural actors...transform their practices in the face of modernity's contradictions. Needless to say, inequalities in access to forms of cultural production continue, yet these inequalities can no longer be confined within the simple polar terms of tradition and modernity, dominators and dominated".

Kevin Robins, Professor of Geography, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. & David Morley, Professor of Media Studies, Goldsmiths' College at the University of London, CARDOZO ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT LAW JOURNAL, 1993, p.408-409

A point, perhaps, to begin with is the experience of exile and immigration. If the objective is genuinely to open frontiers - cultural as well as geographical - then migrant experience could be an important resource. "Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience." Although exile is a brutalizing experience, there are, indeed, things to be learned from some of its conditions: Seeing "the entire world as a foreign land" makes possible originality of vision. Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that - to borrow a phrase from music - is contrapuntal. The point about this kind of experience is that it could serve to decenter a hegemonic and self-assured Euroculture. Any meaningful European identity must be created out of the recognition of difference, the acceptance of different ethnicities.
3. SAID 'S WRITING CANNOT HELP US IN POLICYMAKING, IT IS INFINITELY REGRESSIVE

Edward Said, University Professor Columbia University, ORIENTALISM, 1978, p.331

One scarcely knows what to make of these caricatured permutations of a book that to its author and in its arguments is explicitly anti-essentialist, radically skeptical about all categorical designations such as Orient and Occident, and painstakingly careful about not "defending" or even discussing the Orient and Islam. Yet Orientalism has in fact been read and written about in the Arab world as a systematic defense of Islam and the Arabs, even though I say explicitly in the book that I have no interest in, much less capacity for, showing what the true Orient and Islam really are. Actually I go a great deal further when, very early in the book, I say that words such as "Orient" and "Occident" correspond to no stable reality that exists as a natural fact. Moreover, all such geographical designations are an odd combination of the empirical and imaginative. In the case of the Orient as a notion in currency in Britain, France, and America, the idea derives to a great extent from the impulse not simply to describe, but also to dominate and somehow defend against it.

KIRKPATRICK SALE

BIO-REGIONALIST AND LUDDITE

Life And Work

Kirkpatrick Sale is an author, activist, and thinker whose work has spanned a wide variety of subjects. Sale has, throughout his career, authored several definitive histories of progressive movements. Involved with many leftist causes in the sixties, he wrote SDS., an authoritative study of the Students for a Democratic Society. He has also written histories of the American Environmental Movement and the Luddite movement, called The Green Revolution and The Luddites And Their War On The Industrial Revolution.