"Orientalism"

Today in class we started to define/describe the term “orientalism,” using the “Introduction” to Edward Said’s Orientalism (1977) and (lurking in the background) the entry for this term in New Keywords.

In his introduction to Orientalism, Said discusses how he will use this term, focusing on how one society (“European”) defines another (“the Orient”) in terms of what is “different” about it, so that “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (Said 3). In other words, by defining “the Orient” as everything that is NOT “European,” Western identity can claim to be both coherent and superior.

Please add to, contest, and generally build up our sense of this term in a comment to this post. In your comment, you might:

• Quote important passages or summarize key ideas from Said
• Quote important passages or summarize key ideas from the “Orientalism” entry in New Keywords, by Nicholas Dirks
• Point out differences between Said and New Keywords
• Refer us to other entries in New Keywords that complement the entry for “Orientalism”
• Link us up to definitions or discussions on the web that illuminate ideas, words or names used by Said in Orientalism or Dirks in New Keywords
• Discuss how “Orientalism” complicates our picture of culture—or, specifically, how it interferes with the “art-culture system” in Clifford

Are You an Author?

“Author” is one of those terms that, unfortunately, New Keywords does not describe. (The book is—as its editors freely admit—a necessarily selective and incomplete “collection” of terms.) If there were to be an entry for this term, however, it would have to address Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay “The Death of the Author.” (The essay was later included in his 1977 book Image-Music-Text. Here are some notes on it). This phrase should remind you of Mitchell’s “art” entry in New Keywords; remember how he talks about the many twentieth-century announcements of the “death” of various art forms? Barthes declares that the idealized author is “dead” because “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” This conception of “text” should be familiar to you too, by now.

What Barthes means by an “author” is mostly a nineteenth-century figure, although he does not really note this historical condition. (Nor does he bother to seek out examples of authorship to support his argument beyond those who are iconic in France.) Another key ingredient of the term “author” would be Michel Foucault’s 1970 essay “What Is an Author?” (Here is an excerpt from the essay, and here is a summary.) Foucault, in describing his notion of the “author-function,” fills in some of the historical gaps in Barthes’ essay, by looking at authorship beginning in the Middle Ages as a way of controlling ideas and defining intellectual property. In other words, it was only when “a system of ownership and strict copyright rules were established (toward the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century) that the transgressive properties always intrinsic to the act of writing became the forceful imperative of literature. It is as if the author, at the moment he was accepted into the social order of property which governs our culture, was compensating for his new status by reviving the older bipolar field of discourse in a systematic practice of transgression and by restoring the danger of writing which, on another side, had been conferred the benefits of property.” Huh? I think what he’s saying here is that governing forces have always kept tabs on who is writing in order to regulate what is written; it was only when this regulation eventually gave authors ownership of their work (thus enabling authorship as a profession) that authors took on a heroic cultural role. Here you might think of the distinction, as marked perhaps in the aisles of the mega-bookstore, between capital-L “Literature,” where you find “great books,” and plain old “literature,” as it would appear in the phrase “travel literature” or “scientific literature,” i.e., a body of writing. Like the difference between “art” and “Art,” this distinction implies cultural status: great Authors write great Literature.

It would also be important that our prospective entry for the term “author” address the contemporary textual phenomena of email, text messaging, and of course the web, with many kinds of sites, including social networking sites, discussion groups, virtual reality games and blogs like this one, that are “authored” by all kinds of folks. These forms of authorship seem to confirm Barthes’ idea that a text is nothing but “a tissue of quotations from innumerable centres of culture”—think of the abbreviations used in text messages, which practically constitute a new dialect; the many cultural references we make in our emails (“Did you see last night’s episode of Battlestar Galactica???”); and of course the quotations from and links to other sources that comprise the web.

Please comment on this post to indicate you have successfully signed on as a co-author of this blog. In your comment, why don’t you name one of your favorite Authors? Or, if you want to resist validating that particular form of authorship, link us up to a virtual author you admire?

"Paris, Capital of the 19th Century"

Some annotated online versions of Walter Benjamin's essay or notes on the essay:

From Professor Andrew Feenberg’s homepage (Simon Fraser University):
http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/benjaminparis.pdf

From Perspecta, Vol. 12. (1969), 163-172.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0079-0958%281969%2912%3C163%3APCOTNC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-B

From Professor Chuck Tryon’s website (Georgia Tech University):
http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~ctryon/fwp/benjaminparis.htm

Some sites devoted to the Arcades project and/or the material culture of Paris in the nineteenth century:

Giles Peaker, “Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk: Reading in the Ruins,” from Other Voices 1.1: http://www.othervoices.org/gpeaker/Passagenwerk.php

Brown University Center for Digital Initiatives, “Paris, Capital of the 19th Century”:
http://dl.lib.brown.edu/paris/

My own notes on the first half of the essay, with references, terms and translations I looked up. Weblinks to sources are included. Notes in purple are my own thoughts as I worked through the text. These notes demonstrate a very thorough engagement with the essay; your own reading practices might vary depending on what you need to get out of it.

Page 146
epigraph 1: from a Vietnamese poem.
Does Benjamin like it because it is pretty or because it alludes to “great ladies” and “small ladies,” i.e., class on parade?

epigraph 2:
The magic columns of these palaces
Show to the amateur on all sides
In the objects their porticos display
That industry is the rival of the arts.

Fourier: A Utopian Socialist who hated industrialization. http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/lecture21a.html
1772-1837. “French social theorist who advocated a reconstruction of society based on communal associations of producers known as phalanges (phalanxes). His system came to be known as Fourierism.”
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9035043/Charles-Fourier
What does this have to do with the Arcades? Fourier presumably would have disliked them as monuments to industrial capitalism.

Page 147
“Empire is the style of revolutionary heroism for which the state is an end in itself.”
Intriguing, provocative to suggest that "empire" is a "style" and that it is not driven by high aims.
architectonic: 1. “relating to, or characteristic of architecture, design and construction. 2. relating to the scientific systematisation of the totality of knowledge.” http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/architectonic

Page 148
Epigraph: “Each epoch dreams the one to follow.”
Much of this page I don’t understand—leave it for now.

Page 149
Travail (1901) and Therese Raquin (1867):
Novels by French writer, intellectual and political activist Emile Zola, who was famous for his article “J’Accuse” (1898) in which he accused the French army of injustice and anti-Semitism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Zola

Daguerre: Inventor of photography (1839). Others had experimented with recording images seen through a lens, but he was the first to devise a method (and have it patented) that allowed such images to last. Before inventing the daguerreotype, he was a “Romantic painter and printmaker most famous until then as the proprietor of the Diorama, a popular Parisian spectacle featuring theatrical painting and lighting effects.” http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/dagu/hd_dagu.htm

panorama: A view, but here the “painting in the panoramas” reference suggests that Benjamin is specifically referring to painting. “Panoramic paintings are massive artworks that reveal a wide, all-encompassing view of a particular subject, often a landscape, military battle, or historical event. They became especially popular in the 19th Century in Europe and the United States. A few have survived into the 21st Century and are on public display.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panoramic_painting
So, Daguerre was engaged in making visual spectacles, the diorama and the photograph, that are a lot like the panoramic paintings.

epigraph: “Sun, look out for yourself!”
This alludes to the technology of photography, in which sunlight (or an artificial light source) is used to illuminate and "transcribe" the scene to be photographed.

David: (1748-1825). “French painter, one of the central figures of Neoclassicism” http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/david/. Neoclassicism is “A French art style and movement that originated as a reaction to the Baroque in the mid-eighteenth century, and continued into the middle of the nineteenth century. It sought to revive the ideals of ancient Greek and Roman art. Neoclassic artists used classical forms to express their ideas about courage, sacrifice, and love of country.” http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/n/neoclassicism.html
From the examples given, it seems that neo-classical paintings are very “realistic,” clear and detailed—very suitable for a visual spectacle like a panorama, which is meant to create the illusion of a real landscape.

Page 150
“Daguerre is a pupil of the panorama painter Prevost, whose establishment is situated in the Passage des Panoramas.”
Aha! Another link between photography and panoramic painting.

Page 151
Grandville: French cariacaturist and political cartoonist. http://www.search.eb.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/eb/article-9037712

Page 152
Saint-Simonists: “(n.) A system of socialism in which the state owns all the property and the laborer is entitled to share according to the quality and amount of his work, founded by Saint Simon (1760-1825).” http://www.drwords.com/define/Saint-Simonism

“The world exhibitions glorify the exchange value of commodities. They create a framework in which commodities’ intrinsic value is eclipsed. They open up a phantasmagoria that people enter to be amused. The entertainment industry facilitates this by elevating people to the level of commodities… The enthronement of merchandise, with the aura of amusement surrounding it, is the secret theme of Grandville’s art.”

Okay, I’m starting to see the links now between world exhibitions, where commodities are displayed as if in a theme park, and the other ideas about visual spectacles, panoramas, photographs, and the Arcades, which are shopping galleries. The Arcades are important as a key site where this whole “phantasmagoria” of commodities occurs, and thus they connect to other sites (like the world exhibitions) and media of display (like photographs, panoramas, dioramas, and Grandville’s cartoons). In places like the Arcades, PEOPLE are on display, as much as PRODUCTS.

READING: A WEB MODEL

The reading for this course will often consist of critical and sometimes theoretical texts. While the number of pages will be substantial, the main challenge will come from the content: these texts will often be difficult. I will provide you with resources to assist you, and our class time will usually be spent in discussing and digesting the reading. However, you must be prepared to work hard at this reading—and to become comfortable with a certain amount of intellectual discomfort. In other words, don't expect to “get it” immediately, or completely! Nor should you expect it to become transparent; there will often be some element of a reading that remains obscure.

To address these challenges, we will adopt a “web model” of reading. That means that I will often assign several texts for you to read together. For example, I’ll assign short articles in New Keywords to go along with longer essays; at other times I will ask you to look up terms on online sources such as, yes, good old Wikipedia—or even Google—as well as more academically acceptable reference sources, online exhibits or articles. Texts that are not encyclopedic or referential in nature may also illuminate other texts in ways we should query. As the quarter progresses, I will ask you to find texts to situate next to assigned texts. We will not necessarily regard any of these texts as definitive. Instead, our aim is to put texts into conversation with each other, both to enrich our understanding of each one, but also to reveal the fissures that exist within and between them.

The idea of the “web” will also figure in the course in other ways. Soon, I’ll ask you to post to this blog. Some of your assignments will also take the form of a “web,” albeit in hard copy. Most importantly, “web reading” serves not only as a practice, but also as a kind of model for what it means to read culture.

Please note that the course blog can not substitute for class; it will not include assignment guidelines and all course materials. The blog is intended to supplement and reflect what we do together in class, and to serve as a compilation of references and resources.