Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism

Professor Bryan S Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134839407
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

It is often thought that the development of capitalism and the modernization of culture have brought about a profound decline of religious belief and commitment. The history of Christianity in the last two decades appears to be a good illustration of this general process of secularization with the undermining of belief and commitment as Western cultures became industrial and urban. However, in the twentieth century we have seen that Islam continues to be a dominant force in politics and culture not only in the Orient but in Western society. In this challenging study of contemporary social theory, Bryan Turner examines the recent debate about orientalism in relation to postmodernism and the process of globalization. He provides a profound critique of many of the leading fissures in classical orientalism. His book also considers the impact of the notion of the world in sociological theory. These cultural changes and social debates also reflect important change in the status and position of intellecuals in modern culture who are threatened, not only by the levelling of mass culture, but also by the new opportunities posed by postmodernism. He takes a critical view of the role of sociology in these developments and raises important questions about the global role of English intellectuals as a social stratum. Bryan Turner's ability to combine these discussions about religion, politics, culture and intellectuals represents a remarkable integration of cultural analysis in cultural studies.

Part 1

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Orientalism

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Chapter 1

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Orientalism, postmodernism and religion

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The problem of social and cultural diversity has been a classic issue in the humanities and the social sciences throughout the period we refer to as the modern age. With the rise of the world economy and cultural globalization, this question of cultural difference has become even more acute in contemporary politics. In the 1970s academics were interested in a specific feature of this inter-cultural problem, namely how Western societies have understood and interpreted oriental societies through the period of imperial expansion. The debate about orientalism (Said 1978a) gave rise to a new approach to decolonization and the writing of history, especially the writing of Indian history. These ‘subaltern studies’ (Guha 1981) marked the arrival of a new confidence and radicalism among third-world academics in the struggle for decolonization at both the cultural and political levels. This critical tradition came to be known eventually as ‘cultural discourse studies’ (Bhabha 1983). It became clear in the 1980s that there were strong intellectual connections between the orientalist debate, subaltern studies and feminism which were all struggles for an authentic voice. Orientalism and colonial discourse studies are concerned to explore the problems of subjectivity and authenticity among social groups or cultures which are excluded from power. I explore some aspects of this debate in Chapter 13. In the 1990s there is equally strong evidence to suggest a connection between anti-orientalism and postmodernism as alternatives to modernist rationalism. This collection of essays examines these interconnections and attempts to understand the role of intellectuals in the modern world.

I have an ambiguous relationship to orientalism in the sense that in the year that Edward Said published Orientalism (1978), I also brought out a modest volume called Marx and the End of Orientalism (Turner 1978a); Edward Said's book has deservedly become famous while my study remains marginal. My contribution to these new directions was to consider a limited range of problems in the social sciences. Said has been working on a larger canvas. My ambiguity about orientalism is also that I have never done fundamental research in the area of Islamic and Arabic cultures. My own writings were originally about Max Weber and, because very few sociologists were writing about Islam, my work was of some interest to sociologists in the late 1970s. It is only with the recent development of postmodern theory that sociologists in general have become interested in Islam and orientalism. Otherness has become the issue.

Although Said's writings have received much specific attention, I want to talk about the long-term implications of his work. While the book is now obviously outdated, many of the problems raised by Said continue to exercise the minds, not only of Arabic researchers and Islamists, but of feminists and scholars working on alternative philosophies and methodologies. In the 1970s Said was enormously intellectually challenging; within the Anglo-Saxon world, he introduced many of us to the wonderful scholarship of Michel Foucault, whose work on historical discourses continues to influence research in the humanities and social sciences. At the time, Said presented us with a very profound critique of liberalism by showing how power and knowledge are inevitably combined and how power relations produced through discourse a range of analytical objects which continue to impact on scholarship in a way which is largely unanticipated and unobserved. In his argument with liberalism Said also provided us with a critique of what was a conventional view in American social science and epistemology, namely the alleged separation of facts and values and the neutrality of science. Said's work was significant in showing how discourses, values and patterns of knowledge actually constructed the ‘facts’ which scholars were attempting to study, apparently independently. Over the years this classical approach to orientalism has largely shaped what people understand by the notion of ‘Otherness’, and the problem of the ‘Other’ in human cultures has been taken up first of all by feminism, by black studies and more recently by postmodernism. An exciting and important challenge of Said's work was what one may call ‘the methodology of the text’, that is, Said was able to apply the more advanced aspects of American literary studies to the analysis of history and social sciences; and through what is popularly called deconstructionism, Said was able to provide new directions for the analysis of historical and social phenomena. Certainly Said's approach was very attractive at the time because he provided a model of what we might call the intellectual hero. Said was not simply someone who sat on the margins of literary studies and analytical research, he was actually seen to be at the forefront of Palestinian politics and Middle Eastern politics.

My own work in the 1970s was much more influenced by the work of Marxists like Louis Althusser and, in the United Kingdom, radical groups in Middle Eastern studies turned to theory, being influenced specifically by Marxist sociologists such as Nicos Poulantzas. The attraction of Marxism was to provide a critique of many of the taken-for-granted assumptions of a liberal, individualistic, social science. At the time there was much debate about the so-called ‘Asiatic conditions’ of despotism and more specifically about the Asiatic mode of production which exercised much of our time in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Both Said and Althusser offered an alternative challenge to the legacy of positivistic sociology which in North America was associated with a value-free individualistic approach. In so far as my own work had any critical merit, it was really to show that Marx also shared much of this Western legacy of perceiving the Orient as a unified system, one characterized by stationariness, lack of social change, the absence of modernization, the absence of a middle-class bourgeois culture, and the absence of a civil society. From this critical stance, one could see how both Marx and Weber fitted into the legacy of Western analysis of the East. The Marxist notion of the Asiatic mode of production and Weber's concept of patrimonialism shared common assumptions. This feature of the orientalist legacy in the social sciences is investigated in Chapters 3 and 7.

I want to turn now to some problems with this critical anti-orientalism that came from writers like Said. There are some standard criticisms of Said's work which are well known. While Said's Orientalist critique dawned upon younger scholars as a new approach, much of his work had already been done in a more mundane way by writers like V.G.Kiernan (1972) in Lords of Human Kind. For example, Said was a significant critic of French orientalism, but he was particularly weak in terms of German and British orientalism. These questions are examined in Chapters 4 and 5. In retrospect, there were in fact many forms of orientalism and it was inadequate to lump so many diverse traditions into a single orientalist tradition. Many of these questions are raised in a recent book by Lisa Lowe on Critical Terrains (1991) in which she examines French and British orientalism and illustrates many aspects of this argument. I would say, however, that the problem of ‘other cultures’ has always been a central problem of anthropology from Herodotus onwards. Modern anthropology had its origins in seventeenth-century debates about people from newly acquired colonies. Otherness raised a deep theological problem about the ‘Great Chain of Being’, namely how did these strange cultures fit into God's plan? The idea of outsiders and insiders is actually a standard form of all anthropological problematics, particularly the anthropological tradition that embraces hermeneutics and textuality. This has become increasingly clear in the work of postmodernists like G. Vattimo who have been analysing the end of modernity and the end of history with reference to a radical hermeneutic anthropology. With Vattimo, I think that textual or hermeneutic radicalism is close to an antiorientalist critique because it is primarily concerned to grasp the nuances and ambiguities of local practices and beliefs. Much of the central work of classical anthropology was concerned with this problem of, to put it rather naively, understanding other cultures.

The other political condition that has changed very profoundly since the 1970s of course is that Said's Orientalism appeared when communism was still a viable political option and for radical social scientists Marxism was still available as a vibrant and possible tradition in the universities. The secular collapse of organised communism actually makes the intellectual credibility of Marxism as a general theory of society very doubtful; many Marxist writers in the West would of course like to argue that nothing significant has changed, but such a position is ultimately untenable. The early critique of orientalism was associated with a process of decolonization which assumed that Marxism provided an alternative to capitalism in terms of theory and politics. Perhaps Islam, in the argument of Ernest Gellner, is the only global, credible political system. We are writing in a post-communist world and that fact ought to have profound implications for how we see the role of Islam or feminism or humanism or any other social movement as a plausible mode of thinking or living. Post-communism as an intellectual and political condition explains much of the current interest in Islam and postmodernism.

Another criticism of the legacy of Said relates to the problem of Michel Foucault and politics. Here again, this is rather a large issue and I am only going to touch on the edges of this question. It is a controversial issue, but it is very difficult to derive a coherent political position from the work of Foucault. One is aware of the fact that Foucault's work does lend itself, for example, to critical criminology. His writing on Soviet psychiatry and his analysis of French penal traditions provide a way of moving from his analytical working to a political position, but generally it has been rather difficult to derive systematic radical politics from Foucault's critical analysis. Foucault's critique of dominant paradigms of knowledge in conventional systems suggests at best a form of romantic anarchism. The same issue arises for Said because his own politics relating to Palestine cannot be derived easily from the epistemological position of his book Orientalism. That is, there is an hiatus between the philosophy and the practice which has proved very difficult to fill. If you read Said's book Covering Islam (1978b) you will see that there he adopts what you might call a realist epistemology; that is, that he believes that the problem of covering Islam journalistically is simply that journalists are badly trained. They pop in and out of countries for a few days, talk to a few taxi drivers and then write a lead article about Arabic politics. Said's criticisms here are perfectly reasonable and valid, but they are not related analytically or philosophically to his own work or to orientalism—one could write Covering Islam without having read a single word of Foucault or Derrida. Deconstruction as a technique merely identified the problems of representation without offering many solutions. This difficulty is very evident in attempts to develop alternative histories (O'Hanlon and Washbrook 1992).

Another criticism of Said's approach to history, which again, is problematic, is the concentration on textuality and textualism. An exclusive focus on ‘textual practices’ has negated the social dimension of language and meaning, and confused the materiality of social relations with an alleged materiality of the context. Textualism has resulted in a vicious solipsism in which there can be no distinction between fictional writing and social reality. Jean Baudrillard's claim that the Gulf War was merely a television event is a particularly notorious example of this focus.

A further problem in this area has been the rather difficult issue of fascism and deconstructionism. Said's intellectual foundations come from Foucault but behind Foucault's social philosophy is the work of Martin Heidegger, in particular the philosophical critique of metaphysics. It has been very difficult to disassociate Heidegger and deconstructionism from the legacy of fascism. Heidegger's work is essentially anti-modernist in my view, and his writings on technology show all the signs of a massive conservative reaction to democracy and modernization. However brilliant Heidegger's philosophy may be, there are some genuine political problems in this legacy, which has been further illustrated by the case of Paul de Man. There is guilt by association which is not easy to throw off

I have outlined these criticisms of Said simply as a collection of notes, primarily because they are well known. My main concern lies elsewhere. Another consequence of the debate about orientalism was an equally pernicious occidentalism, that is, a rejection of everything to do with the West and an implicit rejection of the legacy of modernization. This antimodernist dimension of critical theory may explain some of the attraction of Heidegger's cultural elitism; some aspects of this issue are examined in Chapter 9. Now some aspects of this rejection of the West obviously are justifiable in connection with the indigenization of knowledge which has occupied much anthropological debate about the growth and fostering of the social sciences in third-world society. More pertinent to this discussion is the so-called problem of the Islamization of knowledge. One peculiar consequence of the legacy of Foucault and Said has been a defence of a fundamentalist reading of Islamic knowledge and tradition which involve an opposition to secularism and the disenchantment of modernization as conceptualized in Max Weber's Sociology of Religion. This involves a claim about the authenticity of tradition over inherited, imported or alien knowledge. In sociology you see this argument in particular in the endless attempts to demonstrate that Ibn Khaldun was in fact the founding father of all social sciences against the claims of Marx, Weber and Durkheim. However interesting Ibn Khaldun may be, his work does not offer a very useful analysis of late, industrial urban civilizations. There is a debate about the epistemological imperialism of the West, and Said's recent (Said 1993) work on culture and imperialism lends support to this idea that a post-colonial period still involves cultural domination. One of the problems of the Islamization of knowledge is that there is difficulty in deciding whether the fundamentalist claims about this Islamization of knowledge are modernist or anti-modernist. This leads to a problem about whether one can embrace Western technology without Western values. Sociology suggests that you cannot have modernization, technology, urbanization and bureaucratization without the cultural baggage that goes with it and this baggage is essentially a post-Enlightenment system of thought. Now academic indigenization is obviously attractive, but can you have an indigenous methodology or an indigenous epistemology? One might agree with the idea that there are some facts which are peculiar to certain societies; for example, because there was not a history of feudalism in societies like Australia and New Zealand one cannot generalize from the works of Western sociologists working on European cases to the societies of the southern hemisphere where typically there was not a transition from feudal society to capitalism. These problems are further analysed in Chapters 2 and 3. Much of the work of Marx and Durkheim presupposed a feudal society and therefore much of the legacy of Western sociology is not applicable to Asian societies. If we adopted this argument in an analysis of Nepal or Saudi Arabia or Central Africa, the weight of the indigenization argument is quite profound. However, I am not convinced that you can have an indigenization of rationality or indigenization of methodology. This debate is primarily a debate about the authority of local versus global knowledge, and hence about the cultural authority of intellectuals as a universal category.

A similar argument applies to claims about so-called feminist methodology. Feminist methodology is just good sociology. The argument in feminist sociology is that you have to interact with your audience, you have to understand their knowledge and to utilize knowledge to bring about change and so forth. Feminist methodology is sensitive to the social and political needs of audiences and clients. Much of the argument about feminist methodology is really a repeat of symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology from the 1960s. One would have the same problem with the fundamentalist paradigm. It would not be possible to develop something called Islamic social science, for the same reason that you cannot have Christian social science or Jewish social science or any other type of ethnic social science. There is a basic logic and theory to the social sciences which cannot be subsumed under a particular ethnic or cultural or historical label. Furthermore, while the claim for Islamization of knowledge is influential, all cultures are undergoing a profound process of globalization. It is odd that in a period of strong localistic and regional tendencies, we live in a world in which the globalization of civilization is one of the profound facts of modern life. I return to this argument in Chapter 7.

Globalization is an extension of the emergence of world economic systems, but sociologists are more concerned with cultural globalization. There is a profound sense of globalism brought about by tourism, by world sport, world news, McDonaldization, AIDS, human rights and so on. Globalization and localization go together. Wherever you have the emergence of global consciousness, there will be a reaction which promotes an anti-global movement. Globalization is an important idea, but we have to be aware of the fact that the world religions have always claimed to be global and that part of the problem of trying to understand Islam and the Christian legacy is how to understand the concept of ‘the world’ in traditional cultures and how that relates to the concept of globalization in modern society. Here again the processes of globalization raise very interesting and important questions about the role of intellectuals as carriers of globalism. This question of the world religions is examined in Chapter 8. One criticism of globalization is that it is simply Westernization. However, there are profound cultural movements coming out of Japan and other strong economies in the Asian region which are shaping the globe to such an extent that one could equally talk about the orientalization of modern cultures. What has globalization got to do with the Islamization of knowledge and the legacy of Said? It is simply the case that globalization makes it very difficult to carry on talking about oriental and occidental cultures as separate, autonomous or independent cultural regimes. The possibility of moving from an out-of-date orientalism to global sociology is explored in Chapter 7.

It is equally important to connect globalization with the debate about postmodernity. We do not need to enter into an endless discussion of what postmodernity means. Some of these debates about definitions are considered in Chapter 9. Briefly, postmodernity refers to the extension of the processes of commodification to everyday life and the impact of mass consumer cultures on cultural systems, blurring the distinction, for example, between high and low culture. Postmodernism means the use of simulation in cultural production, and in stylistic terms it involves self-parody and irony. Now much of the postmodern debate has been concerned to assert the importance of difference and otherness, so there...