On Self-reflexivity

         We have been talking about self-reflexivity a lot in the seminar. We say that self-reflexivity is important if not central to good scholarship. There are various ways that it can manifest. One of them is identification with a label (oriental, post-colonial etc.). In the Introduction to Orientalism Said refers to himself as “the oriental subject”.This reaffirms a category that through his work Said tries to complicate. Aijaz Ahmed puts it eloquently, “One is transfixed by the very voice that one debunks”. Why would this be a problem?

         This is problematic on multiple levels. Said’s identification as an oriental subject creates a homogeneous group of oriental subjects (we are not told the different groupings within). For instance the Palestinian intellectual who is trained in and becomes a part of the western intellectual tradition would also be a part of it. And a Bedouin would also possibly be a part of it. Geographical differences aside (India, Middle East etc.) but the orient within the same spatial imagination would include different oriental subjects that the project doesn’t take into account. This homogeneous oriental subject is further re-affirmed by the archive that is accessed. Said’s archive is expansive to the point that it includes people ranging from Voltaire to Henry Kissinger. This expansive archive makes Said’s project strong because it includes everything cultural within the fold of the “discursive system” called orientalism. Moreover, it is also problematic because in shedding light on the various representations of oriental subjects one is bound to ask about the historicity and contexts of these representations. In the words of Gramsci (who Said invokes very early on in his writing) are the traces and inventory of these representations similar for every historical subject? It is integral to understand that self-reflexivity is deeply tied to self-imagination.

         Said admires Auerbach. I remember reading one of Said’s essays on Auerbach published many years before Orientalism. In Reflections on Exile and Orientalism too, Said cites the same story that the essay contained. Auerbach wrote Mimesis in Turkey where he arrived after he fled Germany. He wrote that book without having access to any material that he referenced. He wrote from memory.     Said affiliates with Auerbach. He sees his writings as being born out of exile too. Yet in Orientalism he doesn’t talk about the Orient/ oriental subjects which one would assume he would associate with as an “oriental subject” (like Auerbach wrote of the Western cannon--a tradition that he thought he belonged to even if it was threatened by fascism). What is this self-reflexivity? Is it any good? Does it aid scholarship or make us blind when we imagine ourselves as subjects in particular ways? I don’t know what its value is, but I do know self-reflexivity is almost inescapable. I remember Orhan Pamuk wrote somewhere that he writes because he hopes to understand why he is “so very, very angry at everyone”. That to my mind is also self-reflexivity. Perhaps it’s about making sense of one’s anger at the world (the Occidental world in Said's case).