Second, did you read the article? He's talking about European intellectuals who went to the Middle East, didn't like what they saw because it didn't agree with their ideas of the Orient, buried themselves in libraries where they searched for more congenial texts, and reported on those texts as found reality.
Joanna
----- Original Message -----
On Feb 6, 2012, at 3:30 AM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
> I mentioned the article...because it described how Europeans
> preferred to construct the Orient out of texts rather than out of
> reality.
But, alas, our only immediate grasp of "reality" occurs in instantaneous purely subjective glimpses. Otherwise "reality" can be grasped only as mediated, only as constructed. And the mediating materials are "texts"--the internal "texts" we call memories and the social "texts" provided by the (usually) verbalized memories of everyone else. So construction of the "Orient" or anything else out of texts is inevitability, not preference. And criticism of Orientalism is criticism of texts. What else could it be? Better to say "Europeans preferred to construct the Orient out of tendentiously selected and edited texts rather than from a full spectrum of texts that would furnish an essentially accurate portrayal of Oriental reality."
Shane Mage
This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
kindling in measures and going out in measures."
>Herakleitos of Ephesos
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