one whose interest was defined by the notion of Sunna (or orthodoxy) in Islam, the other whose focus was on the quasi-Christlike, theosophical Sufi figure, Mansur al-Hallaj. 3/3
Not a bot. Most of my posts are from a book I am reading. This year it's Edward Said's 'Orientalism'.
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one whose interest was defined by the notion of Sunna (or orthodoxy) in Islam, the other whose focus was on the quasi-Christlike, theosophical Sufi figure, Mansur al-Hallaj. 3/3
It is no accident, then, that the two major scholarly careers of this period, one British, one French, were H. A. R. Gibb's and Louis Massignon’s, 2/3
British Oriental expertise fashioned itself around consensus and orthodoxy and sovereign authority; French Oriental expertise between the wars concerned itself with heterodoxy, spiritual ties, eccentrics. 1/3
The British vision, exemplified by Lawrence, is of the mainstream Orient, of peoples, political organizations, and movements guided and held in check by the White Man's expert tutelage; the Orient is "our" Orient, "our" people, "our" dominions. 2/2
Barrès sees things, not in terms of waves, battles, spiritual adventures, but in terms of the cultivation of intellectual imperialism, as ineradicable as it is subtle. 1/2
"They call them 'groceries!'"
You had me at 'Trump dies' WAIT
I just looked him up last night after seeing him on an episode of 'Murder, She Wrote' on the Hallmark Mystery channel (I know, I know)
Yet the difference between French and British expertise remains: the former manages an actual conjunction of peoples and territory, whereas the latter deals with a realm of spiritual possibility. 3/3
For Barrès, however, there is an additional political dimension to his journey: he seeks proof, and conclusive evidence, for a constructive French role in the East. 2/3
Like so many works before it, the 𝘌𝘯𝘲𝘶𝘦̂𝘵𝘦 is a work of recapitulation whose author not only searches out sources and origins of Western culture in the Orient but also redoes Nerval, Flaubert, and Lamartine in their voyages to the Orient. 1/3
So far from being a mere man lost in the great rush of confusing events, Lawrence equates himself fully with the struggle of the new Asia to be born. 3/3
And when, for whatever reason, the movement fails (it is taken over by others, its aims are betrayed, its dream of independence invalidated), it is 𝘓𝘢𝘸𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦'𝘴 disappointment that counts. 2/3
In any event, what matters to Lawrence is that as a white expert, the legatee of years of academic and popular wisdom about the Orient, he is able to subordinate his style of being to theirs, thereafter to assume the role of Oriental prophet giving shape to a movement in "the new Asia.” 1/3
One is a sly reference to the noted French director
Nice try, self-driving car. And self-writing, from the looks of it.
Like Conrad's Kurtz, Lawrence has cut himself loose from the earth so as to become identified with a new reality in order—he says later—that he might be responsible for "hustling into form ... the new Asia which time was inexorably bringing upon us.” 2/2
"Could," "would," and "if" are Lawrence's way inserting himself in the field, as it were. Thus the possibility is prepared for the last sentence, in which as manipulator of the Arabs Lawrence puts himself at their head. 1/2
The Jew, the worshipper of Adonis, the Damascene lecher, are signs not so much of humanity, let us say, as of a semiotic field called Semitic and built into coherence by the Semitic branch of Orientalism. 3/3
and that is powerful enough to light up both the gross and the refined topographies within its range. 2/3
Lawrence is backed in such statements by a respectable tradition stretching like a lighthouse beam through the whole nineteenth century; at its light-emanating center, of course, is "the Orient,” 1/3
which is to say that if the collective academic endeavor called Orientalism was a bureaucratic institution based on a certain conservative vision of the Orient, then the servants of such a vision in the Orient were imperial agents like T. E. Lawrence. 2/2
When as a result of World War I the Orient was made to enter history, it was the Orientalist-as-agent who did the work. Hannah Arendt has made the brilliant observation that the counterpart of the bureaucracy is the imperial agent,” 1/2
Narrative, in short, introduces an opposing point of view, perspective, consciousness to the unitary web of vision; it violates the serene Apollonian fictions asserted by vision. 4/4
above all, it asserts that the domination of reality by vision is no more than a will to power, a will to truth and interpretation, and not an objective condition of history. 3/4
Narrative asserts the power of men to be born, develop, and die, the tendency of institutions and actualities to change, the likelihood that modernity and contemporaneity will finally overtake "classical" civilizations; 2/4
Moreover, narrative is the specific form taken by written history to counter the permanence of vision. Lane sensed the dangers of narrative when he refused to give linear shape to himself and to his information, preferring instead the monumental form of encyclopedic or lexicographical vision. 1/4
not as narrative, but as all complexity, problematics, betrayed hope—with the White Orientalist author as its prophetic, articulate definition. 3/3
the ambiguities, the half-imagined, tragicomic results of this new, revived Orient become the subject of expert writing, a new form of Orientalist discourse that presents a vision of the contemporary Orient, 2/3
This is Lawrence's own synopsis of chapter 1 of 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘗𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘢𝘳𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘞𝘪𝘴𝘥𝘰𝘮. The "knowledge" of "some Englishmen" authors a movement in the Orient whose "affairs" create a mixed progeny; 1/3
Yet none the less the rebellion of the Sherif of Mecca came to most as a surprise, and found the Allies unready. It aroused mixed feelings and made strong friends and enemies, amid whose clashing jealousies its affairs began to miscarry.” 3/3
Their knowledge of the nature and power and country of the Arabic-speaking peoples made them think that the issue of such a rebellion would be happy: and indicated its character and method. So they allowed it to begin, having obtained formal assurances of help for it from the British Government. 2/3
“Some Englishmen, of whom Kitchener was chief, believed that a rebellion of Arabs against Turks would enable England, while fighting Germany, simultaneously to defeat her ally Turkey. 1/3
Their views refined and gave a personal twist to the academic style of modern Orientalism, with its repertoire of grand generalizations, tendentious "science" from which there was no appeal, reductive formulae. 2/2
"The sun made me an Arab," Doughty wrote in 𝘈𝘳𝘢𝘣𝘪𝘢 𝘋𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘢, "but never warped me to Orientalism." Yet in the final analysis they all (except Blunt) expressed the traditional Western hostility to and fear of the Orient. 1/2
Absolutely goddamned right
The crucial point is that everything one can know or learn about "Semites" and "Orientals" receives immediate corroboration, not merely in the archives, but directly on the ground. 2/2
"We" are this, "they" are that. Which Arab, which Islam, when, how, according to what tests: these appear to be distinctions irrelevant to Smith's scrutiny of and experience in the Hejaz. 1/2
And this, Smith says, despite the fact that "our Mohammedan sources draw a veil, as far as they can, over all details of the old heathenism.’' 3/3
If this picture succeeds in revealing the antecedent, and still influential, roots of monotheism in totemism or animal worship, then the scholar has been successful. 2/3
The nominal barriers presented to the world by Islam or Judaism are swept aside; Smith uses Semitic philology, mythology, and Orientalist scholarship "to construct... a hypothetical picture of the development of the social systems, consistent with all the Arabian facts." 1/3
Opening shot of Slymenstra in a fifties kitchen wearing a retro polka-dot dress
Every modern, native instance of behavior became an effusion to be sent back to the original terminal, which was strengthened in the process. This kind of "dispatching" was precisely the 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘤𝘪𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘦 of Orientalism. 2/2
The tendency of the former was always towards greater variety, yet this variety was always being restrained, compressed downwards and backwards to the 𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 terminal of the generality. 1/2
it forced vision away from common, as well as plural, human realities like joy, suffering, political organization, forcing attention instead in the downward and backward direction of immutable origins. 3/3
it asserted that there was no escape from origins and the types these origins enabled; it set the real boundaries between human beings, on which races, nations, and civilizations were constructed; 2/3
The point to be emphasized is that this truth about the distinctive differences between races, civilizations, and languages was (or pretended to be) radical and ineradicable. It went to the bottom of things, 1/3
It’s way more than personal electoral choices at this point. See you when you get here.
This is a hasty and bad take, friend. There is a substantial percentage of resistance citizens who reject this guy. Kirk is the three-of-diamonds in the deck of Trumper dead-enders
Wrigley opened in 1914; you are correct that the 14 is oddly over-emphasized. I was worried there was an 88 lurking somewhere on there
Buddhism, or Zoroastrianism they felt themselves, as George Eliot's Dr. Casaubon confesses, to be acting "like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes.” 3/3
From this set, which was not available to the native for discovery or introspection, there was no subsequent escape. The antiquarian bias of Orientalists was supported by these empiricist ideas. In all their studies of "classical" Islam, 2/3
Now this attempt would have been impossible had it not also been believed—in classical empiricist terms—that mind and body were interdependent realities, both determined originally by a given set of geographical, biological, and quasi-historical conditions. 1/3
Coelacanth we all get along?
For another, the coincidence was a fact uniquely the result of method, tradition, and politics all working together. 3/3
For one, it could only have been made from the outside by virtue of a vocabulary and epistemological instruments designed both to get to the heart of things and to avoid the distractions of accident, circumstance, or experience. 2/3
The primitiveness of such a state exists simultaneously on at least two levels: one, 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, which is reductive; and two (according to Lawrence and Bell), 𝘪𝘯 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺. This absolute coincidence was itself no simple coincidence. 1/3
The voice of K2SO! I was surprised when it wasn’t Bill Nighy
Muskellunge
in both cases what Lawrence fastens on is the Arab as if seen from the cleansing perspective of one not an Arab, and one for whom such unselfconscious primitive simplicity as the Arab possesses is something defined by the observer, in this case the White Man. 3/3
What appealed to Lawrence's imagination was the clarity of the Arab, both as an image and as a supposed philosophy (or attitude) towards life: 2/3
In such statements as these, we note immediately that "the Arab" or "Arabs" have an aura of apartness, definiteness, and collective self-consistency such as to wipe out any traces of individual Arabs with narratable life histories. 1/3
It should go without saying that the road design is crap. The bike lane at intersections like these just turns a bicyclist into a sitting duck. Just out of self-preservation, I will exit the bike lane and occupy the right lane in a way that gives way to right-turners. Asserting my rights!
"Freedom for ourselves and freedom for our sons/And, failing freedom, War." Behind the White Man's mask of amiable leadership there is always the express willingness to use force, to kill and be killed. 2/2
"Cleaning a land" is best done by White Men in delicate concert with each other, an allusion to the present dangers of European rivalry in the colonies; for failing in the attempt to coordinate policy, Kipling's White Men are quite prepared to go to war: 1/2
the import of the generalizations about Orient and Orientals, the sense of distinction preserved between Orient and Occident, the desirability of Occidental dominance over the Orient—all these are the same in both traditions. 2/2
Ultimately, perhaps, the difference one always feels between modern British and modem French Orientalism is a stylistic one; 1/2
In them Orientalism and an effective praxis for handling the Orient received their final European form, before the Empire disappeared and passed its legacy to other candidates for the role of dominant power. 4/4
a jealously preserved sense of personal mission in the Orient, cultivated eccentricity, a final disapproval of the Orient. For them all the Orient was their direct, peculiar experience of it. 3/4
because of their intimate and expert knowledge of the Orient and of Orientals. They formed a "band"—as Lawrence called it once—bound together by contradictory notions and personal similarities: great individuality, sympathy and intuitive identification with the Orient, 2/4
And neither was it by accident that men and women like Gertrude Bell, T. E. Lawrence, and St. John Philby, Oriental experts all, posted to the Orient as agents of empire, friends of the Orient, formulators of policy alternatives 1/4
There, laid out on an operating table for surgery, was the Sick Man of Europe, revealed in all his weakness, characteristics, and topographical outline. 2/2
But at no time did the convergence between latent Orientalist doctrine and manifest Orientalist experience occur more dramatically than when, as a result of World War I, Asiatic Turkey was being surveyed by Britain and France for its dismemberment. 1/2
Seemed to me that all the huffin'n'puffin might eventually strengthen something for a lucky few. Eventually CPAP and the occasional antihistamine was the trick that brought back the sandman and the sheep.
Years ago I bought a didgeridoo for this very reason. Seemed reasonable? Something something 'circular breathing'
Mmmm, I really like me some towns, too.
In such a way Orientalism was able to survive revolutions, world wars, and the literal dismemberment of empires. 4/4
Orientalism staked its existence, not upon its openness, its receptivity to the Orient, but rather on its internal, repetitious consistency about its constitutive will-to-power over the Orient. 3/4
Transmitted from one generation to another, it was a part of the culture, as much a language about a part of reality as geometry or physics. 2/4
But like all enunciative capacities and the discourses they enable, latent Orientalism was profoundly conservative—dedicated, that is, to its self-preservation. 1/4
by which something called an "Oriental" could be named and talked about without danger of too much obscurity. 2/2
Thus when Balfour spoke about the Oriental to the House of Commons in 1910, he must surely have had in mind those enunciative capacities in the current and acceptably rational language of his time, 1/2
HOHO! Artisanal AI is so jolly
HELLO, HI
European science, scholarship, understanding, and administration—the credit for having made the Orient what it was now. And this had been the achievement—inadvertent or not is beside the point—of modern Orientalism. 2/2
The Orient to them was no sudden discovery, no mere historical accident, but an area to the east of Europe whose principal worth was uniformly defined in terms of Europe, more particularly in terms specifically claiming for Europe— 1/2
You had me at 'metal band'
and cultural, political, demographical, sociological, and historical—entity over whose destiny they believed themselves to have traditional entitlement. 3/3
What matters more immediately is the peculiar epistemological framework through which the Orient was seen, and out of which the Powers acted. For despite their differences, the British and the French saw the Orient as a geographical— 2/3
It would be out of place here to discuss the entire labyrinthine and deeply controversial history of the Near Orient in the early twentieth century, as its fate was being decided between the Powers, the native dynasties, the various nationalist parties and movements, the Zionists. 1/3
Yet only if the white races indulged their taste for voyaging—a mark of their intellectual supremacy—could colonial expansion occur. 4/4
The "power of expansion of the Western races," argued a leading geographer, La Roncière Le Noury, "its superior causes, its elements, its influences on human destinies, will be a beautiful study for future historians.” 3/4
The absence of substantial colonial holdings was blamed by military men for that combination of military and commercial weakness in the war with Prussia, to say nothing of long-standing and pronounced colonial inferiority compared with Britain. 2/4
When in the late 1870s, the Société académique indochinoise reformulated its goals, it found it important to "bring Indochina into the domain of Orientalism." Why? In order to turn Cochin China into a "French India.” 1/4
If you've got video evidence of a prominent leftist engaging in the kind of Gish-gallop that the Right uses so prolifically-- I'd love to see that
My Se7en Private 10aho
GPT '98
During the thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties the suffering populations of the Orient were limited to the Christian minorities in Syria. And there was no record of "l'Orient" appealing to France for its salvation. 3/3
The fiction of "populations souffrantes" had of course been used by Napoleon when he appealed to the Egyptians on their behalf against the Turks and for Islam. 2/3
Of such views as this Disraeli would doubtless have said, as he often did, that France had only "sentimental interests" in Syria (which is the "Orient" of which Girardin was writing). 1/3