In the conventional, liberal perspective, there is the assumption
not only that power and knowledge are antithetical, but that valid knowledge requires
the suppression of power. Within the liberal history of ideas, the emergence of
science out of ideology and common-sense beliefs is conjoined with the growth
of individual freedom and with the decline of arbitrary political terror. This
view of the contradiction of reason and power has been recently challenged by
Michel Foucault, who argues that the growth of bureaucratic control over
populations after the eighteenth century required more systematic forms of
knowledge in the form of criminology, penology, psychiatry and medicine.
The exercise of power in society thus presupposes new forms of
scientific discourse through which
deviant and marginal groups are defined and controlled. Against
the liberal tradition, we are, through an analysis of the Western rationalist
tradition, forced to admit that ‘power and knowledge directly imply one
another, that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution
of a
field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and
constitute at the same time power relations’ (Foucault 1977:27).
The growth of scientific discourse does not, therefore, inaugurate
a period of individual freedoms, but rather forms the basis of more extensive systems
of institutionalized power through an alliance of the prison and penology, the
asylum and psychiatry, the hospital and clinical medicine, the school and
pedagogy. Discourse creates difference through classification, tabulation and
comparison and individuates persons for bureaucratic purposes. The categories
of ‘criminal’, ‘insane’, and ‘deviant’ are the manifestations of a scientific discourse
by which the normal and sane
exercise power along a systematic dividing of sameness and
difference. The exercise of power over subordinates cannot consequently be
reduced simply to a question of attitudes and motives on the part of
individuals, since power is embedded in the very language and institutions by
which we
describe, understand and control the world.
Valid comparisons between deviants and normal individuals, between
the sane and insane, between the sick and healthy, cannot be achieved by simply
reforming attitudes and motives, since these distinctions themselves presuppose
a discourse in which conceptual differences are expressions of power relations.
The analysis of knowledge/power in the work of Michel Foucault provides
the basis for Edward Said’s influential study of orientalism (1978) as a
discourse of difference in which the apparently neutral Occident/ Orient contrast
is an expression of power relationships. Orientalism is a discourse which represents
the exotic, erotic, strange Orient as a comprehensible, intelligible phenomenon
within a network of categories, tables and concepts by which the Orient is
simultaneously defined and controlled. To know is to subordinate. The
orientalist discourse was consequently a remarkably persistent framework of
analysis which, expressed through theology, literature, philosophy and
sociology, not only an imperial relationship but actually constituted a field
of political power. Orientalism created a typology of characters, organized
around the contrast between the rational Westerner and the lazy Oriental. The
task of orientalism was to reduce the endless complexity of the East into a
definite order of types, characters and constitutions. The chrestomathy,
representing the exotic Orient in a systematic table of accessible information,
was thus a typical cultural product of occidental dominance.
In Said’s analysis of orientalism, the crucial ‘fact’ about the
orientalist discourse was that we know and talk about Orientals, while they
neither there were apparently no equivalent discourses of occidentalism. The society
from which comparisons are to be made has a privileged possession of a set of
essential features—rationality, progress, democratic institutions, economic development—in
terms of which other societies are deficient and backward. These features
account for the particular character of Western society and explain the defects
of alternative social formations. As an accounting system, orientalism set out
to explain the progressive features of the Occident and the social
stationariness of the Orient (Turner 1974a).
One of the formative questions of classical sociology—why did
industrial capitalism first emerge in the West?—is consequently an essential
feature of an intellectual accounting system which hinges upon a basic
East/West contrast. Within the broad sweep of this occidental/oriental
contrast, Islam
has always represented a political and cultural problem for
Western accounting systems. Unlike Hinduism or Confucianism, Islam has major
religious ties with Judaism and Christianity; categorizing Islam as an ‘oriental
religion’ raises major difficulties for an orientalist discourse. While the
issue of prophetic uniqueness is a contentious one, there are strong arguments
to suggest that
Islam can, along with Judaism and Christianity, be regarded as a
variant of the general Abrahamic faith (Hodgson 1974). Furthermore, Islam has
been a major cultural force inside Europe and provided the dominant culture of many
Mediterranean societies. While Islam is not ambiguously oriental, Christianity
is not in any simple fashion an occidental religion.
Christianity as a Semitic, Abrahamic faith by origin could be
regarded as an ‘oriental religion’ and Islam, as an essential dimension of the
culture of Spain, Sicily and Eastern Europe, could be counted as occidental.
The problem of defining Islam has always possessed a certain urgency for the discourse
of orientalism; thus in Christian circles it was necessary to categorize Islam
as either parasitic upon Christian culture or a sectarian offshoot of the
Christian faith.
The point of Foucault’s analysis of discourse is to suggest that
the same rules governing the distribution of statements within a discourse may
be common to a wide variety of apparently separate disciplines (Foucault 1972).
The orientalist problematic is not peculiar to Christian theology, but is a
discourse which underlines economics, politics and sociology. If the basic
issue behind Christian theology was the uniqueness of the Christian revelation
with respect to Islam, the central question behind comparative sociology was
the uniqueness of the West in relation to the alleged stagnation of the East.
In an earlier publication I have suggested that sociology attempted to account
for the apparent absence of capitalism in Islamic societies by conceptualizing
Islam as a series of social and historical gaps (Turner 1978a).
Western sociology characteristically argued that Islamic society
lacked those autonomous institutions of bourgeois civil society which
ultimately broke the tenacious hold of feudalism over the Occident. According
to this view, Muslim society lacked independent cities, an autonomous bourgeois
class, rational bureaucracy, legal reliability, personal property and that
cluster of rights which embody bourgeois legal culture. Without these
institutional and cultural elements, there was nothing in Islamic civilisation
to challenge the dead hand of precapitalist tradition. The orientalist view of
Asiatic society can be encapsulated in the notion that the social structure of
the oriental world was characterized by the absence of a civil society, that
is, by the absence of a network of institutions mediating between the
individual and the state. It was this social absence which created the
conditions for oriental despotism in which the individual was permanently
exposed to the arbitrary rule of the despot. The absence of civil society
simultaneously explained the failure of capitalist economic development outside
Europe and the absence of political democracy.
