#binary construction

In “Orientalism”, Edward Said identifies and discusses the West’s artificial construction of its imagined “Other”, the “Orient”, as a binary index of essentialised difference which constructs the West as superior and powerful in contrast to the Orient’s generalised “lack”. This “lack” is constituted by means of negative attributes assigned to the Orient: it is said to be irrational, passive, feminised, untamed, timeless, disordered and essentially unknowable. The West, by inference, is the antithesis of all of these traits: rational, active, authoritative, powerful, civilised, progressive, ordered and comprehensible.

Said observes that the invention of this discourse by the West has produced a body of knowledge on the “Oriental Other” that communicates far more about the Western imperial societies that produced it than it does about supposed “Oriental” culture. This imperial “gaze” also provides auto-justification for the multifaceted project of colonial inquest, appropriation, education and civilisation.

This point is important in understanding the necessary presence of an implied concept of the self whenever one represents or constructs difference, for example, a cultural Other. The action of taking a photograph renders the subject of that photograph an Other. As with any other means of recording, as the recordist one necessarily occupies a position of power in relation to that which you are representing. A photograph has the authority to concretise this into binary difference, rendering the subject a concretised and mysterious object, but simultaneously one within the bounds of rational apprehension, collection, appraisal and control.