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Essay for Intro2CompLit on east-west binary

I wrote this paper for my intro to comp lit class in october of 2023. It looks at the introduction chapter of Edward Said's Orientalism:

    Edward Said’s Orientalism is a discussion of and meditation on exactly that, Orientalism. The ‘Introduction’ chapter serves to define the term Orientalism as well as divulge the methods and ways of thinking Said employs to create such definition. The Introduction of Said’s Orientalism works through the East-West binary by complicating this paradox with another assumed binary: the real and the imagined. 

    Said understands Orientalism as “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’” (2). Historically Orientalism has been defined as an academic discipline concerned with Oriental art, literature, and culture. Said’s language - “a style of thought” - suggests that while Orientalism may be academic, it is equally if not predominantly a social and cultural framework pervasive in the West. Said grounds this with his use of the words ontological, referring to the inherent nature of being prescribed to a concept or entity, and epistemological, relating to the methods in which knowledge is acquired and validated. 

    The ontological distinction that Said speaks of refers to the construction of the Orient/East and the Occident/West as fundamentally different. Orientalism understands the Occident as rational, progressive, and superior. The style of thinking associates the Orient with exocticism, backwardness, and inferiority. Orientalist ontology posits Europe as the self and the Orient as the other. Existentialist theory supposes that one comes to understand themself only through their gaze upon the other. In positioning the East as the other, the West has been able to construct an identity for itself. Because European culture and frameworks see the Orient as primitive and weak, it understands itself as strong, modern, and just.

    Said explains that “because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action. This is not to say that Orientalism unilaterally determines what can be said about the Orient, but that it is the-whole network of interests inevitably brought to bear on (and therefore always involved) any occasion when that peculiar entity ‘the Orient’ is in question” (3). Whether it be colonialist or imperialist, Europe has historically had an interest in the Orient. The specific European interests always necessitated the show of Western power. Thus the easiest way to create such power was to position the Orient as weak and foolish. Said does not want to paint a picture that ignores the voice and agency of the East but rather illuminate the ways in which the self-determination of the Orient is ignored or forbidden by the colonialist/imperialist Western incentives that prop up Orientalism.

    The ontological notion of the Occident as the rational self lends to the epistemological distinctions within Orientalism previously discussed by Said. The Orientalist epistemology suggests that sources and methods used to produce knowledge about the West are scientific and objective. Inversely, the Orientalist methods used to garner knowledge about the East are subjective and imaginative. Said suggests that Orientalism does not observe these differences but rather constructs and depends upon them. 

    Orientalism’s language of “a style of thought” and its discussion of the epistemological methods towards the East may misrepresent Orientalism as an imaginative product. It is true that the framework of the Occident permits writers to project their, often unfounded, imagined interpretations of the Orient as reality. Said writes, however, this process happens without consent “for example, in the fact that Flaubert’s encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only Kuchuk Hanem physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was ‘typically Oriental’” (6). The key thing here is Said’s inclusion of the word domination. Domination exists in the material rather than the imagined. It calls forth a real history of Western violent power over the East. While Orientalist texts might compose an imaginary truth, in reality they are bastions of Western domination over the Orient. The content of the aforementioned literatures are imagined by their individual authors, but the frameworks that the combined Orientalist literatures construct have had very real and experienced impacts on the Orient. Orientalist literature’s tendencies to represent without consent are to be seen as a counterpart to acts of the nonconsensual supremacy of the West.

    In Orientalism’s Introduction Said examines how he might approach the construction of his definition of Orientalism. Historically as an academic discipline Orientalism has found its definition of the Orient in a process that derives the general from the singular. This epistemological method is unsound as the definitions of the Orient created by it are positivistic. Additionally, the method of deriving knowledge of the Orient that is particular and singular understands a sum of individual literatures as the informants and fabricators of hegemony. This method does not factor the relationship of power between the West and the East that has long existed as cultural hegemony. Said turns to speculate if a more general epistemological approach to the Orient would create a more accurate definition of the space. This general approach would solely investigate doctrines of Western supremacy. This too creates a dogmatic sort of definition of the Orient as approaching the aforementioned doctrines as truth reinforces stereotypes and hegemony, and approaching such doctrines as imagined erases the fact of the relationships between these two places. It is best to employ both the general and the particular perspectives together. For example, in Orientalism Said will often investigate the language of a piece of writing as the choices of an individual author. Subsequently, or sometimes simultaneously, he will investigate word choice as the product of the ways of thinking predominate in the author’s cultural-geographical context. This method teaches that individual Orientalist literatures are inseparable from the hegemony they were produced within as well as how those texts construct Western doctrines to perpetuate the hegemonic.

    As Said thinks about the individual author and their work within and outside of their cultural context, he considers the notion of pure versus political knowledge. Orientalism is a discourse between literary, historical, philosophical, and academic texts. The book Orientalism looks to works from each of these fields to construct its beliefs about the framework. The Occident tends to view academic texts as the only literature with the ability to communicate nonpolitical, impartial, pure knowledge unaffected by any doctrine. Scholars working with Orientalism tend to turn to such texts to extract objective truth about the Orient. Said complicates this notion and practice saying “it is true that no production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim its author’s involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances” (11). If this is true of all scholarly articles, how might it play out with such works of Orientalism? When the Occident views a Western scholar’s work as pure knowledge the scholar’s epistemological methods are ignored. The Western scholar’s Orientalist epistemological methods inherently contain the scholar’s geopolitical identity and circumstances of reality. As the scholar becomes contextualized in geopolitics it becomes clear that their academic text is political rather than pure knowledge. The Western scholar garners and documents knowledge of the Orient “as a European or American first, as an individual second” (11). This scholar will never be able to construct knowledge or truth of the Orient without overt acknowledgement of the colonialist and imperialist incentives that construct their geopolitical identity. The material and historical impacts of Orientalism carry significantly more weight than an individual Western scholar’s relationship to the East carries. Thus, when a Western individual attempts to understand and/or convey something about the Orient they will almost always do so with and through a geopolitical identity that has been contrived to uphold Western supremacy, even if such a scholar’s personal identity does not support or desire to work with colonialist/imperialist frameworks, incentives, or histories. Orientalist scholarly texts will always be political because of the way they, whether intentional or unintentional, support hegemony and violence. 

    Said’s Introduction chapter in Orientalism asks its readers to reconsider the multifaceted nature of Orientalism. Said’s methods point towards an understanding of Orientalism that is not merely political or academic. Said first investigates literature to find that, despite the tradition of fictional and poetic writing being rooted in an author’s imagination, Orientalist literature is wielded as a tool of the West that has (and does) create a history of oppression of the East. Said next makes known how he combined perspectives that centralize the personal and the cultural to approach such literatures. Finally he places the individual within their context to illuminate the way in which one’s actions always carry impactful, political weight.

This chapter makes it clear that Orientalism is the “distribution of [skewed] geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts” to create interest in, support, and maintain the European and American material and intellectual domination over the East (12). Orientalism’s Introduction leaves readers with the conclusion that the only way to be rid of the East-West binary is to examine and subsequently implode hegemonic Orientalist frameworks.

The Outback

 

Cleo from 5 to 7: A Narrative of Existential Images

 I wrote this essay for a midterm for my intro film class:

    When one approaches Cleo from 5 to 7 as they would a rudimentary piece of literature or film, the movie tells the story of ‘vain’ and ‘immature’ pop music icon Cleo Victorie facing a possible cancer diagnosis. Cleo from 5 to 7 is a coming of age story but this may not be apparent in Cleo’s dialogue. The coming of age genre denotes a narrative with an originally jejune protagonist grappling with inner turmoil. This genre of story will end with the personal and spiritual growth of the protagonist. Though Cleo grapples with her identity as she faces death, her dialogue is unchanging. She speaks mostly of herself or of things in relationship to herself throughout the film. The other characters in the movie are, likewise, no help in telling the film’s story. If an audience approaches Cleo from 5 to 7 through its characters and dialogue they will leave the film with the impression that nothing has happened. When audiences approach this film through its images, however, they will finish the movie having witnessed linear character growth. It is what lies within the images - motifs of mirrors, gaze, and nature - and the way in which such images appear and are arranged that creates the coming of age story and existentialist meaning of Cleo from 5 to 7. 

    Agnes Varda’s film Cleo from 5 to 7 follows the character of Cleo reconciling her identity through a cancer diagnosis. The 1962 film was made within the French New Wave and is closely tied with the movement’s thinking around the auteur. French film theorist Alexandre Astruc’s 1957 essay “The Birth of a New Avant Garde: La Camera-Stylo” posits this new cinema to be the modern novel. Astruc says that “[modern] philosophical meditations on human production, psychology, metaphysics, ideas, and passions… are such that only the cinema can do justice to them.” Cleo from 5 to 7’s division into 13 chapters is a nod to the idea of this emerging cinema as intellectually and artistically equal to literature. The chapters neatly divide the movie into nice sections as well as poke fun at critics who believed that cinema could never be as profound, impactful, or as important as literature. However, the chapters do not express the film’s narrative. Varda did not need to rely on antiquated literary traditions to tell Cleo’s story. 

    Through this movie Varda realizes Astruc’s hope for cinema to release itself “from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, [and to instead] become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language.” It is difficult to do a film segmentation on Cleo from 5 to 7 as the film’s narrative is largely the impression that its images leave on its viewers. What is seen on screen is not a visual companion to a literary work.

    The events of the film emanate from the fact that Cleo is facing and thinking about her death. It is not unreasonable then to look to existentialist thought in deconstructing this movie, especially considering the popularity of the philosophy in 1960s France. Existentialist-Feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex proposes the idea of a feminine condition as the series of expectations and male-sanctioned behaviors/actions imposed on a woman prior to her birth. The Second Sex’s notion of the feminine condition speaks to Jean Paul Sartre’s idea of existence preceding essence; the idea that in our modern, secular world a person is not born with a predetermined nature but rather creates one through choices, actions, and experiences. De Beauvoir’s thinking aligns with Sartre’s as they both believe there to be no god responsible for a predetermined nature. However, De Beauvoir contradicts Sartre’s belief that there is never a predetermined essence. De Beauvoir’s thinking around the feminine condition posits that femininity is in fact an essence imposed upon a woman before she exists. This predetermined essence is not spiritual but is rather established through historical male intersubjectivity. The feminine condition exists to construct an omnipotent masculine identity through the positioning of women as the perpetual other. 

    Existentialist thought posits that when one sees themself in a mirror they never see a reflection of their authentic self and always an image of themself through the gaze of others. In the first half of Cleo from 5 to 7, Cleo is represented as the perpetual other. She looks at herself in a mirror nearly ten times within the first half hour of the film. Not until the second half of the film does the linear construction of self begin, so it would be pointless to examine each individual aforementioned occurrence. Let us turn to the first time we watch Cleo look into a mirror.

    Upon receiving news of cancer from her psychic, Cleo exits the office and walks through a hallway of mirrors. She stops to examine her reflection as her internal monologue says “ugliness is a kind of death. As long as I’m beautiful I’m even more alive than others.” The hallway of mirrors provides an infinite reflection effect, seemingly trapping Cleo within endless representations of herself as the other. The repetition of herself as the other in this cinematic image represents her disillusioned state in which she believes her authentic essence is that of the feminine condition. She sees herself as an alive being only through her ability to fulfill the masculine expectation for her to be beautiful. She does not question her constructed identity. Cleo continues to look to mirrors to satisfy her ego. Her looking in the mirror at the hat shop brings to light the way in which Cleo wears her predetermined identity like a costume. Her reflection in the mirrors at her house are representative of the fact that even in a space that asserts itself as entirely her own, she cannot escape from the expectations of the feminine condition.

    Mirrors remain a motif throughout the second half of the film but they no longer present Cleo as the other. The film sets up our expectation of how we will see Cleo reflected and then shatters it to create a narrative of growth and change. The midpoint of Cleo from 5 to 7 marks the beginning of Cleo’s questioning of her predetermined essence. Just before this point is the first time we see a mirror near Cleo and we do not see her reflection within it. This happens twice over the course of twenty minutes. The first is directly after Jose leaves. Cleo discusses with Angele how she feels like Jose doesn’t take her seriously. Cleo stands up from her bed and looks in the mirror. Her reflection is blocked. All we see is the back of her head as she examines herself. 

    The second time we see a mirror absent of Cleo’s reflection follows her performance of “Sans Toi.” Cleo sings “With all my doors open wide, with the wind rushing through, I'm like an empty house without you. Like a deserted isle, eroded by the sea. My sand slips away without you. Beauty washed. Cold and naked. My body’s an empty shell without you.” Cleo’s delivery of the song is intensely emotional. She resonates with the lyrics because she is realizing her position as the perpetual other. The lyrics tell the story of a woman who lives under the feminine condition but understands that without a man’s essence opposite of her’s she has no identity. The camera embodies the emotions and realizations of Cleo. As Cleo sings she is framed in isolation, her surroundings obscured entirely, she looks into the camera, breaks the fourth wall, and sheds a tear. 

    De Beauvoir posits that to escape the feminine condition a woman must recognize the arbitrary construction of her essence. Cleo’s rupture of the fourth wall is exactly that. She identifies and faces the gaze that defines her. Moreover, she claims the autonomous role as the looker and positions those who do place their gaze upon her, character within the film as well as the audience, as the other. Cleo then looks in the mirror for the second time after the film’s midpoint. When she looks in the mirror this time we cannot see her in the reflection. The mirror motif in the first half of the film is replaced by the motif of gaze in the second to demonstrate her new identification with the self.

    Gaze/perspective is used to communicate that Cleo is in the process of self determination. As Cleo walks to the sculpture studio, the movie shows its viewers images of pedestrians walking past and looking at the camera, and then cuts to Cleo. (These juxtaposed images convey that, in the world of the film, the passersby are in fact looking at Cleo, not the camera. When we see an image without Cleo in it we are to assume that we are seeing through Cleo’s eyes.) The movie continues to cut between those walking past Cleo and images of Cleo herself from the people of Paris’ perspectives. The film then cuts to tableaus of Cleo’s psychic, then to Bob, to Angele, and to Jose. In looking at these people from Cleo’s point of view we see these people as the other. We understand that Cleo is beginning to define the self. She sees those around her as the other, and thus revokes their ability to prescribe her an identity. The sequence ends with a shot of Cleo’s wig hanging on the frame of a mirror. Cleo divorces herself from cultural concepts of femininity. She has literally hung up her predetermined essence. 

    One of the final scenes of Cleo from 5 to 7 brings Cleo to a park in the middle of Paris. This is the first time Cleo is removed from the social and is placed within the natural. The camera drops the jump cuts and highly stylized tableaus previously used in the movie in favor of a more fluid, poetic style of documenting. The new characters that the camera and setting take on emphasize authenticity. As Cleo walks through the park she encounters a staircase. She sings and dances her way down the stairs. She engages with the motions of her life under the feminine condition, however they are now positioned within the natural and there is no gaze upon her to derive pleasure or to evaluate how effective her actions are at fulfilling the requirements of being a woman. Cleo’s dance is a reclamation of the traditionally feminine. She chooses to sing and dance as expressions of her desires and emotions. 

    Following this moment it is revealed that Cleo’s birth name is Florence. The name Cleo descends from Cleopatra, a woman whose identity has been obscured by Orientalism. Orientalism is a negative discipline in which everything is defined (by ‘The West’) in relation to a perceived other (‘The East’). Cleo’s stage name being tied to the legacy of Orientalism further suggests that her identity as Cleo is contrived from impersonal perceptions and western social/cultural expectations. Conversely, Cleo’s birth name of Florence is thought to mean flowering. The name Florence conjures ideas of the natural. Cleo’s identification as Florence allows her to shed the constructed and embrace the natural. 

    In the last scene of the movie Antoine gives his thanks to Cleo and separately to Florence. This reinforces the understanding that Cleo has only begun to shed her predetermined essence. She recognizes that her identity has been imposed on her and she sees a pathway to her new identity, but she has not constructed such an identity yet. This line of dialogue also alludes to the fact that Cleo still lives within a culture that wants to dictate the ways in which she can exist. Though she may redefine her essence, those around her will likely continue to foist upon her expectations of womanhood. 

    The final question is why Varda has made the choice to title her film Cleo from 5 to 7 when the span of the film is only an hour and a half long? I believe Varda encourages the viewer to imagine that Cleo will begin to construct a new identity following the end of the movie. We are unable to see the formation of Cleo’s self-determined identity because it is just that, in process. If the “Sans Toi” scene fashions Cleo as the self, then we are the other as the viewer. Cleo no longer needs us to see herself. She will create her own identity independently of a gaze that she had previously let define her. 

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