292 ORIENTALISM mental body founded to oversee and sponsor research interest in the Middle East—produced a Report on Current Research. The contribution “Present State of Arabic Studies in the United States” (done, interestingly enough, by a professor of Hebrew) is prefaced by an epigraph announcing that “no longer is knowledge of foreign languages, for instance, the sole province of the scholars in the humanities. It is a working tool of the engineer, the economist, the social scientist, and many other specialists.” The whole report stresses the importance of Arabic to oil-company executives, tech- . nicians, and military personnel. But the report's main talking point is this trio of sentences: “Russian universities are now producing fluent Arabic speakers. Russia has realized the importance of appealing to men through their minds, by using their own language. The United States need wait no longer in developing its foreign language program.”"** Thus Oriental languages are part of some Policy objective-—as to a certain extent they have always been—or part of a sustained propaganda effort. [n both these aims the study of Oriental languages becomes the instrument carrying out Harold Lasswell's theses about propaganda, in which what counts is not what people are or think but what they can be be and think. The propagandist outlook in fact combines respect for individuality with indifference to formal democracy. The respect for individuality arises from the dependence of large scale operations wpon the support of the mass and upon experience with the variability of human preferences. . . . This regard for men in the mass rests upon no democratic sey about men being the i cor a iMciests; _oreiees a one alternative to the olid reason oF clinging Umorously. to the Fragments of. ‘some. Mossy Tock of ages. Calculating the prospect of securing a permanent change in habits and values involves much more than the estimation of the preferences of men in general. It means taking account of the tissue of relations in which men are webbed, searching for signs of preference which may reflect no deliberation and directing a program towards a solution which fits in fact... . With respect to those adjustments which do require mass action the task of the propagandist is that of inventing goal symbols which serve the double function of facilitating adoption and adaptation. The symbols must induce acceptance spontaneously. . It follows that the management ideal is control of a situation not by imposition but by divination. . . . The propagandist takes

Orientalism Now 293 it for granted that the world is completely caused but that it is only partly predictable... .197 The acquired foreign language is therefore made part of-a_subtle assault upon populations, just as the study of a foreign region like the Orient i is turned into a program for control by divination. Yet such programs must always have a liberal veneer, and usually this is left to scholars, men of good will, enthusiasts to attend to. The idea encouraged is that in studying Orientals, Muslims, or Arabs “we” can get to know another people, their way Of life and thought, and so on. To this end it is always better to let them speak for themselves, to represent themselves (even though underlying this fiction stands Marx’s phrase—with which Lasswell is in agreement—for Louis Napoleon: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” ). But only up to a point, and in a special way. In 1973, during the anxious days of the October Arab-Israeli War, the New York Times Magazine commissioned two articles, one representing the Israeli and one the — Arab side of the conflict. The Israeli side was presented by an Israeli lawyer; the Arab side, by an American former ambassador to an Arab country who had no formal training in Oriental studies. Lest we jump immediately to the simple conclusion that the Arabs were believed incapable of representing themselves, we would do well to remember that both Arabs and Jews in this instance were Semites (in the broad cultural designation T have been discussing) and that both were being made to be represented for a Western audience, It is worthwhile here to remember this passage from Proust, in which the sudden appearance of a Jew into an aristocratic salon is described as follows: The Rumanians, the Egyptians, the Turks may hate the Jews. But in a French drawing-room the differences between those people are not so apparent, and an Israelite making his entry as though he were emerging from the heart of the desert, his body crouching like a hyaena’s, his neck thrust obliquely forward, spreading himself in proud “saiaams,” completely satisfies a certain taste for the oriental [un goitt peur lorientalisme}.1* 2. Cultural relations policy. While it is true to say that the United States did not in fact become a world empire until the twentieth century, it is also true that during the nineteenth century the United States was concerned with the Orient in ways that prepared for its later, overtly imperial concern. Leaving aside the