Third Space and the Authenticity of the Observed

In a culture that attempts defiance of the realities that its people do not have constant meaning, recent regressive political paradigm shifts bring great concern for the emergent meanings that will be fashioned in the context of this new culture; what we will make things mean or signify moving forward. Islamism or Africanism might substitute Orientalism, but its the upholding of such binary perspectives that masks a hybrid nature of a colonial encounter and the postcolonial condition.

According to Edward Said, “anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient is an Orientalist” (quoted in Sardar and Van Loon 1999, 109), and what they say or do is Orientalism. Orientalism is a cultural derivation of, primarily, the European and American search for self-identity. This search has led to a destructive and omniscient spread of colonial persuasion. Formulating a distinction between the “orient and the Occident” results from the West’s changes in cultural constructions of ‘nature’ and its increasing separation from it. A confused identity in combination with this form of thought perpetuates rhetoric of blame and misunderstanding, and produces what amounts to a state of schizophrenia: Western culture as an observer is becoming completely alienated from itself – assuming a character that is reliant upon the authenticity of the observed. 

Periods of history when values undergo a fundamental shift are certainly not unprecedented. This happened in the Hellenistic period, when from the ruins of the classical world the Middle Ages were progressively born. It happened during the Renaissance, which opened the way to the modern era. The distinguishing features of such transitional periods are a fusion and blending of cultures and a plurality or parallelism of intellectual and spiritual worlds. These are periods when all consistent value systems collapse, when cultures distant in time and space are discovered or rediscovered. They are periods when there is a tendency to quote, imitate, and amplify, rather than to state with authority or integrate. New meaning is gradually born from the encounter, or the intersection, of many different elements.

Said’s notions of a “third space” – a resistance to the categorization of cultures into “universalist frameworks” (Sardar and Van Loon 1999, 120) – are evident in the newly emerging descriptions of Chinese gardens between 1850 and 1950. The collapse or alteration of American and European value systems is certainly connected to alterations in these social and cultural constructions of nature. Orientalist literature which previously saw Chinese gardening practices as “tortuous”, began to speak more of “admiration than condemnation” (Clunas 1997, 28). The “third space” is what Said called “hybridity”. Hybridity “displaces the history that creates it, but sets up new structures of authority and generates new political initiatives” (Sardar and Van Loon 1999, 120). The new interest in and admiration of the Orient was deeply rooted in a shift in cultural and botanic traditions of the West. International horticultural exhibitions spawned an economic movement in “major transfers of plant matter from Asia to Europe and America” (Clunas 1997, 29). 

If we begin to analyse Said’s notion of “hybridity” in light of Western economic initiatives and conceptions of a newly emergent identity with ‘nature’, we may question the validity of his argument. That hybridity is “a strategic reversal of the process of domination” (Sardar and Van Loon 1999, 120) simply does not apply. The appropriation and naturalization of Chinese (Eastern) plant material was deceptively justified in the writings of Orientalists such as Gothein and Jellicoe. The products of ‘nature’ that “risked torture and degradation in the East could be transported to the Home Countries . . . to form part of an unproblematic nature . . . in fact celebrat[ing] British imperial hegemony over a large part of the globe” (Clunas 1997, 29).

The Orient and the East have helped define the West as its contrasting image, idea, personality, and experience. Today, this identity may be best understood within the context of postmodernism. Orientalism is an inherent cultural and societal compulsion deeply rooted in the historical evolution of Western ideological thought, and its dissemination. Certainly it has perpetuated a growing distinction between East and West, 'us' and 'them'. In fact, Orientalism remains as a “Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient” (Sardar and Van Loon 1999, 109). In this hegemonic fervency develops an “Orientalist rhetoric which effectively says that Americans and Europeans do things, Asians just are” (Clunas 1997, 31). The result is an identity of oneself that is detached – reliant upon its distinction with others. 

This is not an attempt to spread an intellectual fear over the commercial expansion of the West that destroys alien cultures. It is rather a typical expression of our multicultural era, a signal that an amalgamation of cultures has been and is taking place. It is evidence that something is happening; something is being born. We are in a phase when one age is succeeding another, when everything is possible because our civilization does not have its own unified style, its own spirit, and its own aesthetic.