Untreated Strangeness: On Edward Said, Imaginative Geographies and Conspiracy

I work in a small university. As such, I routinely teach areas of sociology that are outside my scope of research expertise. Mostly, this is a lot of extra reading, but sometimes it turns up unexpected gems.

A few weeks ago, I was reading, possibly for the fourth or fifth time, a chapter of Edward Said’s Orientalism. In this chapter, Said explores how the “Orient” exists, both as an academic field, and more broadly as an orientation towards the other. The Orientalist in Said’s account is less interested in studying what actually exists, than applying pre-formed truths with varying degrees of success.

What struck me most about this section of the chapter is Said’s discussion of Lévi-Strauss’s ‘science of the concrete’. Lévi-Strauss argues that the mind requires order. He argues that taking note of everything, and placing it in a “secure, findable place, therefore giving things some role to play in the economy of objects and identities that make up an environment” (1995: 53), is a universal human impulse. This is despite the fact that meanings assigned to any given object are arbitrary, given that they vary across cultures. Said goes on to argue that geographical distinctions between ours and theirs are also similarly arbitrary. The ‘not foreign’ exists in contrast to what is imagined to be ‘out there’. The underlying thread in this part of Said’s work is that what we imagine to be so, is just as powerful as what actually exists.

Said elaborates later in the chapter,

“One ought again to remember that all cultures impose corrections upon raw reality, changing it from free-floating objects into units of knowledge. The problem is not that the conversion takes place. It is perfectly natural for the human mind to resist the assault on it of untreated strangeness; therefore cultures have always been inclined to impose complete transformations on other cultures, receiving these cultures not as they are, but as for the benefit of the receiver, they ought to be.” (1995: 67)

In building his argument about Orientalist engagement with the world, Said proposes that imaginative geographies override other forms of knowledge. My interest in Said’s work here is in how the processes of categorisation he attributes to Lévi-Strauss, intermingle with encounters with foreignness.

Society is, in many ways, abstract and complex. As I have written before, it requires us to encounter events that are often beyond our capacity to understand, emerging, as they do, from overlapping complexities in systems, technologies, institutions, histories and mobilities. Still, as Said points out, we have the desire to catalogue and categorise the ‘untreated strangeness’ of life. This process is particularly apparent in social responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that we can understand our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic as part of the same process that Said identifies in Orientalist thought, that is, as a response to ‘foreignness’. After all, what is more foreign than a multi-year global pandemic?

We can instead understand the swirl of misinformation, as an attempt to categorise objects in a world made foreign to us. As Said highlights, what we imagine to be true about the foreign, and our imaginative geographies of ‘the strange’ are more important than other forms of knowledge. How we feel is what matters. These feelings shape our substantive engagement with the world, and what we understand it to be. Just as the Orientalist is not concerned with the Orient as it actually exists, the COVID-19 denier, anti-masking, anti-vaccine, ivermectin taking subject is not concerned with COVID-19 as it actually exists, rather they are responding based on their imaginative geography of the now-foreign pandemic world. As per Said’s theory, these geographies exaggerating aspects of the foreign, for example, disproven COVID-19 treatments, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and ignoring others – that vaccines are safe and reduce death and disease transmission.

Conspiracy theories more broadly, are also examples of imaginative geographies, attempting to respond to what often feels like ‘untreated strangeness’. They are broadly speaking (sub)cultural systems of categorisation that given meaning at shape to the world, as theories that explain foreignness in ways that emphasise the superiority of one culture over the supposed decadence and excess of others. We can see these themes playing out in the QAnon conspiracy cultures, where the righteous Q crusades against the decadence and sin of “Washington Elites” who engage in grotesque and immoral behaviour.

Applying insights from Said’s work on Orientalism frames the misinformation problem in cultural terms and sensibilities, making the problem one that social scientists are well-versed in tackling. To grapple with the range of seemingly contradictory, concerning and dangerous responses to COVID-19, we have to understand that they are part of a (sub)culture and system of knowledge creation, that generates imaginative geographies that uphold and reproduce particular culture values as it seeks to catalogue, categorise and theorisation the strangeness of the pandemic world.