ABSTRACT
Is the “Middle East” a construct, partly with term and meaning, and signified and signifier of no correspondence with analytic realities? Indeed, “Middle” and “East” carry lexical meanings of geographical position. But position is of no consequence here. It is, rather, authorial positioning that is at issue. The field of knowledge’s resulting unstable texts may be said to be “truths” only in so far as they are (1) extensions of concepts and theories that cohere ontologically and epistemologically and (2) derivatives of known conceptual repertoires, and disciplinary traps, conditioned, temporally and spatially, by methodological or, at times, ideological choices. The knowing and writing of the Middle East, to an extent, then, vacillates between representations and misrepresentations that square with those choices. They do not necessarily mirror a “real” Middle East. Dogmatism about these choices possibly compromises knowledge-making itself, in the order of “lost translation”. A notion of Middle East politics as “multiple” resonates well only by engaging the field via “multi”-modality and “multi”-disciplinarity. This mediates deconstruction of the complexity that is “simulated postcoloniality”. The chapter introduces and attempts to weave into the analysis. In this vein, by drawing on semiotics, philosophy, and politics, it refigures new ways of understanding writing the Middle East, or a parody of it, a “copy of a copy”, as it were. Reference to “simulacra”, “assemblages”, “rhizomes”, “territorialization” and “deterritorialization”, which the field tended to ignore or sublate, points to missing links in the chain of writing and un-writing the Middle East.
