Orientalism - autonomous learning

240 ORIENTALISM
Orientalism Now
241
Against this static system of "synchronic essentialism"43 I have
called vision because it presumes that the whole Orient can be
seen panoptically, there is a constant pressure. The source of
pressure is narrative, in that if any Oriental detail can be shown to
move, or to develop, diachrony is introduced into the system. What
seemed stable-and the Orient is synonymous with stability and
unchanging etemality-now appears unstable. Instability suggests
that history, with its disruptive detail, its currents of change, its
tendency towards growth, decline, or dramatic movement, is possible
in the Orient and for the Orient. History and the narrative by
which history is represented argue that vision is insufficient, that
"the Orient" as an unconditional ontological category does an
injustice to the potential of reality for change.
Moreover, narrative is the specific form taken by written history
to counter the permanence of vision. Lane sensed the dangers of
narrative when he refused to give linear shape to himself and to his
information, preferring instead the monumental form of encyclopedic
or lexicographical vision. Narrative asserts the power of men
to be born, develop, and die, the tendency of institutions and
actualities to change, the likelihood that modernity and contemporaneity
will finally overtake "classical" civilizations; above all, it
asserts that the domination of reality by vision is no more than a
will to power, a will to truth and interpretation, and not an objective
condition of history. Narrative, in short, introduces an opposing
point of view, perspective, consciousness to. the unitary web of
vision; it violates the serene Apollonian fictions asserted by vision.
When as a result of World War I the Orient was made to enter
history, it was the Orientalist-as-agent who did the work. Hannah
Arendt has made the brilliant observation that the counterpart of
the bureaucracy is the imperial agent,44 which is to say that if the
collective academic endeavor called Orientalism was a bureaucratic
institution based on a certain conservative vision of the Orient, then
the servants of such a vision in the Orient were imperial agents like
T. E. Lawrence. In his work we can see most clearly the conflict
between narrative history and vision, as-in his words-the "new
Imperialism" attempted "an active tide of imposing responsibility
on the local peoples [of the Orient]."45 The competition between the
European Powers now caused them to prod the Orient into active
life, to press the Orient into service, to turn the Orient from unchanging
"Oriental" passivity into militant modern life. It would
be important, nevertheless, never to let the Orient go its own way or
get out of hand, the canonical view being that Orientals had no
tradition of freedom.
The great drama of Lawrence's work is that it symbolizes the
struggle, first, to stimulate the Orient (lifeless, timeless, forceless)
into movement; second, to impose upon that movement an essentially
Western shape; third, to contain. the new and aroused Orient
in a personal vision, whose retrospective mode includes a powerful
sense of failure and betrayal.
I meant to make a new nation, to restore a lost influence, to give
twenty millions of Semites the foundation on which to build an
inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts .... All the
subject provinces of the Empire to me were not worth one dead
English ·boy. If I have restored to the East some self-respect, a
goal, ideals: if I have made the standard rule of white over red
more exigent, I have fitted those peoples in a degree for the new
commonwealth in which the dominant races will forget their brute
achievements, and white and red and yellow and brown and black
will stand up together without side-glances in the service of the
world. 46
None of this, whether as intention, as an actual undertaking, or as
a failed project, would have ,been remotely possible without the
White Orientalist perspective at the outset:
The Jew in the Metropole at Brighton, the miser, the worshipper
of Adonis, the lecher in the stews of Damascus were alike signs
of the Semitic capacity for enjoyment, and expressions of the same
nerve which gave us at the other pole the self-denial of the Essenes,
or the early Christians, or the first Khalifas, finding the ways to
heaven fairest for the poor in spirit. The Semite hovered between
lust and self-denial.
Lawrence is backed in such statements by a respectable tradition
stretching like a lighthouse beam through the whole nineteenth
century; at its light-emanating center, of course, is "the Orient," and
that is powerful enough to light up both the gross and the refined
topographies within its range. The Jew, the worshipper of Adonis,
the Damascene lecher, are signs not so much of humanity, let us say,
as of a semiotic field called Semitic and built into coherence by the
Semitic branch of Orientalism. Inside this field, certain things were
possible:
Arabs could be swung on an idea as on a cord; for the unpledged
allegiance of their minds made them obedient servants. None of