Orientalism - autonomous learning

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118 ORIENTALISM
Orientalist Structures and Restructures
119
But there was a tendency among some thinkers to exceed comparative
study, and its judicious surveys of mankind from "China to
Peru," by sympathetic identification. This is a third eighteenthcentury
element preparing the way for modern Orientalism. What
today we call historicism is an eighteenth-century idea; Vico,
Herder, and Hamann, among others, believed that all cultures were
organically and internally coherent, bound together by a spirit,
genius, Klima, or national idea which an outsider could penetrate
only by an act of historical sympathy. Thus Herder's Ideen zur
Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784.:...1791) was a
panoramic display of various cultures, each permeated by an
inimical creative spirit, each accessible only to an observer who
sacrificed his prejudices to Einfiihlung. Imbued with the populist
and pluralist sense of history advocated by Herder and others, 6 an
eighteenth-century mind could breach the doctrinal walls erected
between the West and Islam and see hidden elements of kinship
between himself and the Orient. Napoleon is a famous instance of
this (usually selective) identification by sympathy. Mozart is
another; The Magic Flute (in which Masonic codes intermingle
with visions of a benign Orient) and The Abduction from the
Seraglio locate a particularly magnanimous form of humanity in
the Orient. And this, much more than the modish habits of "Turkish"
music, drew Mozart sympathetically eastwards.
It is very difficult nonetheless to separate such intuitions of the
Orient as Mozart's from the entire range of pre-Romantic and
Romantic representations of the Orient as exotic locale. Popular
Orientalism during the late eighteenth century and the early
nineteenth attained a vogue of considerable intensity. But even this
vogue, easily identifiable in William Beckford, Byron, Thomas
Moore, and Goethe, cannot be simply detached from the interest
taken in Gothic tales, pseudomedieval idylls, visions 6f barbaric
splendor and cruelty. Thus in some cases the Oriental representation
can be associated with Piranesi's prisons, in others with Tiepolo's
luxurious ambiences, in still others with the exotic sublimity of lateeighteenth-century
paintings. 7 Later in the nineteenth century, in
the works of Delacroix and literally dozens of other French and
British painters, the Oriental genre tableau carried representation
into visual expression and a life of its own (which this book unfortunately
must scant). Sensuality, promise, terror, sublimity,
idyllic pleasure, intense energy: the Orient as a figure in the pre-
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all designation must be accomplished by means of a certain rela­
tion to all other possible designations. To know what properly
appertains to one individual is to have before one the classification~or
the possibility of classifying-all others. 9
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Romantic, pretechnical Orientalist imagination of late-eighteenthcentury
Europe was really a chameleonlike quality called (adjectivally)
"Oriental."8 But this free-floating Orient would be severely
curtailed with the advent of academic Orientalism.
A fourth element preparing the way for modern Orientalist
structures was the whole impulse to classify nature and man into
types. The greatest names are, of course, Linnaeus and Buffon,but
the intellectual process by which bodily (and soon moral, intellectual,
and spiritual) extension-the typical materiality of an
object-could be transformed from mere spectacle to the precise
measurement of characteristic elements was very widespread. Linnaeus
said that every note made about a natural type "should be a
product of number, of form, of proportion, of situation," and indeed,
if one looks in Kant or Diderot or Johnson, there is everywhere a
similar penchant for dramatizing general features, for reducing vast
numbers of objects to a smaller number of orderable and describable
types. In natural history, in anthropology, in cultural generalization,
a type had a particular character which provided the observer with a
designation and, as Foucault says, "a controlled derivation." These
types and characters belonged to a system, a network of related
generalizations. Thus,
In the writing of philosophers, historians, encyclopedists, and
essayists we find character-as-designation appearing as physiologicalmoral
classification: there are, for example, the wild men, the
Europeans, the Asiatics, and so forth. These appear of course in
Linnaeus, but also in Montesquieu, in Johnson, in Blumenbach, in
Soemmerring, in Kant. Physiological and moral characteristics
are distributed more or less equally: the American is "red, choleric,
erect," the Asiatic is "yellow, melancholy, rigid," the African is
"black, phlegmatic, lax."lo But such designations gather power
when, later in the nineteenth century, they are allied with character
as derivation, as genetic type. In Vico and Rousseau, for example,
the force of moral generalization is enhanced by the precision with
which dramatic, alrnost archetypal figures-primitive man, giants,
heroes-are shown to be the genesis of current moral, philosophic,