Orientalism - autonomous learning

120 ORIENTALISM
Orientalist Structures and Restructures
121
even linguistic issues. Thus when an Oriental was referred to, it
was in terms of such genetic universals as his "primitive" state, his
primary characteristics, his particular spiritual background.
The four elements I have described--expansion, historical confrontation,
sympathy, classification-are the currents in eighteenthcentury
thought on whose presence the specific intellectual and
institutional structures of modern Orientalism depend. Without
them Orientalism, as we shall see presently, could not have occurred.
Moreover, these elements had the effect of releasing the Orient
generally, and Islam in particular, from the narrowly religious
scrutiny by which it had hitherto been examined (and judged) by
the Christian West. In other words, modern Orientalism derives
from secularizing elements in eighteenth-century European culture.
One, the expansion of the Orient further east geographically and
further back temporally loosened, even dissolved, the Biblical
framework considerably. Reference points were no longer Christianity
and Judaism, with their fairly modest calendars and maps, but
India, China, Japan, and Sumer, Buddhism, Sanskrit, Zoroastrianism,
and Manu. Two, the capacity for dealing historically (and not
reductively, as a topic of ecclesiastical politics) with non-European
and non-Judeo-Christian cultures was strengthened as history itself
was conceived of more radically than before; to understand Europe
properly meant also understanding the objective relations between
Europe and its own previously unreachable temporal and cultural
frontiers. In a sense, John of Segovia's idea of contraferentia between
Orient and Europe was realized, but in a wholly secular way;
Gibbon could treat Mohammed as a historical figure who influenced
Europe and not as a diabolical miscreant hovering somewhere
between magic and false prophecy. Three, a selective identification
with regions and cultures not one's own wore down the obduracy of
self and identity, which had been polarized into a community of
embattled believers facing barbarian hordes. The borders of
Christian Europe no longer served as a kind of custom house; the
notions of human association and of human possibility acquired a
very wide general-as opposed to parochial-legitimacy. Four, the
classifications of mankind were systematically multiplied as the
possibilities of designation and derivation were refined beyond the
categories of what Vico called gentile and sacred nations; race,
color, origin, temperament, character, and types overwhelmed the
distinction between Christians and everyone else.
But if these interconnected elements represent a secularizing
tendency, this is not to say that the old religious patterns of human
history and destiny and "the existential paradigms" were, simply
removed. Far from it: they were reconstituted, redeployed, redistributed
in the secular frameworks just enumerated. For anyone
who studied the Orient a secular vocabulary in keeping with these
frameworks was required. Yet if Orientalism provided the vocabulary,
the conceptual repertoire, the techniques-for this is what,
from the end of the eighteenth century on, Orientalism did and
what Orientalism was-it also retained, as an undislodged current
in its discourse, a reconstructed religious impulse, a naturalized
supernaturalism. What I shall try to show is that this impulse in
Orientalism resided in the Orientalist's conception of himself, of the
Orient, i:lnd of his discipline.
The modern Orientalist was, in his view, a hero rescuing the
Orient from the obscurity, alienation, and strangeness which he
himself had properly. distinguished. His research reconstructed the
Orient's lost languages, mores, even mentalities, as Champollion
reconstructed Egyptian hieroglyphics out of the Rosetta Stone. The
specific Orientalist techniques-lexicography, grammar, translation,
cultural decoding-restored, fleshed out, reasserted the values both
of an ancient, classical Orient and of the traditional disciplines of
philology, history, rhetoric, and doctrinal polemic. But in the process,
the Orient and Orientalist disciplines changed dialectically, for they
could not survive in their original form. The Orient, even in the
"classic" form which the Orientalist usually studied, was modernized,
restored to the present; the traditional disciplines too were brought
into contemporary culture. Yet both bore the traces of powerpower
to have resurrected, indeed created, the Orient, power that
dwelt in the new, scientifically advanced techniques of philology
and of anthropological generalization. In short, having transported
the Orient into modernity, the Orientalist could celebrate his
method, and his position, as that of a.secular creator, a man who
made new worlds as God had once made the old. As for carrying on
such methods and such positions beyond the life-span of any individual
Orientalist, there would be a secular tradition of continuity, a
lay order of disciplined methodologists, whose brotherhood would
be based, not on blood lineage, but upon a common discourse, a
praxis, a library, a set of received ideas, in short, a doxology,
common to everyone who entered the ranks. Flaubert was prescient
enough to see that in time the modern Orientalist would become a
copyist, like Bouvard and Pecuchet; but during the early days, in