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ORKENTALKSM

-- Edward ~ Said -- r

Vintage Books A Division of Random House

New York

Introduction

I On a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil war of 1975-1976

a French journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown area that "it had once seemed to belong to ... the Orient of Chateau- briand and Nerval." He was rigbt about the place, of course, especially so far as a European was concerned. The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place

vaf romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, re- markable experiences. Now it was disappearing; in a sense it had happened, its time was over. Perhaps it seemed irrelevant that ~.!!.tals themselves had something at s a e illIIreJYrucess;<l:iat even in the time of Chiiteau nan an crv Orientals a lived ther~ d th ow it was the who were Buffed" ; the main thing

,(:-yU~or the European visitor was a European representation 'Ofthe .JLrient and its can em =ryJate,Jxll. ich ha a £fivile ed c~mmunal s~nificance for the' ournalist and his French re~rs. - Americans will not feel quite the same about the Orient, which for them-is-much more likely to be associated very differently with the Far Eastl (China and Japan, mainly). Unlike the Americans, the French and the British-less so the-Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians. and Swiss-have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling@rientali~, a way of coming to terms with the. Orient that is based on the Orienrs specIiil place ill European '£.estern experieDC~. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Euro 's rea test and richest an est colonies, t esc " ilizations and Ian ua es, its cultural contesta . and one of its dee est and most recurring images of the Other. In a Ilion, the Orient has elpe to define urope (or t e West)

I

)

~.

MJ-~ r~

as its contrasting imag,e. idea ~ersonalit~ experienc.e. Yet none of this Orient is merelyira inat: . The Orient is an integral part ohl European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship. imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. In contrast, the American understanding of the Orient will seem considerably less dense, although our recent Japanese, Korean, and Indochinese adventures ought now to be creating a more sober, more realistic "Oriental" awareness. Moreover, the vastly expanded American political and economic role in the Near East (the Middle East) makes great claims on our understanding of that Orient.

It will be clear to the reader (and will become clearer still throughout the many pages that follow) that by Orientalism I mean

~ several things. all of them. in my opinion. interdependent. The -;)nost readily accepted designation for OrientaliSiiliS an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orien~-and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist-either in its specific or its gen- eral aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orien- talism. Compared with Oriental studies or area studies, it is true that the term Orientalism is less preferred by specialists today. both because it is too vague and general and because it connotes the high-handed executive attitude of nineteenth-century and early- wentieth-century European colonialism. Nevertheless books are written and congresses held with "the Orient" as their main focus, with the Orientalist in his new or old guise as their main authority. The point is that even if it does not survive as it once did, Orien- talism lives on academically through its doctrines and theses about the Orient and the Oriental.

Related to this academic tradition, whose fortunes, transmigra- tions, specializations, and transmissions are in part the subject of this study, is a more general meaning for Orientalism. Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological

) distinction made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the qccident." Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and im- perial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social Rescriptions, and political accounts concerning the

2

7

RIENTALISM

Introduction 3

Orient, its people, customs, "mind," destiny, and so on. This Orien- talism can accommodate Aeschylus, say, and Victor Hugo, Dante and Karl Marx. A little later in this 'introduction I shall deal with t'he methodological problems one encounters in so broadly con- strued a "field" as this. ~_~i",n",te~.:.cbange betWeen th academic d the more or less imaginativ meanin s of OrientiIism.Js-. onstant one, and-since the I Ighteenth century there has been a consi erable, quite disciplined-perhaps even regulated-traffic between the two. Here I come to the third ~ of Orientalisrn, which is something more (~rul materiall defined than either of the other two. T~ig teenth century as a very roughly defined

'- starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient----<lealing with it

c-by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and havin au- ilionty over the Orient. I have faun it useful here to employ

NllcnerFoucau 1'5 notion of a discourse, as described by him in The Archaeology of Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish, to identify Orientalism. My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a dj>course one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was

f~ableto manage-and even produce-the Orient politically. socio-\ 10 ically, militari! , ideolo icall scientificall and ima inativelyduring t e post-Enlight~ent eriod. Moreover, so authoritative a position di Orientalism have that I believe no one writing, think- ing, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism. In brief, because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action. This is not to say that Orientalism unilaterally determines what can be said about the Orient, but that it is the whole network of interests inevitably brought to bear on (and therefore always involved in) any occasion when that peculiar entity "the Orient" is in question. How this happens is what this book tries to demonstrate. It also tries to show that European 1/ culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.

Historically and culturally there is a quantitative as well as a qualitative difference between the Franco-British involvement in the Orient and-until the period of American ascendancy after

\

4 ORIENTALISM

World War II-the involvement of every other European and At- lantic power. To speak of Oriental ism therefore is to speak mainly, although not exclusively, of a British and French cultural enter- prise, a project whose dimensions take in such disparate realms as the imagination itself, the whole of India and the Levant, the Biblical texts and the Biblical lands, the spice trade, colonial armies and a long tradition of colonial administrators, a formidable schol- arty corpus, innumerable Oriental "experts" and "hands," an Orien- tal professorate, a complex array of "Oriental" ideas (Oriental despotism, Oriental splendor, cruelty, sensuality), many Eastern sects, philosophies, and wisdoms domesticated for local European use-the list can be extended more or less indefinitely. My point is that Orientalism derives from a particular closeness experienced between Britain and France and the Orient, which until the early nineteenth century had really meant only India and the Bible lands. From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the end of World War II France and Britain dominated the Orient and Orientalism; since World War II America has dominated the Orient, and approaches it as France and Britain once did. Out of that closeness, whose dynamic is enormously productive even if it always demonstrates the comparatively greater strength of the Occi- dent (British, French, or American), comes the large body of texts I call Orientalist.

It should be said at once that even with the generous number of books and authors that I examine, there is a much larger number that I simply have had to leave out. My argument, however, de- pends neither upon an exhaustive catalogue of texts dealing with

/the Orient nor upon a clearly delimited set of texts, authors, and ~ideas that together make up the Orientalist canon. I have depended

-{\."..,r- instead upon a different methodological alternative-whose back- \!". bone in a sense is the set of historical generalizations I have so far

been making in this Introduction-and it is these T want now to discuss in more analytical detail.

II I have begun with the assumption that the Orient is not an inert

fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either. We must take seriously Vico's great obser-

x/ .~ ~ Introduction 5

ot:~ion t~ men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography: as both geo- graphical and cultural entities-to say nothing of historical entities -such locales, regions, geographical sectors as "Orient" and "Occi- dent" are man-made. Therefore as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other.

Having said that, one must go on to state a number of reasonable qualifications. In the first place, it would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no cor- responding reality. When Disraeli said in his novel Tancred that the East was a career, he meant that to be interested in the East )Vas something bright young Westerners would find to be an all-

/consuming passion; he should not be interpreted as saying that the East was only a- career for Westerners. There were-and are- cultures and nations whose location is in the East, and their lives, histories, and customs have a brute reality obviously greater than anything that could be said about them in the West b~out that V fact this study of Orientalism has very little to contribute, ~Rt to ackno~ge It tacitly:' But t e p enomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orien- talism and its ideas about the Orient (the East as career) despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a "real" Orient My point is that Disraell's s atement about the East refers mainly to that crea e consistency, that regular constellation of ideas as the pre-ernment t mg a out the Orient, and not to its mere being, as Wallace Stevens's phrase has it.

A second qualification is that ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied. To be- lieve that the Orient was created-or, as I call it, "Orientalized" -and to believe that such things happen simply as a necessity of the imagination, is to be disingenuous. The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony, and is quite accurately indicated in the title of K. M. Panikkar's classic Asia and Western Dominance? The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be "Oriental" in all those ways considered common-

6 ORIENT ALISM

place by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be-that is, submitted to being-made OrientaL There is very little consent to be found, [or example, in the fact that Flau- bert's encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely in. ftuential model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke [or and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy,ra1e. and these were historical facts of domination that allowed

Vhim not only to possess Kuchuk Hanem physically but to speak [or her and tell his readers in what way she was "typically OrientaL" My argument is that Flaubert's situation of strength in relation to Kuchuk Hanem was not an isolated instance. It fairly stands for the pattern of relative strength between East and West, and the

......-- discourse about the Orient that it enabled. This brings us to a third qualification. One ought never to assume

that the structure of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or of myths which, were the truth about them to be told, would simply blow away. I myself believe that Oriental ism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a veridic discourse about the Orient (which is what, in its academic or scholarly form, it claims to be). Never- theless, what we must respect and try to grasp is the sheer knitted- together strength of Orientalist discourse, its very close ties to the enabling socio-economic and political institutions, and its redoubt- able durability. After all, any system of ideas that can remain unchanged as teachable wisdom (in academies, books, congresses, universities, foreign-service institutes) from the period of Ernest Renan in the late 1840s until the present in the United States must be something more formidable than a mere collection of lies. Orientalism, therefore, is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body o[ theory and practice in which, [or many generations, there as een a considerable material invest- ment. ontinued investment rna e Orientalisrn, as a system of knowledge about the Orient, an accepted grid [or filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness, just as that same investment multiplied-indeed, made truly productive-the statements prolif- .({ erating out from Oriental ism into the general culture. A~

Grarnsci has made the useful analytic distinction between civilW and political society in which the former is made up of voluntary (or at least rational and noncoercive) affiliations like schools,

I'

\ Introduction 7

/

families, and unions, the latter of state institutions (the army. the police, the central bureaucracy) whose role in the polity is direct ./' domination. Culture, of course, is to be found operating within civil society, where the influence of ideas, of institutions, and of otherpersons works not through }domination but by what Gramsci callsLcon~t. In any society not tOf8I.iTIirian,then, certain cultural forms predominate over others, just as certain ideas are more in- fluential than others; the form of this cultural leadership is what Gramsci has identified as hegemony, an indispensable concept for any understanding of cultural life in the industrial West. It is hegemony, or rather the result of cultural hegemony at work, that gives Orientalism the durability and the strength 'I have been speak- ing about so far. Orientalism is never far from what Denys Hay has called the idea of Europe," a collective notion identifying "us" Europeans as against all "those" non-Europeans, and indeed it can be argued that the major component in European culture is pre- cisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Eu- rope: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the norl-European peoples and cultures. There is in addi- tion the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves

. reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usu- ally overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more Skeptical, thinker might have had different views on the matter.

In a quite constant way, Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand. And why should it have been otherwise, especially during the period of extraordinary European ascendancy from the late Renaissance to the present? The scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier was in, or thought about, the Orient because he could be there, or could think about it, with very little resistance on the Orient's part, Under the general heading of knowledge of the Orient, and within the um- brella of Western hegemony over the Orient during the period from the end of the eighteenth century, there emerged a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial, and historical theses about mankind and the universe, for instances of economic and sociological theories of development, revolution, cultural person-

•

8 ORIENTALISM

ality, national or religious character. Additionally, the imaginative examination of things Oriental was based more or less exclusively

Iupon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallengedcentrality an Oriental world emerged, first according to generalideas about who or what was an Oriental, then according to adetailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by abattery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections. If we ----can point to great Orientalist works of genuine scholarship like Silvestre de Sacy's Chrestomathie arabe or Edward William Lane's Accollnt of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, we need also to note that Renan's and Gobineau's racial ideas came out of the same impulse. as did a great many Victorian pornographic novels (see the analysis by Steven Marcus of "The Lustful Turk"').

And yet, one must repeatedly ask oneself whether what matters in Orientalism is the general group of ideas overriding the mass of material-about which who could deny that they were shot through with doctrines of European superiority, various kinds of racism, imperialism. and the like, dogmatic views of "the Oriental" as a kind of ideal and unchanging abstraction?-or the much more varied work produced by almost uncountable individual writers, whom one would take up as individual instances of authors dealing with the Orient. In a sense the two alternatives, general and particular, are really two perspectives on the same material: in both instances one would have to deal with pioneers in the field like William Jones, with great artists like Nerval or Flaubert. And why would it not be possible to employ both perspectives together, or one after the other? Isn't there an obvious danger of distortion (of precisely the kind that academic Orientalism has always been prone to) if either too general or too specific a level of description is maintained systematically?

My two fears are distortion and inaccuracy, or rather the kind of inaccuracy produced by too dogmatic a generality and too posi- tivistic a localized focus. In trying to deal with these problems I have tried to deal with three main aspects of my own contemporary reality that seem to me to point the way out of the methodological or perspectival difficulties I have been discussing, difficulties that might force one. in the first instance, into writing a coarse polemic on so unacceptably general a level of description as not to be worth the effort, or in the second instance, into writing so detailed and atomistic a series of analyses as to lose all track of the general

Introduction 9

lines of force informing the field, giving it its special cogency. How then to recognize individuality and to reconcile it with its in- telligent, and by no means passive or merely dictatorial, general and hegemonic context?

III I mentioned three aspects of my contemporary reality: I must

explain and briefly discuss them now, so that it can be seen how I was led to a particular course of research and writing.

1. The distinction between pure and political knowledge. It is very easy to argue that knowledge about Shakespeare or Words-

~

worth is not political whereas knowledge about contemporary C ina or the Soviet Union is. My own formal and professional e"

'tf'A .. designation is that of "humanist," a title which indicates the ~, humanities as my field and therefore the unlikely eventuality that

there might be anything political about what I do in that field. Of course, all these labels and terms are quite unnuanced as I use them here, but the general truth of what I am pointing to is, I think, widely held. One reason for saying that a humanist who writes about Wordsworth, or an editor whose specialty is Keats, is not involved in anything political is that what he does seems to have

vno direct litical effect u on reality in the ever da sense. A scholar whose field is Soviet economics works in a highly charged area where there is much government interest, and what he might produce in the way of studies or proposals will be taken up by policymakers, government officials, institutional economists, in- telligence experts. The distinction between "humanists" and persons whose work has policy implications, or political significance., can be broadened further by saying that the former's ideological color is a matter of incidental importance to politics (although possibly of great moment to his colleagues in the field, who may object to his Stalinism or fascism or too easy liberalism), whereas the ideology of the latter is woven directly into his material-indeed, economics, politics. and sociology in the modern academy are ideological sciences-and therefore taken for granted as being "political" Nevertheless the determining impingement on most knowledge

10 ORIENTALISM

produced in the contemporary West (and here r speak mainly about the United States) is that it be onRolitical, that is, scholarly, academic, impartial, above partisan or small-minded doctrinal belief. One can have no quarrel with such an ambition in theory. perhaps, but in practice the reality is much more problematic. No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious

(

or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a member of a society. These continue to bear on what he does professionally, even though naturally enough his research and its fruits do attempt to reach a level of relative freedom from the inhibitions and the restrictions of brute, everyday reality. For there is such a thing as knowledge that is less, rather than more, partial than the individual (with his entangling and distracting life circumstances) who produces it. Yet this knowledge is not therefore automatically nonpolitical.

Whether discussions of literature or of classical philology are fraught with-or have unmediated-political significance is a very large question that I have tried to treat in some detail elsewhere. (; What r am interested in doing now is suggesting how the general liberal consensus that "true" knowledge is fundamentally non- political (and conversely, that overtly political knowledge is not "true" knowledge) obscures the highly if obscurely organized political circumstances obtaining when knowledge is produced. No one is helped in understanding this today when the adjective "political" is used as a label to discredit any work for daring to

/iolate the protocol of pretended suprapolitical objectivity. We may say, first, that civil society recognizes a gradation of political im- portance in -the various fields of knowledge. To some extent the political importance given a field comes from the possibility of its direct translation into economic terms; but to a greater extent political importance comes from the closeness of a field to ascertain- able sources of power in political society. Thus an economic study of long-term Soviet energy potential and its effect on military capability is likely to be commissioned by the Defense Department. and thereafter to acquire a kind of political status impossible for a study of Tolstoi's early fiction financed in part by a foundation. Yet both works belong in what civil society acknowledges to be a similar field, Russian studies, even though one work may be done by a very conservative economist, the other by a radical literary

Introduction 11

historian. My point here is that "Russia" as a general subject matter has political priority over nicer distinctions such as "economics" and "literary history," because political society in Gramsci's sense reaches into such realms of civil society as the academy and saturates them with significance of direct concern to it. I do not want to press all this any further on general theoretical

grounds: it seems to me that the value and credibility of my case can be demonstrated by being much more specific, in the way, for example, Noam Chomsky has studied the instrumental connection between the Vietnam War and the notion of objective scholarship as it was applied to cover state-sponsored military research." Now because Britain, France, and recently the United States are imperial powers, their political societies impart to their civil societies a sense of urgency, a direct political infusion as it were, where and when- ever matters pertaining to their imperial interests abroad are concerned. I doubt that it is controversial. for example, to say that an Englishman in India or Egypt in the later nineteenth century .took an interest in those countries that was never far from their

/ status in his mind as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is 'somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact-and yet that is what I am saying in this study/ f Orientalism. for if it is true that no production of krrowledge

in the huma ci c.es can eyer ignore or disclaim its author's involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances, then it must also betrue that for a uro ean menca" s u J2pg_the

nent there can be no disclaiming the main circumstances of his actua ity:rnal he comesup against the Ori~ gJ;ur.opean or ~can rst, as an mdividUal second .. And to be a European or an American in such a situation is by no means an inert fact. It meant and means being aware, however dimly, that one belongs to _ owe with definite interests in the Orient, and more important, that one belongs to a part of the earth with a definite history of in- volvement in the Orient almost since the time of Homer.

Put in this way, these political actualities are still too undefined and general to be really interesting. Anyone would agree to them without necessarily agreeing also that they mattered very much, for instance, to Flaubert as he wrote Salammbo, or to H. A. R. Gibb as he wrote Modern Trends in Islam. The trouble is that there is too great a distance between the big dominating fact, as I have de-

scribed it, and the details of everyday life that govern the mi ute ~ discipline of a novel or a scholarly text as each is being written.

Yet if we eliminate from the start any notion that "big" facts like ! imperial domination can be applied mechanically and deterministic-

+- ally to such complex matters as culture and ideas, then we will begin to approach an interesting kind of study. My idea is that European and then American interest in the Orient was political according to some of the obvious histo '~counts of it that I have given here, but that it was ltur that created that interest that acted d)'Aamisally along with brute P-Qlitical. eca-

rationales to make the Orient the varied and

12 ORIENT ALISM_

c~ =plicated place that it obviously was in the fiel I ~ Orientalism.

There ore, Oriental ism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institu- tions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious "Western" imperialist plot to hold down the "Oriental" world.~ rather a distribution of eo DUtica! awareness into aesthetic,

{ sc 0 aT economic sociolo kat historical, and philological texts; It is an elaboration not only of a basic geograp lea IS me IOn (the world is made u of two une ual halves Orient and O' t butd a so 0 a woe series of "interests" which, b such means asT scho at y IscQvery. 0 0 ica reconstruction 1 analysIs, andscape and sociological description, it not anI creates u a so mamtalO5.; 1 zs, ra er t an expresses, a certain will or

intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political <as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), p~ cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts. values).If power moral (as wlth ideas about what "we" do and what they" cannot do or understand as "we" do). Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is-and does not simply represent-a con- siderable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as

c:fSUCh has less to do with the O;.ot than it does with "our" world.

Introduction 13

Because Orientalism is a cultural and a political fact, then, it does not exist in some archival vacuum; quite the contrary, I think it can be shown that what is thought, said, or even done about the Orient follows (perhaps occurs within) certain distinct and in- tellectually knowable lines. Here too a considerable degree of nuance and elaboration can be seen working as between the broad superstructural pressures and the details of composition, the facts of textuality. Most humanistic scholars are, I think, perfectly happy with the notion t at texts exist in contexts; that there is such a thing as inrertextuality.. that the pressures of conventions, predecessors, and rhetorical styles limit what Walter Benjamin once called the "overtaxing of the productive person in the name of . . . the

.--::::~rinciple of 'creativity: " in which the poet is believed on his own, .:---(7and out of his pure mind, to have brought forth his work.' Yet

there is a reluctance to allow that political, institutional, and ideo- logical constraints act in the same manner on the individual author. A humanist will believe it to be an interesting fact to any interpreter of Balzac that he was influenced in the Comedie humaine by the conflict between Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier, but the same sort of pressure on Balzac of deeply reactionary monarchism is felt in some vague way to demean his literary "genius" and therefore to be less worth serious study. SimiJarly-as Harry Bracken has been tirelessly showing-philosophers will conduct their discussions of Locke, Hume, and empiricism without ever taking into account that there is an explicit connection in these classic writers between their "philosophic" doctrines and racial theory, justifications of slavery, or arguments for colonial exploita- tion." These are common enough ways by which contemporary scholarship keeps itself pure. .

Perhaps it is true that most attempts to rub culture's nose in the mud of politics have been crudely iconoclastic; perhaps also the social interpretation of literature in my own field has simply not kept up with the enormous technical advances in detailed ./ textual analysis. But there is no getting away from the fact that literary studies in general, and American Marxist theorists in

~articular,....have.-av"ided the effort a riously bridging the gap]

\ between !he superstru t nd e-base-Ie ·ll-lextua.l...lli>!wic~

--scholarship; on anot er occasion I have gone so far as to say that the literary-cultural establishment as a whole has declared the serious study of imperialism and culture off limits." For Orientalism brings one up directly against that question-that is, to realizing

('~~

f4 If \AM'-»»: '6RIENTALISMhat~Utical imperial:Jn _ooverns an entire fiel tudy, imagina-tion, n sc 0 ar y Institutions-in such a way as to make its~i avoidance an intellectual and historical impossibility. Yet there ~

.._ will always remain the perennial escape mechanism of saying that • a literary scholar and a philosopher, for example. are trained in

literature and philosophy respectively, not in politics or ideological / n analysis. 10 other words, the specialist argument can work qUit~ , r~ effectively to block the larger and, in my opinion, the more intel-~ f lectually serious perspective.

- Here it seems to me there is a simple two-part answer to be given, at least so far as the study of imperialism and culture (or Orientalism) is concerned. In the first place, nearly every nineteenth-century writer (and the same is true enough of writers in earlier periods) was extraordinarily well aware of the fact of empire: this is a subject not very well studied, but it will not take a modem Victorian specialist long to admit that liberal cultural heroes like John Stuart Mill, Arnold, Carlyle, Newman, Macaulay, Ruskin, George Eliot, and even Dickens had definite views on race and imperialism, which are quite easily to be found at work in their writing. So even a specialist must deal with the knowledge that Mill, for example, made it clear in On Liberty and Representa- tive Government that his views there could not be applied to India (he was an India Office functionary for a good deal of his life. after all) because the Indians were civilizationally, i t racially, inferior. The same kind of paradox is to be found i Marx, as I try to show in this book. In the second place, to believ at politics in the fonn -of imperialism bears upon the production of literature. scholarship. social theory, and history writing is by no means equivalent to saying that culture is therefore a demeaned 'or denigrated thing. Quite the contrary: my whole point is to say that we can better-understand the persistence and the durability of saturatin~egemonic systems-like-cultu e when we realize that their internal constraints upon writers and thinkers w re1JYoduct})e, not unilaterally inhibiting. It is this idea that Grarnscf certamly, and Foucault and Raymond Williams in their very different ways have been trying to illustrate. Even one or two pages by Williams on "the uses of the Empire" in The Long Revolution tell us more about nineteenth-century cultural richness than many volumes of hermetic textual analyses. to

Therefore I study Oriental ism as a dynamic exchange between

t b

Introduction 15

individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires-British, French, American-in whose in- tellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced. What interests me most as a scholar is not the gross political verity but the detail, as indeed what interests us in someone like Lane or Flaubert or Renan is not the (to him) indisputable truth that Occi- dentals are superior to Orientals, but the profoundly worked over and modulated evidence of his detailed work within the very wide space opened up by that truth. One need only remember that Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians is a classic of historical and anthropological observation because of its style, its enormously intelligent and brilliant details, not because of its simple reflection of racial superiority. to understand what I am saying here.

The kind of political questions raised by Orientalism, then, are as follows: What other sorts of intellectual, aesthetic, scholarly, and cultural energies went into the making of an imperialist tradi- tion like the Orientalist one? How did philology, lexicography, history. biology, political and economic theory, novel-writing, and lyric poetry come to the service of Orientalism's broadly imperialist view of the world? What changes, modulations, refinements, even revolutions take place within Orientalism? What is the meaning of originality, of continuity, of individuality, in this context? How does Orientalism transmit or reproduce itself from one epoch to another? In fine, how can we treat the cultural, historical phenom- enon of Oriental ism as a kind of willed human work-not of mere unconditioned ratiocination-in all its historical complexity, detail, and worth without at the same time losing sight of the alliance be- tween cultural work, political tendencies, the state, and the specific realities of domination? Governed by such concerns a humanistic study can responsibly address itself to politics and culture. But this is not to say that such a study establishes a hard-and-fast rule about the relationship between knowledge and politics. My argument is that each humanistic investigation must formulate the nature of that connection in the specific context of the study, the subject matter, and its historical circumstances. 2. The methodological question. In a previous book I gave a

good deal of thought and analysis to the methodological importance for work in the human sciences of finding and formulating a first step. a point of departure, a beginning principle.'! A major lesson

16 ORlENTALISM

I learned and tried to present was that there is no su in as a merely given, or simply available, starting point be innin s ~e to be made lor eaeh project in sueh a way as t """;,n lollows r ow ere 10 m erienee has the aiffieulty 0 this

lesson been more consciously lived (with what success--or failure -1 eannot really say) than in this study 01 Oriental ism. The idea of beginning, indeed the act of beginning, necessarily involves an act of delimitation by which something is cut out 01 a great mass of material, separated from the mass, and made to stand for, as well as be, a starting point, a beginning; lor the student 01 texts one such notion of inaugural delimitation is Louis Althusser's idea of the problematic, a specific determinate unity of a text, or group of texts, which is something given rise to by analysis." Vet in the case of Orientalisrn (as opposed to the case of Marx's texts, which is what Althusser studies) there is not simply the problem 01 finding a point 01 departure, or problematic, but also the question 01 designating which texts, authors, and periods are the ones best suited for study.

It has seemed to me foolish to attempt an encyclopedic narrative history 01 Orientalism, first 01 all because if my guiding principle was to be "the European idea of the Orient" there would be Virtually no limit to the material 1 would have had to deal with; second, because the narrative model itself did not suit my descrip- tive and political interests; third, because in such books as Raymond Schwab's La Renaissance orientale, Johann Flick's Die Arabischen Studten in Europa bis in den Anfang des 20. l ahrhunderts, and more recently, Dorothee Metlitzki's The Matter of A raby in Medieval England'? there already exist encyclopedic works on cer- tain aspects of the European-Oriental encounter such as make the critic's job, in the general political and intellectual context 1 sketched above, a different one. There still remained the problem 01 cutting down a very fat

., archive to manageable dimensions, and more important, outlining something in the nature of an intellectual order within that group of texts without at the same time following a mindlessly chrono- logical order. My starting point therefore has been the British, French, and American experience of the Orient taken as a unit, what made that experience possible by way 01 historical and intel- lectual background, what the quality and character of the ex- perience has been. For reasons I shall discuss presently I limited that already limited (but still inordinately large) set 01 questions to

t .....,.

Introduction 17

the Anglo-French-American experience of the Arabs and Islam, which for almost a thousand years together stood for the Orient. Immediately upon doing that, a large part of the Orient seemed to have been eliminated-India, Japan, China, and other sections of the Far East-not because these regions were not important (they obviously have been) but because one could discuss Europe'S experience of the Near Orient, or of Islam, apart from its ex- perience of the Far Orient. Yet at certain moments of that general European history of interest in the East, particular parts of the Orient like Egypt, Syria, and Arabia cannot be discussed without also studying Europe's involvement in the more distant parts, of which Persia and India are the most important; a notable case in point is the connection between Egypt and India so far as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain was concerned. Similarly the French role in deciphering the Zend-Avesta, the pre-eminence of Paris as a center of Sanskrit studies during the first decade of the nineteenth century, the fact that Napoleon's interest in the Orient was contingent upon his sense of the British role in India: all these Far Eastern interests directly influenced French interest in the Near East, Islam, and the Arabs.

Britain and France dominated the Eastern Mediterranean from about the end of the seventeenth century on. Yet my discussion of that domination and systematic interest does not do justice to (a) the important contributions to Orientalism of Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain, and Portugal and (b) the fact that one of the im- portant impulses toward the study of the Orient in the eighteenth

___ century was the revolution in Biblical studies stimulated by such variously interesting pioneers as Bishop Lowth, Eichhorn, Herder, and Michaelis. In the first place, I had to focus rigorously upon the British-French and later the American material because it seemed inescapably true not only that Britain and France were the pioneer nations in the Orient and in Oriental studies, but that these vanguard positions were held by virtue of the two greatest colonial networks in pre-twentieth-century histor . t American Oriental / ' position since World War II has fit-I think, quite self-consciously -in the places excavated by the two earlier European powers. Then too, I believe that the sheer quality, consistency, and mass of British, French, and American writing on the Orient lifts it above the doubtless crucial work done in Germany, Italy, Russia. and elsewhere, But I think it is also true that the major steps in

~~holarship\ were first taken in either Britain and France. J

18 ORIENTALlSM

then elaborated upon by Germans. Silvestre de Sacy, for example, was nOI only the first modem and institutional European Orientalist, who worked On Islam, Arabic literature, the Druze religion, and Sa sanid Persia; he was also the teacher of Champollion and 01 Franz Bopp, the founder of German comparative linguistics. A similar claim of priority and subsequent pre-eminence can be mad, for William Jones and Edward William Lane.

In the second place-and here the failings of my study of Oriental ism are amply made up for-there has been some important recent work on the background in Biblica' scholarship to the rise of what I have called modem Orientalism. The best and the most illuminatingly relevant is E. S. Shaffer's impressive "Kubla Khan" and The Fall of Jerusalem," an indispensable study of the origins ,<If Romanticism, and of the intelleclual activity underpinning a l great deal of what goes on in Coleridge, Browning, and George Eliot. To some degree Shaffer's work refines upon the outlines pro- vided in Schwab, by articulating the material of relevance to be • found in the German Biblical scholars and using that material 10 read, in an intelligent and always interesting way, the work of three major British writers. Yet what is missing in the book is some sense of the polilical as well as ideological edge given the Oriental material by the British and French writers I am principally con- cerned with; in addition, unlike Shaffer I attempt to elucidate subsequent developments in academic as well as literary OrientaIism that bear On the connection between British and French Orientalism on the one hand and the rise of an explicitly colonial-minded im- penallsm On the other. Then too, I wish to show how all these earher matters are reproduced more or Jess in American Oriental ism after the Second World War.

Nevertheless there is a possibly misleading aspect to my study, where, aside from an occasional reference, I do not exhaustively discuss the Gennan developments after the inaugural period domi- nated b w that seeks to provide an understanding academic Orientalis and pays little attention to scholars like

, u er, ecker, Goldziher. Brockelmann, N6ldeke-to mention onryanandful needs to e reproac ed, and freely re- proach myself. I particUlarly regret not taking more account of the great scientific prestige that accrued to German scholarship by the middle of the nineteenth century, whose neglect was made into a denunciation of insular British scholars by George Eliot. ] have 10 mind Eliot's unforgettable portrait of Mr. Casaubon in Middle-

Introduction

march ..One reason Casaubon cannot finish his Key to All Mythol- ogies is, according to his young cousin Will Ladislaw, that he is unacquainted with German scholarship. For not only has Casaubon chosen a subject "as changing as chemistry: new discoveries are constantly making new points of view": he is undertaking a job similar to a refutation of Paracelsus because "he is not an Orientalist, you know.':" Eliot was not wrong in implying that by about 1830, which is

when Middlemarch is set, German scholarship had fully attained its European pre-eminence. Yet at no time in German scholarship during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century could a close partnership have developed between Orientalists and a protracted, sustained national interest in the Orient. There was nothing in Germany to correspond to the Anglo-French presence in India, the l-evant, North Africa. Moreover, the German On nt was almost

~' exclusively netio ar y-J r at lea assiealj-Osie it was made the SUbject of lY.Jics,fan~sies, and eve~ls, but it was never actual, the way Egypt and Syria were actual for Chateaubriand, Lane, Lamartine. Burton, Disraeli, or Nerval. There is some signifi- cance in the fact that the two most renowned German works on the Orient, Goethe's Westostlicher Diwan and Friedrich Schlegel's Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der lndier, were based respectively~ on a Rhine journey and on hours spent in Paris libraries. What German Oriental scholarship did was to refine and elaborate tech- niques whose application was to texts, myths, ideas, and languages almost literally gathered from the Orient by imperial Britain and France.

Yet what German Orientalism had in common with Anglo-

~

Ereneh nd later American Orientalism was a kind of intellectual authorit ver the Orient within Western culture. This authority mus . large part e e su -jecnlf any escription of Orientalism, and it is so in this study. Even the name Orientalism suggests a serious, perhaps ponderous style of expertise; when 1 apply it to modern American social scientists (since they do not call them- selves Orienta lists, my use of the word is anomalous), it is to draw attention to the way Middle East experts can still draw on the vestiges of Orientalism's intellectual position in nineteenth-century Europe.

There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually

7

19

r ')

20

, •.J',

ORIENTALISM

' •• I indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from . try.ditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits. repro-

\Auces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed. All these attributes of authority apply to Oriental ism, and much of what I do in this study is to describe both the historical authority in and the personal authorities of Orientalism.

My principal methodological devices for studying authority here are what can be called strategic location, which is a way of describ- ing the author's position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he writes about, and strategic formation, which is a way of analyzing the relationship between texts and the way in which groups of texts, types of texts, even textual genres, acquire mass, density. and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large. I use the notion of strategy simply to identify

~he problem every writer on the Orient has faced: how to get hold J:lf it, how to approach it, how not to be defeated or overwhelmed My its sublimity. its scope, its awful dimensions. Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself vis-a.-vis the Orient; translated into his text, this location includes the kmd of narrative. - ---=--, voice he ad0l'.ts, the type of structure e OlIOs,t ieKinds of Images,

J J ,iliemes, motifsthaTCircu a e IO fiis textc-a11-of-which-add up::to " "',~ deliberate ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient,

an nriall, re resentin j 6'FS"eaking in its behalf, NoneofThis takes place in the abstract, however. 'Every wrtter on the Orient (and this is true even of Horner) assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and on which he relies. Additionally, each work on the Orient affiliates itself with other works, with audiences, with institutions, with the Orient itself. The ensemble of relationships between works, audiences, and some particular aspects of the Orient therefore constitutes an analyzable formation-for example, that of philo- logical studies, of anthologies of extracts from Oriental literature, of travel books, of Oriental fantasies-whose presence in time, in discourse, in institutions (schools, libraries, foreign services) gives it strength and authority. It is clear, I hope, that my concern with authority does not

entail analysis of what lies hidden in the Orientalist text, but • i ~ analysis rather of the text's surface, its exteriority to what it de-r soribes. I do not think that this idea can be overemphasized.

Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that J the Orienta list, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes

Introduction

the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West. He is never concerned with the Orient except as the first cause of what he says. What he says and writes, by virtue of the fact that it is said or written, is meant to indicate that the Orienta list is outside the Orient, both as an existential and as a moral fact. The principal product of this exteriority is of course representation: as early as Aeschylus's play The Persians the Orient is transformed from a very far distant and often threatening Otherness into figures that are relatively familiar (in Aeschylus's case. grieving Asiatic women). The dramatic immediacy of representation in The Persians obscures the fact that the audience is watching a highly artificial enactment of what a non-Oriental has made into a symbol for the whole Orient. My analysis of the Orienta list text therefore places emphasis on the e idenc ich is by no means invisible, for such representa- ~s representation not as "natural" depictions of the Orient. This evmence is found just as prominently in the so-called truthful text (histories, philological analyses, political treatises) as in the avowedly artistic (i.e., openly imaginative) text. The things to look at are~tyle figures of speech. setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some great original. The exteriority of the repre- sentation is always governed by some version of the truism that if the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and [aute de mieux, for the poor Orient. "Sie konnen sich nieht vertreten, sie mUssen vertreten werden," as Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

Another reason for insisting upon exteriority is that I believe it needs to be made clear about cultural discourse and exchange within a culture that what is commonly circulated by it is not

""truth" but representations. It hardly needs to be demonstrated again that language itself is a highly organized and encoded system, which employs many devices to express, indicate, exchange messages and information, represent, and so forth. In any instance of at least written language, there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or a representation. The value, efficacy, strength, apparent veracity of a written statement about the Orient

\ therefore relies very little, and cannot instrumentally depend, on < J • .......the Orient as such. On the contrary, the written statement is a presence to the reader by virtue of its having excluded, displaced, made supererogatory any such real thing as "the Orient." Thus all

21

22 ORIENT ALlSM

of Orientalism stands forth and away from the Orient: that Oriental ism makes sense at all depends more on the West than on the Orient, and this sense is directly' indebted to various Western techniques of representation that make the Orient visible, clear, "there" in discourse about it. And these representations rely upon institutions, traditions, conventions, agreed~upon codes of under- standing for their effects, not upon a distant and amorphous Orient.

The difference between representations of the Orient before the last third of the eighteenth century and those after it (that is, those belonging to what T call modern Oriental ism) is that the range of representation expanded enormously in the later period. It is true that after William Jones and Anquetil-buperron, and after Napoleon's Egyptian expedition, Europe came to know the Orient more scientifically, to live in it with greater authority and discipline than ever before. But what mattered to Europe was the expanded scope and the much greater refinement given its techniques for

/receiving the Orient. When around the tum of the eighteenth century the Orient definitively revealed the age of its languages- thus outdating Hebrew's divine pedigree-it was a group of Euro- peans who made the discovery, passed it 00 to other scholars, and preserved the discovery in the new science of lodo-European philology. A new powerful science for viewing the linguistic Orient was born, and with it, as Foucault has shown in The Order of Things, a whole web of related scientific interests. Similarly William Beckford, Byron, Goethe, and Hugo restructured the Orient by their art and made its colors, lights, and people visible through their images, rhythms, and motifs. At most. the "real" Orient provoked a writer to his vision; it very rarely guided it. Orientalism responded more to the culture that produced it than

to -its putative q!>ject,which was also produced by the West. Thus the history of Oricntalisrn has both an internal consistency and a highly articulated set of relationships to the dominant culture sur- rounding it. My analyses consequently try to show the field's shape and internal organization, its pioneers, patriarchal authorities, canonical texts, doxological ideas, exemplary figures, its followers, elaborators, and new authorities; I try also to explain how Oriental- ism borrowed and was frequently informed by "strong" ideas, doctrines, and trends ruling the culture. Thus there was (and is) a linguistic vOrient, a Freudian Orient, a Spenglerian Orient, a Darwinian Orient, a racist Orient-and so on. Yet never has there

Introduction 23

been such a thing as a pure. or unconditional, Orient; similarly, never has there been a nonmaterial form of Orientalisrn, much less something so innocent as an "idea" of the Orient. In this underlying conviction and in its ensuing methodological consequences do I differ from scholars who study the history of ideas. For the emphases and the executive form, above all the material effectiveness, of statements made by Orientalist discourse are possible in ways that any hermetic history of ideas tends completely to scant. Without those emphases and that material effectiveness Orientalism would be just another idea, whereas it is and was much more than that. Therefore I set out to examine not only scholarly works but also works of literature, political tracts, journalistic texts, travel bOOkS,/ religious and philological studies. J;.wl.th~wQFd .~)0l~"id...per. sRective is broadly' histor" a and \':anthmp.aJogi<;.al, given that I believe all texts to be worldly and circumstantial in (of course) ways that vary from genre to genre, and from historical period to historical period.

Yet unlike Michel Foucault, to whose work I am greatly in- debted, I do believe in the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism. The unity of the large ensemble of texts I analyze is due in part to the fact that they frequently refer to each other: Orientalism is after all a system.1or citing works and authors. Edward William Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians was read and cited by such diverse figures as Nerval, Flaubert, and Richard Burton. He was an authority whose use was an imperative for anyone writing or think- ing about the Orient, not just about Egypt: when Nerval borrows passages verbatim from Modern Egyptians it is to use Lane's authority to assist him in describing village scenes in Syria, not Egypt. Lane's authority and the opportunities provided for citing him discriminately as well as indiscriminately were there because o-" Orientalism could give his text the kind of istributive currenc that he acquired. There is no way, however. of understanding Lane's currency without also understanding the peculiar features of his text; this is equally true of Renan, Sacy, Lamartine, Schlegel, and a group of other influential writers. Foucault believes that in general the individual text or author counts for very little; empirically, in the case of Oriental ism (and perhaps nowhere else) I find this not to be so. Accordingly my analyses employ close textual readings

l

24 ORIENTALISM

whose goal is to reveal the dialectic between individual text or writer and the complex collective formation to which his work is a

contribution. Yet even though it includes an ample selection of writers, this

book is still far from a complete history or general account of Orientalism. Of this failing I am very conscious. The fabric of as thick a discourse as Orientalism has survived and functioned in Western society because of its richness: all I have done is to describe 7parts of that fabric at certain moments, and merely to suggest the Iexistence of a larger whole, detailed, interesting, dotted with fascinating figures, texts, and events. I have consoled myself with believing that this book is one installment of several, and hope there are scholars and critics who might want to write others. There is still a general essay to be written on imperialism and culture; other studies would go more deeply into the connection between Orientalism and pedagogy, or into Italian, Dutch, German, and Swiss Orientalism, or into the dynamic between scholarship and imaginative writing. or into the relationship between administrative ideas and intellectual discipline. Perhaps the most important task of all would be to undertake studies in contemporary alternatives to Orientalisrn, to ask how one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a nonrepressive and nonmanipulative, per- spective. But then one would have to rethink the whole complex problem of knowledge and power. These are all tasks left em- barrassingly incomplete in this study.

The last, perhaps self-flattering, observation on method that I want to make here is that I have written this study with several audiences in mind. For students of literature and criticism, Oriental- ism offers a marvelous instance of the interrelations between society, history, and textuality; moreover, the cultural role played by the Orient in the West connects Orientalism with ideology, politics, and the logic of power, matters of relevance. I think, to the literary com- munity. For contemporary students of the Orient, from university scholars to policymakers, I have written with two ends in mind: one, to present their intellectual genealogy to them in a way that bas not been done; two, to criticize--with the hope of stirring dis- cussion-the often unquestioned assumptions on which their work for the most part depends. For the general reader, this study deals with matters that always compel attention, all of them connected not only with Western conceptions and treatments of the Other but also with the singularly important role played by Western culture

Introduction 25

in what Vico called the world of nations. Lastly, for readers in the so-called Third World, this study proposes itself as a step towards an understanding not so much of Western polities and of the non- Western world in those politics as of the strength of Western cultural discourse, a strength too often mistaken as merely decora- tive or "superstructural." My hope is to illustrate the formidable structure of cultural domination and, specifically for formerly colonized peoples, the dangers and temptations of employing this structure upon themselves or upon others. The three long chapters and twelve shorter units into which this

book is divided are intended to facilitate exposition as much as possihle. Chapter One, "The Scope of Oriental ism,". draws a large circle around all the dimensions of the subject, both in terms of historical time and experiences and in terms of philosophical and political themes. Chapter Two, "Orientalist Structures and Re- structures," attempts to trace the development of modern Oriental- ism by a broadly chronological description, and also by the description of a set of devices common to the work of important poets, artists, and scholars. Chapter Three, "Orientalism Now:' begins where its predecessor left off, at around 1870. This is the period of great colonial expansion into the Orient, and it cul- minates in World War II. The very last section of Chapter Three characterizes the shift from British and French to American hegemony; I attempt there finally to sketch the present intellectual and social realities of Oriental ism in the United States.

3. The personal dimension. In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci """'-says:"The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory." The only available English ranslation inexplicably leaves Gramsci's comment at that, whereas in fact Gramsci's Italian text concludes by adding. "therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory. "111

Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my awareness of being an "Oriental" as a child growing up in two British colonies. All of my education, in those colonies (Palestine and Egypt) and in the United States, has been Western, and yet that deep early awareness has persisted. In many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals. This is why for me the

26

J lamic Orienl h h d t be Ihe center of allention. Whelher I have aehieved i the invenlory prescribed by Gramsci is ?'" me 10 jUdge, although I have felt it importanl 10 be COnse'OUIri trying 10 produee ne. Along the way, as everely and as ,:,'" as I have been able, I have tried to maintain a critical consci as well as empl ying Ih e inSlrument of hisrcncal, hum . and eultural research of which my educalion has made me lk fortunale beneficiary. In none of that, however, have I ever loll hold of the cultural rea lily of, the personal involvemenl in h'\lll~been constituted as, "no Orienral."

The hislorieal circumslances making such a study possible are fairly Complex, and I can Only lisllhem schematically here. Anyonr resident in the West since the 1950s, partiCUlarly in the UIlJled Slates, will have lived through an era of extraordinary turbulence in the relations of East and West, No one will have failed to noe how "East" has always signified danger and threat during !his

./ period, even as it has mean I the traditional Orient as well as Russia. In the universities a grOWing establishment of area-studies programs and inSlilutes has made the scholarly Sludy of the Orient a branch of national policy. Public affairs in this country include. healthy interest in the Orient, as much for its strategic and econormc Importance as for its traditional exolicism. If the world has become immediately accessible to a Western citizen living in the electronic age, the Orient too has drawn nearer to him, and is now less a myth perhaps than a place crisscrossed by Western, especially American,mterests.

One aspect of the electronic, pOSlmodern world is that there has been a remforcement of the stereotypes by which the Orient IS v,eWed.Te!l!v'S1on,the hims, and ail tfie media's resources have forced information into more and more standardized molds. So far·~O . 'g

. nentlS concerned, standardization and cultural stereot In havemlensifled the hold of the nineteenth-century academic and unag'native demOnology of "the mysterious Orient." This is nowhere ;ore true than in Ihe ways by Which the Near East is grasped . .hree things have COntributed to making even the simplest percep-

han of the Arabs and Islam imo a highIY'politidzed. almost raucousmatter- on h . . . J I . .: e, I e hIStory of popUlar anti-Arab and ann- s annepreJud,cein the W .... . h history

of 0 . est, whIch IS Jmmedlately reflected 10 telZ · nentalism; two, the struggle between the Arabs and Israeli,onlSm and' I ff b h

lhe Iibe' , s e ects upon American Jews as well as upon at ral Culture and the popUlation at large; three, the almost

ORI NTALISM

Introduction 27

total absence of any cultural position making it possible either to identify with or dispassionately to discuss the Arabs or Islam. Furthermore, it hardly needs saying that because the Middle East is pow so identified with Great Power politics, oil economics, and the simple-minded dichotomy of freedom-loving, democratic Israel and evil, totalitarian, and terroristic Arabs, the chances of anything like a clear view of what one talks about in talking about the Near East are depressingly small.

My own experiences of these matters are in part what made me write this book. The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is disheartening. There exists here an almost unanimous consensus that politically he does not exist, and /" when it is allowed that he does, it is either as a nuisance or as an Oriental. The web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political im- perialism, dehumanizing ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and it is this web which every Palestinian has come to feel as his uniquely punishing destiny. It has made matters worse for him to remark that no person academic- ally involved with the Near East-no Orientalist, that is-has ever in the United States culturally and politically identified himself wholeheartedly with the Arabs; certainly there have been identi- fications on some level, but they have never taken an "acceptable" fonn as has liberal American identification with Zionism, and all too frequently they have been radically flawed by their association either with discredited political and economic interests (oil- company and State Department Arabists, for example) or with religion.

The nexus of knowledge and power creating "the Oriental" and in a sense obliterating him as a human being is therefore not for me an exclusively academic matter. Yet it is an intellectual matter of some very obvious importance. I have been able to put to use my humanistic and political concerns for the analysis and description of a very worldly matter, the rise, development, and consolidation of Orientalism. Too often literature and culture are presumed to be politically, even historically innocent; it has regularly seemed otherwise to me, and certainly my study of Orientalism has con- vinced me (and I hope will convince my literary colleagues) that society and literary culture can only be understood and studied together. In addition, and by an almost inescapable logic, I have

~ found myself writing the history of a strange, secret sharer of ~ Western anti-Semitism. That anti-Semitism and, as I have discussed

28 ORlENTALISM

it in its Islamic branch, Orientalism resemble each other very closely is a historical, cultural, and political trutb that needs only to be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly understood But what I should like also to have contributed here is a better underlitanding of the way cultural domination has operated. If this stimulates a new kind of dealing with the Orient, indeed if it eliminates the "Orient" and "Occident" altogether, then we shall have advanced a little in tbe process of what Raymond Williams has called the "unlearning" of "the inherent dominative mode.'?"

c

I Redrawn Frontiers, Redefined Issues, Secularized Religion

Gustave Flaubert died in 1880 without having finished Bouvard et Pecuchet, his comic encyclopedic novel on the degeneration of knowledge and the inanity of human effort. Nevertheless the essen- tial outlines of his vision are clear, and are clearly supported by the ample detail of his novel. The two clerks are members of the bourgeoisie who, because one of them is the unexpected beneficiary of a handsome will, retire from the city to spend their lives on a country estate doing what they please ("nous ferons tout ce que nous plaira!"). As Flaubert portrays their experience, doing as they please involves Bouvard and Pecuchet in a practical and theoretical jaunt through agriculture, history, chemistry. education, archaeol- ogy. literature, always with less than successful results; they move through fields of learning like travelers in time and knowledge, experiencing the disappointments, disasters, and letdowns of unin- spired amateurs. What they move through, in fact, is tile whole disillusioning ex erience of the nineteenth century. whereby-in Charles Moraze's phrase-s-vles bourgeois conquerants" turn out to be the bumbling victims of their own leveling incompetence and mediocrity. Every enthusiasm resolves itself into a boring cliche, and every discipline or type of knowledge changes from hope and power into disorder, ruin, and sorrow. Among Flaubert's sketches for the conclusion of this panorama

of despair are two items of special interest to us here. The two men debate the future of mankind. Pecuchet sees "the future of Humanity through a glass darkly," whereas Bouvard sees it "brightly!"

Modern man is progressing, Europe will be regenerated by Asia. The historical law that civilization moves from Orient to Occident ... the two forms of humanity will at last be soldered together.'

This obvious echo of Quinet represents the start of still another of the cycles of enthusiasm and disillusionment through which the two men will pass. Flaubert's notes indicate that like all his others,

113

114 ORIENTALISM

this anticipated project of Bouvard's is rudely interrupted by reality-this time by the sudden appearance of gendarmes who accuse him of debauchery. A few lines later, however, the second item of interest turns up. The two men simultaneously confess to each other that their secret desire is once again to become copyists. They have a double desk made for them, they buy bnoks, pencils, erasers, and-as Flaubert concludes the sketch- "ils s'y mettent": they turn to. From trying to live through and apply knowledge more or less directly, Bouvard and Pecuchet are reduced finally to tran- scribing it uncritically from one text to another.

Although Bouvard's vision of Europe regenerated by Asia is not fully spelled out, it (and what it comes to on the copyist's desk) can be glossed in several important ways. Like many of the two men's other visions, this one is global and it is reconstructive; it represents what Flaubert felt to be the nineteenth-century predilection for the rebuilding of the world according to an imaginative vision, some- times accompanied by a special scientific technique. Among the visions Flaubert has in mind are the utopias of Saint-Simon and Fourier, the scientific regenerations of mankind envisioned by Cornte, and all the technical or secular religions promoted by ideologues, positivists, eclectics, occultists, traditionalists, a~d idealists such as Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, Michelet, Cousin, Proudhon, Cournot, Cabet, Janet, and Lamennais.' Throughout the nove) Bouvard and Pecuchet espouse the various causes of such figures; then, having ruined them, they move on looking for newer ones, but with no better results.

The roots of such revisionist ambitions as these are Romantic in a very specific way. W; must remember the extent to which a major part of the spiritual and intellectual project of the late eighteenth century was a reconstituted theology-natural supern~- turalism, as M. H. Abrams has called it; this type of thought IS carried forward by the typical nineteenth-century attitudes Flaubert satirizes in Bouvard et Pecuchet, The notion of regeneration there- fore harks back to

a conspicuous Romantic tendency, after the rationalism and decorum of the Enlightenment ... [to revert] to the stark drama and supra rational mysteries of the Christian story and doctrines and to the violent conflicts and abrupt reversals of the Christian inner life, turning on the extremes of destruction and creation, hell and heaven, exile and reunion, death and rebirth, dejection and joy, paradise lost and paradise regained .... But since they

\

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 115

lived, inescapably, after the Enlightenment, Romantic writers revived these ancient matters with a difference: they undertook to save the overview of human history and destiny, the existential paradigms, and the cardinal values of their religious heritage, by reconstituting them in a way that would make them intellectually acceptable, as well as emotionally pertinent, for the time being."

What Bouvard has in mind-the regeneration of Europe by Asia"/ -was a very influential Romantic idea. Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, for example, urged upon their countrymen, and upon Europeans in general, a detailed study of India because, they said, it was Indian culture and religion that could defeat the materialism and mechanism (and republicanism) .of Occidental culture: And / from this defeat would anse a new, revitalized Europe: the Biblical imagery of death, rebirth, and redemption is evident in this pre- scription. Moreover, the Romantic Orientalist project was not merely a specific instance of a general tendency; it was a powerful shaper of the tendency itself, as Raymond Schwab has so con- vincingly argued in La Renaissance orientale. But what mattered was not Asia so much as Asia's use to modern Europe. Thus anyone who, like Schlegel or Franz Bopp, mastered an Oriental language was a spiritual hero, a knight-errant bringing back to Europe a sense of the holy mission it had now lost. It is precisely this sense that the later secular religions portrayed by Flaubert carry on in the nineteenth century. No less than Schlegel, Wordsworth, and Chateau briand, Auguste Comte-like Bouvard-was the adherent and proponent of a secular post-Enlightenment myth whose out- lines are unmistakably Christian.

In regularly allowing Bouvard and Pecuchet to go through revi- sionist notions from start to comically debased finish, Flaubert drew attention to the human flaw-oo~to alI projects. He saw perfectly welI that underneath the idee re,uel"Europe-regenerated-by-Asia" lurked a ve.ry insidious .~u .~.either~rope" no: "Asia" was anything WIthout the 'VISIOnarieStechOlgue. for turnt~~vast geo- graphical domains into treatable, and~a eable, enlit Atbot- tom, therefore, Europe and Asia wer our urope an our sla- our will and representation, as Schopen auer had said. istorical laws were in reality historians' laws, just as "the two forms of humanity" drew attention less to actuality than to a European capac-

"ity for lending an-made distinctions an air of inevitability. As for the other half of t e p rase-"will at last be so ered together"- there Flaubert mocked the blithe indifference of science to actuality,

116 ORIENTALlSM

a science which anatomized and melted human entities as if they were so much inert matter. But it was not just any science he mocked: it was enthusiastic, event messianic European science, whose victories included failed revoluTIons,wars, oppression, and an unteachable appetite for putting grand, bookish ideas quixotically to work immediately. What such science or knowledge never reckoned with was its own deeply ingrained and unself-conscious bad innocence - ' and the resistance to it of reality. When Bouvard plays the scientist he naively assumes that science merely is, that reality is as the scientist says it is, that it does not matter whether the scientist is a fool or a visionary; he (or anyone who thinks like him) cannot see that the Orient may not wish to regenerate Europe. or that Europe was not about to fuse itself democratically with yellow or brown Asians. In short, such a scientist does not recognize in his science the egoistic will to power that feeds his endeavors and corrupts his

ambitions. Flaubert, of course, sees to it that his poor fools are made to

rub their Doses in these difficulties. Bouvard and pecuchet have learned that it is better not to traffic in ideas and in reality together. The novel's conclusion is a picture of the two of them now perfectly content to copy their favorite ideas faithfully from book onto paper. Knowledge no longer requires application to reality; knowledge is what gets passed on silently, without comment, from one text to another. Ideas are propagated and disse~ated anonymously, they are repeated without attribution; tbey have literally become idees recues: what matters is that they are there, to be repeated, echoed, and re-echoed uncritically.

In a highly compressed form this brief episode, taken our of Flaubert's notes for Bouvard ef Ncuchef, frames the specifically modern structures of Orientalism, which after all is one discipline among the secular (and quasi-religious) faiths of nineteenth-century European thought. We have already characterized the general scope of thought about the Orient that was handed on through tbe medieval and Renaissance periods, for which Islam was the essential Orient. During the eighteenth century, however, there were a number of new, interlocking elements that hinted at the com- ing evangelical phase, whose outlines Flaubert was later to re-create.

For one, the Orient was being opened out considerably beyond the Islamic lands. This quantitative change was to a large degree the result of continuing, and expanding, European exploration of

OrientalistStructuresandRestructures 117

the rest of the world. The increasing influence of <gavel literatu~::> imaginary utopias. mora] ynyages and scientific rep~ht the Onent into sharper and more extended focus. If Oriental ism is indebted principally to the fruitful Eastern discoveries of Anquetil and Jones during the latter third of the century, these must be seen in the wider context created by Cook and Bougainville, the voyages of Tournefort and Adanson, by the President de Brosses's Hlstoire des navigations aux terres australes, by French traders in the Pacific, by Jesui missionaries in China and the Americas, by William Dampier's explorations and reports, by innumerable speculations on giants, Patagonians, savages, natives, and monsters supposedly residing to the far east, west, south, and north of Europe. But all such widening horizons had Europe firmly in the privileged center, as main observer (or mainly ooserved, as ill GoldsmIth's Citizen of the World). For even as Europe moved itself outwards, its sense

.j,f cultural strength was fortified. From travelers' tales, and not only from great institutions like the various India companies, colonies were created and ethnocentric perspectives secured.~ For another, a more knowledgeable attitude towards the alien

and exotic was abetted not only by travelers and explorers but also by historians for whom European experience could profitably be compared with other, as well as older, civilizations. That powerful current in eighteenth-century historical anthropology, described by scholars as the confrontation of the gods, meant that Gibbon could read the lessons of Rome's decline in the rise of Islam, just as Vico could understand modern civilization in terms of the barbaric, poetic splendor of their earliest beginnings. Whereas Renaissance historians judged the Orient inflexibly as an enemy, those of the eighteenth century confronted the Orient's peculiarities with some detachment and with some attempt at dealing directly with Oriental source material, perhaps because such a technique helped a Euro- pean to know himself better. George Sale's translation of the Koran and his accompanying preliminary discourse illustrate the change. Unlike his predecessors, Sale tried to deal with Arab history in terms of Arab sources; moreover, he let Muslim commentators on the sacred text speak for themselves.' In Sale, as throughout the eighteenth century, simple comparatism was the early phase of the cnmparative disciplines (philology, anatomy, jurisprudence, re- / ligion) which were to become the boast of nineteenth-century method.

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But there was a tendency among some thinkers to exceed corn- parative study, and its judicious surveys of mankind from "China to Peru," by sympathetic identification. This is a third eighteenth. century 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 h~to~~m~athY. Thus Herder's Ideen zu' Philosophie de' Gese rc e de' ensehheit (1784-1791) was a panoramic display of various cultures, each permeated by an inimical creative spirit, ea ible only to an observer who

'1 sacrificed his prejudices t Einfiihlung Imbued with the populist and pluralist sense of history advocated by Herder and others," 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 "Turk-

_ ish"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 IDeae. Popular Oriental ism 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 of 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 late- eighteenth-century paintings.' Later in the nineteenth century. in the works of Delacroix and literally dozens of other French and British painters, the Oriental genre t~u carried ,representation into visual expression ana a life of its own (which tniSlioo' un- for una emus scan . ensua lty, promise, terror, sublimity. idyllic pleasure, intense eoergy: the Orient as a figure in the pre·

OrientalistStructuresandRestructures 119

Romantic, pretechnicaI Orientalist imagination of late-eighteenth- century Europe was really a chameleonlike quality called (adjec- tivally) "Oriental." 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, intel- lectual, 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. Lin- naeus 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 chara~ which ro· .h_b~with a designation and, as Foucault say a controlled derivation-s'<Tbese , types and characters belonged to a sys em, a network of related generalizations. Thus,

all designation must be accomplished by means of a certain rela- tion to all other possible designations. To know what properly'Iappertains to one individual is to have before one the classifica-

I tion-or the possibility of classifying-all others." In the writing of philosophers, historians, encyclopedists, and

essayists we find character-as-designation appearing as physiological- moral 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 Soemrnerring, 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."'" But such designations gather power when, later in the nineteenth century, they are allied with character as derivation, as genetic type. In Vieo and Rousseau, for example, the force of moral generalization is enhanced by the precision with which dramatic, almost archetypal ~ures-primitive man, giants, heroes-are shown to be tne genesis of current moral, philosophic,

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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 con- frontation, sympathy, classification-are the currents in eighteenth- century 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

~

be Christian West. In other words, modem Orientalism deri~~ rom secularizing elements in-eighteenth-century European cultu~ Ofie, the expansIOn of the Onent further east geographically and further back temporally loosened, even dissolved, the Biblical framework considerably. Reference points were no longer Christian- ity and Judaism, with their fairly modest calendars and maps, but India, China, Japan, and Sumer, Buddhism, Sanskrit, Zoroastrian-

~ism, and Manu. Two, the capacity for dealing historically (and not reductively, as a topic of ecclesiastical politics) with non-European and non-Judea-Christian cultures was strengthened as history itself was conceived of more radically than before: to understand Europe properly meant also understanding t objectiv ~\!lCen Europe and its own I2reviousl unrea empor-al-and-ettltural fran iers. In a sense, John of Segovia's idea of contrajerentia be- tween 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

1 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· inte~ted elements represent a secularizing

r

)

Orlentalist Structures and Restructures 121

, )

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, re- distributed in the secular frameworks just enumerated. For anyone who studied the Orient a secular vocabulary in keeping with these frameworks was required. Yet if Oriental ism provided the vocab- -ulary. the conceptual repertoire, the techniques-for this is what,

I from the end of the eighteenth century on, Orientalism did and what Orientalism was-it also retained, as an un [sledged current

-i in its discants,\, a ;CCOIISb oete lOllS 1m ill . d \ supernaturalism. W at Sf all try to show is that this impulse in Orientalisrn resided in the Orientalist's conception of himself, of the Orient, and 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 power- power 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 indiv~ ual 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

122 ORIENTALISM

the careers of Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan, no such danger was apparent.

M thesis is that the essential aspects of modern Orientalist theor an praxis (from which rese - enves ca testaD I not as a sudden access of objective knowledge

Orient but as a set 0 structure t east, secularized, redisposed, and re-formed by such disciplines as pJiiIology, Which III tum welt lIatutalized moderp'zed and laIC1zei! substitutes for (or versions of) Christ jan supematuraligm. In the fOrm of new texts and ideas, the East was accommodated to these structures. Linguists and explorers like Jones and Anquetil were contributors to modern Oriental ism. certainly. but what distin- guishes modern Oriental ism as a field. a group of ideas, a discourse. is the work of a later generation than theirs. If we use the Napoleonic expedition (J 798-1801) as a sort of first enabling experience for modem Orientalism, we can consider its inaugural heroes-in Islamic studies, Sacy and Renan and Lane-to be builders of the field, creators of a tradition, progenitors of the Orientalist brother- hood. What Sacy, Renan, and Lane did was to place Orientalism on a scientific and rational basis. This entailed not only their own exemplary work but also the creation of a vocabulary and ideas that could be used impersonally by anyone who wished to become

/' an Orientalist. Their inauguration of Orientalism was a considerable feat. It made possible a scientific terminology; it banished obscurity and instated a special form of ilIuminafion for the OrIent; If estab- lished the figure of the Orientalist'as central authority forthe Orient: it legitimized a special kind of specifically coherent Orientalist work; it put into cultural circulation a form of discursive currency by whose presence the Orient henceforth wQuld-be rpgketJ f.or; above all, the work of the inaugurators carved out a field of study and a family of ideas which in turn could form a community of scholars whose lineage, traditions, and ambitions were at once internal to the field and external enough for general prestige. The more Europe encroached upon the Orient during the nineteenth century, the more Orientalism gained in public confidence. Yet if this gain coincided with a loss in originality. we should not be entirely surprised, since its mode, from the beginning, was reconstruction and repetition. I

One final observation: The late-eighteenth-century and nine- teenth-century ideas, institutions, and figures I shall deal with in this chapter are an important part, a crucial elaboration, of the first

OrientalistStructuresandRestructures 123

phase of the greatest age of territorial ac uisition ever known. By the end of World War I Europe had colonized ~ of the earth. To say simply that modern Orientalism has been an aspect of both imperialism and colonialism is not to say anything very disputable. Yet it is not enough to say it; it needs to be worked through analytically and historically. I am interested in showing how modern Orientalism, unlike the precolonial awareness of Dante and d'Herbelot, embodies a systematic discipline of accum-

hlo/ion. And far from this being exclusively an intellectual or theoretical feature, it made Orientalism fatally tend towards the systematic accumulation of human beings and territories. To recon- struct a dead or lost Oriental language meant ultimately to recon- struct a dead or neglected Orient; it also meant that reconstructive precision, science, even imagination could prepare the way for what armies, administrations, and bureaucracies would later do on the ground, in the Orient. In a sense, the vindication of Orientalism was not only its intell~F-ar-tistic successes but its later effec- tiveness, its usefulness, i!s authority. ,urely it deserves serious atten- tion on all those counts.

II Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan:

Rational Anthropology and Philological Laboratory

The two great themes of Silvestre de Sacy's life are heroic effort and a dedicated sense of pedagogic and rational utility. Born in 1757 into a Jansenist family whose occupation was traditionally that of notaire, Antoine-Isaac-Silvestre was privately tutored at a Benedictine abbey, first in Arabic, Syriac, and Chaldean, then in Hebrew. Arabic in particular was the language that opened the Orient to him since it was in Arabic, according to Joseph Reinaud,