Decided not to include this as an appendix to To Be or Not To Be: brahman or Abrahman / The World Turned Upside-Down, so thought to publish these remnants of my unfinished Master's thesis for the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago as would have appeared in my book here in the blog. Enjoy . . .
APPENDIX
Upon revisiting the remnants of my
never-completed Master's thesis, an endeavor undertaken after I had resigned my
ministry and more or less set Christianity aside, I immediately recognized that
my thinking already quite succinctly showed more than subtle resonances with
what I have since come to know as sanAtana dharma, “keeping it together
forever,” and especially with Advaita, “non-dualism.” Upon revisiting so many memories of my
experiences of this life lived, I realize that a path of yoga, yolk or union—body
and mind, space and time, self and other—had already begun in my path and
pilgrimage. Being conveyed to Taos and
to the Hanuman Temple for Shivaratri in 1997 and the apparent shift of paradigm
that came to me from that experience was in fact only a continuation of the
same dharma that had been guiding me along my path all the while, and likely
even long before this life lived.
If
you choose to read this addendum, you will certainly note a continuity between
the ideas and concepts I incorporated those years ago when endeavoring to sort
through the dualistically constructed conflicts between Judaism, Christianity
and Islam—the primary crux of most wars and dangerous tensions facing the
peoples of the world since the Cold War ended and in fact since long before—and
my embrace of “Hinduism” and the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta and those
contingent theories I have proffered in the preceding. Indeed, I have come to understand my
explorations of post-modernism and deconstruction in my last year of college
into graduate school as a perfect segue between Christianity and sanAtana
dharma, all pertinent and poignant parts of the Play of the Gods in
this Golden Age of the Dark Age.
Unfortunately,
about 70-80 pages of my MA Thesis, fruit of my labors at the U of C, are no
longer extant, lest there's a 3½” floppy disk in storage and well enough hidden
somewhere amongst my personal effects.
Nonetheless, I am still pleased enough with these remaining pages to
include them as at least an appendix to this text, as I feel they help to
present my intellectual as well as spiritual pilgrimage from an early devotion
to Nature and the mountains, to devoted Christian minister, to student of cultural
history and critical theory at the University of Chicago, to wandering devotee
of Shakti advocate of Advaita Vedanta and proponent of some rather radical
theories. Likewise, these words further
elucidate my general contentions of To Be or Not To Be: brahman or Abrahman
/ The World Turned Upside-Down with an academic rigor that is rather
outside my regular parlance these days, and will certainly grant those
academics that chance to read and consider the previous chapters a bit more
insight into the theoretical underpinnings and general intellectual influences
that lay somewhere behind the formulation of the preceding rather paradigm
shaking theories.
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
NON-ESSENTIALLY OCCIDENTAL:
HETEROGLOSSIA IN THE WESTERN DISCOURSE ON ISLAM
MASTER’S THESIS
MASTER OF ARTS PROGRAM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
BY
JEFFREY C. ARCHER
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
JUNE 1996
In the past few decades, a number of critical works have appeared
dealing with the nefarious “Orientalism” and other such Western discourses on
“others.” While serving to bring up a great many important issues about
ethnocentrism, colonialism, post-colonialism, and relations of power in
general, many of these critiques also seem to implicate the West as a whole as
subsumed within a homogenous, essentializing discourse when engaged in writing
about these “others.” From Edward Said’s famous (or infamous) work Orientalism[1] to
the recent proliferation of a self-reflective discourse in anthropology and in
the history of the “non-West,” “the West” has begun to appear as the only topos
where it is legitimate to speak of a unitary discourse or, to use Foucault’s
term, episteme. Indeed, the metadiscursive practices which have become en vogue
of late seem so concerned with the tropes of representation used to discuss the
world of the “outside” that they have been largely blind to the effects of
their own simultaneous essentialization of the “inside.” It seems this
oversight has done a small but significant disservice to those encompassed in
“the West” (whatever exactly that term designates); for to critique a singular,
homogenous discourse of “the West” is indeed as much a misrepresentation as it
is to critique as homogeneous the societies of “the East.”
I do not intend to imply
that these metadiscourses are not necessary (at least provisionally), that
there is no real disparity in the way this “West” has related to the
“outside”—especially in material terms. Yet it might serve “us” to note that
when “we” talk about a Foucaultian type discourse which encompasses all attempts
at the representation of the “other,” the “outside,” of “them” that we are in
fact reifying these distinctions. Even if this discourse is limited, as a
neo-Marxian reading would dictate, to the bourgeois, the male, the academic,
the official, the dominant media, etc., and excludes the most obvious “others”
within “the West” itself, a significant “self” is nevertheless
constituted, and one which contrasts in its singular force, dynamics, and
indivisibility, to “the rest.”
Again, I must assert that
a critique of “the West” as an agent of unparalleled exploitation carried out
on “others” is not without merit. It is also not unfounded to argue that this
exploitation was and is vitalized by the use of language in a certain
way--“power in discourse”[2]--and
that this inadvertent usage of language has a significant genealogy. Indeed, it
is vital to attack the abuses which have been carried out in the name of “the
West.” Yet we must acknowledge that this “West” (capitalized, signifying a
proper noun; an entity) is itself a construct; indeed, the “reality” of which
has allowed for the very designation of the “other”--“barbarian,” “infidel,”
“savage,” “primitive,” etc. And despite the efforts of many conscientious
scholars, this “West,” whose penetrating gaze has looked down from the towering
heights of its monolithic edifice to survey the rest of the globe’s inhabitants
yet stands.
To invert a category of
“the other” found in a European mythological discourse on the other[3],
this “West” might be compared to a cyclops, with but one eye to survey its
surroundings. Its (or it might be said, “his”) monocular gaze scans the horizon
with no sense of depth, only able to make out the surface of all he sees. Yet
one other likeness between this cyclops and “the West” which must not be
overlooked (or, perhaps more accurately, left “unspoken”) is that the latter is
a myth just as the former; the latter inscribed with such potency in the
imagination that its reality is rarely brought into serious question. The sense
of a unity which is produced in any such discourse on “the West” in which
“West” is capitalized (in all senses of the word[4])
and left out of quotation marks--whether it be a “critical” reading or a
self-indulgent--leaves this monster alive, albeit perhaps not completely
unfettered.
In discussing the
all-important distinction between “self” and “other,” Tzvetan Todorov points
out in his book The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other that
“We can discover the other in ourselves, realize we are not a homogenous
substance, radically alien to whatever is not us: as Rimbaud said, Je est un
autre.” [5] Indeed,
to categorically situate a homogenous discourse of the West against a plethora
of unessentializable “others” still maintains the distinction of an “us” and a
“them” with no in-between.
Lila Abu-Lughod makes an
argument in her recent writings which works to pluralize the “lives” of her
subjects, yet which maintains the above distinction. By writing against even
the taken-for-granted, liberal humanist category of “culture” which has been
used to describe anthropology’s “others”[6] (and
it must be added, to describe the “self” as well), yet maintaining the use of
what she terms a “tactical” humanism (with its shades of a very “Western”
attachment to the self-actualizing individual), Abu Lughod goes only halfway
toward reducing the texual/discursive violence done. Her writing accepts “the
myth . . . of the self-constituting subject, that a consciousness of being
which has an origin outside itself is no being at all.”[7]Rather,
this must be erased from the text which endeavors to represent the other
without violence.
From such a rejection, we can proceed to the
idea that though histories and identities are necessarily constructed and
produced from many fragments, fragments which do not contain the signs of any
essential belonging inscribed in them, this does not cause the history of the
subaltern to dissolve once more into invisibility. This is firstly because we
[ought]apply exactly the same decentering strategies to the monolithic
subject-agents of elite historiography; [8]
Thus it seems even Abu
Lughod’s assertions, perhaps among the most radical of the self-reflective
oevres in anthropology today, fails to apply the same critical perspective when
discussing the discursivity of the “West”; and indeed, this works to the
detriment of the project’s coherence. Rather, we must recognize the “other” in
the “self”; that the “West” is not so easy to distinguish, at least in some
marginal realms of discourse, from the “other,” and that the other is not
always placed into the confining categories of discourse in the course of
textualization.
As repeatedly stated
above, there is a substantial difference in the play of power in the discourses
of “West” on “the other” versus “West” on the “self” (the very constructedness
of these entities notwithstanding). Europe and America have indeed been the
exploiters; they have largely controlled the various modes of production,
whether one’s vantage is from a materialist or discourse analytic perspective
(or both). It is perhaps less immediately important from the perspective of a
simple political justice, conceived in the most colloquial terms, to treat the
figure of “the West” with as much self-reflexivity as the representation of
those encompassed by the “non-West.” And yet, if these various critiques of the
essentializing techniques of discourse are to maintain validity, they must
apply across the board—across the borders between the constructs of “us” and
“them”—and deconstruct the discourses on “us” as well as those on “them.” Or at
least they must find discontinuities, ruptures, resistance, competitions, and
contra-dictions within the “discourse of the West,” and specifically that realm
of discourse on “the other.” Indeed, perhaps only when this is done can
Abu-Lughod’s project of writing against culture be accomplished. Only then can
the field of power-discourse be in some way leveled. The contention of this
paper is, then, that “the Occident” must be deconstructed in all its facets as
well as “the Orient” and other “others” created in the imagination of the
dominant discourse of “the West.” Indeed, if there is still a coherently
constructed “self”-consciousness remaining—even as an object of critique—there
will inevitably remain an “other” as the “outside” and the definite opposite of
this “self.”
James Clifford, another
important critic in the field of anthropology, indeed does argue against
“occidentalism,” as the inverse of orientalism (in Said’s usage), but does not
carry this criticism down to the level of identity at its most fundamental
level (i.e., the “ontological” or linguistic category of the “self”), and often
makes inadvertent reference to the “Western and non-Western,” even if only
referring to the realm of professional academia.[9] His
critique of Said’s Orientalism does sum up, with some insight, the problems
with the latter.
Indeed Said’s methodological catholicity
repeatedly blurs his analysis. If he is advancing anthropological arguments,
Orientalism appears as the cultural quest for order. When he adopts the stance
of a literary critic, it emerges as the process of writing, textualizing, and
interpreting. As an intellectual historian Said portrays Orientalism as a
specific series of influences and schools of thought. For the psychohistorian
Orientalist discourse becomes a representative series of personal-historical
experiences. For the Marxist critic of ideology and culture it is the
expression of definite political and economic power interests. Orientalism is
also at times conflated with Western positivism, with general definitions of
the primitive, with evolutionism, with racism. One could continue the list.
Said’s discourse analysis does not itself escape the all-inclusive
“Occidentalism” he specifically rejects as an alternative to Orientalism (328).[10]
This very apt and insightful example notwithstanding,
Clifford himself is open to the criticism that he does not take this critique
of a critique of the critique of “the other” far enough. Perfectly willing to
disavow the use of dichotomizing concepts such as “the West-rest (“Third
World”),”[11]he
does not carry out the necessary next step, which would be the deconstruction
of identity itself (both of “the West” and, as a prior necessity, of even the
individual as a bounded object). Clifford also admits his inability to do
without the concept of “culture,” which he nonetheless admits is an
essentializing technique.[12]
To quote P. Stephen
Sangren on Clifford and the postmodern critique in anthropology in general: “by
making textual authority stand for cultural authority in general, the literary
critic, as fabricator and deconstructor of that authority, places him-/herself
in a position of transcendent power--if not that of a king, at least that of a
high priest.”[13] Though
I disagree with most of the rest of Sangren’s argument against postmodern
criticism, it seems this at least might be in some way accurate. This chorus of
critics seeking to right the wrongs of their predecessors necessarily usurp
their power, if not to represent the “other” in a totalizing way, then to
represent the “West” in such a manner--or to stand as representatives of “the
West” themselves, i.e., as its self-conscience. In order to complete the
project of constructing a discourse in which the other is no longer dominated
or subjugated or placed under “the West,” the existence of this very “West” as
a construct must be made known and shown inadequate or incomplete from its very
foundation.
The bounded self has
been a recurrent element of discourses in the west (plural; lower case) from
the earliest of texts, as has the call for a self-critical discourse
(“recurrent” emphasized because they are not the only; are not always nor in
all ways present). Bryan S. Turner notes that the confessional manuals of the
“Middle Ages” “provided the disciplines whereby a new concept of the interior
self could flourish.”[14] Turner
cites Caroline Walker Bynum’s contention that in the twelfth-century “religious
writing showed a specific interest in the inner landscape of the psyche and a
concern for the development of models of moral consciousness and ethical
behavior.”[15] Yet
we may take this cursory genealogy further.
From the earliest
Christian writings, the book of I Corinthians exhorts, “But let a man examine
himself” (11:28); and Galatians, “But let each one examine his own work, and
then he will have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another” (6:4). Neither
is the Torah/Old Testament without statements which indicate a
“self”-consciousness and self-critical discourse. Proverbs 20:27, for instance,
tells that “The spirit of a man is the lamp of the Lord, Searching all the
inner depths of the heart.” Thus, as Jacques Derrida notes,
We all know this program of Europe’s
self-reflection or self-presentation. We are old, I say it again. Old Europe
seems to have exhausted all the possibilities of discourse and
counter-discourse about its identification. Dialectic in all its essential
forms, including those that comprehend and entail anti-dialectic, has always
been in the service of this autobiography of Europe, even when it took on the
appearance of a confession. For avowal, guilt, and self-accusation no more escape
this old program than does the celebration of self.[16]
“The West” can confess
its sins against the rest of the world with the sincerest of conviction, and
yet the long-standing border--the definite difference--still remains. The
ontologically derived notion that “the West” has a history (as opposed to
histories, perhaps) necessarily leaves the foundation intact which has led to
the racisms, colonialisms, and various other exploitations of the world not-us.
Conceding that the history of the West has produced some good along with the
bad, it remains that until “we” can recognize how much this discourse is a
construct, and not the only one which might be used with coherence, “the West”
will still stand against “the rest,” and the latter as a definite, essential
entity. And as Derrida contends, “every reduction of the other to a real moment
of my [or “our”] life, its reduction to the state of empirical alter-ego, is an
empirical possibility, or rather eventuality, which is called violence.”[17]
What can be offered as
an alternative, then, to the history of “the West”—a project which will always
end at “violence”--which would break apart this presumed whole, which might
finally loose the discourse of domination from its very ground? Certainly, Foucault might be of some use in
this, except for his (later) critiques, especially on power, which tend toward
the totalistic—at least in our area of concern, i.e., in discourse. Though his
“archaeologies” might look for ruptures, discontinuities, etc., and might be of
some promise to these ends,[18] Foucault’s
later “genealogies” have been all too easily appropriated by those who would
construct a homogenous meta-discourse on “the West” (e.g., Said). The work of
Jacques Derrida and Mikhail Bakhtin, however, seems to offer the more possible
possibility (Derrida would see it possibility of the impossible) of a basis by
which this sort might be begun. In Bakhtin’s dialogic and carnivalesque--the
realm of laughter and a “self”-contending discourse of parody and the grotesque,
and in Derrida’s juxtaposition and blurring of “self” and “other” in the realms
of the most fundamental levels of language and being, there seems to be at
least the possibility of other histories of the history of “the other.”
________________________________________________________________________
This can be said, inversely or reciprocally, of
all identity or all identification: there is no self-relation, no relation to
oneself, no identification with oneself, without culture, but a culture of
oneself as a culture of the other, a culture of the double genitive and of the
difference to oneself. The grammar of the double genitive also signals that a
culture never has a single origin. Monogenealogy would always be a
mystification in the history of culture.
Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading
Thanks to the duality of tone, the laughing
people, who were not in the least concerned with the stabilization of the
existing order and of the prevailing picture of the world (the official truth),
could grasp the world of becoming as a whole. They could thus conceive the gay
relativity of the limited class theories and the constant unfinished character
of the world--the constant combination of falsehood and truth, of darkness and
light, of anger and gentleness, of life and death. The dual tone of the
people’s speech is never torn away from this whole nor from the becoming; this
is why the negative and positional elements do not seek a separate, private,
and static expression. The dual tone never wants to halt the spinning wheel, to
find and outline the top and the bottom, the front and the back; on the
contrary, it marks their continuous change and fusion. In popular speech the
accent is always placed on the positive element (but we repeat, without tearing
it away from the negative).
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World
A “gay relativity”--not
relativism. Gazes into the past that would not find one discourse dominant, nor
all discourses (separately) equivocal--i.e., on a metaphysical level. For
indeed the function of a still-constituted-being extant in the modernist
rhetoric of relativism is still well within the “self”-reflective discourse
which Derrida finds in the official language of “Old” Europe.[19]As
Dominick LaCapra points out in a discussion of Bakhtin,
extreme documentary objectivism and relativistic
subjectivism do not constitute genuine alternatives. They are mutually
supportive parts of the same larger complex. The objectivist places the past in
the “logocentric” position of what Jacques Derrida calls the “transcendental
signified.” It is simply there in its sheer reality, and the task of the
historian is to use sources as documents to reconstruct past reality as
objectively as he or she can . . . The relativist simply turns objectivist
“logocentrism” upside-down. The historian places himself or herself in the
position of “transcendental signifier” that “produces” or “makes” the meaning
of the past (LaCapra 1985: 137-8).[20]
Indeed, Bakhtin’s “gay
relativity” is caught up in his notions of the dialogic, the
polyphonic/heteroglot, and the carnivalesque and the grotesque as fields which
destroy the boundaries of the subject itself--much like Derrida’s
“supplementarity” or “differance.[21] Bakhtin’s “dialogic” is the realm of an
open-ended discourse, the place of speech between opposing sides.
Constituted in this dialogue the language is not owned by either speaker, as in
a monologic discourse, but indeed constitutes both the voice of the speaker and
of the “other” of the specific utterance. As LaCapra points out,
Bakhtin insisted instead on the dual reference
of language or discursive practices. The problems of reported speech in all its
variants--from direct quotation through indirect discourse to modes of
quasi-direct or free speech--were for him the crux of a theory of language in
both literature and life. Especially significant for him was that it did ‘not
at all contain an “either/or” dilemma; its specificum [was] precisely a matter of both author and character speaking at the same
time, a matter of a single linguistic construction within which the accents of
two differently oriented voices are maintained.[22]
Thus Bakhtin’s dialogic
can be understood as deriving from a critique of both Hegelian/Marxist
dialectics, as there is never the violence of the synthesis, and Sausseurian
linguistics[23]
emphasizing the overlapping of any binary opposites, and thus blurring the
distinction between such things as “self” and “not-self” as definite categories.
Bakhtin’s heteroglossia
or polyphony is the space where these voices, past and present, contend with a
dominant (“official”) discourse. This takes place most succinctly in the realm
of the “carnivalesque” or “grotesque,” and has no resemblance to the pathetic
“points of resistance” in Foucault’s power relationships[24] For
Foucault, resistance can never escape the dominant discourse of power, but
rather constitutes opposites within it[25] In the polyphony of the carnivalesque, the
resistance is not only to the hegemony of the official discourse, but to its
whole ontological basis of the “self” or any unit of speech as an
essentializable entity (i.e., set in a solid, boundaried opposition to
“not-self” or any opposites). Thus “the carnival attitude generates an
ambivalent interaction between all basic opposites in language and life--a
‘jolly relativity’ in which poles are taken from their pure binarism and made
to touch and know one another.[26]
Again, Bakhtin:
The ancient dual tone of speech is the stylistic
reflection of the ancient dual-bodied image. As the ancient image
disintegrated, an interesting phenomenon in the history of literature and
spectacle took place: the formation of images in pairs, which represent top and
bottom, front and back, life and death . . . The dialogue of these pairs is of considerable interest, since it marks
the as yet incomplete disintegration of the dual tone. In reality, it is a
dialogue of the face with the buttocks, of birth with death[27]
. . . and thus of “self” and all that is
“not-self.” Seen in this way, the polyphony of the carnival, the dialogic of
the grotesque, serves to realize Derrida’s project of “supplementarity”:
finding in the “remainder,” the unaccountable left-over of any system of
“analytic or polar opposites,” the “undecidable interplay of excess and lack
between the same and the other[28] This
deconstructed self in Derrida is derivative of a critique of Sausseure, as
well. In “differance,” a
Derridaian neo-logism working at the level of structural binaries, “one (e.g.,
one pair of opposites) is the same as the other but as differed or
deferred.[29] To
limit the other to the circumscribed space of a binary correlative is as much a
potentiality for violence as it is to view the other as completely unrelated.
The implications of
these modes of blurring the self/other distinction applied to the history of
“the West,” or more specifically, the histories and other modes of
representation of the west on the other, are radical. Though Said and many
other critics have called for “the West” to re-evaluate its discourse as has
been used to enclose and essentialize “the Orient,” a carnivalesque reading of
“Western” discourse would find the breaks, ruptures, and discontinuities in this
supposedly all-encompassing discourse--i.e., the impossible possibility of the
other-in-self in the remnants of past discourses. Only in this way could the
polyphony of voices stand to counter the official construction of “others”--not
so completely other, nor same,
after all--and a hegemonic
“self” which is the construct constituting “the West.”
This “historical”
project would have radical implications for a majority of the “disciplines” in
the university as it is structured today. The seemingly solid distinction
between the fields of literary criticism, history and cultural anthropology,
for instance, would become unrecognizable. For not only would the study of
“other” cultures as such be
called into question, but the “West” as a coherent, essentializable historical
object as well--and all the disciplines constituted by such objectifications to
study, dissect, and taxonomize. There would remain no
epistemological-ontological borders between the traditionally constituted
fields of inquiry of the “one” and “the other.” A perspective which would look
for discourses without the usual identifying practices of the social sciences
would transcend the distinctions of bounded fields in all senses, and would
look for the “other” in the “self”--whether this “self” as one’s own or as the
other’s. Closed systems, or as Bakhtin calls them, “-isms,” would thus be
questioned at their most foundational level:
“Reason (ratio) itself,”
the practice of dividing, categorizing, opposing, “might be seen as an attempt
to ration and limit the play of supplementarity. Analysis provides clear and
distinct ideas which define boundaries and confine ambiguity or overlap to
marginal, borderline cases. Insofar as analysis defines polar opposites, it
constructs ideal types of heuristic fictions[30]
Thus the very basis of
“the West” as it has often been imagined; of positivism; of the “scientific”
practice of dividing, limiting, defining; of logic; would be found lacking in
their attempt to describe the human situation. The imminence of the “dominant
discourse” could thus be laughed at in a Bakhtinian sense, and perhaps finally
made impotent to commit further violences within such a discourse of “jolly
relativity.”
Rather than dissecting,
differentiating, delimiting the other, the approach I have been advocating
would look for what anthropologist Unni Wikan calls “resonance” to find its
impetus to inscribe.[31] This
practice of “feeling-thought” which Wikan translates from the Balinese
word “keneh” is understood
by Wikan’s informants to stand for the empathetic union of things, ideas, etc.,
which would “rationally” seem to be contradictory.[32] One
of Wikan’s informants notes, “But Westerners have no resonance . . . because
they use their thoughts only, and so ideas and understandings do not spring
alive.[33] What
we must do is to look for our thoughts to “spring alive,” and look for the
margins of discourse where they always do. To find “other voices” from our past
with “the other” means to look beyond the “rational” distinctions social scientists
have been trained to uncover. This does not mean to reduce the other to its
common denominators, to what is its easiest synonym in the familiar language.
Rather it is to harmonize with alterity, to let it sound chords on the very
sinews of the self.
In the western
relationships with Islam, the great majority of textual remnants extant from
the archives of the former are either
polemic or essentializing or about the different nature of “the infidel,” “the
Turk,” and the European. Yet there are also significant traces where ruptures
occur of so easy a generalization. Even within the oeuvres of particular
authors who may generally show contempt for Islam, one can often find traces of
admiration, and even self-identification.
Fragmentary sources such
as these, though most often hidden under the mass of the “official” discourse,
indicate at least the undercurrent of diffused inversions or blurrings of the
succinct bounds of European self-identification and self-enclosure. To find
such a history or “archaeology of subjugated knowledges and practices"[34] or
“genealogy” of these marginalized realms of discourse would be to find in our
own past a ground for building a more ethical response to supposed others--that
is, a “culture of oneself as a culture of the other . . . and as the difference to oneself.[35] Thus
the goal of this study will be to uncover just such ruptures, inversions, and
blurrings in the diversity of discourses on the “other” of Islam.
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
She was dressed in a caftan of gold brocade,
flowered with silver, very well fitted to her shape, and showing to advantage
the beauty of her bosom, only shaded by the thin guaze of her shift. Her
drawers were pale pink, her waistcoat green and silver, her slippers white,
finely embroidered, her lovely arms adorned with bracelets of diamonds and her
broad girdle set round with diamonds; upon her head a rich Turkish handkerchief
of pink and silver, her own fine black hair hanging a great length in various
tresses, and on one side of her head some bodkins of jewels. I am afraid you
will accuse me of extravagance in this description. I think I have read
somewhere that women always speak in rapture when
they speak of beauty, but I can’t imagine why they should not be allowed to do
so. I rather think it virtue to be
able to admire without any mixture of desire or envy.
Lady Mary Wortley Mantagu, desription of an
Ottoman official’s “Lady,” Turkish
Embassy Letters (emphasis mine)
“To admire without any
mixture of desire or envy.” Perhaps the “impossible possibility,” expressing
the liminal space between sameness and difference. For envy must maintain a definite
“other”; desire, an object. The
body, experienced sensually as if desired;
taken into the eye, but not consumed. Perhaps something “feminine”—wanting of
the desire to penetrate, yet gazing beneath the outer layers: “her shape, only
shaded by the thin guaze of her shift.”
When “Europe” is
supposed (by many recent critics) only able to figure the other one
dimensionally, as a target of contempt, or as an object of possessive desire,
Lady Montagu’s letter to Lady Mar leads the reader to discern an alternative.
The recognition of alterity--an identity not bound by the limitations of
linguistic representation, i.e., here as one encountered in “rapture,” as
inexpressible, the “unlimited Desire”
Levinas associates with the “absolutely other,[36]--that
is, that which remains unknown even under the direct gaze of passion--and
without the base, lusting desire to captivate, to use for selfish pleasure, to
“know,” reduce, own, or control.
Lady Montagu’s
representation of Fatima may fall short of the ideal lower-body stratum in
Bakhtin--still too refined, masked in propriety. Yet it does locate in her body
and dress (or rather, in the gaze which falls upon the body and dress) a space
which might serve as an opening for the texts which will follow. The
appreciation which is expressed by numerous European authors for Islam is
indeed often sensual, exotic, and even erotic without necessarily being imbued
with a penetrative intent.
The Romantic is never necessarily reduced
to Neitzche’s Apollolian, or to a closed system
of discourse as Foucault would have it. Rather, as Bakhtin noted, strands of
the carnivalesque still resonate in some spaces within expressions of the
Romantic, releasing the body from the bonds of essential description.
“Rapture” opens in the
text the possibility of uncoercive description. Rapture shuns closure, as it
evades the compulsion to commit the being of another entirely into the text
without the possibility of escape. The unutterable Saying opposing (while not lieing opposite to) the Said[37] Here
Fatima is freed from the enclosure the previous sentences of description would
command. The other remains other--but not alien--in the encounter inscribed as
“rapture.”
To return to the
“something feminine” from above, it is perhaps this inversion of the dominant
discourse which is in many ways the architypical other. As Levinas contends, “I
think the absolutely contrary contrary [ le contraire absolutement contraire], whose contrariety is in no
way affected by the relationship that can be established between it and its
correlative, the contrariety that permits its terms to remain absolutely other,
is the feminine.[38] In
spite of critiques condemning Levinas here for sexism, it seems there is indeed
something substantial in his discussion of “Eros,” perhaps disclosing a realm
of other not necessarily subjectable to the simple binary relationship
(rationalized, logified if
you will). Levinas contends that there is an “absence of any fusion in the
erotic,”[39]
thus that there is no violence done the other in the act, in spite of the
metaphors which attempt to place intercourse in terms of knowledge--”knowing”
in the Biblical parlance, for example--and thus in the position of the subject.
Levinas concludes his
discussion of Eros:
Can this relationship with the other through
eros be characterized as a failure? Once again, the answer is yes, if one
adopts the terminology of current descriptions, if one wants to characterize
the erotic by “grasping,” “possessing,” or “knowing.” But there is nothing of
all this, or the failure of this, in eros. If one could possess, grasp, and
know the other, it would not be other. Possessing, knowing, and grasping are
synonyms of power[40]
Thus the “other” from
the voice of the official (in this case the “phalologocentric” discourse) is
not obtainable, not subjectable, indefinable.
Furthermore, the relationship with the other is
generally sought out as a fusion. I have precisely wanted to contest the idea
that the relationship with the other is fusion. The relationship with the Other
is the absence of the other; not absence pure and simple, not the absence of
pure nothingness, but absence in a horizon of the future, an absence that is
time[41]
Above I wrote of the
“sentences of description” which would “command . . . enclosure.” In what
Levinas terms the “terminology of current description” these sentences would
indeed do just that. Yet it might be rendered otherwise:
The caress is a mode of the subject’s being,
where the subject who is in contact with another goes beyond this contact.
Contact as sensation is part of the world of light. But what is caressed is not
touched, properly speaking. It is not the softness or warmth of the hand given
in contact that the caress seeks. The seeking of the caress constitutes its
essence by the fact that the caress does not know what it seeks. This “not
knowing,” this fundamental disorder, is the essential. It is like a game with
something slipping away, a game absolutely without project or plan, not with
what can become ours or us, but with something other, always other, always
inaccessible, and always still to come [à venir][42]
To render the above
“description” of Fatima otherwise, it might rather be understood as a verbal
“caress.” To read again,
She was dressed in a caftan of gold brocade,
flowered with silver, very well fitted to her shape, and showing to advantage
the beauty of her bosom, only shaded by the thin guaze of her shift. Her
drawers were pale pink, her waistcoat green and silver, her slippers white,
finely embroidered, her lovely arms adorned with bracelets of diamonds and her
broad girdle set round with diamonds; upon her head a rich Turkish handkerchief
of pink and silver, her own fine black hair hanging a great length in various
tresses, and on one side of her head some bodkins of jewels.
Not quite drawing Fatima
into the realm of the rationed, the circumscribed, the subjected, this fragment
speaks the movement of the eye over the body: over, then under, the “thin guaze
of her shift” which only shades her figure; up the legs (“Her drawers were pale
pink”) to her waistcoat; on to her feet, her “lovely arms,” her girdle, her
“fine black hair.” This caress, however, is no violation, no rape. A rape,
figurative as well as literal, seeks to subdue, control, and subject the other;
to conquer violently, to place her under the ownership of the violator, to
subject her to the categories of the “known.” The above is rather an encounter
between one “Westerner” and one other-than-she, where the boundaries of self
and other touch, not to feel out the
terrain of the unknown in order to make it known, but to seek her unknowable
self which will remain so even under the caress, under the gaze of her other.
________________________________________________________________________
Accompanied by two young men, his son and
nephew, he arrives with his hand extended and a smile on his lips. He accepts a
chair and takes his seat with lordly grace--and I send the news to my two
traveling companions that I have the bogeyman of the desert in my tent[43]
Thus begins Pierre
Loti’s account of Mohammed-Jahl, the Bedouin bandit-sheik whose desert domains
Loti and his pilgrim’s caravan must cross in order to reach Gaza on their way
to the Holy Land, as is recounted in Le
Désert.
A fine and superb old bandit’s face. Gray beard
and eyebrows. A cameo profile. Flashing eyes, which on the spur of the moment
can be imperious and cruel or else disarmingly gentle. He is dressed in a red
Brusa silk robe embroidered with yellow flames; its dangling sleeves almost
touch the ground; over this a generous Bedouin tunis. On his head a veil (couffie) of heavy Mecca silk, held
in place by a crown of gold cords with black wool knots. Tiny feet, bare in
leather sandals; tiny child’s hands playing with the traditional stick shaped
like a lotus leaf that serves as a camel whip.
This “description” bears
at least superficial resemblance to the Lady Montagu’s text above: a sensually
inscribed portrait of an individual who is other to the writer. Yet there are many “descriptions” offered
by travelers to the lands of Europe’s fascination--to the east and to the west.
Such writing understood as “description” would indeed place the other within
the perimeters of the sentence, between the initial capital letter and the last
mark of punctuation. But were it to be seen otherwise, with a view to alternate
readings, it might be read as might the text of Fatima above: sensuality taken
in with a gaze, but not emptied of possibilities in this gaze; a figure
remaining free to surprise, to defy any bounds seemingly prescribed by the
text.
In the following we
“catch sight of Mohammed-Jahl, holding his riding crop as if it were a scepter,
his eyes flashing with rage from under his beautiful veil tied with gold cords.
He is roaring like a lion, old but still frightening and in charge”; where only
four pages before he was “our guide on
his knees [emphasis mine] before the governor. The guide has an
attitude both supplicant [emphasis
mine] and sly, watching and pressing for the definitive yes that would permit us to
continue our trip.” Both on his knees and donning a scepter; a supplicant and a
king. The place which one should assign this figure must be somewhere
between the two, in the space Derrida terms differance. Neither really
this, nor that; something truly other--but not altogether unfamiliar or
alien, either.
I might well point out
that both Loti and Lady Montagu were suspected of maintaining affections for
both sexes, a coincidence to be sure[44] But
such biographical conjecture is out of place here. What is not, however, is a
discussion of the gendering of a
text.[{place here a footnote to the appropriate texts: Jung on
bi-sexuality}]. For it seems these two texts occur in a sort of liminal space,
both offering sexually ambiguous portrayals, leaving both the identity of the
imagined writers, and indeed of the subjects of the writing (though not
necessarily in regard to their sexual preferences), in question. The effect,
thus, is that there can be no essentialization of these subjects who are other.
They remain so by the refusal of the text to define them once and for all--by
their occupation of a space emploted in ambiguity.
There is no
essentialization, no definite confinement of Fatima or Mohammed-Jahl. Their
finitude, their definition, is not assured by their placement in “dead words”;
for these texts leave them open to becoming whomever they might later become,
either later in the text or later in the imagination [{Foucault on imagination
in The Order of Things}]. This is perhaps an immanent function of sexually
ambiguity--working something like Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, but not falling into
the specificum of the space he plotted out as such--where the relation of
imagined writer and inscribed being are uncertain, where the possibility of a
“masculinity” and a “femininity” are present in both. Especially for Loti, who
belonged to time which, according to Foucault, demanded of the scientific
categories of sexuality a definitive expression of one’s being, the portrayal
of a sexually ambiguous sensuality leaves the portrait with an uncertain degree
of precision--i.e., in that space so troubling to the nineteenth century: that
which defies a specific emplotment in the grid of scientific knowledge, that
which seems between two opposite
categories of the known--and thus free to complete itself elsewhere, outside
the bounds of possible description.
(feminine/inversion/etc
here).
[English philosopher
Roger Bacon, for instance, traces the revival of philosophy to the Muslim Avicenna[45] One
knight who had first hand experience with the Turks in the late
eleventh-century argues with great conviction that “they are of a Frankish
race.[46] This
notion of a racial self-identity with the Turks is echoed in the assertion that
the Turks, whose name was supposed by some to have derived from Teucri, the descendants of the
Trojans. This assertion, strongly refuted by Richard Knolles in the early
seventeenth century[47] would
both justify the Turkish conquest of Constantinople as an act of revenge
against the Greeks for their ancient trickery, and recognize them as the kin of
the Romans--i.e., contemporary Italians. Such fragments, of which there are
many more, indicate that it is not so easy to do a mono-genealogy of Europe’s
self-closure to their most immanent “other.”
Boccaccio, a noted
exemplar of the carnivalesque during the Renaissance, recalls a story about a
wise Jew who tells a parable to escape a rhetorical trap set by Saladin. The
story equivocates Islam, Judaism, and Christianity as the religions are
represented as three beloved sons[48] The
numerous courtly romances portraying Saladin as a heroic figure, though most
often in a European aristocratic guise, occasionally give a glimpse of him as
an authentically non-European figure whom Europeans could admire. Travelers to
the Ottoman lands throughout the centuries of contact brought back varying
accounts, both positive and negative, which were consumed by the public with
much fervor. Many of the accounts either compare the Turks favorably with their
European counterparts, or identify certain attributes of the latter with the
former. In the eighteenth-century, a tract was even published entitled Mahomet no impostor, or a Defense of
Mahomet.[49] Many other such sources and points of
rupture exist in texts throughout the European discourses on Islam, even in the
century of the most notorious “Orientalization” of the “Orient.”]
BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR “NONESSENTIALLY OCCIDENTAL:
HETEROGLOSSIA IN THE WESTERN DISCOURSE ON ISLAM”
Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Writing
Against Culture.” Chapter in Recapturing Anthropology, ed.
Richard Fox, 137-62. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1991.
Bakhtin, Mikhail
M. Rabelais and his World. Translated
by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Translated
by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and
Michael B. Naas. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated
by A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. Translated by Richard Hurley. New York: Random
House, 1978.
Knolles, Richard. The Turkish History from the Original of the
Nation to the Growth of the Ottoman Empire: with the Lives and Conquests of
their Princes and Emperors. Library of Congress; Washington, D.C.:
Wing, 1975. Text-fiche.
LaCapra, Dominick. Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts,
Contexts, Language. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983.
History and Criticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1985.
Limón, Jóse, Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural
Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas. Madison, WI: The University
of Wisconsin Press, 1994.
Mason, Peter. Deconstructing America: Representation of
the Other. London: Routledge, 1990.
Morson, Gary Saul.
“Bakhtin and the Present Moment.” The
American Scholar 60 (Spring 1991): 201-222.
Maxime Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam. Translated
by Roger Veinus. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1987.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage
Books, 1979.
Sangren, P. Stephen.
“Rhetoric and the Authority of Ethnography: ‘Postmodernism’ and the Social
Reproduction of Texts.” Current
Anthropology 29, no. 3 (June 1988): 405-35.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America: The Question of the
Other. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.
Turner, Brian S. Orientalism, Postmodernism, & Globalism. New
York: Routledge, 1994.
Wikan,
Unni. “Beyond the Words: The Power of Resonance.” American Ethnologist 19, no. 3 (August 1992): 460-82.
[1] Edward
Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979).
[2] See Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Volume
1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), pp. 92-96.
[3] Peter Mason, Deconstructing America: Representations of
the Other (New York: Routledge, 1990), 44, 57, 73-4, 99.
[4] For the implications/explication of this term,
see J. Derrida, The Other
Heading, trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B Naas
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992).
[5] Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans.
Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 3.
[6] Lila Abu-Lughod, “Writing Against Culture,”
in Recapturing Anthropology, ed.
Richard Fox (Sante Fe, NM: School of American Research Press).
[7] Rosalind O’Hanlon, “Recovering the Subject:
Subaltern Studies and Historiographies of Resistance in Colonial South
Asia” Modern Asian Studies 22,
no. 1, quoted in Talal Asad, Genealogies
of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 14, emphasis mine.
[8] Ibid.
[9]James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press), 53-54.
[10] ibid., 271.
[11] ibid., 273.
[12] ibid., 10.
[13] P. Stephen Sangren, “Rhetoric and the Authority of
Ethnography: ‘Postmodernism’ and the Social Reproduction of Texts” Current Anthropology 29, no. 3
(June 1988), 423.
[14] Bryan S. Turner, Orientalism, Postmodernism, and Globalism (London: Routledge, 1994),
193.
[15] ibid.
[16] Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s
Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 26.
[17] Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan
Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 128.
[18] Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans.
A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972).
[19] Dominick LaCapra, History
and Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 137-8.
[20] Ibid., 152.
[21] Dominick
LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual
History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press), 298.
[22] Gary Saul Morson,
“Bakhtin and the Present Moment” The
American Scholar 60 (Spring 1991), 206.
[23] Foucault 1978, 95.
[24]
ibid.,
94-95.
[25] LaCapra 1983, 298.
[26] Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 433-4.
[27] LaCapra 1983, 152.
[28] ibid.
[29] ibid.
[30] Unni Wikan, “Beyond the
Words: the Power of Resonance” American
Ethnologist 19, no. 3 (August 1992).
[31] ibid., 463.
[32] ibid.
[33] see Jóse Limón, Dancing with the Devil (Madison,
WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 125. In his discussion of his
theoretical approach to writing this ethnography on Mexican-Americans in south
Texas, Limón finds the “archaeological” practices of Foucault appropriate to
exploring the counter-discourse of this marginalized group. He also uses a
Bakhtinian reading to inform his interpretation of the realms of resistance to
the encroachment of post-modern hegemonic discourse--the latter notion which he
finds wanting in light of the presence of regenerative carnivalesque features
in modern Mexican-American discursive practices.
[34] Derrida (1992), 10.
[35] Mason, 2.
[36] See Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and
Levinas (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 30-31.
[37] Emmanuel Levinas, Time
and the Other, transl. by Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne
University Press, 1987), 85.
[38] ibid., 89.
[39] ibid., 90.
[40] ibid.
[41] ibid., 89.
[42] Pierre Loti, The Desert, transl. by Jay Paul
Minn (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1993), 88.
[43] Alexander Pope, engaged in a bitter battle with Lady
Montagu in the press, called her “lewd lesbia” and “Sappho” (Anita Desai, in
her introduction to Turkish Embassy
Letters). Likewise, Jay Paul Minn states of Loti: “His sexual prowess hints
strongly at bisexuality, although solid proof of the male side is lacking.
However, he did have deep emotional attachments to several men” (from Minn’s
introduction to The Desert).
[44] Maxime Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam, transl. by Roger Veinus.
(Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1987), 16.
[45] ibid., 22.
[46] Richard
Knolles, The General Historie of the
Turkes . . . 3rd ed. (London, 1621).
[47] The Decameron, The First Day, Third Story.
[48] Rodinson, 16.
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