Remora

There�s a nice review of God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492-1945 by Claude Rawson in TNR last week. Limited Inc prepared for the worst in the intro grafs. Reviewer Jonathan Alter seemed to be heading into traffic in the usual way with the oblique hissing at the supposed �anti-Western� clique in the universities:
�Over the past two decades, with evidently growing vehemence, the critique of Western civilization has become the great preoccupation of the humanities in American institutions of higher learning, especially in departments of literary studies. (Edward Said's Orientalism, which appeared in 1978, was certainly one point of departure for this general trend, though not all the current assaults on the pernicious influence of the West can be traced to Said.) It is Western civilization, we are repeatedly told, that has perpetrated the evils of colonialism on a global scale, and in the postcolonial era it is Western capitalism that continues to exploit and to "immiserate" the masses of the developing world. The legacy of enslavement and murder that is abundantly manifested in colonialism, it is sometimes claimed, was merely brought to its logical fulfillment in the concentration-camp universe created by the Nazis.�

The key that this music is scored to is revealed by the word �pernicious.� It is, by the way, the whole art of reading, this finding of resonances within contexts, this uncovering of the codedness on the surface of the codes. For surely Limited Inc isn�t wrong to suppose that the word carries a value redolent of extravagantly mustachioed villains tying the village beauty to the railroad tracks? If colonialism is merely a matter of gaslight melodrama, surely it is nothing to get too upset about. And then there is the Marquis de Said � red light, red light, evacuate the craft. This is, we know, the New Republic, and Said is in the shooting gallery there. His is the face atop the silhouette of the menacing intifada warrior that Marty Peretz takes matitudinal aim at, with his .45.
But Alter is not going down that path. Leaving the simplicities of vilification behind, he has a genuinely interesting point to make � or at least he claims that Rawson does:
�What Rawson bracingly demonstrates is that humanistic inquiry still can be, and deserves to be, an empirically grounded activity. He decries the "selective use of evidence to support currently approved indignations (or the earlier ones they replace)," and he goes on to cite a tart characterization by Marjorie Perloff of how intellectual arrangements are now generally made in the groves of academe: "The preferred method is to know what one wants to prove ... and then to collect one's supportive exempla, the game being to ignore all `evidence' that might point in a contrary direction."
Much of Rawson's book is a documentation of Western imaginings of other races, ethnicities, and cultures, from Montaigne's "Des cannibales" to the propaganda of the Third Reich. (To Rawson's credit, in discussing this topic he avoids the pretentiousness of using the capitalized and hypostasized form "the Other," and he also eschews the Gallic barbarity of the abstraction "alterity.") Now, many of the images that he considers, both verbal and visual, are violent and troubling: the ethnic or racial others are imagined with both prurience and clinical condescension as embodiments of sexual license and depravity, as human approximations of the bestial, and hence as fit objects for subjugation, exploitation, and ultimately extermination. Still, as Rawson repeatedly shows, the simple story of racist abomination told by the postcolonial critics often does not correspond to the ambivalences or even the dialectical character of the actual Western images. And the others are often imagined, as Montaigne illustrates, not on a binary model of the good Europeans and the savage non-Europeans, but on a triadic model, a more complicated model that is not designed to provide any ideological satisfaction, in which both benign and brutal varieties of the others are considered as antitheses to the writer's own culture.�

Rawson�s suspicion of the unilateral moralist approach to colonial studies is captured, in a pretty damning way, in his criticism of Sander Gilman:

�Sander Gilman, a scholar who has made an academic career of chronicling racist stereotypes, describes the picture as an "erotic caricature of the Hottentot Venus," with the voyeur flatly defined as "a white, male observer." What Gilman astonishingly overlooks, as Rawson duly notes, is that the most obtrusive caricature in the engraving is the face of the man looking into the telescope. The man's face is depicted as a grotesque cross between the head of a bloated frog and the head of a dewlapped bulldog. The telescope thus becomes a satiric joke about European voyeurism; and, as Rawson suggests, the woman's thrusting posterior figures as a gesture of well-deserved contempt directed at the fat man with the telescope who is ogling her. The image is not an expression of power, it is a criticism of power.�

Even here, though, Limited Inc would like to remark that vulgar Foucaultians have demonized the word power, so that it is almost useless. Since Foucault�s point, following Nietzsche, is that there is no zero degree of power, it is difficult to see how any viewpoint could divest itself of power. Or how it could want to. What is the desire for an au-dela de pouvoir, anyway? In fact, Foucault�s further point was that the promotion of the myth that there is, indeed, some zero degree of power is part of the game of power. An important, and characteristic element of modernity, inherited from both the Platonic and Christian tradition.

Oddly, Limited Incs posts this week seem to return to the topic of the West and the Other. Unlike Alter, I think there�s a point to the capitalization. Since Alter seems to also diss alterity, for reasons that Derrida would have a field day with � find the name encrypted in the name, find the Latin that turns to gall in Gallic - I suppose he just doesn�t appreciate the concept, or its position in Hegel�s dialectic, and, necessarily, ours. Well, it is certainly there, with or without Alter�s approval.

Reading the West�s relationship to the Other through the Yahoos is a marvelous idea. Especially as it can never be said enough that the West, as a monolithic concept, was not the concept with which any intellectual up to the 19th century primarily thought.