Orientalism - autonomous learning

126 ORIENT ALISM
Orientalist Structures and Restructures
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from the Orient what its distance and eccentricity have hitherto kept
hidden, and two, because these examples have the semiotical power
in them (or imparted to them by the Orientalist) to signify the
Orient.
All of Sacy's work is essentially compilatory; it is thus ceremoniously
didactic and painstakingly revisionist. Aside from the
Principes de grammaire generale, he produced a Chrestomathie
arabe in three volumes (1806 and 1827), an anthology of Arab
grammatical writing (1825), an Arabic grammar of 1810 (d
['usage des eleves de ['Ecole speciale), treatises on Arabic prosody
and the Druze religion, and numerous short works on Oriental
numismatics, onomastics, epigraphy, geography, history, and
weights and measures. He did a fair number of translations and two
extended commentaries on Calila and Dumna and the Maqamat of
al-Hariri. As editor, memorialist, and historian of modern learning
Sacy was similarly energetic. There was very little of note in other
related disciplines with which he was not au courant, although his
own writing was single-minded and, in its non-Orientalist respects,
of a narrow positivist range.
Yet when in 1802 the Institut de France was commissioned by
Napoleon to form a tableau generale on the state and progress of the
arts and sciences since 1789, Sacy was chosen to be one of the team
of writers: he was the most rigorous of specialists and the most
historical-minded of generalists. Dacier's report, as it was known
informally, embodied many of Sacy's predilections as well as containing
his contributions on the state of Oriental learning. Its title
-Tableau historique de ['erudition fran{:aise-announces the new
historical (as opposed to sacred) consciousness. Such consciousness
is dramatic: learning can be arranged on a stage set, as it were,
where its totality c.an be readily surveyed. Addressed to the king,
Dacier's preface stated the theme perfectly. Such a survey as this
made it possible to do something no other sovereign had attempted,
namely to take in, with one coup d'oeil, the whole of human
knowledge. Had such a tableau historique been undertaken in
former times, Dacier continued, we might today have possessed
many masterpieces now either lost or destroyed; the interest and
utility of the tableau were that it preserved knowledge and made it
immediately accessible. Dacier intimated that such a task was
simplified by Napoleon's Oriental expedition, one of whose results
was to heighten the degree of modern geographical knowledgeY
(At no point more than in Dacier's entire discours do we see how
the dramatic form of a tableau historique has its use-equivalent in
the arcades and counters of a modern department store.)
The importance of the Tableau historique for an understanding
of Orientalism's inaugural phase is that it exteriorizes the form of
Orientalist knowledge and its features, as it also describes the
Orientalist's relationship to his subject matter. In Sacy's pages on
Orientalism-as elsewhere in his writing-he speaks of his own
work as having uncovered, brought to light, rescued a vast amount
of obscure matter. Why? In order to place it before the student.
For like all his learned contemporaries Sacy considered a learned
work a positive addition to an edifice that all scholars erected together.
Knowledge was essentially the making visible of material,
and the aim of a tableau was the construction of a sort of
Benthamite Panopticon. Scholarly discipline was therefore a specific
technology of power: it gained for its user (and his students) tools
and knowledge which (if he was a historian) had hitherto been
lost. 15 And indeed the vocabulary of specialized power and acquisition
is particularly associated with Sacy's reputation as a pioneer
Orientalist. His heroism as a scholar was to have dealt successfully
with insurmountable difficulties; he acquired the means to present
a field to his students where tliere was none. He made the books,
the precepts, the examples, said the Duc de Broglie of Sacy. The
result was the production of material about the Orient, methods for
studying it, and exempla that even Orientals did not have. 10
Compared with the labors of a Hellenist or a Latinist working
on the Institut team, Sacy's labors were awesome. They had the
texts, the conve\1tions, the schools; he did not, and consequently
, ..
,',I had to go about making them. The dynamic of primary loss and
subsequent gain in Sacy's writing is obsessional; his investment in it
was truly heavy. Like his colleagues in other fields he believed that
knowledge is seeing-pan-optically, so to speak--but unlike them
he not only had to identify the knowledge, he· had to decipher it,
interpret it, and most difficult, make it available. Sacy's achievement
was to have produced a whole field. As a European he
ransacked the Oriental archives, and he could do so without leaving
Franc.e. What texts he isolated, he then brought back; he doctored
them; then he annotated, codified, arranged, and commented on
them. In time, the Orient as such became less important than what
the Orientalist made of it; thus, drawn by Sacy into the sealed