can only focus on one article, but please mention each article, this week only two articles.

Guidelines for Responses

• There is no required length for responses. You are assessed on your thoughtful engagement with the material. Please do not post a summary.

• Your response should bring up substantive comments and questions with regard to the reading at hand and the broader themes in the class.

• You may choose to relate what you read to some part of your daily life, current events, or some other situation, policy debate, etc..

• Responses can be speculative, propose applications, or pose critiques.

6 The West and the Rest: Discourse
and Power

Stuart Hall

Contents

1 Introduction

1.1 Where and what is “the West”?

2 Europe Breaks Out

2.1 When and how did expansion begin?

2.2 Five main phases

2.3 The Age of Exploration

2.4 Breaking the frame

2.5 The consequences of expansion for the idea of “the West”

3 Discourse and Power

3.1 What is a “discourse”?

3.2 Discourse and ideology

3.3 Can a discourse be “innocent”?

4 Representing “the Other”

4.1 Orientalism

4.2 The “archive”

4.3 A “regime of truth”

4.4 Idealization

4.5 Sexual fantasy

4.6 Mis-recognizing difference

4.7 Rituals of degradation

4.8 Summary: stereotypes, dualism, and “splitting”

5 “In the Beginning Allthe World was America”

5.1 Are they “true men”?

5.2 “Noble” vs “ignoble savages”

5.3 The history of “rude” and “refined” nations

6 From “the West and the Rest” to Modem Sociology

7 Conclusion

References

THE WEST AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND POWER

185

1 Introduction

The first five chapters of this book examine the long historical

processes through which a new type of society – advanced, developed,

and industrial – emerged. They chart in broad outline the paths by

which this society reached what is now called “modernity.” This

chapter explores the role which societies outside Europe played in this

process. It examines how an idea of “the West and the Rest” was

constituted; how relations between western and non-western societies

came to be represented. We refer to this as the formation of the

“discourse” of “the West and the

Rest.”

185
185

189

189

190

191

195

197

201

201

202

203

205

205

206

208

209

210

211

213

215

216

216

217

219

221

224

225

1.1 Where and what is ”the West”?

This question puzzled Christopher Columbus and remains puzzling

today. Nowadays, many societies aspire to become “western” – at least

in terms of achieving western standards of living. But in Columbus’s

day (the end of the fifteenth century), going West was important mainly

because it was believed to be the quickest route to the fabulous wealth

of the East. Indeed, even though it should have become clear to

Columbus that the New World he had found was not the East, he never

ceased to believe that it was, and even spiced his reports with

outlandish claims: on his fourth voyage, he still insisted that he was

close to Quinsay (the Chinese city now called Hangchow), where the

Great Khan lived, and probably approaching the source of the Four

Rivers of Paradise! Our ideas of “East” and “West” have never been free

of myth and fantasy, and even to this day they are not primarily ideas

about place and geography.

We have to use short-hand generalizations, like “West”

and

“western,” but we need to remember that they represent very complex

ideas and have no simple or single meaning. At first sight, these words

may seem to be about matters of geography and location. But even this,

on inspection, is not straightforward since we also use the same words

to refer to a type of society, a level of development, and so on. It’s true

that what we call “the West,” in this second sense, did first emerge in

Western Europe. But “the West” is no longer only in Europe, and not

all of Europe is in “the West.” The historian John Roberts has remarked

that “Europeans have long been unsure about where Europe ‘ends’ in

the east. In the west and to the south, the sea provides a splendid

marker … but to the east the plains roll on and on and the horizon is

awfully remote” (Roberts, 1985, p. 149). Eastern Europe doesn’t (doesn’t

yet? never did?) belong properly to “the West”; whereas the United

States, which is not in Europe, definitely does. These days,

technologically speaking, Japan is “western,” though on our mental

map it is about as far “East” as you can get. By comparison, much of

Latin America, which is in the western hemisphere, belongs

economically to the Third World, which is struggling – not very

successfully – to catch up with “the West.” What are these different

-‘.- –_._———–_ …_-

186 FORMATIONS OF MODERNITY

societies “east” and “west” of, exactly? Clearly, “the West” is as much

an idea as a fact of geography.

The underlying premise of this chapter is that “the West” is a

historical, not a geographical, construct. By “western” we mean the

type of society discussed in this book: a society that is developed,

industrialized, urbanized, capitalist, secular, and modern. Such

societies arose at a particular historical period – roughly, during the

sixteenth century, after the Middle Ages and the break-up of feudalism.

They were the result of a specific set of historical processes

–

economic, political, social, and cultural. Nowadays, any society which

shares these characteristics, wherever it exists on a geographical map,

can be said to belong to “the West.” The meaning of this term is

therefore virtually identical to that of the word “modern.” Its

“formations” are what we have been tracing in the earlier chapters in

this book. This chapter builds on that earlier story.

“The West” is therefore also an idea, a concept – and this is what

interests us most in this chapter. How did the idea, the language, of

“the West” arise, and what have been its effects? What do we mean by

calling it a concept?

The concept or idea of “the West” can be seen to function in the

following ways:
First, it allows us to characterize and classify societies into different

categories – i.e. “western,” “non-western.” It is a tool to think with. It

sets a certain structure of thought and knowledge in motion.

Secondly, it is an image, or set of images. It condenses a number of

different characteristics into one picture. It calls up in our mind’s eye –

it represents in verbal and visual language – a composite picture of

what different societies, cultures, peoples, and places are like. It

functions as part of a language, a “system of representation.” (I say

“system” because it doesn’t stand on its own, but works in conjunction

with other images and ideas with which it forms a set: for example,

“western” = urban = developed; or “non-western” = non-industrial =
rural = agricultural = under-developed.)
Thirdly, it provides a standard or model of comparison. It allows us

to compare to what extent different societies resemble, or differ from,

one another. Non-western societies can accordingly be said to be “close

to” or “far away from” or “catching up with” the West. It helps to

explain difference.
Fourthly, it provides criteria of evaluation against which other

societies are ranked and around which powerful positive and negative

feelings cluster. (For example, “the West” = developed = good =

desirable; or the “non-West” = under-developed = bad = undesirable.)
It produces a certain kind of knowledge about a subject and certain

attitudes towards it. Inshort, it functions as an ideology.
This chapter will discuss all these aspects of the idea of “the West.”

We know that the West itself was produced by certain historical

processes operating ina particular place inunique (and perhaps

unrepeatable) historical circumstances. Clearly, we must also think of

the idea of “the West” as having been produced in a similar way. These

two aspects are in fact deeply connected, though exactly how is one of

THE WEST AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND POWER 187

the big puzzles in sociology. We cannot attempt to resolve here the age-

old sociological debate as to which came first: the idea of “the West,”

or western societies. What we can say is that; as these societies

emerged, so a concept and language of “the West” crystallized. And

yet, we can be certain that the idea of “the West” did not simply reflect

an already-established western society: rather, it was essential to the

very formation of that society.

What is more, the idea of “the West,” once produced, became

productive in its turn. It had real effects: it enabled people to know or

speak of certain things in certain ways. It produced knowledge. It

became both the organizing factor in a system of global power relations

and the organizing concept or term in a whole way of thinking and

speaking.

The central concern of this chapter is to analyze the formation of a

particular pattern of thought and language, a “system of

representation,” which has the concepts of “the West” and “the Rest” at

its center.

The emergence of an idea of “the West” was central to the

Enlightenment, which was discussed at length in chapter 1. The

Enlightenment was a very European affair. European society, it

assumed, was the most advanced type of society on earth, European

man (sic) the pinnacle of human achievement. It treated the West

as the result of forces largely internal to Europe’s history and

formation.

However, in this chapter we argue that the rise of the West is also a

global story. As Roberts observes, “‘Modem’ history can be defined as

the approach march to the age dominated by the West” (Roberts, 1985,

p. 41). The West and the Rest became two sides of a single coin. What

each now is, and what the terms we use to describe them mean,

depend on the relations which were established between them long

ago. The so-called uniqueness of the West was, in part, produced by

Europe’s contact and self-comparison with other, non-western, societies

(the Rest), very different in their histories, ecologies, patterns of

development, and cultures from the European model. The difference of

these other societies and cultures from the West was the standard

against which the West’s achievement was measured. It is within the

context of these relationships that the idea of “the West” took on shape

and meaning.

The importance of such perceived difference needs itself to be

understood. Some modern theorists of language have argued that

meaning always depends on the relations that exist between the

different terms or words within a -meaning system (see chapter 5).

Accordingly, we know what “night” means because it is different from

– in fact, opposite to – “day.” The French linguist who most influenced

this approach to meaning, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1912), argued

that the words “night” and “day” on their own can’t mean anything; it

is the difference between “night” and “day” which enables these words

to carry meaning (to signify).

Likewise, many psychologists and psychoanalysts argue that an

infant first learns to think of itself as a separate and unique “self’ by

188 FORMATIONS OF MODERNITY

recognizing its separation – its difference – from others (principally, of

course, its mother). By analogy, national cultures acquire their strong

sense of identity by contrasting themselves with other cultures. Thus

we argue, the West’s sense of itself – its identity – was formed not o

~

y

by the internal processes that gradually molded Western European

countries into a distinct type of society, but also through Europe’s sense

of difference from other worlds – how it came to represent itself in

relation to these “others.” In reality, differences often shade

imperceptibly into each other. (When exactly does “night” become

“day”? Where exactly does “being English” end and “being Scottish”

begin?) But, in order to function at all, we seem to need distinct,

positive concepts, many of which are sharply polarized towards each

other. As chapter 5 argues, such “binary oppositions” seem to be

fundamental to all linguistic and symbolic systems and to the

production of meaning itself.

This chapter, then, is about the role which “the Rest” played in the

formation of the idea of “the West” and a “western” sense of identity.

At a certain moment, the fates of what had been, for many centuries,

separate and distinct worlds became – some would say, fatally –

harnessed together ~n the same historical time-frame. They became

related elements .in the same discourse, or way of speaking. They
became different parts of one global social, economic, and cultural

system, one interdependent world, one language.

A word of warning must be entered here. In order to bring out the

distinctiveness of this “West and the Rest” discourse, I have been

obliged to be selective and to simplify my representation of the West,

and you should bear this in mind as you read. Terms like “the West”

and “the Rest” are historical and linguistic constructs whose meanings

change over time. More importantly, there are many different

discourses, or ways in which the West came to speak of and represent

other cultures. Some, like “the West and the Rest,” were very western-

centered, or Eurocentric. Others, however, which I do not have space tD

discuss here, were much more culturally relativistic. I have elected to

focus on what I call the discourse of “the West and the Rest” because it

became a very common and influential discoUrse, helping to shape

public perceptions and attitudes down to the present.

Another qualification concerns the very term “the West,” which

makes the West appear unified and homogeneous – essentially one

place, with one view about other cultures and one way of speaking

about them. Of course, this is not the case. The West has always

contained many internal differences – between different nations,

between Eastern and Western Europe, between the Germanic Northern

and the Latin Southern cultures, between the Nordic, Iberian, and

Mediterranean peoples, and so on. Attitudes towards other cultures

within the West varied widely, as they still do between, for example,

the British, the Spanish, the French, and the German.

It is also important to remember that, as well as treating non-

European cultures as different and inferior, the West had its own

internal “others.” Jews, in particular, though close to western religious
traditions, were frequently excluded and ostracized. West Europeans

:,
‘”I ”

i~.;_

THE WEST AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND POWER 189

often regarded Eastern Europeans as “barbaric,” and, throughout the

West, western women were represented as inferior to western men.

The same necessary simplification is true of my references to “the

Rest.” This term also covers enormous historical, cultural, and

economic distinctions – for example, between the Middle East, the Far

East, Africa, Latin America, indigenous North America, and Australasia.

It can equally encompass the simple societies of some North American

Indians and the developed civilizations of China, Egypt, or Islam.

These extensive differences must be borne in mind as you study the

analysis of the discourse of “the West arid the Rest” in

this chapter.

However, we can actually use this simplification to make a point about

discourse. For simplification is precisely what this discourse itself does.
It represents things which are in fact very differentiated (the different

European cultures) as homogeneous (the West). And it asserts that these

different cultures are united by one thing: the fact that they are all
different from the Rest. Similarly, the Rest, though different among
themselves, are represented as the same in the sense that they are all
different from the West. In short, the discourse, as a “system of
representation,” represents the world as divided according to a simple
dichotomy – the West/the Rest. That is what makes the discourse of

“the West and the Rest” so destructive – it draws crude and simplistic

distinctions and constructs an over-simplified conception of

“difference.”

2 Europe Breaks Out

Inwhat follows, you should bear in mind the evolution of the system

of European nation-states discussed in chapter 2. “The voyages of

discovery were the beginning of a new era, one of world-wide

expansion by Europeans, leading in due course to an outright, if

temporary, European … domination of the globe” (Roberts, 1985, p.

175). In this section we offer a broad sketch of the early stages of this

process of expansion. When did it begin? What were its main phases?

What did- it “break out” from? Why did it occur?

2.1 When and how did expansion begin?

Long historical processes have no exact beginning or end, and are

difficult to date precisely. You will remember the argument in chapter

2 that a particular historical pattern is the result of the interplay

between a number of different causal processes. Inorder to describe

them, we are forced to work within very rough-and-ready chronologies

and to use historical generalizations which cover long periods and pick
out the broad patterns, but leave much of the detail aside. There is

nothing wrong with this – historical sociology would be impossible

without it – provided we know at what level of generality our argument

is working. For example, if we are answering the question, “When did

Western Europe first industrialize?,” it may be sufficient to say, “During

-,.~-::;’v . .. _

190 FORMATIONS OF MODERNITY

the second half of the eighteenth century.” However, a close study of

the origins of industrialization in, say, Lancashire, would require a

more refined time-scale. (For further discussion of this point, see the

Introduction to part I.)

We can date the onset of the expansion process roughly in relation to

two key events:

1 The early Portuguese explorations of the African coast (1430-98);

and

2 Columbus’s voyages to the New World (1492-1502).

Broadly speaking, European expansion coincides with the ~nd of what

we call “the Middle Ages” and the beginning of the “modern age.”

Feudalism was already in decline in Western Europe, while trade,

co~erce, and the market were expanding. The centralized monarchies

of France, England, and Spain were emerging (see chapter 2). Europe

was on the threshold of a long, secular boom in productivity,

improving standards of living, rapid population growth, and that

explosion in art, learning, science, scholarship, and knowledge known

as the Renaissance. (Leonardo da Vinci had designed flying machines

and submarines prior to 1519; Michelangelo started work on the Sistine

Chapel in 1508; Thomas More’s Utopia appeared in 1516.) For much of

the Middle Ages, the arts of civilization had been more developed in

China and the Islamic world than in Europe. Many historians would

agree with Michael Mann that “the point at which Europe ‘overtook’

Asia must have been about 1450, the period of European naval

expansion and the Galilean revolution in science”; though as Mann also

argues, many of the processes which made this possible had earlier

origins (Mann, 1988, p. 7). We will return to this question at the end of

the section.

2.2 Five main phases

The process of expansion can be divided, broadly, into five main

phases:

1 The period of exploration, when Europe “discovered” many of the

“new worlds” for itself for the first time (they all, of course, already

existed).

2 The period of early contact, conquest, settlement, and colonization,

when large parts of these “new worlds” were first annexed to

Europe as possessions, or harnessed through trade.

3 The time during which the shape of permanent European

settlement, colonization, or exploitation was established (e.g.

plantation societies in North America and the Caribbean; mining

and ranching in Latin America; the rubber and tea plantations of

India, Ceylon, and the East Indies). Capitalism now emerged as a

global market.

4 The phase when the scramble for colonies, markets, and raw

materials reached its climax. This was the “high noon of

Imperialism,” and led into World War I and the twentieth century.

THE WEST AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND POWER 191

5 The present, when much of the world is economically dependent on

the West, even when formally independent and decolonized.

There are no neat divisions between these phases, which often

overlapped. For example, although the main explorations of Australia

occurred in our first phase, the continent’s shape was not finally known

until after Cook’s voyages in the eighteenth century. Similarly, the

Portuguese first circumnavigated Africa in the fifteenth century, yet the

exploration of the African interior below the Sahara and the scramble

for African colonies is really a nineteenth-century story.

Since we are focusing on “formations,” this chapter concentrates on

the first two phases – those involving early exploration, encounter,

contact, and conquest – in order to trace how “the West and the Rest”

as a “system of representation” was formed.

2.3 The Age of Exploration

This began with Portugal, after the Moors (the Islamic peoples who had

conquered Spain) had finally been expelled from the Iberian peninsula.

Prince Henry “The Navigator,” the pioneer of Portuguese exploration,

was himself a Crusader who fought the Moors at the battle of Ceuta

(North Africa; 1415) and helped to disperse the Moorish pirates who

lurked at the entrance to the Mediterranean. As Eric Newby explains:

With the pirates under control there was a real possibility that the

Portuguese might be able to take over the caravan trade – an

important part of which was in gold dust – that Ceuta enjoyed

with the African interior. In the event, the attempt to capture this

trade failed … And so there emerged another purpose. This was

to discover from which parts of Africa the merchandise,

particularly the gold dust, emanated and, having done so, to

contrive to have it re-routed … to stations on the Atlantic coast in

which the inhabitants would already have been converted to

Christianity and of which the King of Portugal would be the ruler.

(Newby, 1975,p. 62)

This comment pinpoints the complex factors – economic, political.

and spiritual- which motivated Portuguese expansion. Why, then,

hadn’t they simply sailed southwards before? One answer is that they

thought their ships were not sufficiently robust to endure the fierce

currents and contrary winds to be encountered around the curve of the

North African coastline. Another equally powerful factor was what is

called the “Great Barrier of Fear” – evident, for example, in the belief

that beyond Cape Bojador lay the mouth of Hell, where the seas boiled

and people turned black because of the intense heat. The late-medieval

European conception of the world constituted as much of a barrier to

expansion as technological and navigational factors.

In 1430, the Portuguese sailed down the west coast of Africa, hoping

to find not only the sources of the African gold, ivory, spice, and slave

trades, but also the legendary black Christian ruler, “Prester John.” In

stages (each consolidated by papal decree giving Portugal a monopoly

-;..i’
I~.

192 FORMATIONS OF MODERNITY

‘. _:.AZORES

1432:

Go~loVelho

MADEIRA ISLANDS.:

CAPE

VERDE

ISLAND~ • Cape

1456 •.•: Verde
Cadamosto •

Gambia River
1455 Cadamosto

The Equator

INDIA

N

OCEAN

ATLANTIC

OCEAN
N

t
Figure6.1 Portuguese expansion

“in the Ocean Sea … lying southward and eastward”), the Portuguese

pushed. down the African coast, and past the “Great Barrier of Fear.” In

1441, the first cargo of African slaves captured by Europeans arrived in

Portugal – thereby beginning a new era of slave-trading.

In 1487/8 Bartolomeo Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope and

Pedro da Covilhiio, taking the caravan route overland, reached the

Sudan from where he sailed to India (1488). Later, Vasco da Gama

sailed around Africa and then, with the aid of a Muslim pilot, across

the Indian Ocean to the city of Calicut (1497-8). Within ten years

Portugal had established the foundations of a naval and commercial

empire. Displacing the Arab traders who had long plied’ the Red Sea

and Indian Ocean, they established a chain of ports to Goa, the East

Indies, the Moluccas, and Timor. In 1514, a Portuguese mission reached

Canton (China), and in 1542 the first contact was made with Japan.

By comparison, the exploration of the New World (America) was at

first largely a Spanish affair. After long pleading, Columbus, the

THE WEST AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND POWER 193

ATLANTIC

OCEAN
N

t
__ 1492-3

__ 1493-6

__ 1498

__ 1502-4

Figure6.2 The voyages of ChristopherColumbus

Genoese navigator, finally persuaded King Ferdinand and Queen

Isabella of Spain to support his “western Enterprise” to find a westerly

route to the treasures of the East. Deliberately under-estimating the

distance of Asia from Europe (he chose the shortest of a number of

guesses on offer from medieval and classical sources) he sailed into the

“Green Sea of Darkness” in 1492. In four remarkable voyages he

became the first European to land on most of the islands of the

Caribbean and on the Central American mainland. He never

relinquished his ·belief that “I am before Zaiton (Japan) and Quinsay

(China), a hundred leagues, a little more or less” (Coluinbus, 1969, p.

26). The misnamed “West Indies” are a permanent reminder that the

Old World “discovered” the New by accident. But Columbus opened

up a whole continent to Spanish expansion, founded on the drive for

gold and the Catholic dream of converting the world to the Christian

faith. Shortly afterwards, Amerigo Vespucci (to whom the American

continents owe their name) sailed north to Carolina, and south along

the coast of Brazil to Rio, Patagonia, and the Falkland Islands .

._—-_._–_ …………….-.-.__ …_-

194 FORMATIONS OF MODERNITY

. ,
_.i

In 1500 a Portuguese called Pedro Cabral, sailing to India, was blown

out into the Atlantic and landed fortuitously on the coast of Brazil,

giving Portugal her first foothold in what was to become Latin America.

The threatened Spanish-Portuguese rivalry was aggravated by papal

decrees favoring the Spanish, but was finally settled by the Treaty of

Tordesillas (1494), which divided the “unknown world” between the

Spanish and the Portuguese along a line of longitude running about

1500 miles west of the Azores. This line was subsequently revised

many times and other nations, like Spain’s arch enemy and Protestant

rival, England, greedy to partake of the riches of the New World, soon

made nonsense of it with their buccaneering exploits an~ raids along

the Spanish Main. “Nevertheless,” as John Roberts observes of the

treaty,

… it is a landmark of great psychological and political

importance: Europeans, who by then had not even gone round the

globe, had decided to divide between themselves all its

undiscovered and unappropriated lands and peoples. The

potential implications were vast … The conquest of the high seas

was the first and greatest of all the triumphs over natural forces

which were to lead to domination by western civilisation of the

whole globe. Knowledge is power, and the knowledge won by the

first systematic explorers … had opened the way to the age of

western world hegemony.

(Roberts, 1985, p. 194)

In 1519-22, a Portuguese expedition led by Magellan circumnavigated

the globe, and Sir Francis Drake repeated this feat in 1577-80.

The early Spanish explorers of the New World opened the way to

that ruthless band of soldier-adventurers, the Conquistadors, who

completed the conquest of Central and South America, effecting the

transition from exploration to conquest and colonization.

In 1513 Balboa, having explored the northern coast of South

America, crossed the Isthmus of Darien to the Pacific. And in 1519

Cortes landed in Mexico and carried through the destruction of the

Aztec empire. Pizarro pushed south through Ecuador to the Andes and

Peru, and destroyed the Inca empire (1531-4), after which Orellana

crossed the continent by way of the Amazon (1541-4). The

Conquistadors were driven by the prospect of vast, unlimited fortunes.

“We Spaniards,” Cortes confessed, “suffer from a disease that only gold

can cure” (quoted in Hale, 1966, p. 105).

The Spanish proceeded to push up into what are now New Mexico,

Arizona. Florida, and Arkansas (1528-42). Meanwhile, further north,

other nations were also busy exploring. John Cabot, a Venetian sailing

under English patronage, landed at Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and

New England (1497-8). In 1500-1, the Portuguese Corte Real, and in

1524 the Italian Verrazano, explored the Atlantic seaboard of North

America. They were followed in 1585-7 by Sir Walter Raleigh, and a

number of British colonies were soon established: Newfoundland

(1583), Roanoke (1585), and Jamestown (1607).

Yet further north, British explorers such as Gilbert, Frobisher, Davis,

Hudson, and Baffin (1576-1616) tried in vain to find an alternative

THE WEST AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND POWER 195

route to the East via a north-west passage through the Arctic seas. This

quest was partly responsible for the opening up of North America, and

Dutch, French, and English colonies sprang up along the Atlantic

seaboard. Nevertheless, the serious exploration of Canada and North

~erica was led largely by the French: Cartier, Champlain, and their

followers exploring the St Lawrence river, the Great Lakes, and the

Mississippi river down to the Gulf of Mexico (1534-1682).

The Spanish and Portuguese established an early presence in the Far

East, and soon the Spanish were exploring the Pacific, colonizing

islands, and even commuting out of Manila in the Philippines to the

west coast of America (1565-1605). But the Dutch and the English set

out to flout the Spanish and Portuguese commercial monopolies. The

.British East India Company was founded in 1599, the Dutch East India

Company in 1602. After their independence from Spain in 1584, the

Dutch became one of the most powerful commercial nations, their East

Indies trade laying the basis for the flourishing of Dutch bourgeois

culture (Schama, 1977). From a base in the old spice empire, the Dutch

reached Fiji, the East Indies, Polynesia, Tasmania, New Zealand, and in

1606 were the first Europeans to catch sight of Australia. Over the next

thirty years they gradually pieced together the Australian jigsaw-puzzle,

though the Australian coast was not completely mapped until after

Cook’s famous voyages (1768-79) to Tahiti, the South Pacific, and the

Antarctic.

By the eighteenth century, then, the main European world-players –

Portugal, Spain, England, France, and Holland – were all in place. The

serious business of bringing the far-flung civilizations they had

discovered into the orbit of western.trade and commerce, and

exploiting their wealth, land, labor, and natural resources for European

development had become a major enterprise. (China and India

remained closed for longer, except for trading along their coasts and

the efforts of Jesuit missionaries.) Europe began to imprint its culture

and customs on the new worlds. European rivalries were constantly

fought out and settled in the colonial theaters. The colonies became

the “jewels in the crown” of the new European empires. Through

trade monopolies and the mercantilist commercial system, each of

these empires tried to secure exclusive control of the flow of trade for

its own enrichment. The wealth began to flow in: in 1554 America

yielded 11 percent of the Spanish Crown’s income; in 1590, 50

percent.

2.4 Breakingthe frame

Towards the end of the fifteenth century, then, Europe broke out of its

long confinement. What had bottled it up for so long? This is a difficult

question to answer, but we can identify two sets of factors – the first,

material, the ‘second, cultural.

Physical barriers to the East The Middle Ages represented an actual

loss of contact with and knowledge of the outside world. Alexander the

Great’s conquests (336-323 B.C.) had taken the Macedonian-Greek

armies as far east as the Himalayas. Only his troops’ reluctance

196 FORMATIONS OF MODERNITY

‘,.

:,
::’
:’1

prevented him from reaching what he believed to be the limits of the

inhabited world. The Roman Empire stretched from Britain to the

Arabian deserts. But in the Middle Ages Europe closed in on itself. It

retained some knowledge of India (especially among Venetian traders),

but beyond that lay unknown territory. Though every port and trade

route on the Mediterranean was mapped, the basic contours of other

seas and continents were shrouded in mystery. For example, though

Europe bought great quantities of Chinese silk, transported by caravan

across Central Asia, it took little interes,t in the great civilization from

which the silk came.

A key factor in this was that, after the seventh century A.D., “sea-

routes and land-routes alike were barred by the meteoric rise of Islam,

which interposed its iron curtain between West and East” (Latham,

1958, p. 8). It was Arab middlemen who brought eastern goods to the

European sea-ports of the Mediterranean and Black Sea to sell. The

Crusades (1095-1291) were the long, and for a time unsuccessful,

struggle of Christian Europe to roll back this “infidel threat.” But just

when, at last, Europe seemed to be winning, a thunderbolt struck from

a quarter unexpected by both Islam and Christendom: the invasions of

the Mongol and Tartar nomads from the Central Asian steppes (1206-

60), which left a trail of devastation in their wake. However, Islam

suffered even more than Christendom from the Tartar invasions and, in

the thirteenth century, the eastern curtain lifted briefly.

During this interval, the Venetian Marco Polo and other members of

his family undertook their famous travels to the court of the Great

Khan, China, and Japan (1255-95).

Marco Polo’s Travels with its tales of the fabulous wealth of the East

played a decisive role in stimulating the European imagination to

search for a westerly route to the East, a search that became

increasingly important. For soon the eastern opening became blocked

again by the rise of a new Islamic power, the Ottoman Empire; and

China, under the Ming dynasty, once more turned inwards .

This had profound effects. It stimulated expansion westwards,

favoring the European powers of the Atlantic seaboard (Spain, Portugal,

Britain, Holland, and France). It also tended to isolate Western from

Eastern Europe – a process reinforced by the growing split between

Western (Catholic) and Eastern (Orthodox) Churches. From this point

onwards, the patterns of development within Western and Eastern

Europe sharply diverged.

::

~

.:~

The barriers in the mind A second major obstacle to the East lay in

the mind – consisting not only of the sketchy knowledge that

Europeans had of the outside world, but of the way they

conceptualized and imagined it. To the north, they believed, there was

“nothing – or worse … barbarian peoples who” until civilized by the

church, were only a menace” (Roberts, 1985, p. 117). To the east, across

the plains, there were barbarians on horseback: Huns, Mongols, and

Tartars. To the south lay the shifting empires of Islam, which, despite

their early tolerance of Christianity and of the Jews, had advanced deep

into Europe – to Poitiers and Constantinople, across North Africa and

~,~.~
THE WEST AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND POWER 197

into Spain, Portugal, and southern Italy. The cradle of European

civilization and trade was the Mediterranean. In the eastern

Mediterranean, there was Byzantium – a civilization which was part of

Christendom. But, as we said, the Catholic and Orthodox churches

were drawing farther apart as the centuries passed.

For what lay beyond, Europe relied on other sources of knowledge –

classical, biblical, legendary, and mythological. Asia remained largely a

world of elephants and other wonders almost as remote as sl).b-Saharan

Africa. There were four continents – Europe, Africa, Asia, and “Terra

Australis Incognita” (“The Unknown Southern Land”) – the way to the

latter being judged impassable. On medieval maps, the land mass

crowded out the oceans: there was no Pacific and the Atlantic was a

narrow, and extremely dangerous, waterway. The world was often

represented as a wheel. superimposed on the body of Christ, with

Jerusalem at its hub. This conception of the world did not encourage

free and wide-ranging travel.

2.5 The consequences of expansion for the
idea of ”the West”

Gradually, despite their many internal differences, the countries of

Western Europe began to conceive of themselves as part of a single

family or civilization – “the West.” The challenge from Islam was an

important factor in hammering Western Europe and the idea of “the

West” into shape. Roberts notes that “The word ‘Europeans’ seems to

appear for the first time in an eighth-centwy reference to Charles

Martel’s victory [over Islamic forces) at Tours. All collectivities become

more self-aware in the presence of an external challenge, and self-

awareness promotes cohesiveness” (Roberts, 1985, p. 122). And Hulme

speaks of “… the consolidation of an ideological identity through the

testing of [Europe’s) Eastern frontiers prior to the adventure of Atlantic

exploration …. A symbolic end to that process could be considered

Pius ill’s 1458 identification of Europe with Christendom” (Hulme,

1986, p. 84).

But in the Age of Exploration and Conquest, Europe began to define

itself in relation to a new idea – the existence of many new “worlds,”

profoundly different from itself. The two processes – growing internal

cohesion and the conflicts and contrasts with external worlds –

reinforced each other, helping to forge that new sense of identity that

we call “the West.” In the following extract Michael Mann offers an

explanation of European development by making a series of historical

generalizations about long-term socio-economic and religious factors:

Why is “Europe” to be regarded as a continent in the first place?

This is not an ecological but a social fact. It had not been a

continent hitherto: it was now created by the fusion of the

Germanic barbarians and the north-western parts of the Roman

Empire, and the blocking presence of Islam to the south and east.

Its continental identity was primarily Christian, for its name was

Christendom more often than it was Europe.

198 FORMATIONS OF MODERNITY

Europe was undoubtedly a place where competition flourished

but why? It is not “natural.” … In fact, competition presupposes’

two further forms of social organization. First, autonomous actors

must be empowered to dispose of privately owned resources

without hindrance from anyone else. These actors need not be

individuals, or even individual households, enjoying what in

capitalist societies we call “private property.” … But collective

institutions also qualify, as long as they have a responsible

authority structure empowered to dispose of its resources for

economic advantage, without interference from others, or from

custom – then the laws of neoclassical economics can begin to

operate ….

Second, competition among actors on a market [basis] requires

normative regulation. They must trust one another to honour their

word. They must also trust each other’s essential rationality.

These normative understandings must apply not only in direct

interaction but right across complex, continental chains of

production, distribution and exchange ….

European social structure supplied these requirements. The

social structure which stabilized in Europe after the ending of the

barbarian migrations and invasions (that is, by AD 1000) was a

multiple acephalous federation. Europe had no head, no centre,

yet it was an entity composed of a number of small, cross-cutting
interaction networks. These, based on economic, military and

ideological power, each differed in their geographical and social

space and none was itself unitary in nature. Consequently no

single power agency controlled a clear-cut territory or the

people within it. As a result most social relationships were

extremely localized, intensely focused upon one or more of a

number of cell-like communities – the monastery, the village,

the manor, the castle, the town, the guild, the brotherhood and

so on. These collectivities had a power autonomy guaranteed

by law or custom, an exclusivity of control over “their”

resources. They qualify, therefore, as “private” property

owners ….

Whatever this extraordinary multiple, acephalous federation

would achieve, it was unlikely to be organized stagnation.

Historians over and over again use the word restless to
characterize the essence of medieval culture. As McNeill puts it,

“it is not any particular set of institutions, ideas or technologies

that mark out the West but its inability to come to a rest. No other

civilized society has ever approached such restless

instability …. In this … lies the true uniqueness of Western

civilization” (McNeill, 1963, p. 539). But such a spirit need not

induce social development. Might it not induce other forms of

stagnation: anarchy, the Hobbesian war of all against all, or

anomie where the absence of social control and direction leads to
aimlessness and despair? We can marry the insights of two great

sociologists to guess why social development, not anarchy or

anomie, may have resulted.

THE WEST AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND POWER 199

First Max Weber, who in noting the peculiar restlessness of

Europe, always added another word: rational. “Rational
restlessness” was the psychological make-up of Europe, the

opposite of what he found in the main religions of Asia …

Weber located rational restlessness especially in Puritanism.

But Puritanism emphasized strands of the Christian psyche

which had been traditionally present. … Christianity encouraged

a drive for moral and social improvement even against worldly

authority. Though much of medieval Christianity was piously

masking brutal repression, its currents of dissatisfaction

always ran strong. We can read an enormous literature of social

criticism, visionary, moralistic, satirical, cynical. Some is

laboured and repetitious, but its peak includes some of the

greatest works of the age – in English: Langland and Chaucer.

It is pervaded by the kind of psychological quality identified by
Weber.

But to put this rational restlessness in the service of social

improvement probably also required a mechanism identified by

another sociologist: Emile Durkheim. Not anarchy or anomie but
normative regulation was provided at first primarily by

Christendom. Political and class struggles, economic life and even

wars were, to a degree, regulated by an unseen hand, not Adam

Smith’s but Jesus Christ’s …. The community depended on the

general recognition of norms regarding property rights and free

exchange. These were guaranteed by a mixture of local customs

and privileges, some judicial regulation by weak states, but

above all by the common social identity provided by

Christendom ….

The main conclusion is unmistakable. The most powerful and

extensive sense of social identity was Christian, though this was

both a unifying transcendent identity and an identity divided by

the overlapping barriers of class and literacy. Cross-cutting all

these were commitments to England, but these were variable and,

in any case, included less extensive dynastic connections and

obligations. Thus, Christian identity provided both a common

humanity and a framework for common divisions among

Europeans ….

The Christian achievement was the creation of a minimal

normative society across state, ethnic, class and gender

boundaries. It did not in any Significant sense include the Eastern

Byzantine Church. It did, however, integrate the two major

geographical areas of “Europe”, the Mediterranean lands with

their cultural heritage, their historic and predominantly extensive
power techniques -literacy, coinage, agricultural estates and

trading networks – and north-western Europe with its more

intensive power techniques – deep ploughing, village and kin
solidarities and locally organized warfare. If the two could be kept

in a single community, then European development was a

possible consequence of their creative interchange.

(Mann, 1988, pp. 10-15)

200 FORMATIONS OF MODERNITY

In contrast to Mann, John Roberts brings cultural and ideological

aspects to the fore:

Europeans … now [took] a new view of themselves and their

relation to the other peoples of the globe. Maps are the best clue

to this change … They are always more than mere factual

statements. They are translations of reality into forms we can

master; they are fictions and acts of imagination communicating

more than scientific data. So they reflect changes in our pictures

of reality. The world is not only what exists “out the~e”; it is also

the picture we have of it in our minds which enables us to take a

grip on material actuality. In taking that grip, our apprehension of

that actuality changes – and so does a wide range of our

assumptions and beliefs.

One crucial mental change was the final emergence of the

notion of Europe from the idea of Christendom. Maps show the

difference between the two. After the age of discovery, Jerusalem,

where the founder of Christianity had taught and died, could no

longer be treated as the centre of the world – where it appeared on

many medieval maps. Soon it was Europe which stood at the

centre of Europeans’ maps. The final key to a new mental picture

was provided by the discovery of the Americas. Somewhere about

1500 European map-makers had established the broad layout of

the world map with which we are familiar. In the fifteenth

century, Europe had usually been placed in the top left-hand

corner of attempts to layout the known world, with the large

masses of Asia and Africa sprawled across the rest of the surface.

The natural centre of such maps might be in any of several places.

Then the American discoveries slowly began to effect a shift in

the conventional arrangement; more and more space had to be

given to the land masses of North and South America as their true

extent became better known ….

By the middle of the century the new geographical view of the

world had come to be taken for granted. It was given its canonical

expression in the work of Mercator … Mercator’s new

“projection”, first used in a map in 1568, … drove home the idea

that the land surface of the globe was naturally grouped about a

European centre. So Europe came to stand in some men’s minds at

the centre of the world. No doubt this led Europeans for centuries

to absorb unconsciously from their atlases the idea that this was

somehow the natural order of things. It did not often occur to

them that you could have centred Mercator’s projection in, say,

China, or even Hawaii, and that Europeans might then have felt

very different. The idea still hangs about, even today. Most people

like to think of themselves at the centre of things …. Mercator

helped his own civilisation to take what is now called a

“Eurocentric” view of the world.

(Roberts, 1985,pp. 194-202)

Roberts argues that maps are “fictions” which “reflect changes in our

pictures ofreality.” His larger claims, however, focus on the centrality

THE WEST AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND POWER 201

of Christianity to the idea of “Europe.” For centuries, the concepts

“Europe” and “Christendom” were virtually identical. Europe’s cultural

identity – what made its civilization distinct and unique – was, in the

first instance, essentially religious and Christian. Eventually, the idea of

“Europe” acquired a sharper geographical, political, and economic .

definition. This brought it closer to the modern, secular concept of “the

West.” However, the West has never entirely lost touch with its

Christian roots. The encounter with the new worlds – with difference –

actually reinforced this new identity. It promoted that “growing sense

of superiority,” which Roberts calls a “Eurocentric” view of the world.

3 Discourse and Power

We have looked at the historical process by which an idea of “the

West” emerged from Europe’s growing internal cohesion and its

changing relations to non-Western societies. We turn, next, to the

formation of the languages or “discourses” in which Europe began to

describe and represent the difference between itself and these “others”

it encountered in the course of its expansion. We are now beginning to

sketch the formation of the “discourse” of “the West and the Rest.”

However, we need first to understand what we mean by the term

“discourse.”

3.1 What is a “discourse”?

Incommon-sense language, a discourse is simply “a coherent or

rational body of speech or writing; a speech, or a sermon.” But here the

term is being used in a more specialized way. By “discourse,” we mean

a particular way of representing “the West,” “the Rest,” and the

relations between them. A discourse is a group of statements which

provide a language for talking about – i.e. a way of representing – a

particular kind of knowledge about a topic. When statements about a

topic are made within a particular discourse, the discourse makes it

possible to construct the topic in a certain way. It also limits the other

ways in which the topic can be constructed.

A discourse does not consist of one statement, but of several

statements working together to form what the French social theorist,

Michel Foucault (1926-84) calls a “discursive formation.” The

statements fit together because anyone statement imvlies a relation to

all the others: “They refer to the same object, share .J.lesame style and

support ‘a strategy … a common institutional … or political drift or

pattern'” (Cousins and Hussain, 1984, pp. 84-5).

One important point about this notion of discourse is that it is not

based on the conventional distinction between thought and action,

language and practice. Discourse is about the production of knowledge

through language. But it is itself produced by a practice: “discursive

practice” – the practice of producing meaning. Since all social practices

entail meaning, all practices have a discursive aspect. So discourse

.———.–~–“._-. —

202 FORMATIONS OF MODERNITY

enters into and influences all social practices. Foucault would argue

that the discourse of the West about the Rest was deeply implicated in

practice – i.e. in how the West behaved towards the Rest.

To get a fuller sense of Foucault’s theory of discourse, we must bear

the following points in mind.

1 A discourse can be produced by many individuals in different

institutional settings (like families, prisons; hospitals, and asylums). Its

integrity or “coherence” does not depend on whether or not it issues

from one place or from a single speaker or “subject.” Nevertheless,

every discourse constructs positions from which alone it makes sense.

Anyone deploying a discourse must position themselves as if they were

the subject of the discourse. For example, we may not ourselves believe

in the natural superiority of the West. But if we use the discourse of

“the West and the Rest” we will necessarily find ourselves speaking

from a position that holds that the West is a superior civilization. As

Foucault puts it, “To describe a … statement does not consist in

analysing the relations between the author and what he [sic) says … ;

but in determining what position can and must be occupied by any

individual if he is to be the subject of it [the statement)” (Foucault,

1972, pp. 95-6).

2 Discourses are not closed systems. A discourse draws on elements

in other discourses, binding them into its own network of meanings.

Thus, as we saw in the preceding section, the discourse of “Europe”

drew on the earlier discourse of “Christendom,” altering or translating

its meaning. Traces of past discourses remain embedded in more recent

discourses of “the West.”

3 The statements within a discursive formation need not all be the

same. But the relationships and differences between them must be

regular and systematic, not random. Foucault calls this a “system of

dispersion”: “Whenever one can describe, between a number of

statements, such a system of dispersion, whenever … one can define a

regularity … [then] we will say … that we are dealing with a

discursive formation” (Foucault, 1972, p. 38).

These points will become clearer when we apply them to particular

examples, as we do later in this chapter.

3.2 Discourse and ideology

A discourse is similar to what sociologists call an “ideology”: a set of

statements or beliefs which produce knowledge that serves the interests

of a particular group or class. Why, then, use “discourse” rather than

“ideology”?

One reason which Foucault gives is that ideology is based on a

distinction between true statements about the world (science) and false

statements (ideology), and the belief that the facts about the world help

us to decide between true and false statements. But Foucault argues

that statements about the social, political, or moral world are rarely

ever simply true or false; and “the facts” do not enable us to decide

THE WEST AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND POWER 203

definitively about their truth or falsehood, partly because “facts” can be

construed in different ways. The very language we use to describe the

so-called facts interferes in this process of finally deciding what is true

and what is false.

For example, Palestinians fighting to regain land on the West Bank

from Israel may be described either as “freedom fighters” or as

“terrorists.” It is a fact that they are fighting; but what does the fighting

mean? The facts alone cannot decide. And the very language we use –

“freedom fighters/terrorists” – is part of the difficulty. Moreover, certain

descriptions, even if they appear false to us, can be made “true”

because people act on them believing that they are true, and so their

actions have real consequences. Whether the Palestinians are terrorists

or not, if we think they are, and act on that “knowledge,” they in effect

become terrorists because we treat them as such. The language

(discourse) has real effects in practice: the description becomes “true.”

Foucault’s use of “discourse,” then, is an attempt to side-step what

seems an unresolvable dilemma – deciding which social discourses are

true or scieIltific, and which false or ideological. Most social scientists

now accept that our values enter into all our descriptions of the social

world, and therefore most of our statements, however factual, have an

ideological dimension. What Foucault would say is that knowledge of

the Palestinian problem is produced by competing discourses – those of

“freedom-fighter” and “terrorist” – and that each is linked to a

contestation over power. It is the outcome of this struggle which will

decide the “truth” of the situation.

You can see, then, that although the concept of “discourse” side-

steps the problem of truth/falsehood in ideology, it does not evade the

issue of power. Indeed, it gives considerable weight to questions of

power since it is power, rather than the facts about reality, which

makes things “true”: “We should admit that power produces

knowledge … That power and knowledge directly imply one another;

that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a

field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and

constitute … power relations” (Foucault, 1980, p. 27).

3.3 Can a discourse be “innocent”?

Could the discourse which developed in the West for talking about the

Rest operate outside power? Could it be, in that sense, purely scientific

– i.e. ideologically innocent? Or was it influenced by particular class

interests?

Foucault is very reluctant to reduce discourse to statements that

simply mirror the interests of a particular class. The same discourse can

be used by groups with different, even contradictory, class interests.

But this does not mean that discourse is ideologically neutral or

“innocent.” Take, for example, the encounter between the West and the

New World. There are several reasons why this encounter could not be

innocent, and therefore why the discourse which emerged in the Old

World about the Rest could not be innocent either.

–

:’0-< .

204 FORMATIONS OF MODERNITY

First, Europe brought its own cultural categories, languages, images,

and ideas to the New World in order to describe and represent it. It

tried to fit the New World into existing conceptual frameworks,

classifying it according to its own norms, and absorbing it into western

traditions of representation. This is hardly surprising: we often draw on

what we already know about the world in order to explain and describe

something novel. It was never a simple matter’ of the West just looking,

seeing, and describing the New World/the Rest without preconceptions.

Secondly, Europe had certain definite purposes, aims, objectives,

motives, interests, and strategies in setting out to discover what lay

across the “Green Sea of Darkness.” These motives and interests were

mixed. The Spanish, for example, wanted to:

1 get their hands on gold and silver;

2 claim the land for Their Catholic Majesties; and

3 convert the heathen to Christianity.

These interests often contradicted one another. But we must not

suppose that what Europeans said about the New World was simply a

cynical mask for their own self-interest. When King Manuel of Portugal

wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain that “the principal motive of

this enterprise fda Gama’s voyage to India) has been … the service of

God our Lord, and our own advantage” (quoted in Hale, 1966, p. 38) –

thereby neatly and conveniently bringing God and Mammon together

into the,same sentence – he probably saw no obvious contradiction

between them. These fervently religious Catholic rulers fully believed

what they were saying. To them, serving God and pursuing “our

advantage” were not necessarily at odds. They lived and fully believed

their own ideology.

So, while it would be wrong to attempt to reduce their statements to

naked self-interest, it is clear that their discourse was molded and

influenced by the play of motives and interests across their language.

Of course, motives and interests are almost never wholly conscious or

rational. The desires which drove the Europeans were powerful; but

their power was not always subject to rational calculation. Marco Polo’s

“treasures of the East” were tangible enough. But the seductive power

which they exerted over generations of Europeans transformed them

more and more into a myth. Similarly, the gold that Columbus kept

asking the natives for very soon acquired a mystical, quasi-religious

significance.

Finally, the discourse of “the West and the Rest” could not be

innocent because it did not represent an encounter between equals. The

Europeans had outsailed, outshot, and outwitted peoples who had no

wish to be “explored,” no need to be “discovered,” and no desire to be

“exploited.” The Europeans stood, vis-a-vis the Others, in positions of

dominant power. This influenced what they saw and how they saw it,

as well as what they did not see.

Foucault sums up these arguments as follows. Not only is discourse

always implicated in power; discourse is one of the “systems” through

which power circulates. The knowledge which a discourse produces

THE WEST AND THE REST. DISCOURSE AND POWER 205

constitutes a kind of power, exercised over those who are “known.”

When that knowledge is exercised in practice, those who are “known”

in a particular way will be subject (i.e. subjected) to it. This is always a

power-relation. (See Foucault, 1980, p. 201.) Those who produce the

discourse also have the power to make it true – i.e. to enforce its

validity, its scientific status.

This leaves Foucault in a highly relativistic position with respect to

questions of truth because his notion of discourse undermines th)’l’

distinction between true and false statements – between science”and

ideology – to which many sociologists have subscribed. Thes

epistemological issues (about the status of knowledge, truth, and

relativism) are too complex to take further here. (Some of em are

addressed further in part III.)However, the important ide to grasp now

is the deep and intimate relationship which Foucault es blishes

between discourse, knowledge, and power. According to Foucault,

when power eperates so as to enforce the “truth” of any set of

statements, then such a discursive formation produces a “regime of

truth.”

Let us summarize the main points of this argument. Discourses are

ways of talking, thinking, or representing a particular subject or topic.

They produce meaningful knowledge about that subject. This

knowledge influences social practices, and so has real consequences

and effects. Discourses are not reducible to class-interests, but always

operate in relation to power – they are part of the way power circulates

and is contested. The question of whether a discourse is true or false is

less important than whether it is effective in practice. When it is
effective – organizing and regulating relations of power (say, between

the West and the Rest) – it is called a “regime of truth.”

4 Representing “theOther”

So far, the discussion of discourse haS been rather abstract and

conceptual. The concept may be easier to understand in relation to an

example. One of the best examples of what Foucault means by a

“regime of truth” is provided by Edward Said’s study of Orientalism. In

this section, I want to look briefly at this example and then see how far

we can use the theory of discourse and the example of Orientalism to

analyze the

discourse of “the West and the Rest.”

4.1 Orientalism

In his book Orientalism, Edward Said analyzes the various discourses
and institutions which constructed and produced, as an object of

knowledge, that entity called “the Orient.” Said calls this discourse

“Orientalism.” Note that, though we tend to include the Far East

(including China) in our use of the word “Orient,” Said refers mainly to

the Middle East – the territory occupied principally by Islamic peoples.

–~~-.——-~—.——-…. ——

206 FORMATIONS OF MODERNITY

Also, his main focus is French writing about the Middle East. Here is

Said’s own summary of the project of his book:

My contention is that, witgout examining Orientalism as a

discourse, one cannot possibly understand the enormously

systematic discipline by which European culture was able to

manage – and even produce – the Orient politically,

sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and

imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. Moreover, so

authoritative a position did Orientalism have that I believe no one

writing, thinking, 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 and 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 …. This book also tries to show that European culture

gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the

Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.

(Said, 1985, p. 3)

We will now analyze the discourse of “the West and the Rest,” as it

emerged between the end of the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries,

using Foucault’s ideas about “discourse” and Said’s example of

“Orientalism.” How was this discourse formed? What were its main

themes – its “strategies” of representation?

4.2 The “archive”

Said argues that, “In a sense Orientalism was a library or archive of

information commonly … held. What bound the archive together was a

family of ideas and a unifying set of values proven in various ways to

be effective. These ideas explained the behaviour of Orientals; they

supplied Orientals with a mentality, a genealogy, an atmosphere; most

important, they allowed Europeans to deal with and even to see

Orientals as a phenomenon possessing regular characteristics” (Said,

1985, pp. 41-2). What sources of common knowledge, what “archive”

of other discourses, did the discourse of “the West and the Rest” draw

on? We can identify four main sources:

1 Classical knowledge: This was a major source of information and

images about “other worlds.” Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.) described a string

of legendary islands, among them Atlantis which many early explorers

set out to find. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) and Eratosthenes (c. 276-194

B.C.) both made remarkably accurate estimates of the circumference of

the globe which were consulted by Columbus. Ptolemy’s Geographia

(2nd century A.D.) provided a model for map-makers more than a

thousand years after it had been produced. Sixteenth-century explorers

believed that in the outer world lay, not only Paradise, but that

“r~’
:~’ti··
~;: ‘T THE WEST AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND POWER 207

“Golden Age,” place of perfect happiness and “springtime of the human

race,” of which the classical poets, including Horace (65-8 B.C.) and

Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 17), had written.

The eighteenth century was still debating whether what they had

discovered in the South Pacific was Paradise. In 1768 the French

Pacific explorer Bougainville renamed Tahiti “The New Cythera” after

the island where, according to classical myth, Venus first appeared

from the sea. At the opposite extreme, the descriptions by Herodotus

(484-425 B.C.) and Pliny (A.D. 23-79) of the barbarous peoples who

bordered Greece left many grotesque images of “other” races which

served as self-fulfilling prophecies for later explorers who found what

legend said they would find. Paradoxically, much of this classical

knowledge was lost in the Dark Ages and only later became available to

the West via Islamic scholars, themselves part of that “other” world.

2 Religious and biblical sources: These were another source of

knowledge. The Middle Ages reinterpreted geography in terms of the

Bible. Jerusalem was the center of the earth because it was the Holy

City. Asia was the home of the Three Wise Kings; Africa that of King

Solomon. Columbus believed the Orinoco (in Venezuela) to be a sacred

river flowing out of the Garden of Eden.

3 Mythology: It was difficult to tell where religious and classical

discourses ended and those of myth and legend began. Mythology

transformed the outer world into an enchanted garden, alive with

misshapen peoples and monstrous oddities. In the sixteenth century Sir

Walter Raleigh still believed he would find, in the Amazon rain-forests,

the king “EI Dorado” (“The Gilded One”) whose people were alleged to

roll him in gold which they would then wash off in a sacred lake.

4 Travellers’ tales: Perhaps the most fertile source of information was

travellers’ tales – a discourse where description faded imperceptibly

into legend. The following fifteenth century German text summarizes

more than a thousand years of travellers’ tales, which themselves often

drew on religious and classical authority:

In the land ofIndian there are men with dogs’ heads who talk by

barking [and) … feed by catching birds …. Others again have only

one eye in the forehead …. In Libya many are born without heads

and have a mouth and eyes. Many are of both sexes …. Close to

Paradise on the River Ganges live men who eat nothing.

For they absorb liquid nourishment through a straw

[and) live on the juice of flowers …. Many have such large

underlips that they can cover their whole faces with them …. In

the land of Ethiopia many people walk bent down like cattle, and

many live four hundred years. Many have horns, long noses and

goats’ feet. … InEthiopia towards the west many have four

eyes … [and] in Eripia there live beautiful people with the necks

and bills of cranes.

(quoted in Newby, 1975, p. 17)

A particularly rich repository was Sir John Mandeville’s Travels – in

fact, a compendium of fanciful stories by different hands. Marco Polo’s

W_ ..__. _.,,~._~ . ._. .- — .__ ..

.r·
“.’,'”

208 FORMATIoNS OF MODERNITY

Travels was generally more sober and factual, but nevertheless

achieved mythological status. His text (embellished by Rusticello, a

romance writer) was the most widely read of the travellers’ accounts

and was instrumental in creating the myth of “Cathay” (“China”

or the East generally), a dream that inspired Columbus and many

others.

The point of recounting this astonishing mixture of fact and fantasy

which constituted late medieval “knowledge” of other worlds is not to

poke fun at the ignorance of the Middle Ages. The point is: (a) to bring

home how these very different discourses, with variable statuses as –

“evidence,” provided the cultural framework through which the

peoples, places, and things of the New World were seen, described, and

represented; and (b) to underline the conflation of fact and fantasy that

constituted “knowledge.” This can be seen especially in the use of

analogy to describe first encounters with strange animals. Penguins and

seals were described as being like geese and wolves respectively; the

tapir as a bull with a trunk like an elephant, the opossum as half-fox,

half-monkey.

4.3 A “regime of truth”

Gradually, observation and description vastly improved in accuracy.

The medieval habit of thinking in terms of analogies gave way to a

more sober type of description of the fauna and flora, ways of life,

customs, physical characteristics, and social organization of native

peoples. We can here begin to see the outlines of an early ethnography

or anthropology.

But the shift into a more descriptive, factual discourse, with its

claims to truth and-scientific objectivity, provided no guarantees. A

telling example of this is the case of the “Patagonians.” Many myths

and legends told of a race of giant people. And in the 1520s, Magellan’s

crew brought back stories of having encountered, in South America,

such a race of giants whom they dubbed patagones (literally, “big

feet”). The area of the supposed encounter became known as

“Patagonia,” and the notion became fixed in the popular imagination,

even though two Englishmen who visited Patagonia in 1741 described

its people as being of average size.

When Commodore John Byron landed in Patagonia in 1764, he

encountered a formidable group of natives, broad-shouldered, stocky,

and inches taller than the average European. They proved quite docile

and friendly. However, the newspaper reports of his encount~r wildly

exaggerated the story, and Patagonians took on an even greater stature

and more ferocious aspect. One engraving showed a sailor reaching

only as high as the waist of a Patagonian giant, and The Royal Society

elevated the topic to serious scientific status. “The engravings took the

explorers’ raw material and shaped them into images familiar to

Europeans” (Withey, 1987, pp. 1175-6). Legend had taken a late

revenge on science.

THE WEST AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND POWER 209

4.4 Idealization

“Orientalism,” Said remarks, “is the discipline by which the Orient was

-(and is) approached systematically, as a topic of learning, discovery and

practice.” “In addition,” he adds, Orientalism “designate[s] that

collection of dreams, images and vocabularies available to anyone who

has tried to talk about what lies east of the dividing line” (Said, 1985,

p. 73). Like the Orient, the Rest quickly became the subject of the

languages of dream and Utopia, the object of a powerful fantasy.

Between 1590 and 1634 the Flemish engraver Theodor de Bry

published his Historia Americae in ten illustrated volumes. These were

leading examples of a new popular literature about the New World and

the discoveries there. De Bry’s books contained elaborate engravings of

life and customs of the New World. Here we see the New World

reworked – re-presented – within European aesthetic conventions,

Western “ways of seeing.” Different images of America are

superimposed on one another. De Bry, for example, transformed the

simple, unpretentious sketches which John White had produced in

1587 of the Algonquin Indians he had observed in Virginia. Facial

features were retouched, gestures adjusted, and postures reworked

according to more classical European styles. The effect overall, Hugh

Honour observes, was “to tame and civilize the people White had

observed so freshly” (Honour, 1976, p. 75).

A major object of this process of idealization was Nature itself. The

fertility of the Tropics was astonishing even to Mediterranean eyes.

Few had ever seen landscapes like those of the Caribbean and Central

America. However, the line between description and idealization is

almost impossible to draw. In describing Cuba, for example, Columbus

refers to “trees of a thousand kinds … so tall they seem to touch the

sky,” sierras and high mountains “most beautiful and of a thousand

– shapes,” nightingales and other birds, marvellous pine groves, fertile

plains and varieties of fruit (quoted in Honour, 1976, p. 5). Columbus’s

friend, Peter Martyr, later used his descriptions to express a set of rich

themes which resound across the centuries:

The inhabitants live in that Golden World of which old writers

speak so much, wherein men lived simply and innocently,

without enforcement of laws, without quarrelling, judges and

libels, content only to satisfy Nature … [There are] naked girls so

beautiful that one might think he [sic] beheld those splendid

naiads and nymphs of the fountains so much celebrated by the

ancients.

(quoted in Honour, 1978, p. 6)

The key themes in this passage are worth identifying since they

reappear in later variants of “the West and the Rest”:

1 the Golden World; an Earthly Paradise;

2 the simple, innocent life;

3 the lack of developed social organization and civil society;

4 people living in a pure state of Nature;

——‘——– —~~–

210 FORMATIONS OF MODERNITY

5 the frank and open sexuality; the nakedness; the beauty of the

women.

In these images and metaphors of !he New World as an Earthly

Paradise, a Golden Age, or Utopia, we can see a powerful European

fantasy being constructed.

4.5 Sexual fantasy

Sexuality was a powerful element in the fantasy which the West

constructed, and the ideas of sexual innocence and experience, sexual

domination and submissiveness, play out a complex dance in the

discourse of “the West and the Rest.”

When Captain Cook arrived in Tahiti in 1769, the same idyll of a

sexual paradise was repeated allover again. The women were

extremely beautiful, the vegetation lush and tropical, the life simple,

innocent, and free; Nature nourished the people without the apparent

necessity to work or cultivate; the sexuality was open and unashamed _

untroubled by the burden of European guilt. The naturalist on

Bougainville’s voyage to the Pacific said that the Tahitians were

“without vice, prejudice, needs or dissention and knew no other god

but Love” (Moorhead, 1968, p. 51). “In short,” Joseph Banks, the

gentleman-scientist who accompanied Cook, observed, “the scene that

we saw was the truest picture of an Arcadia, of which we were going to

be kings, that the imagination can form” (quoted in Moorhead, 1987, p.

38). As Cook’s biographer, J.C. Beaglehole, remarks, “they were

standing on the. beach of the dream-world already, they walked straight

into the Golden Age and embraced their nymphs” (quoted in

Moorhead, 1968, p. 66). The West’s contemporary image of tropical

paradise and exotic holidays still owes much to this fantasy.

Popular accounts by other explorers, such as Amerigo Vespucci

(1451-1512), were explicit – where Columbus had been more reticent-

about the sexual dimension. New World people, Vespucci said, “lived

according to Nature,” and went naked and unashamed; “the

women … remained attractive after childbirth, were libidinous, and

enlarged the penises of their lovers with magic potions” (quoted in

Honour, 1976, p. 56).

The very language of exploration, conquest and domination was

strongly marked by gender distinctions and drew much of its

subconscious force from sexual imagery (see figure 6.3). In figure 6.3,

“Europe” (Amerigo Vespucci) stands bold and upright, a commanding

male figure, his feet firmly planted on terra firma. Around him are the

insignia of power: the standard of Their Catholic Majesties of Spain,

surmounted by a cross; in his left hand, the astrolabe that guided him,

the fruit of western knowledge; behind him, the galleons, sails

billowing. Vespucci presents an image of supreine mastery. Hulme

comments that, “In line with existing European conventions, the ‘new’

continent was often allegorized as a woman” – here, naked, in. a

hammock, surrounded by the emblems of an exotic landscape: strange

plants and animals and, above all, a cannibal feast (see Hulme, 1986, p.

xii).

THE WEST AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND poWER 211

Figure6.3 Europe encounters America(vander Straet, c. 1600)

4.6 Mis-recognizing difference

Said says that “the essence of Oriental ism is the ineradicable

distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority” (Said,

1985, p. 42). How was this strong marking of difference constructed?

Europeans were immediately struck by what they interpreted as the

absence of government and civil society – the basis of all “civilization”

– among peoples of the New World. In fact these peoples did have

several, very different, highly elaborated social structures. The New

World the Europeans discovered was already home to millions of

people who had lived there for centuries, whose ancestors had migrated

to America from Asia across the neck of land which once connected

the tWo continents. It is estimated that sixteen million people were

living in the western hemisphere when the Spanish “discovered” it.

The highest concentration was in Mexico, while only about a million

lived in North America. They had very different standards and styles of

life. The Pueblo of Central America were village people. Others were

hunter-gatherers on the plains and in the forests. The Arawaks of the

Caribbean islands had a relatively simple type of society based on

subsistence farming and fishing. Further North, the Iroquois of the

Carolinas were fierce, nomadic hunters.

The high civilization of the Maya, with its dazzling white cities, was

based on a developed agriculture; it was stable, literate, and composed

of a federation of nations, with a complex hierarchy of government.

The civilizations of the Aztecs (Mexico) and the Inca (Peru) were both

large, complex affairs, based on maize cultivation and with a richly

developed art, culture, and religion. Both had a complex social

structure and a centralized administrative system, and both were

~——_._-

~./~

212
FORMATIONS OF MODERNITY

capable of extraordinary engineering feats. Their temples outstripped in

size anything in Europe, and the Royal Road of the Incas ran for nearly

2000 miles through mountainous terrain – further than the extent of the

Roman empire from York to Jerusalem-‘(see Newby, 1975, pp. 95-7).

These were functioning societies. What they were not was

“European.” What disturbed western expectations, what had to be

negotiated and explained, was their difference. As the centuries passed,

Europeans came to know more about the specific characteristics of

different “native American” peoples. Yet, in everyday terms, they

persisted in describing them all as “Indians,” lumping all distinctions

together and suppressing differences in one, inaccurate stereotype (see
Berkhofer, 1978).

Another illustration of the inability to deal with difference is

provided by Captain Cook’s early experience of Tahiti (1769). The

Englishmen knew that the Tahitians held property communally and

that they were therefore unlikely to possess a European concept of

“theft.” In order to win over the natives, the crew showered them with

gifts. Soon, however, the Tahitians began to help themselves. At first

the pilfering amused the visitors. But when the natives snatched

Banks’s spyglass and snuff-box, he threatened them with his musket

until they were returned. Cook’s crew continued to be plagued by

incidents like this. A similar misunderstanding was to lead to Cook’s

death at the hands of the Hawaiians, in 1779.

The first actual contact with local inhabitants was often through an

exchange of gifts, quickly followed by a more regular system of trade.

Eventually, of course, this trade was integrated into a whole

commercial system organized by Europe. Many early illustrations

represent the inauguration of these unequal exchanges (see figure 6.4).

In Theodor de Bry’s famous engraving of Columbus being greeted by

the Indians, Columbus stands in exactly the same heroic pose as

Vespucci (“Europe”) in van der Straet’s engraving. On the left, the

Cross is being planted. The natives (looking rather European) come,

bearing gifts and offering them in a gesture of welcome. As Columbus

noted in his log-book, the natives were “marvellously friendly towards

us.” “In fact,” he says, disarmingly, “they very willingly traded

everything they had” (Columbus, 1969, p. 55). Subsequent illustrations

showed the Indians laboring to produce gold and sugar (described by

the caption as a “gift”) for the Spaniards.

The behavior of the Europeans was governed by the complex

understandings and norms which regulated their own systems of

monetary exchange, trade, and commerce. Europeans assumed that,

since the natives did not have such an economic system, they therefore

had no system at all and offered gifts as a friendly and suppliant

gesture to visitors whose natural superiority they instantly recognized.

The Europeans therefore felt free to organize the continuous supply of

such “gifts” for their own benefit. What the Europeans found difficult to

comprehend was that the exchange of gifts was part of a highly

complex, but different, set of social practices – the practices of

reciprocity – which only had meaning within a certain cultural context.

Caribbean practices were different from, though as intricate in their

,..,,,.’ilif{!P”

THE WEST AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND POWER 213

Figure 6.4 Columbus being greeted by the Indians (de Bry, 1590)

social meaning and effects as, the norms and practices of European

exchange and commerce.

4.7 Ritualsof degradation

The cannibal feast in the corner of the van der Straet engraving (figure

6.3) was an intrusive detail. It points to a set of themes, evident from

the first contact, which were, in fact, the reverse side – the exact

opposites – of the themes of innocence, idyllic simplicity, and

proximity to Nature discussed earlier. Itwas as if everything which

Europeans represented as attractive and enticing about the natives

could also be used to represent the exact opposite: their barbarous and

depraved character. One account of Vespucci’s voyages brought these

two sides together in the same passage: “The people are thus

naked … well-formed in body, their heads, necks, arms, privy part, feet

of women and men slightly covered with feathers. No one owns

anything but all things are in common …. The men have as wives

those that please them, be they mothers, sisters or friends … They also

fight with each other. They also eat each other” (quoted in Honour,

1976, p. 8).
There were disturbing reversals being executed in the discourse here.

The innocent, friendly people in their hammocks could also be

exceedingly unfriendly and hostile. Living close to Nature meant that

•• -.,.—_ ..,,_. L….. _ ……. __ _ .~. –_

214 FORMATIONS OF MODERNITY

they had no developed culture – and were therefore “uncivilized.”

Welcoming to visitors, they could also fiercely resist and had war-like

rivalries with other tribes. (The New World was no freer of rivalry,

competition, conflict, war, and violence than the Old.) Beautiful

nymphs and naiads could also be “warlike and savage.” At a moment’s

notice, Paradise could turn into “barbarism.” Both versions of the

discourse operated simultaneously. They may seem to negate each

other, but it is more accurate to think of them as mirror-images. Both

were exaggerations, founded on stereotypes, feeding off each other.

Each required the other. They were in opposition, but systematically

related: part of what Foucault calls a “system of dispersion.”

From the beginning, some people described the natives of the New

World as “lacking both the power of reason and, the knowledge of

God”; as “beasts in human form.” It is hard, they said, to believe God
had created a race so obstinate in its viciousness and bestiality. The

sexuality which fed the fantasies of some, outraged many others. The

natives were more addicted, it was said, to incest, sodomy, and

licentiousness than any other race. They had no sense of justice, were

bestial in their customs, inimical to religion. The characteristic which

condensed all this into a single image was their (alleged) consumption
of human flesh.

The question of cannibalism represents a puzzle which has never

been resolved. Human sacrifice – which may have included

cannibalism – was associated with some religious rituals. There may

have been ritual sacrifice, involving some cannibalism, of captured

enemies. But careful reviews of the relevant literature now suggest that

the hard evidence is much sketchier and more ambiguous than has

been assumed. The extent of any cannibalism was considerably

exaggerated: it was frequently attributed by one tribe to “other people”

– who were rivals or enemies; much of what is offered as having been

witnessed first-hand turns out to be second- or third-hand reports; the

practice had usually just ended months before the European visitors

arrived. The evidence that, as a normal matter of course, outside ritual

occasions, New World Indians regularly sat down to an evening meal

composed of juicy limbs of their fellow humans is extremely thin (see,

for example, the extensive analysis of the anthropological literature in
Arens, 1978).

Peter Hulme (1986) offers a convincing account of how cannibalism

became the prime symbol or signifier of “barbarism,” thus helping to fix

certain stereotypes. Columbus reported (January 13, 1493) that in

Hispaniola he met a warlike group, whom he judged “must be one of

the Caribs who eat men” (Columbus, 1969, p. 40). The Spanish divided

the natives into two distinct groupings: the “peaceful” Arawaks and the

“warlike” Caribs. The latter were said to invade Arawak territory, steal

their wives, resist conquest, and be “cannibals.” What started as a way

of describing a social group turned out to be a way of “establishing

which Amerindians were prepared to accept the Spaniards on the

latter’s terms, and which were hostile, that is to say prepared to defend

their territory and way of life” (Hulme, 1986, p..72).

In fact, so entrenched did the idea become that the “fierce” Caribs

THE WEST AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND POWER 215

were eaters of human flesh, that their ethnic name (Carib) came to be

used to refer to anyone thought guilty of this behavior. As a result, we

today have the word “cannibal,” which is actually derived from the

name “Carib.”

4.8 Summary: stereotypes, dualism, and “splitting”

We can now try to draw together our sketch of the formation and

modes of operation of this discourse or “system of representation” we

have called “the West and the Rest.”

Hugh Honour, who studied European images of America from the

period of discovery onwards, has remarked that “Europeans

increasingly tended to see in America an idealized or distorted image of

their own countries, on to which they could project their own

aspirations and fears, their self-confidence and … guilty despair”

(Honour, 1976, p. 3). We have identified some of these discursive

strategies in this section. They are:

1 idealization;

2 the projection of fantasies of desire and degradation;

3 the failure to recognize and respect difference;

4 the tendency to impose European categories and norms, to see

difference through the modes of perception and representation of

the West.

These strategies were all underpinned by the process known as
stereotyping. A stereotype is a one-sided description which results from

the collapsing of complex differences into a simple “cardboard cut-

out.” Different characteristics are run together or condensed into one.

This exaggerated simplification is then attached to a subject or place. Its

characteristics become the signs, the “evidence,” by which the subject

is known. They define its being, its essence. Hulme noted that,

As always, the stereotype operates principally through a judicious

combination of adjectives, which establish (certain] characteristics

as (if they were] eternal verities (“truths”), immune from the

irrelevancies of the historical moment: (e.g.) “ferocious”,

“warlike”, “hostile”, “truculent and vindictive” – these are present

as innate characteristics, irrespective of circumstances;

… [consequently, the Caribs] were locked as “cannibals” into a

realm of “beingness” that lies beyond question. This stereotypical

dualism has proved stubbornly immune to all kinds of

contradictory evidence.

(Hulme, 1986, pp. 49-50)

By “stereotypical dualism” Hulme means that the stereotype is split

into two opposing elements. These are two key features of the discourse

of “the Other”:

1 First, several characteristics are collapsed into one simplified figure

which stands for or represents the essence of the people; this is

stereotyping.

~~~ …… .,..—.=;;…~~__ … •__ • •. ._. ._._u

~

216 FORMATIONS OF MODERNITY

2 Second, the stereotype is split into two halves – its “good” and

“bad” sides; this is “splitting” or dualism.

Far from the discourse of “the West and the Rest” being unified and

monolithic, “splitting” is a regular feature of it. The world is first

divided, symbolically, into good-bad, us-them, attractive-disgusting,

civilized-uncivilized, the West-the Rest. All the other, many

differences between and within these two halves are collapsed,

simplified – i.e. stereotyped. By this strategy, the Rest becomes defined

as everything that the West is not – its mirror image. It is represented

as absolutely, essentially, different, other: the Other. This Other is then

itself split into two “camps”: friendly-hostile, Arawak-Carib, innocent-

depraved, noble-ignoble.

5 “Inthe Beginning All the World was
America”

Writing about the use of stereotypes in the discourse of “the Other,”

Sander Gilman argues that “these systems are inherently bi-polar (i.e.

polarized into two parts), generating pairs of antithetical signifiers (i.e.

words with apparently opposing meanings). This is how the deep

structure of the stereotype reflects the social and political ideologies of

the time” (Gilman, 1985, p. 27). He goes on to say:

With the split of both the self and the world into “good” and

“bad” objects, the “bad” self is distanced and identified with the

mental representation of the “bad” object. This act of projection

saves the self from any confrontation with the contradictions

present in the necessary integration of “bad” and “good” aspects

of the self. The deep structure of our own sense of self and the

world is built upon the illusionary [sic) image of the world

divided into two camps, “us” and “them”. “They” are either

“good” or “bad”.

(Gilman, 1985, p. 17)

The example Gilman gives is that of the “noble” versus the “ignoble

savage.” In this section, we examine the “career” of this stereotype.

How did it function in the discourse of “the West and the Rest”? What

was its influence on the birth of modem social science?

5.1 Are they ”true men”?

The question of how the natives and nations of the New World should

be treated in the evolving colonial system was directly linked to the

question of what sort of people and societies they were – which in turn

depended on the West’s knowledge of them, on how they were

represented. Where did the Indians stand in the order of the Creation?

Where were their nations placed in the order of civilized societies?

Were they “true men” (sic)? Were they made in God’s image? The point

THE WEST AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND POWER 217

was vital because if they were “true men” they could not be enslaved.

The Greek philosophers argued that man (women rarely figured in

these debates) was a special creation, endowed with the divine gift of

reason; the Church taught that Man was receptive to divine grace. Did

the Indians’ way of life, their lack of “civilization,” mean that they

were so low on the scale of humanity as to be incapable of reason and

faith?

The debate raged for most of the fifteenth century. Ferdinand and

Isabella issued decrees saying that “a certain people called Cannibals”

and “any, whether called cannibals or not, who were not docile” could

be enslaved. One view was that “they probably descended from another

Adam … born after the deluge and … perhaps have no souls” (see

Honour, 1978, p. 58). However, Bartolome de Las Casas (1474-1566),

the priest who made himself the champion of the Indians, protested

vigorously at the brutality of the Spaniards in putting Indians to work

as forced labor. Indians, he insisted, did have their own laws, customs,

civilization, religion, and were “true men” whose cannibalism was

much exaggerated. “All men,” Las Casas claimed, “however barbarous

and bestial … necessarily possess the faculty of Reason … ” (quoted by

Honour, 1978, p. 59). The issue was formally debated before Emperor

Charles X at Valladolid in 1550.

One paradoxical outcome of Las Casas’ campaign was that he got

Indian slavery outlawed, but was persuaded to accept the alternative of

replacing Indians with African slaves, and so the door opened to the

horrendous era of New’World African slavery. A debate similar to that

about the Indians was held about African slavery prior to

Emancipation. The charter of the Royal Africa Company, which

organized the English slave trade, defined slaves as “commodities.” As

slavery expanded, a series of codes was constructed for the Spanish,

French, and English colonies governing the status and conduct of

slaves. These codes defined the slave as a chattel- literally, “a thing,”

not a person. This was a problem for some churches. But in the British

colonies the Church of England, which was identified with the planters,

accommodated itself to this definition without too much difficulty, and

made little effort to convert slaves until the eighteenth century. Later,

however, the Dissenters in the anti-slavery movement advocated

abolition precisely because every slave was “a man and brother” (see

Hall, 1991).

5.2 “Noble” vs “ignOble savages”

Another variant of the same argument can be found in the debate about

the “noble” versus the “ignoble savage.” The English poet John Dryden

provides one of the famous images of the “noble savage”:

I am as free as Nature first made man,

E’re the base Laws of Servitude began,

When wild in woods the noble Savage ran.

(The Conquest of Granada, I.I.i.207-9)

218 FORMATIONS OF MODERNITY

– I

Earlier, the French philosopher Montaigne, in his essay Des Canniboles
(1580), had placed his noble savage in America. The idea quickly took

hold on the European imagination. The famous painting of “The

Different Nations of America” by Le Brun in Louis XIV’s (1638-1715)

Versailles Palace was dominated by a “heroic” representation of an

American Indian – grave, tall, proud, independent, statuesque, and

naked (see Honour, 1978, p. 118). Paintings and engravings of

American Indians dressed like ancient Greeks or Romans became

popular. Many paintings of Cook’s death portrayed both Cook and the

natives who killed him in “heroic” mold. As Beaglehole explains, th~

Pacific voyages gave new life and impetus to the idealization of the

“noble savage,” who “entered the study and drawing room of Europe in

naked majesty, to shake the preconceptions of morals and politics” (in

Moorhead, 1987, p. 62). Idealized “savages” spoke on stage in ringing

tones and exalted verse. The eponymous hero in Aphra Behn’s novel

Oroonoko (1688), was one of the few “noble” Africans (as opposed to

American Indians) in seventeenth-century literature, and was fortunate

enough to have “long hair, a Roman nose and shapely mouth.”

“Heroic savages” have peopled adventure stories, Westerns, and

other Hollywood and television films ever since, generating an

unending series of images of “the Noble Other.”

The “noble savage” also acquired sociological status. In 1749, the

French philosopher Rousseau produced an account of his ideal form of

society: simple, unsophisticated man living in a state of Nature,

unfettered by laws, government, property, or social divisions. “The

savages of North America,” he later said in The Social Contract, “still

retain today this method of government, and they are very well

governed” (Rousseau, 1968, p. 114). Tahiti was the perfect fulfillment

of this preconceived idea – “one of those unseen stars whieh eventually

came to light after the astronomers have proved that it must exist”

(Moorhead, 1987, p. 62).

The French Pacific explorer Bougainville (1729-1811) had been

captivated by the way of life on Tahiti. Diderot, the philosopher and

editor of the Encyclopedie (see chapter 1), wrote a famous Supplement

about Bougainville’s voyage, warning Tahitians against the West’s

intrusion into their innocent happiness. “One day,” he prophesied

correctly, “they [Europeans] will come, with crucifix in one hand and

the dagger in the other to cut your throats or to force you to accept

their customs and opinions” (quoted in Moorhead, 1987). Thus the

“noble savage” became the vehicle for a wide-ranging critique of the

over-refinement, religious hypocrisy, and divisions by social rank that

existed in the West.

This was only one side of the story. For, at the same time, the

opposite image – that of the “ignoble savage” – was becoming the

vehicle for a profound reflection in European intellectual circles on the

nature of social development. Eighteenth-century wits, like Horace

Walpole, Edmund Burke, and Dr Johnson, poured scorn on the idea of

the noble savage. Ronald Meek has remarked that contemporary notions

of savagery influenced eighteenth-century social science by generating a

critique of society through the idea of the noble savage; “It is not quite

THE WEST AND THE REST. DISCOURSE AND POWER 219

so well known … that they also stimulated the emergence of a new

theory of the development of society through the idea of the ignoble

savage” (Meek, 1976, p. 2).

The questions which concerned the social philosophers were: What

had led the West to its high point of refinement and civilization? Did

the West evolve from the same simple beginnings as “savage society” or

were there different paths to “civilization”?

Many of the precursors and leading figures of the Enlightenment

participated in this debate. Thomas Hobbes, the political philosopher,

argued in Leviathan (1651) that it was because of their lack of

“industry … and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation,

nor use of commodities” that “the savage people in many places of

America … live at this day in [their] brutish manner” (Hobbes, 1946,

pp. 82-3). The English satirist Bernard Mandeville, in his Fable of the

Bees (1723), identified a series of “steps” or stages in which economic

factors like the division oflabor, money, and the invention of tools

played the major part in the progress from “savagery” to “civilization.”

The philosopher John Locke claimed that the New World provided a

prism through which one could see “a pattern of the first ages in Asia

and Europe” – the origins from which Europe had developed. “In the

beginning,” Locke said, “all the World was America” (Locke, 1976, p.

26). He meant by this that the world (i.e. the West) had evolved from a

stage very much like that discovered in America – untilled,

undeveloped, and uncivilized. America was the “childhood of

mankind,” Locke claimed, and Indians should be classed with

“children, idiots and illiterates because of their inability to reason in

abstract, speculative … terms” (quoted in Marshall and Williams, 1982,

p.192).

5.3 The history of “rude” and “refined” nations

The “noble-ignoble” and the “rude-refined” oppositions belonged to

the same discursive formation. This “West and the Rest” discourse

greatly influenced Enlightenment thinking. Itprovided the framework

of images in which Enlightenment social philosophy matured.

Enlightenment thinkers believed that there was one path to civilization

and social development, and that all societies could be ranked or

placed early or late, lower or higher, on the same scale. The emerging

“science of society” was the study of the forces which had propelled all

societies, by stages, along this single path of development, leaving

some, regrettably, at its “lowest” stage – represented by the American

savage – while others advanced to the summit of civilized development

– represented by the West.

This idea of a universal criterion of progress modelled on the West

became a feature of the new “social science” to which the

Enlightenment gave birth. For example, when Edmund Burke wrote to

the Scottish Enlightenment historian William Robertson on the

publication of his History of America (1777), he said that “the great

map of Mankind is unrolled at once, and there is no state or gradation

of barbarism, and no mode of refinement which we have not at the

220 FORMATIONS OF MODERNITY

same moment under our view; the very different civility of Europe and

China; the barbarism of Persia and of Abyssinia; the erratic manners of

Tartary and of Arabia; the savage state of North America and of New

Zealand” (quoted by Meek, 1976, p. 173). Enlightenment social science

reproduced within its own conceptual framework many of the

preconceptions and stereotypes of the discourse of “the West and the

Rest.”

The examples are too voluminous to refer to in detail. Meek argues

that “No one who reads the work of the French and Scottish pioneers

[of social science) of the 1750s can fail to notice that all of them,

without exception, were very familiar with the contemporary studies of

the Americans; that most of them had evidently pondered deeply about

their significance and that some were almost obsessed by them …. The

studies of Americans provided the new social scientists with a

plausible working hypothesis about the basic characteristics of the

“first” or “earliest” stage of socio-economic development” (Meek, 1976,

p. 128). Many of the leading names of the French Enlightenment –

Diderot, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Turgot, Rousseau – used the studies of

early American Indians in this way.

This is also the case with the Scottish Enlightenment. In Adam

Smith’s Theory of the Moral Sentiments (1759), American Indians are

used as the pivot for elaborate contrasts between “civilized nations”

and “savages and barbarians.” They are also pivotal in Henry Kames’s

Sketches of the History of Man (1774), John Millar’s Origin of the

Distinction of Ranks (1771), and Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History

of Civil Society (1767).

The contribution which this debate about “rude-refined nations”

made to social science was not simply descriptive. It formed part of a

larger theoretical framework, about which the following should be

noted:

1 It represented a decisive movement away from mythological,

religious and other “causes” of social evolution to what are clearly

recognizable as material causes – sociological, economic,

environmental, etc. .

2 It produced the idea that the history of “mankind” (sic) occurred

along a single continuum, divided into a series of stages.

3 Writers differed over precisely which material or sociological factors

they believed played the key role in propelling societies through

these stages. But one factor assumed increasing importance – the

“mode of subsistence”:

In its most specific form, the theory was that society had

“naturally” or “normally” progressed over time through four more

or less distinct and consecutive stages, each corresponding to a

different mode of subsistence, these stages being defined as

hunting, pasturage, agriculture and commerce. To each of these

modes of subsistence … there corresponded different sets of

ideas and institutions relating to law, property, and government

and also different sets of customs, manners and morals.

(Meek, 1976, p. 2)

THE WEST AND THE REST: OISCOURSE AND POWER 221

Here, then, is a surprising twist. The Enlightenment aspired to being a

“science of man.” Itwas the matrix of modern social science. It

provided the language in which “modernity” first came to be defined.

In Enlightenment discourse, the West was the model, the prototype,

and the measure of social progress. It was western progress, civilization,

rationality, and development that were celebrated. And yet, all this

depended on the discursive figures of the “noble vs ignoble savage,”

and of “rude and refined nations” which had been formulated in the

discourse of “the West and the Rest.” So the Rest was critical for the

formation of western Enlightenment – and therefore for modern social

science. Without the Rest (or its own internal “others”), the West would

not have been able to recognize and represent itself as the summit of

human history. The figure of “the Other,” banished to the edge of the

conceptual world and constructed as the absolute opposite, the

negation, of everything which the West stood for, reappeared at the

very center of the discourse of civilization, refinement, modernity, and

development in the West. “The Other” was the “dark” side – forgotten,

repressed, and denied; the reverse image of enlightenment and

modernity.

6 From’ ”the West and the Rest” to
Modern Sociology

In response to this argument, you may find yourself saying – “Yes,

perhaps the early stages of the ‘science of man’ were influenced by the

discourse of ‘the West and the Rest.’ But all that was a long time ago.

Since then, social science has become more empirical, more ‘scientific.’

Sociology today is, surely, free of such ‘loaded images’?” But this is not

necessarily the case. Discourses don’t stop abruptly. They go on

unfolding, changing shape, as they make sense of new circumstances.

They often carry many of the same unconscious premises and

unexamined assumptions in their blood-stream.

For example, some of you may have recognized in the Enlightenment

concept of “modes of subsistence” the outline of an idea which Karl

Marx (1818-83), a “founding father” of modern sociology, was

subsequently to develop into one of the most powerful sociological

tools: his theory that society is propelled forward by the class struggle;

that it progresses through a series of stages marked by different modes

of production, the critical one for capitalism being the transition from

feudalism to capitalism. Of course, there is considerable divergence

between the Enlightenment’s “four stages of subsistence” and Marx’s

“modes of production.” But there are also some surprising similarities.

Inhis Grundrisse, Marx speaks inbroad outlines of the Asiatic, ancient,

feudal, and capitalist or bourgeois modes of production. He argues that

each is dominated by a particular social class which expropriates the

economic surplus through a specific set of social relations. The Asiatic

mode (which is only sketchily developed), is that to which, in Marx’s

— _._——‘-

222 FORMATlDNS OF MODERNITY

view, countries such as China, India, and those of Islam belong. It is

characterized by: (a) stagnation, (b) an absence of dynamic class

struggle, and (c) the dominance of a swollen state acting as a sort of

universal landlord. The conditions for capitalist development are here

absent. Marx hated the capitalist system; nevertheless, he saw it, in

contrast with the Asiatic mode, as progressive and dynamic, sweeping

old structures aside, driving social development forward.

There are some interesting parallels here with Max Weber (1864-

1920), another of sociology’s founding fathers. Weber used a very

dualistic model which contrasted Islam with Western Europe in terms

of modern social development. For Weber, the essential conditions for

the transition to capitalism and modernity are: (a) ascetic forms of

religion, (b) rational forms of law, (c) free labor, and (d) the growth of

cities (see chapter 5 above). All these, in his view, were missing from

Islam, which he represented as a “mosaic” of tribes and groups, never

cohering into a proper social system, but existing under a despotic rule

which absorbed social conflicts in an endlessly repeating cycle of

factional struggles, with Islam as its monolithic religion. Power and

privilege, Weber believed, had been kept within, and rotated between,

the ruling Islamic families, who merely siphoned off the wealth

through taxation. He called this a “patrimonial” or “prebendary” form

of authority. Unlike feudalism, it did not provide the preconditions for

capitalist accumulation and growth.

These are, of course, some of the most complex and sophisticated

models in sociology. The question of the causes and preconditions for

the development of capitalism in the West have preoccupied historians

and social scientists for centuries.

However, it has been argued by some social scientists that both

Marx’s notion of the “Asiatic” mode of production and Weber’s

“patrimonial” form of domination contain traces of, or have been

deeply penetrated by, “Orientalist” assumptions. Or, to put it in our

terms, both models provide evidence that the discourse of “the West

and the Rest” is still at work in some of the conceptual categories, the

stark oppositions and the theoretical dualisms of modern sociology.

In his studies of Weber and Islam (1974) and Marx and the End of

Orientalism (1978), Bryan Turner has argued that both sociology and

Marxism have been unduly influenced by “Orientalist” categories, or, if

you lift the argument out of its Middle Eastern and Asian context, by

the discourse of “the West and the Rest”:

This can be seen … in Weber’s arguments about the decline of

Islam, its despotic political structure and the absence of

autonomous cities …. Weber employs a basic dichotomy between

the feudal economies of the West and the prebendal/patrimonial

political economies of the East. … [He] overlays this

discussion … with two additional components which have

become the staples of the internalist version of development – the

“Islamic ethic” and the absence of an entrepreneurial urban

bourgeoisie.

(Turner, 1978, pp. 7,45-6)

THE WEST AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND POWER 223

Marx’s explanation of the lack of capitalist development in the East is

very different from Weber’s. But his notion that this was due to the

“Asiatic mode of production” takes a similar path. Turner summarizes

Marx’s argument thus:

Societies dominated by the “Asiatic” mode of production have no

internal class conflicts and are consequently trapped within a

static social context. The social system lacks a basic ingredient of

social change, namely class struggle between landlords and an

exploited peasantry … [For example] “Indian society has no

history at all.”

(Turner, 1978, pp. 26-7)

Despite their differences, both Weber and Marx organize their

arguments in terms of broad, simple, contrasting oppositions which

mirror quite closely the West-Rest, civilized-rude, developed-

backward oppositions of “the West and the Rest” discourse. Weber’s is

an “internalist” type of explanation because “he treats the main

problems of ‘backward societies’ as a question of certain characteristics

internal to societies, considered in isolation from any international

societal context” (Turner, 1978, p. 10). Marx’s explanation also looks

like an “internalist” one. But he adds certain “externalist” features. By

“externalist” we mean “relating to a theory of development which

identifies the main problems facing ‘developing’ societies as external to

the society itself, which is treated as a unit located within a structured

international context” (see Turner, 1978, p. 11). In this chapter, we

have adopted an “extemalist” or “global” rather than a purely

“internalist” account of the rise of the idea of the West.

However, these additional features of Marx’s argument lead his

explanation in a very surprising direction. “Asiatic”-type societies, he

argues, cannot develop into modern ones because they lack certain pre-

conditions. Therefore, “only the introduction of dynamic elements of

western capitalism” can trigger development. This makes “capitalist

colonialism” a (regrettable) historical necessity for these societies, since

it alone can “destroy the pre-capitalist modes which prevent them from

entering a progressive historical path.” Capitalism, Marx argues, must

expand to survive, drawing the whole world progressively into its net;

and it is this expansion which “revolutionizes and undermines

pre-capitalist modes of production at the periphery of the capitalist

world” (Turner, 1978, p. 11). Many classical Marxists have indeed

argued that, however stunting and destructive it may have been, the

expansion of western capitalism through conquest and colonization was

historically inevitable and would have long-term progressive outcomes

for “the Rest.”

Earlier, we discussed some of the forces which pushed a developing

Western Europe to expand outwards into “new worlds.” But whether

this was inevitable, whether its effects have been socially progressive,

and whether this was the only possible path to “modernity” are

subjects increasingly debated in the social sciences today (as is

discussed in part ill). Inmany parts of the world, the expansion of

western colonization has not destroyed the pre-capitalist barriers to

224 FORMA nONS OF MODERNITY

development. It has conserved and reinforced them. Colonization and

imperialism have not promoted economic and social development in

these societies, most of which remain profoundly under-developed.

Where development has taken place, it has often been of the

“dependent” variety.

The destruction of alternative ways of life has not ushered in a new

social order in these societies. Many remain in the grip of feudal ruling

families, religious elites, military cliques, and dictators who govern

societies beset by endemic poverty. The destruction of indigenous

cultural life by western culture is, for most of them, a very mixed

blessing. And as the human, cultural, and ecological consequences of

this form of “western development” become more obvious, the question

of whether there is only one path to modernity is being debated with

increasing urgency. The historically inevitable and necessarily

progressive character of the West’s expansion into the Rest is no longer

as obvious as perhaps it once seemed to western scholars.

We must leave these issues as open questions at this stage. However,

this is a useful point to summarize the main thrust of the argument of

this chapter.
7 Conclusion

In the early chapters of this book, we looked at how the distinctive

form of society which we call “modern” emerged, and the major

processes which led to its formation. We also looked at the emergence

of the distinctive form of knowledge which accompanied that society’s

formation – at what the Enlightenment called the “sciences of man,”

which provided the framework within which modern social science

and the idea of “modernity” were formulated. On the whole, the

emphasis in those chapters was “internalist.” Though the treatment was

comparative – acknowledging differences between different societies,

histories, and tempos of development – the story was largely framed

from within Western Europe (the West) where these processes of

formation first emerged.

This chapter reminds us that this formation was also a “global”

process. It had crucial “externalist” features – aspects which could not

be explained without taking into account the rest of the world, where

these processes were not at work and where these kinds of society did

not emerge. This is a huge topic in its own right and we could tell only

a small part of the story here. We could have focused on the economic,

political, and social consequences of the global expansion of the West;

instead, we briefly sketched the outline history of that expansion, up to

roughly the eighteenth century. We also wanted to show the cultural

and ideological dimensions of the West’s expansion. For if the Rest

was necessary for the political, economic, and social formation of the

West, it was also essential to the West’s formation both of its own

sense of itself – a “western identity” – and of western forms of

knowledge.

~

.,~,.
“‘~’:i.. , “‘fI..:

< .~;,

THE WEST AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND POWER 225

This is where the notion of “discourse” came in. A discourse is a

way of talking about or representing something. It produces knowledge

that shapes perceptions and practice. It is part of the way in which

power operates. Therefore, it has consequences for both those who

employ it and those who are “subjected” to it. The West produced

many different ways of talking about itself and “the Others.” But what

we have called the discourse of “the West and the Rest” became one of

the most powerful and formative of these discourses. It became the

dominant way in which, for many decades, the West represented itself

and its relation to “the Other.” In this chapter, we have traced how this

discourse was formed and how it worked. We analyzed it as a “system

of representation” – a “regime of truth.” It was as formative for the

West and “modern societies” as were the secular state, capitalist

economies, the modern class, race, and gender systems, and modern,

individualist, secular culture – the four main “processes” of our

formation story.

Finally, we suggest that, in transformed and reworked forms, this

discourse continues to inflect the language of the West, its image of

itself and “others,” its sense of “us” and “them,” its practices and

relations of power towards the Rest. It is especially important for the

languages of racial inferiority and ethnic superiority which still operate

so powerfully across the globe today. So, far from being a “formation”

of the past, and of only historical interest, the discourse of “the West

and the Rest” is alive and well in the modern world. And one of the

surprising places where its effects can still be seen is in the language,

theoretical models, and hidden assumptions of modern sociology itself.

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I~————~————
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• Page 1

Titles
1.1 Where and what is ”the West”?
1 Introduction
Contents
The West and the Rest: Discourse
Stuart Hall
6

• Page 2
• Page 3

Titles
2 Europe Breaks Out
2.1 When and how did expansion begin?

• Page 4

Titles
2.2 Five main phases
2.3 The Age of Exploration

• Page 5

Titles
t
t
. _—-_._–_ ……………. -.-. __ … _-

• Page 6

Titles
2.4 Breaking the frame

• Page 7

Titles
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2.5 The consequences of expansion for the

• Page 8
• Page 9

Titles
3.1 What is a “discourse”?
3 Discourse and Power

• Page 10

Titles
3.3 Can a discourse be “innocent”?
:’0-< . 3.2 Discourse and ideology

• Page 11

Titles
4.1 Orientalism
4 Representing “the Other”

• Page 12

Titles
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4.2 The “archive”
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• Page 13

Titles
4.3 A “regime of truth”
4.4 Idealization

• Page 14

Titles
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4.5 Sexual fantasy
4.6 Mis-recognizing difference

• Page 15

Titles
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4.7 Rituals of degradation

• Page 16

Titles
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4.8 Summary: stereotypes, dualism, and “splitting”

• Page 17

Titles
5 “In the Beginning All the World was
5.1 Are they ”true men”?
5.2 “Noble” vs “ignOble savages”

• Page 18

Titles
5.3 The history of “rude” and “refined” nations

• Page 19

Titles
6 From’ ”the West and the Rest” to

• Page 20
• Page 21

Titles
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7 Conclusion
References

• Page 22

Titles
I~————~————