118 ORIENTALISM But there was a tendency among some thinkers to exceed comparative study, and its judicious surveys of mankind from “China to Peru,” by sympathetic identification. This is a third eighteenthcentury element preparing the way for modern Orientalism. What today we call historicism is an eighteenth-century idea, Vico, Herder, and Hamann, among others, believed that all cultures were organically and internally coherent, bound together by a spirit, genius, Klima, or national idea which an outsider could penetrate only by an act of historical sympathy. Thus Herder’s deen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-1791) was a Panoramic display of various cultures, each permeated by an inimical creative spirit, each accessible only to an observer who sacrificed his prejudices to Einfiihlung. Imbued with the populist and plurafist sense of history advocated by Herder and others,* an eighteenth-century mind could breach the doctrinal walls erected between the West and Islam and see hidden elements of kinship between himself and the Orient. Napoleon is a famous instance of this (usually selective) identification by sympathy. Mozart is another, The Magic Flute (in which Masonic codes intermingle with visions of a benign Orient) and The Abduction from the Seraglio locate a particularly magnanimous form of humanity in the Orient. And this, much more than the modish habits of “Turkish” music, drew Mozart sympathetically eastwards. It is very difficult nonetheless to separate such intuitions of the Orient as Mozart’s from the entire range of pre-Romantic and Romantic representations of the Orient as exotic locale. Popular Orientalism during the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth attained a vogue of considerable intensity. But even this vogue, easily identifiable in William Beckford, Byron, Thomas Moore, and Goethe, cannot ve simply detached from the interest taken in Gothic tales, pseudomedieval idylls, visions of barbaric splendor and cruelty. Thus in some cases the Oriental representation can be associated with Piranesi’s prisons, in others with Tiepolo’s luxurious ambiences, in still others with the exotic sublimity of lateeighteenth-century paintings.’ Later in the nineteenth century, in the works of Delacroix and literally dozens of other French and British painters, the Oriental genre tableau carried representation into visual expression and a life of its own (which this book unfortunately must scant). Senggality promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic pleasure, intense energythe Orient as a figure in the pre 

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 119 Romantic, pretechnical Orientalist imagination of late-eighteenthcentury Europe was really a chameleonlike quality called (adjectivally) “Oriental.”* But this free-floating Orient would be severely curtailed with the advent of academic Orientalism. A fourth element preparing the way for modern Orientalist structures was the whole impulse to classify nature and man into types. The greatest names are, of course, Linnaeus and Buffon, but the intellectual process by which bodily (and soon moral, intellectual, and spiritual) extension—the typical materiality of an object---could be transformed from mere spectacle to the precise measurement of characteristic elements was very widespread. Linnaeus said that every note made about a natural type “should be a product of number, of forn, of proportion, of situation,” and indeed, if one looks in Kant or Diderot or Johnson, there is everywhere a similar penchant for dramatizing general features, for reducing vast numbers of objects to a smaller number of orderable and describable types. In natural history, in anthropology, in cultural generalization, a type had a particular character which provided the observer with a designation and, as Foucault says, “a controlled derivation.” These types and characters belonged to a system, a network of related generalizations. Thus, all designation must be accomplished by means of a certain relation to all other possible designations. To know what properly appertains to one individual is to have before one the classification—or the possibility of classifying—all others.* In the writing of philosophers, historians, encyclopedists, and essayists we find character-as-designation appearing as physiologicalmoral classification: there are, for example, the wild men, the Europeans, the Asiatics, and so forth. These appear of course in Linnaeus, but also in Montesquieu, in Johnson, in Blumenbach, in Soemmerring, in Kant. Physiological and moral characteristics are distributed more or less equally: the American is “red, choleric, erect,” the Asiatic is “yellow, melancholy, rigid,” the African is “black, phlegmatic, lax.’!* But such designations gather power when, later in the nineteenth century, they are allied with character as derivation, as genetic type. In Vico and Rousseau, for example, the force of moral generalization is enhanced by the precision with which dramatic, almost archetyggl figures—primitive man, giants, heroes—are shown to be the gesiesis of current moral, philosophic, Y