126 ORIENTALISM from the Orient what its distance and eccentricity have hitherto kept hidden, and two, because these examples have the semiotical power in them (or imparted to them by the Orientalist) to signify the Orient. All of Sacy’s work is essentially compilatory; it is thus ceremoniously didactic and painstakingly revisionist. Aside from the Principes de grammaire générale, he produced a Chrestomathie arabe in three volumes (1806 and 1827), an anthology of Arab grammatical writing (1825), an Arabic grammar of 1810 (a l'usage des éléves de (Ecole spéciale), treatises on Arabic prosody and the Druze religion, and numerous short works on Oriental numismatics, onomastics, epigraphy, geography, history, and weights and measures. He did a fair number of translations and two extended commentaries on Calila and Dumna and the Maqamat of al-Hariri. As editor, memorialist, and historian of modern learning Sacy was similarly energetic. There was very little of note in other related disciplines with which he was not au courant, although his own writing was single-minded and, in tts non-Orientalist respects, of a narrow positivist range. Yet when in 1802 the Institut de France was commissioned by Napoleon to forn a tableau générale on the state and progress of the arts and sciences since 1789, Sacy was chosen to be one of the team of writers: he was the most rigorous of specialists and the most historical-minded of generalists. Dacier’s report, as it was known informally, embodied many of Sacy’s predilections as well as containing his contributions on the state of Oriental learning. Its title —Tableau historique de (érudition francaise—announces the new historical (as opposed to sacred) consciousness. Such consciousness is dramatic: learning can be arranged on a stage set, as it were, where its totality can be readily surveyed. Addressed to the king, Dacier’s preface stated the theme perfectly. Such a survey as this made it possible to do something no other sovereign had attempted, namely to take in, with one coup d’oeil, the whole of human knowledge. Had such a tableau historique been undertaken in former times, Dacier continued, we might today have possessed many masterpieces now either lost or destroyed; the interest and utility of the tableau were that it preserved knowledge and made it immediately accessible. Dacier intimated that such a task was simplified by Napoleon’s Oriental expedition, one of whose results was to heighten the degree of modern geographical knowledge.™*

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 127 (At no point more than in Dacier’s entire discours do we see how the dramatic form of a tableau historique has its use-equivalent in the arcades and counters of a modern department store. ) The importance of the Tableau historique for an understanding of Orientalism’s inaugural phase is that it exteriorizes the form of Orientalist knowledge and its features, as it also describes the Orientalist’s relationship to his subject matter. In Sacy’s pages on Orientalism—as elsewhere in his writing—he speaks of his own work as having uncovered, brought to light, rescued a vast amount of obscure matter. Why? In order to place it before the student. For like all his learned contemporaries Sacy considered a learned work a positive addition to an edifice that all scholars erected together. Knowledge was essentially the making visible of material, and the aim of a tableau was the construction of a sort of Benthamite Panopticon. Scholarly discipline was therefore a specific technology of power: it gained for its user (and his students) tools and knowledge which (if he was a historian) had hitherto been lost.° And indeed the vocabulary of specialized power and acquisition is particularly associated with Sacy’s reputation as a pioneer Orientalist. His heroism as a scholar was to have dealt successfully with insurmountable difficulties; he acquired the means to present a field to his students where there was none. He made the books, the precepts, the examples, said the Duc de Broglie of Sacy. The result was the production of material about the Orient, methods for studying it, and exempla that even Orientals did not have.'* Compared with the labors of a Hellenist or a Latinist working on the Institut team, Sacy’s labors were awesome. They had the texts, the conventions, the schools; he did not, and consequently had to go about making them. The dynamic of primary loss and subsequent gain in Sacy’s writing is obsessional; his investment in it was truly heavy. Like his colleagues in other fields he believed that knowledge is seeing—pan-optically, so to speak-—but unlike them he not only had to identify the knowledge, he had to decipher it, interpret it, and most difficult, make it available. Sacy’s achievement was to have produced a whole field. As a European he cansacked the Oriental archives, and he could do so without leaving France. What texts he isolated, he then brought back; he doctored them; then he annotated, codified, arranged, and commented on them. In time, the Orient as such became less important than what the Orientalist made of it; thus, drawn. by Sacy into the sealed x