Fair Exotics. Rajani Sudan
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change of place, is possible only through and in the representation of time; that if this representation were not an intuition (internal) a priori, no conception, of whatever kind, could render comprehensible the possibility of change…. Time is nothing else than the form of the internal sense, that is, the intuitions of self and of our internal state.12
Embedded in the understanding of an a priori category is a curious trust in the stability and universality of the mind. In fact, the notions of both “intuition” and “a priori” rest in unknowing, on the opposite side of eighteenth-century reasoning that purports to use external cultural properties to shape individual or private sentiment. “Intuition” suggests by definition an immediacy of reaction or the lack of a conscious process of reasoning: an unconscious response. “A priori” (especially as Kant popularized the term) also defines the categories as innate to the mind, not based on visible experiential evidence.
These terms upon which he sustains his critique of “pure” reason are conditioned by Enlightenment thinkers (such as Kant himself) who understood difference as only an external phenomenon and therefore inconsequential and ephemeral, while the internal structure of the mind and reason were universal, eternal, and essential. The faith in this belief justifies imperialism, material and imaginative, as the overcoming of “mere” material differences (of the natives) by means of education: as “we” educate the other to use his divinely sanctioned reason, he will become more like us because while we are the embodiment of realized reason, “natives” are only reason in potentia. But the fact that such reasoning depends on the representation of difference embodied by the “native” suggests that there is something suspect about disembodied reason. We may have to account for the success of Enlightenment reasoning because of the threat that difference posed to Western beliefs in the infallibility of their system. In other words, the idea that difference existed, even if it was cast as cultural inferiority, raised the specter of an always differential identity in the seamless integrity of European (and, in the context of this argument, specifically British) mastery. If something could be visibly different and if that difference were crucial in producing the notion of an internalized, transhistorical identity, it spelled an inability of the all-knowing capacities of Western discursive practices to account for phenomenology.
The Kantian model of mind, certain of its own universality and trusting the legitimacy of its constitution of the outside world, nevertheless acknowledges the existence of its own internal “other”: what will come a hundred years later to be called “the unconscious,” Kant called “the thing” itself. Although Kant claimed the noumenal to be outside the scope of human knowledge, many of the romantic philosophers and artists who followed him could not resist the appeal of the unknown self. Little wonder that almost a century later Freud began using these aesthetically produced ideas in order to define the psyche in a scientific discourse. It seems then that Kant’s understanding of the outside world—of a world outside Königsberg or Eastern Prussia or Europe—could only exist, a priori, as an internal projection. In this way, his Critique of Pure Reason can so glibly and successfully exclude history. This exclusion, of course, is nothing new; the cultural privilege Western nations place on historiography may well portend other forms of the successful exclusion of history. Latent anxieties that the impingement of an other, unknown world poses to the integrity and coherence of the “known” world are mitigated by historiographical discourse: our understanding of “universal” events is defined by what we know about ourselves and project onto others. Such a discourse consequently produces Western fantasies of its own political and cultural control. In the case of Kant and the romantic writers who deployed his understanding of the transcendental sublime through poetics, however, the putative incorporation of exotic otherness effectively masked an intense xenophobia that structures the internal life of the mind and the unconscious.13
The belief in an essential internal life of the mind that is able effectively to transcend the material circumstances of its own production has served the academy well, both in Kant’s time and ours. Cultural studies, however, identify the ways aesthetics are politically motivated and manifested as products of power. But while the field of romanticism acknowledges the crucial need for such politicizing, it also holds some particular “truths” to be self-evident. Prominent among these professed truths is the successful foreclosure of xenophobia as a constitutive factor in the production of romantic ideas about subjectivity, inwardness, and authorship. It strikes me, however, that articulations of such “truths” may also usefully uncover the complexities of xenophobia as a cultural phenomenon. Following Freud’s accounts of the processes of incorporation and introjection in which the first notion provides the bodily model for the second psychological operation, xenophobia dictates how (foreign) objects are situated and resituated within domestic discourse. Thus the bodily incorporation of difference that is identified as a “thing” is itself later transposed to its sublime form, the introjection of an idea. Our language embodies the cultural unconscious that rests both within and without the privileged internal space of individual agency.14 In other words, as part of the symbolic, language acts as both basilisk and signpost to conscious ideas and unconscious impulses that make up what we define as “personal” subjectivity, one that may turn out to be more public than private.
A perfectly disembodied and idyllic “life of the mind” will always crucially depend on the dirty work performed by the “life of the body” for its articulation, resting precisely on material hierarchies of gender, race, class, and sexuality that it purports to transcend. Romantic writing—especially its preoccupation with subjectivity, the sublime, or other forms of transcendental philosophy—also rests on the messy material hierarchies that are both invoked and eradicated by xenophobia. Despite the radical changes cultural studies have wrought in the academy, it may nonetheless unconsciously retain older formulations of subjectivity that both depend on and reinforce notions of the internal and the external for their articulation. Romantic writing in particular struggles with its attachment to the imagination: a privileged internal space of unproblematized knowledge (as in Kant’s exposition of the transcendental aesthetic), uncomplicated by the problems that race and gender pose to the production of epistemology. The meaning of race in early eighteenth-century Britain takes shape only as a projected materiality, an external reality far removed from ideas of Cartesian subjectivity. Color that is mapped out on an external skin functions exclusively in relation to the “uncolored” or white body privileged with the capacities of an internal life and a clearly defined “self.”
But exactly how do these internal and external spaces get codified as hierarchies in cultural discourse? One way of addressing this problem is to look at Lacan’s formulations of the unconscious. One of the most difficult—and most transparent—claims Lacan makes about the unconscious is its externality: the fact that the “unconscious is outside.” Like the anatomical navel whose material presence marks a prior connection with someone other and therefore visibly contests the notion of an autonomous body, the ultimately unknown center of a psychic truth is equally visible: only available as a representation, it is out there, waiting to be uncovered, recovered, and situated within some ideological matrix. Ideological assumptions about the difference between external and internal sites of identity have privileged the internal: the enduring Enlightenment belief that the internal carries more meaning than the external turns out, according to Lacan, to be exactly the opposite.
Governed by epistemological interests in order and knowledge produced through a largely taxonomic discourse, Enlightenment thinking focuses on the empirical study, the Cartesian paradigm. Romanticism has been commonly understood as a reaction against Enlightenment reasoning, focusing on the erratic and the uneven rather than the regular, harkening back to older models of romance (medieval) for its paradigmatic shift. M. H. Abrams writes, for example:
in the several decades beginning with the 1780s, however, a number of the keenest and most sensitive minds found radically inadequate, both to the immediate human experience and to basic human needs, the intellectual ambiance of the Enlightenment, with (as they saw it) its mechanistic world-view, its analytic divisiveness (which undertook to explain all physical and mental phenomena by breaking them down into irreducible parts, and regarded all wholes as a collocation of such elementary parts), and its conception of the human mind as totally diverse and alien from its nonmental environment.15
While I