Response: Exoticism beyond Cosmopolitanism?

Exoticism overstates the empirically unfamiliar into a full-fledged aesthetics involving both detection and delectation. Any notion of the exotic relies on an implicit understanding of a boundary, inside which relative familiarity reigns and outside which the wild things roam. What, then, led to a generalized exoticism, one that rendered wondrous so many parts of the world? There is a sequence of identification, transmission, and consumption that characterizes exoticism, a series of delivery mechanisms that renders the exotic as legible and continuous in its mystery despite repeat exposures. As Tzvetan Todorov suggests, "knowledge is incompatible with exoticism, but lack of knowledge is in turn irreconcilable with praise of others; yet praise without knowledge is precisely what exoticism aspires to be. This is its constitutive paradox."¹ What is exotic for one person is not necessarily exotic for another. Eighteenth-century European sailors and chambermaids possessed different knowledge frameworks, leading very different lives: the mariners would have had many more chances to exoticize foreigners than their compatriots of either sex who stayed at home—and as the history of exoticism went, women were much more susceptible to sexual exoticization. However, even more relevant to us is that exoticism in general relies on the singularity of an irreducible aesthetic experience, one that creates an experiential object in the place of a reciprocal ethical transaction with the other.

How did exoticism maintain the sense of aesthetic surprise? A non-exoticist sensibility would systematically assimilate novelty into the observer's life experience. To allow the exotic to linger, novelty has to be placed in a framework that resists assimilation and revels in the perceived unavailability of the sensibilities produced by the exotic object. For instance, the Renaissance institution of the Wunderkammer (or curio cabinet) isolated objects taken from typical locations and cultures, even as their mutual contiguity and juxtaposition (in the cabinet) created ersatz patterns of recognition.² The incongruity of random architectural fragments juxtaposed as an outdoor folly did something similar, as did the expansion of the museum and the art gallery in the eighteenth century, creating sites of public aesthetics that decontextualized and recontextualized artifacts.³ Art and literature went about delivering the exotic through their own modes, genres, and styles.⁴

As Todorov also suggests, exoticism often went hand-in-hand with primitivism, combining principles of egalitarianism, minimalism, and naturalism—principles that we might alternatively dub as fallacies.⁵ While Rousseau's noble savages became a celebrated exotic construct that strongly influenced the Romantics, many earlier eighteenth-century exoticisms often highlighted civilizational complexity, focusing on the sophisticated refinements of those deemed more advanced than Europe in ideas or in material culture, with Ming-Ch'ing China (and occasionally Ottoman Turkey) serving as the most celebrated example. As many satirical implementations from Jonathan Swift to Denis Diderot demonstrate, exoticism as a phantasmagorical projection could be harnessed to a loose allegorization of geographically distanced others with an aim to critique European selves.

If the exotic implies a free-floating object or person that delivers strange effects—whether frissons of delight or shivers of danger— the cosmopolitan denotes a free-floating subject who connects hitherto distinct spheres. In some ways, it could be argued that the cosmopolitan subject arose by being able to harness the unproductive remainders of exoticism into a kind of comparative engine. The cosmopolitan was a new kind of subject who could rise above specific objects, properties, and principles. Fashioned partly out of the empirical experience of enhanced travel and exposure to other cultures, the cosmopolitan subject was nonetheless beholden to a philosophical articulation of the objectives of such random exposures, making a virtue of necessity given the new dis-orientations produced by global travel and commerce in an age of enhanced mercantilism headed for capitalist transformation.

The cosmopolitan sensibility, whether wilfully chosen or contingently experienced, is broader than any single context, nation, or culture. Going beyond the narrowly familiar, the cosmopolitan accounts for multiple locales at the price of coming across as un-rooted, alienated, and even disloyal. If exoticism manages objects and phenomena by drawing a tight boundary between the self and the external world...