Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic

by Peter Mason

When European travelers went overseas in the sixteenth century, they encountered unfamiliar lands, peoples, and sights. These travelers had to re-present these encounters to Europeans for whom they stood for the unfamiliar―the "exotic." But the exotic, according to Peter Mason, is not something that exists prior to its "discovery." Rather, he points out, it is the very act of "discovery" that produces the exotic as such. In Infelicities Peter Mason explores the texts, paintings, drawings, photographs, and museum displays in which the exotic has been represented from the early modern period to the present. He describes the unique iconography that Europeans developed to represent the exotic and the means they employed to display it once artifacts were brought to Europe. In both instances, the exotic object is taken out of its original context and given a meaning and significance it never had; this new meaning and significance, Mason argues, are derived from the imposition of European cultural values and the need to recontextualize the object in a European setting. To differentiate the "exotic" from the "other," Mason says that in understanding the "other" there is engagement and interchange; in encountering the "exotic" it is a one-sided effort at the exotic object never gives up its meaning. The title of the book, Infelicities , comes from philosopher J. L. Austin, who used the term to refer to what happens when something goes wrong on the occasion of an act of utterance. For Mason, this "doctrine of infelicities" seems applicable to European encounters with the exotic and the efforts to represent thoseencounters.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published December 15, 1998

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[Mir · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the theses of this book:

The exotic is not at home
exoticism is derived from the fact that it has been detached from one context and inserted into another, to which it is to some degree refractory.

The exotic is empty
the opacity of the exotic serves to mask the blankness of communication.
...One possible strategy to cope with this blankness is to resort to (unconvincing) equivalences which deny the existence of a problem.
...
This mocking failure of the exotic to be where one expects to find it functions as a way of luring the inquirer away.
... the interior is ever elusive.

The exotic is double
Iteration is not the same as repetition. Iteration introduces differences.
To encounter something a second time is not the same as to encounter it for the first time.
The logic or paradox of exoticism tends to set in motion a kind insatiable regression: the more one is immersed in the exotic, the more one discovers sameness, and the more one seeks ever greater difference. --Eisenman

The exotic is (Over)full
The proliferation of the exotic resulting from the accumulation of superimposed meanings.
The attempt to reduce the alterity of the other by restating it in terms of the familiar.
The attempt to eliminate the effusiveness of the uncharted wilderness by pinning it down in figures.

The exotic is not exotic
exotic would be that which is refractory of egotistical attempts of self to comprehend other.
This opaque other does not exist outside of the discourse that brings it into being.

Themes: ethnography, collection, classification, presentation, spectacle