The Limits of Orientalism: Seventeenth-Century Representations of India

By Rahul Sapra

The Limits of Orientalism: Seventeenth-Century Representations of India challenges the recent postcolonial readings of European, predominantly English, representations of India in the seventeenth century. Following Edward Said’s discourse of “Orientalism,” most postcolonial analyses of the seventeenth-century representations of India argue that the natives are represented as barbaric or exotic “others,” imagining these representations as products of colonial ideology. Such approaches tend to offer a homogeneous idea of the “native” and usually equate it with the term “Indian.” Sapra, however, argues that instead of representing all natives as barbaric “others,” the English drew parallels, especially between themselves and the Mughal aristocracy, associating with them as partners in trade and potential allies in war. While the Muslims are from the outset largely portrayed as highly civilized and cultured, early European writers tended to be more conflicted with Hindus, their first highly negative views undergoing a transformation that brings into question any straightforward Orientalist reading of the texts and anticipates the complexity of later representations of the indigenous peoples of the sub-continent.

Sapra’s theoretical and methodological approach is influenced by such writers as Aijaz Ahmad and Denis Porter, who have highlighted powerful alternatives to Said’s discourse of “Orientalism.” Sapra historicizes European representations of the indigenous to draw attention to the contrasting approaches of the Portuguese, the Dutch and the English in relation to seventeenth-century India, effectively undermining comfortable notions of a homogenous “West.” Unlike the Portuguese, for whom the idea of a dynasty and the conversion of heathens went hand in hand with the idea of trade, for the Dutch and the English the primary consideration was commercial. In keeping with the commercial approach of the English East India Company, most English travelers, instead of representing the Muslims as barbaric “others,” highlight the compatibility between the two cultures and consistently praise the Mughal empire for its religious tolerance. In the representations of the Hindus, Sapra demonstrates that most writers, even while denigrating the Hindu religion, appreciate the civilized society of the Hindus. Moreover, in the representations of sati or widow-burning, a distinction needs to be made between the patriarchal and the Orientalist points of views, which are at variance with each other. The tension between the patriarchal and the Orientalist positions challenges Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s analysis of sati in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” which has become the standard model for most postcolonial appraisals of European representations of sati. The book highlights the lacuna in postcolonial readings by providing access to selections of commonly unavailable early-modern writings by Thomas Roe, Edward Terry, Henry Lord, Thomas Coryate, Alexander Hamilton and other the records of the East India Company, which makes the book vital for students of theory, European and South-Asian history, and Renaissance literatures.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Mar 14, 2011
• ISBN: 9781644531433

Book preview

The Limits of Orientalism

The Limits of Orientalism

Seventeenth-Century

Representations of India

Rahul Sapra

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

Newark

University of Delaware Press

© 2011 by Rahul Sapra

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Distributed by the University of Virginia Press

ISBN 978-1-64453-142-6 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-64453-143-3 (ebook)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file under LC#2010019733

Acknowledgments

I AM GRATEFUL FOR THE GUIDANCE AND SUPPORT OF THE UNIVERSITY of Delaware Press and the Associated University Presses. I would like to thank Julien Yoseloff, Director of the Associated University Presses, for all his support. I also thank Managing Editor Christine Retz and Senior Production Editor Joshua Allen for their expertise. Thanks are also due to the anonymous readers at the University of Delaware Press for their many incisive suggestions for improvement. I am extremely grateful to Donald Mell, Board of Editors, University of Delaware Press, for his valuable guidance and direction at every stage of the project.

I am extremely grateful to Queen’s University for supporting my initial research with doctoral fellowships. I owe my greatest thanks to Paul Stevens who has as much of a stake in this book as I do. He has been an ideal mentor and a source of inspiration for me for many years now. I thank him profoundly for his thoughtful and rigorous engagement with the text, his conscientious advice, continual assistance, his ongoing friendship and his faith in the project and me. I am extremely grateful to Elizabeth Hanson for being a great friend and for providing a highly insightful and perceptive critique of my work. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Stephen Ross for his sincere and intense involvement from the beginning till the final stages of the project. Stephen has been a continuous source of inspiration and encouragement, and he happily supported me with timely assistance and provided excellent suggestions for all my queries. I would go to the extent of stating that without Stephen’s help I could not have completed this project. I am also grateful to Anupam Pandey and Nissim Mannathukkaren for providing stimulating discussions and thoughtful suggestions about my research.

I owe special thanks to the following colleagues at Ryerson University for all their support and friendship: Colin Moers, Alan Sears, Mark Lovewell, Sarah Henstra and Jennifer Burwell. I am thankful to Jordana Lobo-Pires for being an outstanding research assistant. I am equally grateful to all my friends and colleagues from Queen’s University and Kingston. I want to single out especially Chris Fanning, Colleen Shea, Sarah Sweet, Sheetal Lodhia, Rosa Barker, Gabrielle Mcintire, Sushie ji, Saurav Sengupta, Sagar Tipnis, Somnath Sinha, and Renita Reitz.

I would like to thank my family for their continuous encouragement and support: my parents, Roshan and Kiran, my brother Rohit, his wife Archana, my nephews, Ayush and Mehul, and my cousins Rajat Sapra, Sandeep Sareen and Niyati Sareen. I am also grateful to Kewal Yadav and Sopan Joshi.

Finally, I thank my guru Dr. B.S. Rattan for all his blessings.

The Limits of Orientalism

1

Introduction

EVER SINCE ITS PUBLICATION IN 1978, EDWARD SAID’S ORIENTALISM HAS had an enormous influence on a large number of disciplines. Its aggressive attack on Western representations of the Orient created the foundations for postcolonial criticism and led to the exposure of the association between Western knowledge and imperialism.¹ Most current approaches to seventeenth-century European travel narratives on India are influenced by Said and use the narratives to substantiate the discourse of Orientalism. It is generally argued that the seventeenth-century travel narratives on India not only represent the natives as uncivilized/exotic others, but that these representations are influenced by the ideology of colonialism. Most of these approaches, like Said’s, revolve around a homogeneous and coherent idea of the native and usually equate it with the term Indian. My book, which deals primarily with the English travel narratives, explores the complexities in the constructions of the term native by arguing that instead of representing all Indians as uncivilized/barbaric others, the English make numerous distinctions, most importantly between the Hindus and the Muslims. Instead of creating oppositions, the English draw parallels, especially between the Mughal aristocracy and themselves, since both are seen as foreigners in India and are defined in opposition to the Hindus, who are seen as the inhabitants of India and are usually labeled as gentiles. However, while the Muslims are, on the whole, portrayed as being highly civilized and cultured, the representations of the Hindus undergo substantial changes over the period. Early seventeenth-century writers view the Hindus as barbaric others, but after the first quarter of the century a complex picture of the Hindus begins to emerge. Later writers not only provide an intricate picture of the customs and beliefs of the Hindus, but also begin to represent the Hindu culture as a highly civilized one, thus raising further questions about a straightforward Orientalist reading of these narratives.

By highlighting these patterns of complex and discerning representations of the Hindus and the Muslims, I do not propose that there is no trace of Orientalism in the seventeenth century. There are instances when the Europeans do look down upon the natives as inferior others, in terms of both race and religion. If these instances are singled out, they would not only support an Orientalist reading of the travel narratives, but would also anticipate the full-blown Orientalism to be seen in the succeeding centuries. However, the point to be emphasized is that there are also enough instances of highly discerning representations of the natives, which counteract a clear-cut Orientalist reading of the narratives. This is not to imply that the current approaches are totally oblivious to the various moments in the narratives that disrupt an Orientalist reading of the text, but they usually discard these moments as exceptions in order to assert the complicity of the narratives with the discourse of Orientalism. Further, even while questioning Said, most current approaches work within the parameters laid down by Said, and do not object to the theoretical framework used by him in defining the discourse of Orientalism. These approaches are influenced by the modifications of the discourse of Orientalism by critics such as Lisa Lowe, Homi Bhabha, and others. However, although both Lowe and Bhabha question Said, they continue to take seriously his claim that Orientalism is a discourse and therefore utilize the technical apparatus of discourse analysis. The problem with some of these approaches, especially with Bhabha’s, is that because they work within the parameters of discourse analysis, their critique is not executed with reference to a specific historical moment, but is applied indiscriminately to all colonial situations. At the same time, most of these critics do not deal with the possibilities of alternative representations or with the moments of resistance that can disrupt the discourse of Orientalism.

Unlike Bhabha and Lowe, who remodel Orientalism to suit their needs, critics such as Dennis Porter and Aijaz Ahmad question the validity of Orientalism as a discourse by pointing to some fundamental flaws in Said’s theoretical framework. Porter highlights the incompatibility of Foucault’s discourse theory with Gramsci’s idea of hegemony in Said’s work, while Ahmad shows the inherent contradiction in Said’s attempted fusion of Foucault’s discourse theory with High Humanism. By questioning the basis of Said’s theoretical framework, both Porter and Ahmad are able to draw attention to alternatives to Orientalism in their works. These alternatives provide the critical underpinning of my book, which highlights the complexities in the representations of both the Hindus and the Muslims in the seventeenth-century travel narratives. Not only do these complex representations question a straight-forward Orientalist reading, but they also need to be accommodated within the various other discourses simultaneously at work in the seventeenth century, thus exposing the limitations of situating a text within a single discourse. For instance, Ahmad argues that a large number of examples that Said gives in support of Orientalism can actually be situated within the discourse of religion or, more specifically, of Christian belief and heresy. Similarly, in the seventeenth century the English travel writers at times denigrate the natives, both the Hindus and the Muslims, on the basis of religion, but simultaneously appreciate the civilized society in the Mughal empire. However, this is not to deny that the discourse of civility versus barbarism is not present in the seventeenth century, since the same writers who differentiate between themselves and the natives in the Mughal empire in terms of religion, look down upon the African natives in terms of race as beasts and savages who have no concept of religion. But it is misleading to situate the denigration of the natives in Africa or the Mughal empire within colonial discourse, because the policy of the English East India Company was not governed by any well-formulated colonial designs in the seventeenth century. Unlike the Portuguese, for whom the idea of a dynasty and the conversions of heathens went hand in hand with the idea of trade, the approach of the English in the seventeenth century was mainly commercial, dissociated from the idea of either military conquest or religious conversions. Thus, it is simplistic to perceive the complex representations of the natives in the English travel narratives as a product of colonial discourse. Instead, the representations question a straightforward relationship between the discourse of Orientalism and colonial discourse in the seventeenth century.

Said’s Orientalism has had a major influence on a large number of disciplines. Bart Moore-Gilbert, in the introduction to Writing India, observes that "contemporary colonial discourse analysis (in the West if not elsewhere) may be said to emerge with Said’s Orientalism."² Aijaz Ahmad in In Theory observes that Said is our most vivacious narrator of the history of European humanism’s complicity in the history of European colonialism.³ Robert Young in White Mythologies acknowledges that it is in the work of Said that we find the problematic of historicist forms of knowledge linked most forcibly to the question of European imperialism.⁴ He goes on to note that "the appropriation of French theory by Anglo-American intellectuals is marked, and marred, by its consistent excision of the issue of Eurocentrism and its relation to colonialism. Not until Said’s Orientalism (1978) did it become a significant issue for Anglo-American literary theory."⁵ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes Orientalism as a source book in our discipline.⁶ Her essays The Rani of Sirmur (1985), Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism (1985), and Imperialism and Sexual Difference (1986) can be seen as examples of colonial discourse analysis. Following Said’s approach in Orientalism, Spivak’s Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism highlights how the ideology of imperialism informs nineteenth-century novels such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. She suggests:

It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. The role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored. These two obvious facts continued to be disregarded in the reading of the nineteenth-century British literature.⁷

Not only is Spivak’s approach influenced by Said, but in the above quotation, she also anticipates Said’s Culture and Imperialism, which links British novelistic process to British imperial policy:

The continuity of British imperial policy throughout the nineteenth century . . . is actively accompanied by [the] novelistic process, whose main purpose [was] not to raise more questions, not to disturb or otherwise preoccupy attention, but to keep the empire more or less in place. Hardly ever is a novelist interested in doing a great deal more than mentioning or referring to India, for example in Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre, or Australia in Great Expectations. The idea is that (following the general principles of free trade) outlying territories are available for use, at will, at the novelist’s discretion, usually for relatively simple purposes such as immigration, fortune, or exile.⁸

However, Said’s account of Orientalism has also been questioned on various fronts. Spivak herself disagrees with Said on some major issues. She argues that postcolonial criticism should represent a persistent recognition of heterogeneity with regard to postcolonial cultures.⁹ For instance, in The Rani of Sirmur she argues that India cannot be taken to symbolize the rest of the Orient. Unlike Said, she focuses on the possibilities of a counter-discourse, which can be seen in her involvement in the projects of historiography of the Indian subaltern studies group and the translation of Mahashweta Devi’s fiction.

While Spivak both questions and uses Said’s Orientalism as and when required, critics such as Lowe and Bhabha provide a more sustained reformulation of Orientalism in their works. Lowe, while qualifying Orientalism, clarifies that, unlike Said, she is not constructing a master narrative or a singular history of Orientalism, whether of influence or of comparison.¹⁰ Rather, she argues for a conception of Orientalism as heterogeneous and contradictory . . . that Orientalism consist[s] of an uneven matrix of Orientalist situations across different cultural and historical sites, and . . . that each of these Orientalisms is internally complex and unstable.¹¹ However, even while redefining Orientalism, she, like Said, perceives Orientalism to be a discourse, but cautions that Orientalism is an irregular and heterogeneous discourse that cannot be applied in a consistent manner throughout all cultural and historical moments.¹² She adds that,

when Michel Foucault posits the concept of discursive formations—the regularities in groups of statements, institutions, operations, and practices—he is careful to distinguish it as an irregular series of regularities that produces objects of knowledge. In other words, a phenomenon such as the notion of the Orient in early eighteenth-century France may be said provisionally to be constituted by some sort of irregularity—that is, the conjunction of statements and institutions (maps, literary narratives, treatises, Jesuit missionary reports, diplomatic policies, and so forth) pertaining to the Orient. But the manner in which these materials conjoin to produce the category the Orient is not equal to the conjunction constituting the Orient at another historical moment, or in another national culture.¹³

Lowe also cautions that cultural criticism that makes use of the logic of otherness must historicize and theorize its own methods and objects. This is to say that theories are produced, as are all narratives, in particular social contexts and by the particular tensions, contradictions, and pressures of that historical moment.¹⁴ Therefore, instead of using homogeneous categories, she argues that notions such as ‘French culture’, ‘the British Empire’, and ‘European nations’ are likewise replete with ambiguity, conflicts, and nonequivalences.¹⁵

While Lowe emphasizes the element of heterogeneity in the discourse of Orientalism, and also cautions about the need to situate the critique within specific historical contexts, Homi Bhabha, in The Location of Culture, modifies Orientalism by using psychoanalytical theory to argue that the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized is far more complex than Said’s formulation.¹⁶ In The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism, he argues that there is a complex mix of attraction and repulsion that characterizes the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized and that makes the relationship between the two ambivalent. He observes that a major discursive strategy used in colonial discourse is the use of stereotype, which is a

form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always in place, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated—as if the essential duplicity of the Asiatic or the bestial sexual license of the African that needs no proof, can never really, in discourse, be proved. . . . It is [this] force of ambivalence that gives the colonial stereotype its currency: ensures its repeatability in changing historical and discursive conjectures; informs its strategies of individuation and marginalization; produces that effect of probabilistic truth and predictability which, for the stereotype, must always be in excess of what can be empirically proved or logically construed.¹⁷

By introducing the concept of ambivalence, Bhabha questions the polarity or division at the very center of Orientalism.¹⁸ He argues that this site of polarity/binary used by Said is continually under threat from diachronic forms of history and narrative, signs of instability.¹⁹ The binary also produces a problem with Said’s use of Foucault’s concepts of power and discourse.²⁰ Bhabha observes:

The productivity of Foucault’s concepts of power/knowledge lies in its refusal of an epistemology which opposes essence/appearance, ideology/science. "Pouvoir/Savoir" places subjects in a relation of power and recognition that is not part of a symmetrical or dialectical relation—self/other, master/slave—which can then be subverted by being inverted. Subjects are always disproportionately placed in opposition or domination through the symbolic decentering of multiple power relations which play the role of support as well as target or adversary. . . . It is difficult to conceive of the process of subjectification as a placing within Orientalist or colonial discourse for the dominated subject without the dominant being strategically placed within it too.²¹

Bhabha’s point is that, having introduced the concept of discourse [Said] does not face up to the problems it creates for an instrumentalist notion of power/knowledge that he seems to require.²² Bhabha’s concept of ambivalence disrupts the clear-cut dichotomy between the colonizer and the colonized, around which Said bases his argument of power/knowledge. In Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse, Bhabha uses Lacan’s concept of mimicry to argue that colonial discourse wants to produce compliant subjects who mimic the colonizer, but instead it produces ambivalent subjects whose mimicry is almost a form of mockery. The mimic man who is almost the same but not quite is not exactly like the colonizer.²³ Since he is only a partial representation of the colonizer, he subverts the identity of the colonizer who is being represented. Bhabha argues that all instances of colonial imitation share a

discursive process by which the excess or slippage produced by the ambivalence of mimicry (almost the same, but not quite) does not merely rupture the discourse, but becomes transformed into an uncertainty which fixes the colonial subject as a partial presence. By partial [Bhabha] mean[s] both incomplete and virtual. It is as if the very emergence of the colonial is dependent for its representation upon some strategic limitation or prohibition within the authoritative discourse itself.²⁴

In Signs Taken for Wonders, Bhabha introduces the concept of hybridity, which he defines as a problematic of colonial representation . . . that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so the other ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority—its rules of recognition.²⁵ The colonial authority becomes hybridized since it finds itself dealing with and influenced by other cultures.

Most critical works dealing with seventeenth-century European representations of India follow Said’s discourse of Orientalism, but also attempt to qualify Said’s argument by situating their critique within the critical framework provided by critics such as Lowe and Bhabha. Following Said, Kate Teltscher observes that both Terry and Roe are typical in projecting images of English society onto Indian society and recording the differences. For the most part, the representations follow Said’s model of binary opposition: India is presented negatively, as the inverse of England.²⁶ Similarly, Jyotsna Singh observes that the seventeenth-century European representations of India "point to the power of a colonizing imagination which ‘discovers’ new lands via demarcations of identity and difference, often based upon ideological and mythical distinctions between civilization and barbarism and tradition and modernity."²⁷ She states that

the accounts of Roe, Terry and others are . . . implicated in the religious, social and ideological codes of the time, such as a belief in the natural superiority of Christendome over the non-Christian heathens. Whether one considers Thomas Roe an early colonist or not, his struggles in interpreting proliferating cultural signifiers in the Indian society reinforce ideological divisions between barbarism and civilization, so that English identity is often defined in relation to otherness.²⁸

However, Singh adds that postcolonial theory runs the risk of being bogged down in a single binary opposition: colonial and postcolonial, and therefore her work is influenced by

critics such as Homi Bhabha and Lisa Lowe, among several others, [who] have noted the dialogic strains within colonial narratives and called for anti-essentialist revisions of a previously monolithic history—ones in which colonial / postcolonial identity is always already overwritten by the differential play of colonialist ambivalence. Conceptualizing colonial power as a discursive formation in the Foucauldian sense, they challenge the notion of colonial discourse as a closed system that manages and colonizes otherness.²⁹

Like Singh, Teltscher also adds that colonial discourse analysis has moved away from "the Self/ Other opposition charted by Said in Orientalism, toward a more complex sense of the anxieties of colonial rule.³⁰ In dealing with the seventeenth-century representations of the Mughal empire, she attempts to trace the ‘competing and fluctuating logics of similarity and difference’ (to borrow Lisa Lowe’s phrase) which mark the early discourse of India."³¹

However, one of the problems with the approach of critics such as Singh and Teltscher to the seventeenth-century European representations of India is that these critics either deal with the accounts without a specific reference to the historical moment or they posit a homogeneous European view of India in the seventeenth century. Both Singh and Teltscher attempt to work within the theoretical framework provided by Lowe, but they seem to disregard Lowe’s caution about situating the argument within a specific historical context. Teltscher states that a concern with the diversity and historical particularity runs through her work,³² but instead of differentiating among European nations with respect to their specific national, social, and religious contexts, she posits the idea of a common European tradition vis-à-vis India. She argues that for both

the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries it is possible to speak of a European tradition of writing about India. Travel accounts were frequently translated into several European languages and gathered into collections of voyages. François Bernier’s hugely influential account of Mughal history, for instance, was published in France in 1670–71, and translated into English in 1671 and Dutch the year after, with German and Italian editions following in 1671–73 and 1675. In a study of the first European representation of the New World, Stephen Greenblatt has remarked that European mimetic capital, though diverse and internally competitive, easily crossed boundaries of nation and creed: the same can be said of the early representations of India, and so, like Greenblatt, I have decided not to accord those boundaries an absolute respect.³³

Similarly, Singh, while dealing with the English travel writers, does not differentiate their approach from that of other European writers. For instance, regarding Roe, she observes that "like other European travelers / writers, the Ambassador represents the Mogul court in a series of spectacles that both exoticize and demonize the natives."³⁴ The problem of not situating the argument within specific social-historical contexts can be traced back to Bhabha, whose work has also influenced both Singh and Teltscher, and who almost totally disregards historical conditions. Robert Young in White Mythologies observes that

Bhabha’s claims to describe the conditions of colonial discourse—mimicry is . . ., hybridity is . . .—seems always offered as static concepts, curiously anthropomorphized so that they possess their own desire, with no reference to the historical provenance of the theoretical material from which such concepts are drawn, or to the theoretical narrative of Bhabha’s own work, or to that of the cultures to which they are addressed. On each occasion Bhabha seems to imply through this timeless characterization that the concept in question constitutes the conditions of colonial discourse itself and would hold good for all historical periods and contexts.³⁵

Further, Bhabha’s theory of ambivalence is not clear about the idea of resistance. According to Bhabha, the colonial relation is ambivalent, so it generates its own destruction, but this idea is controversial because it implies that the colonial relationship is going to be disrupted, regardless of any resistance or rebellion on the part of the colonized.³⁶ According to Young, Bhabha’s concepts of ambivalence and mimicry necessarily invoke the question of agency: For Bhabha mimicry itself becomes a kind of agency without a subject, a form of representation which produces effects, a sameness which slips into otherness, but which still has nothing to do with any ‘other.’³⁷ However, in Signs Taken for Wonder, Bhabha advances the idea of resistance: "If the effect of colonial power is seen to be the production of hybridization . . . [it] enables a form of subversion . . . that turns the discursive conditions of dominance into grounds of intervention.³⁸ Young argues that by introducing the idea of resistance, Bhabha attempts to shift his concept of mimicry from being something that is simply disquieting for the colonizer to a specific form of intervention: Mimicry marks those moments of civil disobedience within the discipline of civility: signs of spectacular resistance. When the words of the master become the site of hybridity . . . then we may not only read between the lines but even seek to change the often coercive reality that they so lucidly contain."³⁹ Young, however, argues that with the claim for resistance and intervention, the problem of agency returns:

Who is we here, and when do we do what we do? Is Bhabha describing a forgotten moment of historical resistance, or does that resistance remain inarticulate until the interpreter comes . . . later to read between the lines and rewrite history? And precisely what reality can such a reading between the lines hope to change?⁴⁰

It is because Bhabha, like Said, regards Orientalism as a discourse in the Foucauldian sense that his theory refuses to deal with concrete historical facts, since in the Foucauldian discourse a fact is nothing but a product of discourse, and also any resistance to colonial power, instead of arising out of any independent agency, is something that is already constituted by the same power. For instance, in The History of Sexuality, Foucault speaks of the

omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every