时间修辞与亚洲书写:《东方志》的政治宇宙学

Time Rhetoric and Asia Writing:The Political Cosmology in The Suma Oriental of ToméPires

葡萄牙在16世纪初期首次远遣多默·皮列士前往亚洲,《东方志》就是此次出使的官方报告,它在一定程度上呈现了欧洲真正介入印度洋中心的国际贸易体系之前的亚洲知识状况。《东方志》里面有两种时间,即作为表述主体的叙事者与葡萄牙国王共享的“普遍性的时间”,以及为这个时间框架所封存的亚洲—印度洋时间。《东方志》的文本呈现了一个基督圣徒在与其国王陛下讲述其在亚洲各个不同的地理区域获得的世俗知识的情景。这个讲述过程使原本神圣的宗教时间世俗化为“普遍性的时间”。因此,《东方志》中的叙事者既是在空间中旅行,也是在时间中旅行,更是在观念中旅行。随着叙事者的步履迁移,有关亚洲的世俗知识得以累积,欧洲完成现代的蜕变。异域旅行就成为世俗朝圣。表面上,亚洲的时间与叙述者和国王共享的“普遍性时间”一致;实际上,这个现在时态的诅咒把亚洲社会静态化了。亚洲被“普遍性时间”涂抹上了防腐剂,像处理标本那样冻结并封存。这种时间操纵有效地把欧洲叙事者从亚洲景观中分离出来,知识在福柯式的“图表”中得以分配、安置并秩序化,文化的距离就诞生了,从而凸显了时间的空间化意义。这种时间修辞的操纵,最重要的效果之一就是设定了亚洲与欧洲在文本中的非共时性关系,亚洲被冻结在叙事者的讲述中,仅作为欧洲时空的参照而永恒存在。《东方志》的“政治宇宙学”中暗隐着早期近代欧洲异域知识和世界意识的生产机制。

The Suma Oriental of ToméPires:An Account of the East,from the Red Sea to Japan,Written in Malacca and India in 1512–1515 is an official report by ToméPires who was sent as an ambassador to Asia in the early sixteenth century.This report partly represents the knowledge of Asia before Europe entered the Indian Ocean international trade system.There are two series of time:universal time shared between the narrator and Manuel I and the Asia-Indian Ocean time sealed by the former.The Suma Oriental records the conversation of a Christian reporting his traveling in Asia and providing secular knowledge about many different areas to Manuel I.This scene secularizes the sacred time as“universalizing time.”The narrator in The Suma Oriental seems to travel not only in spaces,but also in time and ideas.With the narrator’s traveling,the secular knowledge of Asia is accumulated and Europe is gradually modernized.The exotic traveling becomes a secular pilgrimage.In fact,the present tense that is used to represent Asia has never shared the same significance with the“universalizing time”which is owned by the narrator and the Manuel I,but imprisons Asia by the time preservative.In other words,Asia represented in The Suma Oriental relies on the spatialized-time rhetoric.This time rhetoric separates the narrator from Asian spectacle and distributes and resettles the exotic knowledge in a Foucauldian tableau.Then,the cultural distance and ranks between Europe and Asia are produced,and the spatialized-time significance is foregrounded.This time rhetoric sets a non-synchronicity relation between Asia and Europe and freezes Asia in the narrating as the reference of European time and space.The political cosmology in The Suma Oriental is a metaphor of the producing mechanism of exotic knowledge and world awareness in early modern Europe.