Cosmopolitanism and Material Ethics 93rather than of a doctor: “Tell us what we want to know, then we’ll
leave you alone” (p. 140). However, in the case of Waiting for the
Barbarians , the influence that society’s systems of knowledge and
value have on the protagonist is revealed in other, subtler ways. If we
subject the Magistrate’s archaeological hobbies to further scrutiny,
for instance, we find that the very acts of excavation and collection
are themselves imbued with traces of the same imperial orientation
to humanity that he takes pains to reject: the past is there to be
dug up, “deciphered,” and integrated within a rigid epistemological
framework (p. 16). Indeed, there are once again strong parallels here
with Foucault’s conception of knowledge as an architectural struc-
ture, closely tied to the power apparatus of the day—the Magistrate
is literally digging up relics from the past, in which different sys-
tems of knowledge and of understanding the world prevailed, and is
attempting to integrate them into the episteme of the present.
The epistemology of the Empire also permeates the Magistrate’s
perception of space. Examining his hobby of cartography in par-
ticular, we could note how the activity necessitates the conceptual
appropriation of space within a rigid, economically driven system of
knowledge. The instrument that enables and entrenches these val-
ues is, of course, language, which serves to assimilate space within
imperial knowledge structures by deploying arbitrary signs. A cur-
sor y sur vey of the language that the Magistrate uses when discussing
the land reveals the extent to which such a normative value system
permeates his vision, reflecting a way of viewing the world in terms
of a resource that needs to be enclosed, territorialized, and exploited
for economic gain or military advantage. In contrast to the defini-
tive signifiers he uses to describe enclosed spaces, such as the “fields
[... in which] farmers are loading the two huge old hay-wagons,”
land that does not offer up pecuniary value is labeled in vague and
dismissive terms: patches of “haze” surrounded by “wastes” and
“barren hills” (pp. 14–41). For Robert Marzec, such conceptions of
space are endemic to imperial ideology in that they prioritize the act
of “gaining mastery over the land [... through the violent] ontology
of enclosure.”^41
Although the logic and value system of the Empire therefore clearly
exert an inordinate degree of influence over the Magistrate, and one