Observers of the Fair had remarked how, as one moved up and down its Midway, the more European, civilized, and . . . well, frankly, white exhibits located closer to the center of the "White City" seemed to be, whereas the farther from that alabaster Metropolis one ventured, the more evident grew the signs of cultural darkness and savagery.
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It's good to say that observers noticed this phenomenon because it's evidence and proof. But even without the observers' observations, any rational thinking person would have come to this conclusion. Obviously the Eurocentric stuff was going to be highlighted! White people think history was made by white people! White people think civilization was created by white people! It would take half a semester of a class on non-white civilizations to prove to them how untrue this is but none of them would take that class because they'd read "Non-white Civilizations" and think, "What's the Goddamned point?!" What's particularly hilarious to me is how white people who think they're smart and rational might state how white people invented everything and, by doing so, prove that they're anything but smart and rational. It's just a glaringly incorrect statement that exposes the speaker's ignorance of world history.
"cultural darkness and savagery"
"Cultural darkness" is white speak for "a culture that doesn't resemble white culture." Somehow a culture ignorant of European culture is a culture that has never seen the light of day. Maybe it's against the day, even?! "Savagery" is white speak for "having laws and social mores that are different from European laws and social mores, which makes no sense at all, goes against God and nature, is entirely outrageous from any rational perspective, and is denotative of the beasts in the field."
What this passage suggests is that the Fair has put white civilization at the center and, according to Derrida, the center is the one irreplaceable aspect of a system. But the center of a system cannot be a part of the system. It is both at the center and also outside of the system at the same time. The parts of the system that radiate out from the center are the only parts that are malleable, that can change. And the way they change is often dictated by the system at the center. So white civilization wants the other civilizations of the world to change and become more like the center, to create stability in some kind of homogeneity.
But we also know the center cannot hold because things fall apart. And what happens at that point is that a new center takes the place of the old center. In the case of America in 1893 (and, basically, Western Civilization as a whole), the center was beginning to change drastically. It's almost certainly why Pynchon chose this time period for Against the Day. By 1893, rationality, science, and technology were taking the place of God. God was being kicked out of the center and being replaced by mankind's ability to know and control his environment in ways that no longer needed God as an answer to any question. (By the time Pynchon writes Gravity's Rainbow, another change to the center has begun to take place as we discover rationality has brought us to the brink of destruction. Gravity's Rainbow takes place during World War II and covers the space of time in which Hiroshima is leveled by the United States of America's use of the atomic bomb and it's also written during the Vietnam War, two spaces in time that suggest the death of rationality and a waning of Western Civilization's centerness.)
But until any of that happens, we have the Chicago's World Fair, still maintaining Western Civilization's belief that it's the center of the world, that it is the light in the darkness, the bringer of order to the fringes of culture across the globe. And it only costs a person fifty cents to learn it!
