This Is Enlightenment
Journal Data
| Type | SOURCE_BOOK |
|---|---|
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (US) |
| ISBN-13 | 9780226761466 |
| Open Library | OL18804060W |
| Total publications | 22 |
| Coverage period | 2010 - 2010 |
| Language | EN |
Debates about the nature of the date to the eighteenth century, when Immanuel Kant himself addressed the question, 'What is Enlightenment'? The contributors to this ambitious book offer a paradigm-shifting answer to that now-famous query: is an event in the history of mediation. Enlightenment, they argue, needs to be engaged within the newly broad sense of mediation introduced here - not only oral, visual, written, and printed media, but everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in between. With essays addressing infrastructure and genres, associational practices and protocols, this volume establishes mediation as the condition of possibility for enlightenment. In so doing, it not only answers Kant's query; it also poses its own broader question: how would foregrounding mediation change the kinds and areas of inquiry in our own epoch? This Is Enlightenment is a landmark volume with the polemical force and archival depth to start a conversation that extends across the disciplines that the itself first configured.
Mediation and the Division of Labor
Enlightening Mediation
This chapter offers a philological genealogy of related terms—persuasion, communication, medium, media, mediation—in order to excavate a struggle that works through the whole (hidden) history of mediation: the tension, on the one hand, between the supposed purpose of communication (whether it be the use of rhetoric to persuade or the later ideal of transparent representation that overcomes the opacity of language) and, on the other, the diverse m…
The Strange Light of Postcolonial Enlightenment
This chapter interrogates the contradictions that befell the Congress Party in the wake of Indian independence in 1947. What happens when concepts and practices associated with Enlightenment—suffrage, freedoms of various kinds, political economy—are not homegrown but imports? When they do not develop gradually but are instituted in one year? Are not expressions of popular sovereignty but the explicitly pursued policy of a state seeking to discipl…
“The Horrifying Ties, From Which the Public Order Originates”
Romanticism, Enlightenment and Mediation
This chapter examines the knowledge strategies of the self. The popular poet Edward Young and the author and critic Anna Letitia Barbauld use the figure of the “inner stranger” to reconcile a transcendental soul with a mundane self. Through a reading of the way Samuel Taylor Coleridge takes up the same figure (in “Frost at Midnight”), the chapter traces a secularizing movement from a “porous” to a “buffered” self, so the enigmatic equivocations o…
Mediating Media Past and Present
This chapter develops a historical analogy around the perception called “media shift.” Just as twentieth-century studies of oral (as opposed to scribal and print) culture took off in the wake of new twentieth-century oral technologies like telephony, the phonograph, and the radio, so too did the eighteenth-century conceptualization of oral tradition emerge in a complex dialectical relationship with an emerging sense of the sometimes reviled and s…
This is Enlightenment
This volume emerged from a 2007 international conference held at New York University entitled, “Mediating Enlightenment Past and Present,” which sought answers to many questions about Enlightenment. However, the conference as a whole also yielded a collective answer to the big question: ̳what is Enlightenment?‘, namely that Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation. This chapter attempts to recover that history, for our place in it is…
Mediating Information, 1450–1800
This chapter argues that the Enlightenment involved not so much a radical break with, but an inheritance of, established technologies for storing, organizing, and retrieving information. In the long history of information management, the first early modern period (ca. 1450–1650) was especially significant in the development of new techniques and the refinement of existing ones to manage an explosion of printed matter and manuscript record keeping…
The Piratical Enlightenment
This chapter shows how eighteenth-century German states, as net importers of intellectual property, found that piracy—the free reproduction of books first published by others—could support the Enlightenment ideal of free and open access to knowledge. However, the ensuing debate about the comparative value of a restricted copyright (the English system) and liberal reprinting (German piracy) not only implicates the mediation of Enlightenment (where…
Where were the Media before the Media?
This chapter cautions against the anachronism of applying the modern concept of “the media” to Enlightenment. It suggests that the cleavage between Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment media arrives when new early nineteenth-century technologies—the telegraph, the photograph, and Babbage's analytical engine—separate information processing from the eye, the hand, and the interiority of the individual, which during the Enlightenment still sustained…
Mediating Antiquarians in Britain, 1760–1830
This chapter presents an account of what antiquarians do to transmit ballads—gathering, citation, forensic editing, authentication, and quarrels over value. It argues that in its preoccupation with mediality and its navigation of both Enlightenment historiography and antiquarian eclecticism, balladeering asks us to complicate our standard accounts of "enlightenment" and "media." Antiquarian balladeering asks us to take another look at "close read…
Financing Enlightenment, Part Two
Modes and Codes
This chapter focuses on the complex mediations necessary to produce one of the most consequential events of the modern era: the invention of a new media technology. It tells the story of a chain of mediations, from F. B. Morse's first schemes for telegraphic writing and the several patents he registers and then defends, to the final decision of the Supreme Court. This story links successful implementation of the new medium with the notion of “del…
Novel Knowledge
This chapter argues that the British novelists of the early eighteenth century adopted three elements of natural philosophy in fashioning their narratives: surrogate witnessing, the contrived experiment, and the induction-based reasoning that could translate the findings of a single experiment into truths of general validity. It shows how early novelists fashioned printed texts into experiments that mediated different kinds of knowledge as a mean…
Mediating Le Philosophe
The Present of Enlightenment
This chapter analyzes how Kant, Foucault, and Jean Paul negotiate a central contradiction of Enlightenment. On the one hand, each insists, within their distinct discursive itinerary, that the value and promise of Enlightenment consists in the way it allows us to think the present, the distinctness of the present age, and build a “now” that requires a certain ethos: “a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feel…
Mediated Enlightenment
This chapter argues that we should look to the late seventeenth-century upsurge in the number and ambition of the new genre of the system: “System was the formal means to Enlightenment's end: comprehensive knowledge of a world that could be known—of parts that formed a whole.” Newton demonstrated the “system of the world” that is nature through the use of induction, simplicity, and mathematical proof. Adam Smith then capitalized on Newton's succe…
Mediation as Primal Word
This chapter argues for the importance of “mediation” by highlighting its antithetical senses—“mediation” can connote both “connection/communication” as well as “intervene/ separate.” It presents a case history of mediation that details the intricate process by which the concept of the aesthetic emerged from an explicit project: the effort to transport the epistemological posture developed by natural philosophy—one based in empirical observation,…
Transmitting Liberty
Financing Enlightenment, Part One
This chapter identifies five ways of understanding money that might make us rethink the Enlightenment. It then offers two very brief historical accounts: one summarizes the condition of (English) money during the Enlightenment, and the second chronicles some of the stages by which money lost its own history, as part of a more general cultural process of mystification or erasure. It suggests that some version of this erasure is intrinsic to Enligh…
The Preacher's Footing
This Is Enlightenment
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Mediation and the Division of Labor
Enlightening Mediation
This chapter offers a philological genealogy of related terms—persuasion, communication, medium, media, mediation—in order to excavate a struggle that works through the whole (hidden) history of mediation: the tension, on the one hand, between the supposed purpose of communication (whether it be the use of rhetoric to persuade or the later ideal of transparent representation that overcomes the opacity of language) and, on the other, the diverse m…
The Strange Light of Postcolonial Enlightenment
This chapter interrogates the contradictions that befell the Congress Party in the wake of Indian independence in 1947. What happens when concepts and practices associated with Enlightenment—suffrage, freedoms of various kinds, political economy—are not homegrown but imports? When they do not develop gradually but are instituted in one year? Are not expressions of popular sovereignty but the explicitly pursued policy of a state seeking to discipl…
“The Horrifying Ties, From Which the Public Order Originates”
Romanticism, Enlightenment and Mediation
This chapter examines the knowledge strategies of the self. The popular poet Edward Young and the author and critic Anna Letitia Barbauld use the figure of the “inner stranger” to reconcile a transcendental soul with a mundane self. Through a reading of the way Samuel Taylor Coleridge takes up the same figure (in “Frost at Midnight”), the chapter traces a secularizing movement from a “porous” to a “buffered” self, so the enigmatic equivocations o…
Mediating Media Past and Present
This chapter develops a historical analogy around the perception called “media shift.” Just as twentieth-century studies of oral (as opposed to scribal and print) culture took off in the wake of new twentieth-century oral technologies like telephony, the phonograph, and the radio, so too did the eighteenth-century conceptualization of oral tradition emerge in a complex dialectical relationship with an emerging sense of the sometimes reviled and s…
This is Enlightenment
This volume emerged from a 2007 international conference held at New York University entitled, “Mediating Enlightenment Past and Present,” which sought answers to many questions about Enlightenment. However, the conference as a whole also yielded a collective answer to the big question: ̳what is Enlightenment?‘, namely that Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation. This chapter attempts to recover that history, for our place in it is…
Mediating Information, 1450–1800
This chapter argues that the Enlightenment involved not so much a radical break with, but an inheritance of, established technologies for storing, organizing, and retrieving information. In the long history of information management, the first early modern period (ca. 1450–1650) was especially significant in the development of new techniques and the refinement of existing ones to manage an explosion of printed matter and manuscript record keeping…
The Piratical Enlightenment
This chapter shows how eighteenth-century German states, as net importers of intellectual property, found that piracy—the free reproduction of books first published by others—could support the Enlightenment ideal of free and open access to knowledge. However, the ensuing debate about the comparative value of a restricted copyright (the English system) and liberal reprinting (German piracy) not only implicates the mediation of Enlightenment (where…
Where were the Media before the Media?
This chapter cautions against the anachronism of applying the modern concept of “the media” to Enlightenment. It suggests that the cleavage between Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment media arrives when new early nineteenth-century technologies—the telegraph, the photograph, and Babbage's analytical engine—separate information processing from the eye, the hand, and the interiority of the individual, which during the Enlightenment still sustained…
Mediating Antiquarians in Britain, 1760–1830
This chapter presents an account of what antiquarians do to transmit ballads—gathering, citation, forensic editing, authentication, and quarrels over value. It argues that in its preoccupation with mediality and its navigation of both Enlightenment historiography and antiquarian eclecticism, balladeering asks us to complicate our standard accounts of "enlightenment" and "media." Antiquarian balladeering asks us to take another look at "close read…
Financing Enlightenment, Part Two
Modes and Codes
This chapter focuses on the complex mediations necessary to produce one of the most consequential events of the modern era: the invention of a new media technology. It tells the story of a chain of mediations, from F. B. Morse's first schemes for telegraphic writing and the several patents he registers and then defends, to the final decision of the Supreme Court. This story links successful implementation of the new medium with the notion of “del…
Novel Knowledge
This chapter argues that the British novelists of the early eighteenth century adopted three elements of natural philosophy in fashioning their narratives: surrogate witnessing, the contrived experiment, and the induction-based reasoning that could translate the findings of a single experiment into truths of general validity. It shows how early novelists fashioned printed texts into experiments that mediated different kinds of knowledge as a mean…
Mediating Le Philosophe
The Present of Enlightenment
This chapter analyzes how Kant, Foucault, and Jean Paul negotiate a central contradiction of Enlightenment. On the one hand, each insists, within their distinct discursive itinerary, that the value and promise of Enlightenment consists in the way it allows us to think the present, the distinctness of the present age, and build a “now” that requires a certain ethos: “a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feel…
Mediated Enlightenment
This chapter argues that we should look to the late seventeenth-century upsurge in the number and ambition of the new genre of the system: “System was the formal means to Enlightenment's end: comprehensive knowledge of a world that could be known—of parts that formed a whole.” Newton demonstrated the “system of the world” that is nature through the use of induction, simplicity, and mathematical proof. Adam Smith then capitalized on Newton's succe…
Mediation as Primal Word
This chapter argues for the importance of “mediation” by highlighting its antithetical senses—“mediation” can connote both “connection/communication” as well as “intervene/ separate.” It presents a case history of mediation that details the intricate process by which the concept of the aesthetic emerged from an explicit project: the effort to transport the epistemological posture developed by natural philosophy—one based in empirical observation,…
Transmitting Liberty
Financing Enlightenment, Part One
This chapter identifies five ways of understanding money that might make us rethink the Enlightenment. It then offers two very brief historical accounts: one summarizes the condition of (English) money during the Enlightenment, and the second chronicles some of the stages by which money lost its own history, as part of a more general cultural process of mystification or erasure. It suggests that some version of this erasure is intrinsic to Enligh…
The Preacher's Footing
This Is Enlightenment