This Is Enlightenment
This Is Enlightenment
Debates about the nature of the Enlightenment date to the eighteenth century, when Imanual Kant himself addressed the question, “What is Enlightenment?” The contributors to this ambitious book offer a paradigm-shifting answer to that now-famous query: Enlightenment 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 volumewith the polemical force and archival depth to start a conversation that extends across the disciplines that the Enlightenment itself first configured.
568 pages | 24 halftones, 2 line drawings | 6 x 9 | © 2010
History: European History, History of Ideas
Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature, Romance Languages
Reviews
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
This Is Enlightenment: An Invitation in the Form of an Argument
Clifford Siskin and William Warner
Mediation: A Concept in History
Enlightening Mediation
John Guillory
Where Were the Media before the Media? Mediating the World at the Time of Condillac and LinnaeusKnut Eliassen and Yngve Sandhei Jacobsen
Mediation and the Division of Labor
Peter de Bolla
Transmitting Liberty: The Boston Committee of Correspondence’s Revolutionary Experiments in Enlightenment Mediation
William Warner
Modes and Codes: Samuel F.B. Morse and the Question of Electronic Writing
Lisa Gitelman
Enlightenment: Evidence and Events
Mediating Information, 1450–18
Ann Blair and Peter Stallybrass
Mediated Enlightenment: The System of the World
Clifford Siskin
Romanticism, Enlightenment, and Mediation: The Case of the Inner Stranger
Robert Miles
The Present of Enlightenment: Temporality and Mediation in Kant, Foucault, and Jean Paul
Helge Jordheim
The Strange Light of Postcolonial Enlightenment: Mediatic Form and Publicity in India
Arvind Rajagopal
Proliferation: Mediation and Print
Mediating Media Past and Present: Toward a Genealogy of “Print Culture” and “Oral Tradition”
Paula Mcdowell
Mediating Antiquarians in Britain, 1760–1830: The Invention of Oral Tradition, or, Close-Reading before Coleridge
Maureen Mclane
Mediating le philosophe: Diderot’s Strategic Self-Representations
Anne Fastrup
Novel Knowledge: Judgment, Experience, Experiment
John Bender
The Piratical Enlightenment
Adrian Johns
Effects: Emergent Practices
Financing Enlightenment, Part One: Money Matters
Mary Poovey
Financing Enlightenment, Part Two: Extraordinary Expenditure
Ian Baucom
“The Horrifying Ties, from which the Public Order Originates”: The Police in Schiller and Mercier
Bernhard Siegert
The Preacher’s Footing
Michael Warner
Mediation as Primal Word: The Arts, the Sciences, and the Origins of the Aesthetic
Michael Mckeon
Notes
References
List of Contributors
Index