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  • This Is Enlightenment: An Event in the History of Mediation?
  • Lee Morrissey
Siskin, Clifford, and William Warner, eds. This Is EnlightenmentChicago: Univ. of Chicago, 2010). Pp. xii + 505. 26 ills. $27.50 paper

This Is Enlightenment is a title for those who have been longing for eighteenth-century studies to reimagine and reclaim its former label in intellectual history. This is an attempt to recapture a term that has unfortunately fallen out of favor: “The Enlightenment.” This is a book, then, that redescribes nothing less than the phrase through which the eighteenth century had long been understood. This is a revision that the eighteenth century sorely needs, because of a predicament stemming from facile “end of the grand narrative” arguments that the eighteenth century has faced for too long now. This is the book that claims from its very title that it will redress this problem. This is a book that claims to know just what the Enlightenment is, a very confident claim for any book title. This is, therefore, also a book whose title will attract a lot of attention, which is what happens when a book confidently offers an answer to the famous question “What is Enlightenment?,” the question that Kant, most famously, set out to answer two centuries ago. This is, in short, a book that from the beginning seems to know or at least to offer something that Kant did [End Page 95] not. This is a book, then, that should be of considerable interest to specialists in the eighteenth century.

This is the end of consecutive sentences that begin with “this is.” But I begin with so many of them because the blunt confidence of the title, This Is Enlightenment (the authors are even confident about the ambiguous reference of its pronoun), will likely be crucial to the book’s reception. To its credit, the collection, starting with its title, does aim to put the Enlightenment back into the literary-critical discussion, a most positive development. For too long, the period has labored by being separated from its own grand narrative. And the world is poorer for it. Whether criticized as instrumental reason, celebrated as deliberative democracy, or embraced as a project of emancipation, the Enlightenment sorely needs a discussion of its possibilities and limits. There was clearly a split in the larger culture between post-structuralism and the Enlightenment, a split that by the 1990s post-structuralists such as Derrida were themselves already attempting to address. But the academy had its own variations on this larger polarization. In a wonderful, concise introduction to Postmodernism and the Enlightenment (2000), Daniel Gordon describes the contemporary problem with the Enlightenment: although “the postmodernist thinkers and Enlightenment scholars ought to be in close communication, . . . the Enlightenment . . . is the Other of postmodernism.” 1 Gordon traces a generational tension in approaches to the Enlightenment. To a younger generation, “The stock precepts of 1960s and 1970s historiography, which included the denunciation of intellectual history as a type of ‘elitism,’ are no longer binding” (4). In the years since Gordon’s collection was published, the importance of the Enlightenment has only increased. We can point to the familiar discussion of an apparent rejection of science, reason, and an overall rise of “truthiness” over the truth during the decade. At the same time, material culture’s focus on print, on the one hand, and the increasing shift toward digitization, on the other, have revealed the role of technology in culture to an extent unseen perhaps since the advent of mass market TV.

In this volume, not only is the Enlightenment back in discussion, it is also linked to the most recent questions about technological developments in communication. Editors Clifford Siskin and William Warner argue that in the usual understanding, the Enlightenment “is what asks itself what it is.” But they then offer what they call a “very different answer: Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation.” The shift toward mediation would apparently connect the Enlightenment to a tech-savvy generation. But the next question would be about what “mediation” means. For Siskin and Warner, “mediation” represents a “shorthand for the work done by tools” (5). Mediation is only partly tied...

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