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  • Textual Media in Early American Studies
  • Sandra M. Gustafson (bio)
Archive of Americana.
Bibliography and the Book Trades. Hugh Amory. Edited by David D. Hall. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 174 pp.
Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. Cathy N. Davidson. Expanded Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, 2004. 458 pp.
New Media, 1740–1915. EDITED BY Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2003. 271 pp.
Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution. Susan Juster. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. 276 pp.
Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People. Heather S. Nathans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 246 pp.
Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Leigh Eric Schmidt. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. 318 pp.
Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities. S. E. Wilmer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 281 pp.

In 1804 the Acoustic Temple toured the museums and stages of the United States. This "'Philosophical Machine lately arrived from France'" included "'a temple, representing those where the Egyptians delivered their oracles,'" with "'a small altar, and a crystal . . . for consulting spirits.'" It also included a network of tubes through which questions could be posed and the answers of an invisible "oracle" delivered. As an instance of the Enlightenment imperative to expose the material bases behind "'the improbable tales of Witchcraft and Supernatural Agency,'" the Acoustic Temple exhibited the features of what Neil Harris has termed an "operational aesthetic."1

The aesthetic pleasure that audiences derived from this French "Machine" designed to expose religious "superstition" and faith in prophecy arose from the exposure of the mechanism producing the mysterious voices. "Voice" was simultaneously despiritualized and denaturalized. The performances of voice that were staged in the Acoustic Temple rendered the human voice as something manufactured, as the result of a mechanical process. Revealing the physical apparatus of the temple, with its network of tubes, was like exposing the tubes that produce and perceive voice in the interior of the body: the windpipe and the ear canal. The study of these physiological mechanisms, along with the development of new tools for amplifying sound such as the speaking trumpet invented in the 1670s or the stethoscope of the 1810s, or later the phonograph of the 1870s, suggests the centrality of auditory technologies to the Enlightenment.

Even as it undermined a prophetic treatment of voice as a direct expression of God's will unmediated by written or printed forms, then, a materialist understanding of voice simultaneously put into question the forms of subjectivity anchored in a sense of voice as an unmediated expression of self. As the material nature of voice became an object of knowledge, inquiry into its sources and mechanisms provided the audience with a peculiar and ambiguous pleasure. As Leigh Eric Schmidt has shown in his fresh and vivid historical account of the effect of acoustical science on religious thought in the American Enlightenment, public interest in the Acoustic Temple, like the contemporaneous fad for ventriloquism, demonstrates the [End Page 348] centrality of vocal and auditory mechanisms and technologies for thinking about self and society. When Carwin repeatedly insists that his use of his biloquistic abilities is "mechanical," by which he seems to mean that they are not subject to his control, he highlights the rising concern with human abilities to manage the technologies that they produce, and the danger that those technologies threaten instead to produce them.

Schmidt's work offers an especially valuable point of reflection on the theoretical and psychological stakes of technological determinism. Over the last decade and more, the impact of the Internet has invested debates about technodeterminism and textual media with a deeper resonance. The oracular quality of much early work on the implications of the Internet for contemporary society has given way to suppler accounts of how specific technological approaches create different textual modalities—how, that is, individual and institutional decisions ramify in the creation of specific forms of electronic textuality. This sense of contingency and experimentation, and the need to build and respond to particular constituencies, are perhaps the most valuable lessons offered by Jerome...

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