This is Enlightenment (review)

Echoing President Barack Obama when he said at his inauguration speech, “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works,” Clifford Siskin pushed attendees to consider new questions at the 2011 meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. He asked them, “How does our knowledge work in the world?” His appeal to the audience isolates the main focus of his co-edited book with William Warner, This is Enlightenment. That collection prompts us to ask how our modes of interacting with tools produce particular kinds of knowledge. A concern with tools animates their notion of mediation when Siskin and Warner define the Enlightenment as “an event in the history of mediation” (1). Specifically, they argue that new tools developed in the eighteenth century produced new forms of knowledge, different ways of knowing, and new forms of “connectivities,” a word Siskin used during his presentation at the ASECS conference and one that fits well with the authors’ argument in the book.

By focusing on new forms of interaction, communication, and knowledge, Siskin and Warner challenge critics to unmoor ourselves from more-traditional critical approaches (such as seeing the Enlightenment as a period denomination or as a thematic designation), which fall into “reductive linearity of causality” (9). Instead, critics might consider the Enlightenment as an “event,” which “direct[s] attention to the possibility of its singularity” (9). Then critics would be sensitive to the “contingency of time and place” and how the event links to the elements of which it is not a product but an effect. This method requires critics to focus on practical matters such as dates, for instance, which were applied “retroactively” to the Enlightenment label; the label’s “ongoing usefulness lies in improving the ways that we have already applied it” (9). How can we make the Enlightenment label useful and practical, and how can it work for us? Siskin and Warner’s edited collection lays out a pragmatic historicism.

The final essay in the collection by Michael McKeon perhaps best sketches the broader possibilities of such a pragmatic methodology in describing literature as an elevated kind of “laboratory” (403). He argues, “novels are experiments that capture the experience of the senses . . . by controlling for the variables of time, place, and persons” (403), and the “empirical nature of literature is most importantly confirmed by the formality and figurative thickness of its texts, which is the history of an experimental mediation between sensible actuality and imaginative virtuality. Therefore, the literary end-product of experiment itself has the character of an experiment” (408). Literature is an experiment in time, place, and persons; it tests how people experience the world and how they reflect upon that experience, which involves “reflexivity” (407), testing the practicality of certain beliefs, principles, and practices. This method is productive because it outlines and investigates material and conceptual means of producing types of understanding, especially as they relate to our own current notions of mediation.

Another important essay, John Bender’s “Novel Knowledge,” parallels McKeon’s notion of literature as experiment and laboratory, arguing “the earlier novel did also participate in the aspirations and uncertainties about knowledge, experience, and experiment pervasive during the scientific revolution” (286). For example, “Fielding’s continual presence in Tom Jones . . . points to the work’s organization of scattered experience” (290) concentrating those “into the focused and methodical order of experiment” (290) in which Fielding puts his “leading character into the laboratory and asks readers to observe his behavior” (290–91). The novel functions as a tool to assist in the accumulation of knowledge through experiment. Instead of McKeon’s “reflexivity,” Bender promotes “assessment.” For Bender this means that readers can consider or weigh “evidence, experience, and experiment in order to arrive at judgments” (298). He wants to involve the reader more in determining how circumstances produce forms of knowledge and understanding.

This pragmatic historicism acquires theoretical grounding from the collection’s frequently referenced theorist, Michel Foucault...