This Is Enlightenment (review)

Not so long ago, few would have paused over Ernst Cassirer's description of the eighteenth century as characterized by an intense interest in reason: "'Reason' becomes the unifying and central point of this century, expressing all that it longs for, and all that it achieves" (Cassirer, The Philosophy of Enlightenment [1932; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009], 5). Today, though, sentences like this one from Cassirer's sprawling genealogy of Enlightenment culture look hopelessly out of date, with its teleological optimism marking it as perhaps naive and its interest in the history of ideas marking it as perhaps clichéd. If anything, Cassirer's Enlightenment, a story of thinkers such as Herder and Hume, Condorcet and Condillac, Bayle and Buffon, looks even less current than Immanuel Kant's 1784 description of Enlightenment as "man's exit from his self-incurred minority" (Kant, Basic Writings of Kant, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. F. Max Muller and Thomas K. Abbott [New York: Modern Library, 2001], 135), which focuses instead on qualities such as intellectual and political freedom.

Clifford Siskin and William Warner offer yet another description in the introductory essay of their recent edited collection: "Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation" (1), with "mediation" defined as "the work done by tools" or "everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in between" (5). By this account, Kant becomes less exemplary of Enlightenment than does Francis Bacon, who insisted that new tools were needed precisely in order to prevent the human mind from enslaving itself to idols. Meanwhile, the concept of "Ideas," seen as central to virtually every description of Enlightenment from Kant to Cassirer to the Frankfurt School, becomes demoted within Siskin and Warner's account, forced out of the spotlight by media, the tool by which ideas are produced and transmitted. By its title and by its design, then, the book offers itself as manifesto for a new eighteenth century, as seen by a generation of scholars more influenced by Habermas than by Horkheimer and Adorno, scholars interested not merely in who published what when, but also where, why, how, and for whom.

So how new is Siskin and Warner's Enlightenment? At times it looks much like the old Enlightenment. Kant, far from vanquished, re-emerges as a frequent point of reference within the collection's twenty essays, sometimes in surprising places, such as Ian Baucom's essay on "Financing Enlightenment" and Adrian Johns's essay on "The Piratical Enlightenment." One might similarly expect Hegel and Foucault to play bit parts in this story, dismissed for their beliefs in immaterial abstractions, world spirits, and epistemes, but they turn up frequently enough as well: Hegel in John Guillory's essay on "Enlightening Mediation" and Foucault in Helge Jordheim's essay on "The Present of Enlightenment." No doubt many readers will view the seemingly infinite malleability of "mediation" as a virtue, reconciling largely divergent critical perspectives. Still, the concept seems contorted into odd shapes during certain moments. In the hands of writers such as Lisa Gitelman or Ann Blair and Peter Stallybrass, for example, mediation is unquestionably material, referring to physical instruments like the telegraph for the former and Renaissance writing tablets for the latter. In the hands of Robert Miles, it is categorically immaterial, referring to the Romantic trope of the inner stranger. With mediation defined so capaciously as betweenness, the concept loses some of its explanatory force; a sceptic might, after all, suggest Cassirer's "reason" as a form of mediation, since Cassirer refers not simply to a static body of ideas, but to "a kind of energy, a force which is fully comprehensible only in its agency and effects" (Cassirer, 13). Rather than viewing the book as a "collective answer" (Siskin and Warner, 1), one suspects that a fairer approach might have involved recognizing the substantial differences among the assembled critics, as well as the potential disharmony lurking within their deployment of mediation.

Three essays...