The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America

10. Humanist Enterprise in the Marketplace of Culture

Conclusion Cosmopolitan Medium “This page intentionally left blank” 223 10 Humanist Enterprise in the Marketplace of Culture Thomas Augst In the early twenty-first century, we are witnessing the evolution of genres of discourse that, as with previous eras of “new” technologies of communication, reconfigure the relations between writing and speech in ways that seem to bend once finite boundaries of received forms of knowledge . Books with covers become e-books on screens; practices of writing that once assumed formality and deliberation have become tactile exercises of speed and efficiency that we call “texting”; more or less formalized exchange of messages across geographic distances performed by correspondence or telegrams now draw expressive power from wit and spontaneity once valued by educated classes in rituals of conversation, in genres of online practices we call “chats.” Most radically of all, digital tools for the recording , streaming, relaying, and preserving of the contents of our culture have made the screen a ubiquitous site for not only “desktop” skills of reading and writing but also real-time capture of social co-presence, or what nineteenth-century Americans often called the “living word.” In the density of human exchange afforded by social media, as well as the global flows of information fostered by the Internet, digital tools have captured polis and cosmos for the personal use of individuals around the world. And on screens large and small, the lecture continues to thrive as a genre of learned communication, from high-end TED talks selling “ideas that matter” in an era of information overload to free college courses available through academic initiatives in online learning. Our contemporary e f 224 Thomas Augst media ecology continues to be organized by cultural boundaries that first emerged in the nineteenth century, designing the human interface with sources of information that, with the expansion of printing, would become newly abundant and diverse. Those boundaries were effects of media technology , for prior to the age of electronic broadcasting, live speech could travel only as far as human voice and acoustic spaces permitted. The more important and enduring boundaries, however, were institutional: sites and practices of cultural production that vested particular forms of advanced literacy with practical use and symbolic authority, across sectors of education , entertainment, and devotion. Technologies transform experiences of reading and writing, of speaking and listening. In doing so, they challenge institutional boundaries and conventions of learning, raising questions about where and how students, consumers, and citizens access and value knowledge. What might the institutional history of the lyceum teach us about building social infrastructures for advanced literacy in the contexts of mass communication, about forms and values of humanist enterprise in multimedia environments? The lyceum was part of a larger institutional landscape, encompassing academies and common school, libraries and athenaeums, as well as the early American college, that mediated the meanings and uses of literacy amidst the development of printing as an industrial technology of mass communication. Nineteenth-century lecturers took many pathways through this landscape, in careers that paralleled generational changes in the public lecture as a genre of learned communication, a mode of performance , and a professional occupation. As a social institution, the lyceum stood at the crossroads of historical forces that would shape how we produce and value knowledge in liberal democracy, influencing the development of civil society, mass entertainment, and higher education. The lyceum was a contested field of cultural production, where a traditional genre of learned discourse with roots in the medieval university was democratized, where middle-class audiences cultivated tastes for self-improvement and entertainment , and where forms of intellectual and literary labor would, by the twentieth century, be reorganized by the emergence of the research university and the modern professions. A Civic Institution: The Mission of Public Culture We have become accustomed to thinking about the development of modern media in terms of the geographic reach of communications technologies . Print helped to foster imaginative communities among readers distant 225 Humanist Enterprise in the Marketplace of Culture from one another in time and place; the Web is worldwide, as Internet addresses remind us. But networks of communication are also local, mediated by norms, practices, and spaces that constitute the social infrastructure for the circulation of knowledge among particular communities. Historically, these included the physical spaces in which cultural goods were produced and the shared habits and expectations that drew patrons to these spaces. In nineteenth-century America they included the...