Nmherman on 6 Oct 2000 06:07:07 -0000 |
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[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Al Gore and the Internet |
In a message dated 10/6/2000 12:48:06 AM Central Daylight Time, Jay@Fenello.com writes: > it is being systematically > excluded! Isn't this basic Chomsky? Here is an essay I wrote on commerce in 18th century English Theatre. Prof. Felicity Nussbaum of UCLA will confirm the references: +++++++++ Nickolas Herman Prof. Joel Reed Master's Dossier May 1, 1998 The Terms of Exchange: Gender, Commerce, and the Public Sphere in Two Eighteenth-Century English Narratives ++++++++ Thus far in this paper I have tried to establish three major points. The first was that the ethic of commercial humanism can be meaningfully interpreted as the reification of bourgeois ideology. This reification takes the form of a false equation of the role of property owner with the role of human being pure and simple, and the attempt to disguise the inherent contradiction of a social order founded on relations of domination while basing its legitimacy on the free exercise of communicative reason. The second was that because the representational power of the novel lay in its capacity to internalize the divisions of knowledge and labor the middle class existed to mediate, the conflicts and divisions inherent in in bourgeois ideology must be manifested in narrative representation. Moreover, these conflicts could not be resolved one-sidedly in favor of ideology within the narrative form, but must retain the active engagement of ideology with the idea of its dissolution. My third major argument was a specific inquiry into how one particular attempt to efface the contradictions of mercantile ideology within narrative--namely, the moralization of commercial culture through concepts of gender difference-- failed, leaving significant and recoverable fissures for dissent. Although the strength of the connections among these three assertions warrants serious intellectual inquiry, and certainly rewards analysis with a rich array of insights, the possibility of a highly rigorous and radically unified connection among the three must not be overlooked. If the ideology of commercial humanism depends upon and necessitates the ascendancy of narrative in the novel form as its primary self-representation in discourse, narrative itself--its capacity to articulate meaning--may possess no more legitimacy than the flawed Enlightenment identity of property owner with human being as such with whose emergence narrative coincided. Both Anderson and McKeon view "seriality" as a necessary condition of narrative's pre-eminence as a mode of cultural representation. In his description of how the narrative-based forms of the novel and the newspaper were able to construct the imagined community of nation, Anderson cites Walter Benjamin's concept of "'homogeneous, empty time,' in which simultaneity is...transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment [as in religion and myth], but by temporal coincidence... measured by clock and calendar" (Anderson 24). McKeon does not mention Benjamin, but makes a similar connection of seriality to narrative in his discussion of Levi-Strauss: the structure of myth "'deteriorates into seriality'....At the far end of this process are the origins of the novel" (McKeon 5). Benjamin is profoundly skeptical of any representation dependent for its force on homogeneous, empty time. He writes that "The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through homogeneous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself" (WB 261). The Enlightenment paradigms of human progress are false because they are predicated on a serial conception of time; in Benjamin's view, no critique of Enlightenment that elides this crucial link is valid. Benjamin does not believe that homogeneous empty time can be invested with meaning in the fullest sense; rather, it permits only the continual witness of the wreckage of possible meaning which cannot be retrieved. He illustrates this in his discussion of Klee's painting, Angelus Novus: "Where we perceive a chain of events...[the angel] sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage....[A] storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned....This storm is what we call progress" (WB 259). Homogeneous, empty time replaces the Jetztzeit, "time filled by the presence of the now" (HabermasPP 137), with a linearity that can only catalog the loss of past Jetztzeiten. In other words, the precondition of narrative is a conception of time that only permits an awareness--like the Angel's gaze--of the absence of meaning. If we accept Benjamin's assertions about the nature of linear time, narrative itself must come under scrutiny as an integral mechanism of the ideology of empire and the disruption of the public sphere, as well as an obstacle to the complete realization of aesthetic experience. The retrieval of marginalized discourse from the fissures in ideological narrative falls into the category of "rescuing critique" (HabermasPP 146) that extracts "semantic potential" from the artifacts of linear time and revitalizes them in a fully realized discursive Jetztzeit--an aesthetic analogue to the public sphere. Linear time, and narrative representation, must be carefully interrogated as constructs used to suppress the meanings that threaten ideology. If we consider time as a part of the natural world, Habermas' description of Adorno's critique of Enlightenment is particularly relevant to this distorted construction of time: [In] the original Enlightenment....The I acquires its inner organizational form in the measure that, to coerce external nature, it coerces the amorphous element in itself, its inner nature. Upon this relationship of autonomy and mastery of nature is perched the triumphant self-consciousness of the Enlightenment. (HabermasPP 100) Enlightenment gazing, like Klee's angel, upon the accumulating wreckage of history. Works Cited: 1. Addison, Joseph. The Spectator , Number Sixty-Nine (19 May 1711). Literature and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century England. Ed. Stephen Copley. London: Croom Helm, 1984. 62-65. 2. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. 3. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969. 4. Brown, Laura. Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. 5. Cumberland, Richard. The West Indian. London: 1771. (First Edition, Microfilm; cited by line number as) 6. Guest, Harriet. "A Double Lustre: Femininity and Sociable Commerce, 1730-60." Eighteenth-Century Studies 23 (1990): 479-501. 7. Guest, Harriet. "'These neuter somethings': Gender Difference and Commercial Culture in Mid-C18th England." Unpublished Paper, 1996. 8. Habermas, Jurgen. Philosophical-Political Profiles. Trans. Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983. 9. Habermas, Jurgen. Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Trans. Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984. 10. Habermas, Jurgen. The Theory of Communicative Action. 2 vols. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984-87. 11. Klein, Lawrence. "Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions about Evidence and Analytic Procedure." Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1995): 97-109. 12. Lillo, George. The London Merchant. Ed. William H. McBurney. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1965. 13. McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. 14. Nussbaum, Felicity. Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 15. Olaniyan, Tejumola. "The Ethics and Poetics of a 'Civilizing Mission': Some Notes on Lillo's The London Merchant." English Language Notes 29.4 (June 1992): 33-47. 16. Pocock, J.G.A. Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985 17. Vickery, Amanda. "Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History." The Historical Journal 36 (1993): 383-414. 18. Wilson, Kathleen. "Citizenship, Empire, and Modernity in the English Provinces, c. 1720-1790." Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1995): 69-96. _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold