rounding out this trilogy of posts, i wanted to make a note of our discussion in the last class about how print served to codify the previously much more diverse and distributed spoken vernacular languages of Europe. Resulting from this codification, as Frank pointed out, we got the advent of industrial production (the printed book as 'the first' mass-produced -artificial- commodity), the necessity of systematic education (everyone had to learn to read and write in a common language), and of course the (corollary) emergence of the nationalisms identified by Anderson.
The bourgeoisie -the emergent mercantile middle class- comes into being as the product of at once capitalism (distributed mercantilism), education (centralized cultural reproduction), and nationalism (collectivized xenophobia). There is also, lurking behind these scenes, the extremely important matter of science, but we'll just have to leave it lurking for now...
It's amazing actually, how all of these changes seem to have occurred in such perfect synchrony; a pseudo-Hegelian ideality that we should perhaps attribute to the false clarity of hindsight... Certainly though, there is something to be said for the evidence of feedback-amplifications among some of these interlocking contingencies.
Take for example the matter of pedagogy's anamorphosis. We can see in the Enlightenment a kind of recapitulation of the Platonic moment, in which the techniques that Plato associates with the Sophists seem to reemerge as the set of instructional techniques that would be required to organize and govern the new (read: secular) systems of education. Kant's philosophy is often described as having emerged from his heroic attempt(s) to reconcile the instrumental (Sophistic) rationality of the pragmatic utilitarians with the (Platonic) idealism of Christianity and its church(es).
Developing on Frank's insight into the effects of vernacular codification, it seems evident that what we could call 'contemporary' pedagogy arises as the (Kantian) necessity of fixing the meanings of texts (i.e. by appealing to transcendental categoreality), overpowering the innate interpretive divergence that Derrida called dissemination. The emergent res publica (i.e. the republic) required a homogeneous (if not universally-extended, then at least internally-consistent!) medium. Enlightenment required the immediacy of print media. 'Public reason' requires immediacy generally; as the given a priori upon which successive rationalizations might be based in common...
Lastly, in response to David's pointed concerns about the difficulties of linking capitalism with these print-technologies, I would suggest that we might attempt an escape from a kind of historicism that is itself biased by its dependence on print. Instead we can perhaps make some headway describing the linkage between rationalization and commodification. This attempt is made by Stiegler in his Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, the TC Record's review of which I sent out to the class. Essentially Stiegler thinks this linkage by way his notion of grammatization.
more on this another time ; )
I'm looking forward to seeing you elaborate on your last paragraph here because I'm not clear on the distinction you're making between the historicism you're advocating and the historicism you're not. I was also a little confused by your use of the word "immediacy", but that may be because I've been reading about time and the telegraph, so I read into the word a reference to time and maybe you mean in in the "it's right there, physically in my hands," sort of way. As always, a provocative post!
ReplyDelete