Siskin Clifford, Warner William (eds.) This is Enlightenment

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. — 568 p. — ISBN10: 0226761487; ISBN13: 978-0226761480.Debates about the nature of the Enlightenment date to the eighteenth century, when Immanuel Kant himself addressed the question, “What is Enlightenment?” The contributors to this ambitious book offer a paradigm-shifting answer to that now-famous query: Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation. Enlightenment, they argue, needs to be engaged within the newly broad sense of mediation introduced here—not only oral, visual, written, and printed media, but everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in between. With essays addressing infrastructure and genres, associational practices and protocols, this volume establishes mediation as the condition of possibility for enlightenment. In so doing, it not only answers Kant’s query; it also poses its own broader question: how would foregrounding mediation change the kinds and areas of inquiry in our own epoch? This Is Enlightenment is a landmark volume with the polemical force and archival depth to start a conversation that extends across the disciplines that the Enlightenment itself first configured.This Is Enlightenment: An Invitation in the Form of an Argument. Clifford Siskin and William WarnerMediation: A Concept in HistoryEnlightening Mediation. John Guillory
Where Were the Media before the Media? Mediating the World at the Time of Condillac and Linnaeus. Knut Eliassen and Yngve Sandhei Jacobsen
Mediation and the Division of Labor. Peter de Bolla
Transmitting Liberty: The Boston Committee of Correspondence’s Revolutionary Experiments in Enlightenment Mediation. William Warner
Modes and Codes: Samuel F.B. Morse and the Question of Electronic Writing. Lisa GitelmanEnlightenment: Evidence and EventsMediating Information, 1450–1800. Ann Blair and Peter Stallybrass
Mediated Enlightenment: The System of the World. Clifford Siskin
Romanticism, Enlightenment, and Mediation: The Case of the Inner Stranger. Robert Miles
The Present of Enlightenment: Temporality and Mediation in Kant, Foucault, and Jean Paul. Helge Jordheim
The Strange Light of Postcolonial Enlightenment: Mediatic Form and Publicity in India. Arvind RajagopalProliferation: Mediation and PrintMediating Media Past and Present: Toward a Genealogy of “Print Culture” and “Oral Tradition”. Paula Mcdowell
Mediating Antiquarians in Britain, 1760–1830: The Invention of Oral Tradition, or, Close-Reading before Coleridge. Maureen Mclane
Mediating le philosophe: Diderot’s Strategic Self-Representations. Anne Fastrup
Novel Knowledge: Judgment, Experience, Experiment. John Bender
The Piratical Enlightenment. Adrian JohnsEffects: Emergent PracticesFinancing Enlightenment, Part One: Money Matters. Mary Poovey
Financing Enlightenment, Part Two: Extraordinary Expenditure. Ian Baucom
“The Horrifying Ties, from which the Public Order Originates”: The Police in Schiller and Mercier. Bernhard Siegert
The Preacher’s Footing. Michael Warner
Mediation as Primal Word: The Arts, the Sciences, and the Origins of the Aesthetic. Michael MckeonNotesList of Contributors