Voices of Modernity

Voices of Modernity Baumann & Briggs

A Great Divide could only be projected if premodernity was itself constructed, shaped as a primordial realm that ex- isted apart from modernity; indeed, it was premodern ignorance, magic, superstition, and downright disorder that seemed to make modernity necessary.

And the coffeehouse looms large – notwithstanding the challenge of other contenders – in foundation narratives of the bourgeois public sphere and related social and political formations widely accepted as diagnostic of modernity. In drawing the contrast, then, between the vulgar conversation of “rustiques” and the “ingeniose conversation” of learned men, Aubrey is contributing to the construction of a particularly modernist opposition between the provincial (he uses the term; see, e.g., Aubrey 1898, II: 326) and the universal, in discourse-centered terms.

Thus, what emerges in Aubrey’s autobiographical and antiquarian constructions is not only a personal, but a more general pair of associational complexes that res- onate strongly through the social thought of the past 300 years: rural (or aboriginal), lower class, ignorant, old-fashioned, indigenous – in a word, provincial – versus urban, elite, learned, cosmopolitan, that is to say, modern. 

Locke helped to make the linguistic forms that he championed – precise, plain and unadorned, rational ways of speaking – markers of social status and key gatekeeping mechanisms that would shape who would be accorded the right to participate in politics or to speak,asJu ̈rgenHabermas(1989)suggests,inthepublicsphere

Proposed paper topic: How is Habermas’s “public sphere” situated within a dominant ideology? What other ideology-aware formulations of powerful social intercourse are available?

More broadly, what are we to make of the paralellism between postcolonial critiques and the increasing interdisciplinarity of academia, which is also considering context, multiple meanings, and the role of interpretation, but presumably for its own ends? 

Postcolonial scholars have critiqued the modern/premodern typology applied to print/oral culture. How have postcolonial scholars positioned the transition to digital media?

Weber identified two centuries later as “the disenchantment of the world” “Before printing, Old-wives Tales were ingeniose,” Aubrey observes, but “the divine art of Printing and Gunpowder have frighted away Robin-good- fellow and the Fayries” (Aubrey 1972a: 290).

At the same time that contemporary digital forecasters wonder what will happen when “the author, once the fount of imagination . . . has been divested of authority” (Birkerts 1994: 184, italics in the original), or, more colorfully, “What is to become of the priests of literature, as their temples are abandoned?” (Gore Vidal, quoted in Heim 1999: 3), historians of print culture are looking back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the modern concept of authorship first took firm root, when “the vocabulary of ‘authorship’ was, quite literally, a vocabulary of ‘author-ity,’ and the word ‘author’ was a word of power” (Jaszi 1991: 270; see also Johns 1998; Kernan 1987; Woodmansee 1984; Woodmansee and Jaszi 1994). If, as Adrian Johns argues, “the very identity of print has had to be made,” it becomes necessary to “reappraise where our own concept of print culture comes from, how it developed, when it took hold, and why its sway continues to seems secure” (Johns 1998: 2–4).

 if cultures of the printed word are also ideologies of print, so too are cultures of the spoken word ideologies of orality.