Re-reading the Four Assumptions of Enlightenment Framework in the Eighteenth Century Studies

John Bender is making a review of four different Englishtenment categories that have largely attracted the attention of the critics. Until the recent critical practices of new historicism, cultural materialism, Feminism and partly deconstruction challenged the “frame of reference” or the categories like ‘aesthetic autonomy’, ‘authorship’,’ disinterestedness’ and ‘gendered sexuality’, they were considered to be fixed, stale and natural within the Anglo-American academies.

- Aesthetic Autonomy

Enlightenment invented aesthetics as an autonomous discursive realm; literature was confined to the realms of sense, intuition and imagination. The enlightenment constitution of the aesthetic sketched one major axis in a complex geometry a division of knowledge into disciplines that not only separated the art from the historical scientific and argumentative discourses but also led to sharp distinctions among the arts themselves.

The new movements under discussion came into existence; it reaches across the customary boundaries between literary studies and visual arts, history, anthropology, sociology and so on. Certainly, "interdisciplinary criticism" existed. Interdisciplinary was thought very innovative and creative before the arrival of new historicism, cultural materialism or feminist criticism in American academics. The reality is that American society for eighteenth century studies originated under the banner of interdisciplinary and this study was proud of its interdisciplinarity. But the word "interdisciplinary" implies the preservation of traditional disciplinary boundaries, interdisciplinary  in itself does nothing to denaturalize the category of the aesthetic. It is just one thing to compare literature with other arts.

The new late twentieth century movements work, at least tacitly, to re-establish the previous state of affairs by challenging the autonomy of the aesthetic domain and reconstituting it as a historical phenomenon subject to critical analysis. The new approaches can be called "trans-disciplinary" because these approaches work to erode presumptions on which existing disciplines founded. Trans-disciplinary challenges the disciplinary existence and goes beyond the boundary of art to the social historical, political or contextual boundaries.

- Authorship

Authorship is the second category of enlightenment and it was in prevailing position in traditional criticism. Traditionally, literature used to attribute the authorial presence and authorial intention in any work of art. Arthur used to be supportive as creator, producer and director of text. There was a system to valorize author's personality. If we analyze historical consequences, the anchoring of discourse in sponsoring subjectivity (valorizing author) was in prevailing position in the seventeenth century and was naturalized in the eighteenth century. The category of authorship was made stronger and fixed in the romantic era. Authorship was progressively institutionalized in the nineteenth century literature at that time was gaining its place among the university disciplines.

 New historicism, feminism and other movements of mid and late twentieth century have challenged the prevailing authorial presences.

Although the new historicism and, to a large extent, cultural materialism have been strongly affixed to the authorial canon (most especially to Shakespeare) but in practice they also have challenged the centrality of the canon by placing an enormous array of anonymous or collective social texts on an equal footing with acknowledged masterpieces. The new movements opens the way to treat legislative documents, legal reports, press reports, and conduct books, for instance, now have standing as texts, not just as supporting materials.

Feminist scholars have gone very much further in altering canon despite the preservation of sponsoring subjectivity in some versions of feminism. New criticism also has to struggle to break the old authorial orthodoxy.

In re-reading the category 'authorship' Foucault helped us to understand the historical phenomena that had been taken for granted. His work "what is an Author?" is more influential in breaking the authorial presence. Foucault argues that the idea of the author, which we tend to take for granted, as a timeless, irreducible category is rather a "function" of discourse, which has changed in the course of history. Author, for Foucault, is the culturally made designation, who may get changed with one or another culture.

- Disinterestedness

 A third important category of enlightenment within which the later criticism has operated is faith in transparency, neutrality, and disinterestedness as ideas of critical discourse. In this respect Kant is more interested; he is the eighteenth century figure who most fully theorized the already existed ideal of critical communication in a public sphere free of special interests; whether personal, political, or religious. In this ideal sphere only the spirit of impartial, rational inquiry is supposed to guide research, the findings of which are examined by an equally impartial audience, improved by further analysis and eventually perfected not merely into knowledge but into truth. This disinterested dialogue is technically ungendered but it of course turns out to be male biased.

New historicisms in this disinterested category seem quite passive but they have regularly treated history as a narrative function relative to the historicity of the historian. Along with that new historicists have broken with the idea of history or any other form of knowledge as "empirical representation."

Feminist scholars are not agreed with disinterested as a neutral discourse, they see more explicitly that the canon of disinterestedness and impartiality covers and represents the old male patriarchy in a new garb. Feminists have seen the disinterestedness category has adopted, fully or partially, "the emergent capitalism".

 The recent cultural, political theories, either Marxism or feminism or new historicism or cultural materialism or theories against colonial and oriental attitudes, have been arguing that no discourses are interest free so there remains no longer the existence of disinterestedness category.

- Gendered Sexuality

 Gendered sexuality is another important enlightenment category, which has treated gender as essential truth. Foucault's late work, The History of Sexuality is worthy; it presents a conveniently available, eloquently argued the case for the general proposition that while the biological elements of the sexes remain constant over long periods of time, sexuality is constructed socially and operates differently in each historical time. Foucault describes sexuality as at once constitutive of personality and subject of scientific mapping, surveillance (careful watch kept on somebody/something suspected doing wrong) and social consciousness is an attribute of modern existence that took initial shape as its features emerged across the eighteenth century and that became fully operational in the nineteenth century.

Feminist literary scholars, already having built on historical studies of the family that draw, however, generally, on Marxist categories, have taken further encouragement from Foucault. They have retold the story of the eighteenth century to disclose the ideological implications of writing for and by women. Through the maintenance of class, race and gender, in eighteenth-century, the feminist critics have discussed about male public and female private positions, feminist critique of eighteenth century presents the evidences, to prove gender as a construction in literary works too. Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction and Felicity Nussbaum's, Autobiographical Subject present forceful versions of the feminist critique of eighteenth-century gender construction as it can be seen in literature too. New historicists and cultural materialists regard the arguments of feminist scholars positively.

The analysis of historical perspective by the Ienses of cultural materialism, new historicism, and feminism, in terms of gender construction, these all theories helped to document gender as the mere social construction.

The role of the new historicism in the American academy of the 1 980s can be understood with reference to Jurgen Habermas's discussion of legitimation crises, which depends in turn on his "Theory of communicative competence" (According to John Bender this theory of Habermas is presented here not for showing the superiority of new historicism as he has mentioned ahead that he wants the commonalities among the theories used here. According to him the purpose of brining this context is to show how new historicism is functioning in academics). The convenient summary of Habermas's theory has been translated by Thomas McCarthy, we can interpret the theory as:

Jurgen Habermas's theory of communicative competence is deep rooted in pragmatics (the study of the way in which language is used to express or interpret real intentions in particular situations). In general and common speech, according to Habermas speaker (writer) and his/her reader share some valid norms which satisfy common interest, Habermas here talks about sharable standards of value by means of which inter subjective (between speaker and listener) communication takes place. It means the given historical community interprets its needs on the basis of the sharable norms. We can interpret it as a language has the capacity to coordinate action. The statement of Habermas, however, differs with the post-modernist view of language as propounded by Heidegger and Derrida. While Habermas puts forward the responsibility to act in the world in a normatively justified way the post-modernists take away the responsibility to otherness i.e. ambiguity, dissonance, and difference. Habermas's line of communication is rooted towards correctness, fixity and closure, but the post-modernists make that ineffective by bringing their notion that language functions towards openness, towards ambiguity and in their view inter-subjective communication may not be possible in a normative way.

Unlike the post-modernists, Habermas believes that language frees us from a political world in which might (power) is right. Even after thus, privileging the capacity of language to co-ordinate action; Habermass sees that he is contradicted by literary language, where in, the sincerity principle does not apply so easily. In the interpretation of literary language the relationship between, the writers and the reader turn into the disinterestedness; that is a special form of interest free discourse. He borrows this concept largely from Immanuel Kant.

 Here the worth mentioning point is that after the emergence of post-modernists theories of language, the earlier notion of language is under attack and language fails to communicate properly because of variations, differences, ambiguities and openness, in literary language. Habermas himself accepts that his communicative principle fails. He again takes shelter in disinterestedness category, but the new political- cultural theories have already broken the privilege of this category. Hence, the new cultural theories are functioning in academics to subvert the principles of orthodoxies.

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