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Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation, by Ronald J. Deibert
4. Print and the Medieval to Modern World Order Transformation: Changes to Social Epistemology
Although distributional changes facilitated by the new mode of communication help explain the transition from the medieval to the modern world order, they do not tell the whole story. Ruggie explains that: "The demise of the medieval system of rule and the rise of the modern resulted in part from a transformation in social epistemology. Put simply, the mental equipment that people drew upon in imagining and symbolizing forms of community itself underwent fundamental change."
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In this chapter, I turn to the second of the conceptually distinct effects that arise from a change in the mode of communication: changes to social epistemology. As outlined in the theoretical chapter, social epistemology refers to the web-of-beliefs into which a people are acculturated and through which they perceive the world around them. It encompasses all of the socially constructed ideas, symbolic forms, and cognitive biases that frame meaning and behavior for a population in a particular historical context. According to the ecological holist perspective advanced here, social epistemology is not a mere "superstructure" ultimately reducible to some material "base," but has an independent, constitutive effect on the nature or character of politics and social order. Since these social constructs, symbolic forms, and cognitive biases that comprise the social epistemology of an era obviously blanket a wide spectrum of diverse traits, for analytical purposes we must break them down into some manageable (though not necessarily exhaustive) set. As I outlined in chapter 1, I examine three elements of social epistemology: individual identity, spatial biases, and imagined communities. As will be shown below, changes in all three of these elements of social epistemology were crucial in providing what might be called the "metaphysical" underpinnings of modern world order.
The purpose of this chapter is to trace how changes in these defining symbolic forms and social constructs were in no small part encouraged by the development of the printing environment. This is not to say that they were, in a crude monocausal sense, generated by it. To be sure, the emerging modern social epistemology was a product of many different factors having roots that reach back into the late Middle Ages and beyond. Nevertheless, by viewing changes in social epistemology through the lens of the mode of communication we can see how a comfortable "fitness" obtained between certain symbolic forms and printing that may help explain why they resonated so strongly at this particular juncture. Printing favored some of the important latent components of social epistemology that would later be so important in providing the basis upon which political authority was differentiated in modern Europe.
Individual Identity
Probably the most striking and important shift from the medieval to the modern cosmology was in terms of individual identity. As Dumont explains, there are two different notions of individualism: one, the indivisible sample of the human species found in all societies and cultures; and, two, "the independent, autonomous and thus (essentially) nonsocial moral being, as found primarily in our modern ideology of man and society." 2 Only the latter, ideological notion of "individualism" concerns us here. Dumont points out that "some of us have become increasingly aware that modern individualism, when seen against the background of the other great civilizations that the world has known, is an exceptional phenomenon." 3 In other words, the modern notion of individualism is a historically contingent moral idea, one not linked to all human beings in all times and places, despite the intentions of some liberal teleologists or methodological individualists to portray it as such.
Of course, this does not mean that we cannot trace the roots of individualism back before the modern period. Certainly elements of modern individuality can be found in the Christian religion, which upheld the possibility of every person's salvation regardless of status in the temporal realm (though here individuality was subordinate within a strictly hierarchical view of natural order). 4 And traces of what might be considered characteristic features of "modern" individuality can be seen in sporadic flourishes among medieval intellectuals arising as early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. 5 Another precursor can be found in the teachings of Franciscan piety, which furthered a religion centered on personal experience and private devotion, and which was popular within the newly emerging towns of the thirteenth century. 6 But it is only in modern Europe that individualism is first exalted as a defining principle of individual identity in marked contrast to the medieval "Chain of Being." 7 In other words, any notion of individualism that can be found in the Middle Ages is certainly the exception within an overarching Christian cosmology.
What was the prevailing notion of the "self" in the Middle Ages? The individual's place in the medieval order followed the Augustinian view of "the arrangement of equal and unequal beings, appointing to each the place fitting for him." 8 Thus inequality and difference were taken-for-granted parts of an organic image of society, one that expressed functional differentiation among constituent parts. The clearest expression of this idea was the division of society into the Three Orders: the bellatores, the oratores, and the laboratores (those who fight, those who pray, and those who labor). 9 As Lyon explains, a person's place in medieval cosmology was the antithesis of modern individualism:
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When time and space have a beginning and an end men are also fixed in status, and the whole message of their culture is to remind them of that place and to warn them that only sorrow can result from any attempt to break the chains that tie them to family, trade, religion, and class. Such a lock-step is consistent with a world in which the final metaphysical solutions had been willed into being, and the person who brooded upon himself was considered ill with melancholy from an excess of black bile in his system. 10 |
Most theorists tend to give weight in the emergence of individualism to historical and sociological factors that were outlined in the previous chapter, especially those concerning the rise of towns and commercialism, and the individualist thrust of Protestantism, which helped break through the "natural" order of the Great Chain of Being. C. B. Macpherson, for example, has written of a distinct "possessive individualism" that crystallized among the urban bourgeoisie in early modern Europe--"a conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them." 11 This possessive individualism was not exclusive to moral theorizing or the commercial sector, but was echoed throughout many spheres of society. It was mirrored in the prevailing "atomism" that informed both politics and science, as illustrated in the social contract theorizing of Hobbes and Locke and the radical individualism and inner compulsion expressed by René Descartes. 12 As Charles Taylor explains, atomism echoed "those philosophical traditions which started with the postulation of an extensionless subject, epistemologically a tabula rasa and politically a presuppositionless bearer of rights." 13
That same "atomism" or sense of autonomous individuality that reverberated throughout many spheres of society found its world order counterpart in the notion of state sovereignty, which, like individualism, "betokens a rational identity: a homogenous and continuous presence that is hierarchically ordered, that has a unique center of decision presiding over a coherent 'self', and that is demarcated from, and in opposition to, an external domain of difference and change that resists assimilation to identical being." 14 Indeed, the two (individualism and state sovereignty) are complementary ontological counterparts. Just as politics and society within emerging states gave way to a notion of interactions among atomistic actors, so too did the picture of interactions among political units. Ruggie in particular has shown how this "self-image" of individuals-as-atomistic-actors was gradually transposed onto the world order sphere, with territorial rulers seeing interstate politics as a whole through the same lens--that is, as "atomistic and autonomous bodies-in-motion in a field of forces energized solely by scarcity and ambition." 15 Likewise Dumont explains how "the hierarchical Christian Commonwealth was atomized at two levels: it was replaced by a number of individual States, themselves made of up individual men." 16 This self-image is reflected in Hobbes's view of the state as a "multitude so united in one person." 17 In the words of Otto Gierke:
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The people is made co-extensive with the sum of its constituent units; and yet simultaneously, when the need is felt for a single bearer of the rights of the People, it is treated as essentially a unit in itself. The whole distinction between the unity and the multiplicity of the community is reduced to a mere difference of point of view, according as omnes is interpreted as omnes ut universi or as omnes ut singuli. The eye resolved 18 |
What role did printing play in this shift of world views so central to the constitution of modern world order? In The Invention of the Self, John Lyon asserts that "the invention and spread of movable type is probably the most important mechanical contributor to the idea of the unique self." 19 Of this contribution, there are many particular aspects. First, printing favored the distinctly modern idea of the sovereign voice, the single, author(itative) individual. Ong explains that "the printed text is supposed to represent the words of an author in definitive or 'final' form. it tends to feel a work as 'closed', set off from other works, a unit in itself." 20 Today, such notions are taken for granted; yet it was not always so. Only with the advent of printing did the idea of a "copyright" begin to take shape. For example, it was not until 1557 that a Stationers' Company was incorporated in London to oversee and ensure printer-publisher rights. 21
Prior to that time, the medieval "intertextual" practice held sway. According to Chaytor, "to copy and circulate another man's books might be regarded as a meritorious action in the age of manuscript; in the age of print, such action results in law suits and damages." 22 The Middle Ages did not possess the same conception of "authorship" that has prevailed throughout modernity--a conception that may, in fact, be eroding with the emergence of hypermedia today (as will be shown in chapter 7). 23 Indeed, no special Latin word even existed with the exclusive meaning of plagiarist or plagiarism. 24 The lack of a clear conception of the "author" was due in no small measure to the fact that medieval manuscripts were often the product of many authors, or even none to which the work could be attributed, as many were left unsigned. 25 Glosses and marginal comments were habitually worked into subsequent copies of texts. A good example is the Magna Carta, which survives today in a number of nonidentical copies, varying because scribes made revisions of their own during the recopying process. Susan Reynolds explains that exact duplication was not the scribe's overriding concern: "The charter mattered, but what mattered to both compilers of statute books and writers of chronicles was its gist, not its exact words." 26 As Ong points out:
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Manuscript culture had taken intertextuality for granted. Still tied to the commonplace tradition of the old oral world, it deliberately created texts out of other texts, borrowing, adapting, sharing the common, originally oral, formulas and themes. 27 |
In addition, as the dissemination of popular literature depended mostly on oral transmission, it was impossible for writers to maintain any literary rights, even had they desired to do so in the first place. Assuming medieval writers did want selfishly to guard their status as "authors" of particular works, their only option would be to hoard their own material. "But if they did that," Febvre and Martin point out, "it was impossible for them to enjoy the satisfaction every artist seeks by broadcasting his work to as large an audience as possible." 28
With the introduction of printing, the benefits of authorship, in terms of both personal fame and fortune, became more pronounced. "Contemporary writers who had their names attached to hundreds of thousands of copies of their works became conscious of individual reputation." 29 The "drive-for-fame" became a conscious motivating factor, one that, as Eisenstein suggests, may have been encouraged by the "immortality" afforded by the printed word. 30 In sum, the idea of a single sovereign voice fit the printing environment, where mechanical replaced manual reproduction, leaving oral transmission and the intertextual practices of generations of scribes behind.
Notions of individual identity exclusive to modernity in Europe were also reinforced by the practice of reading in a print culture. Medieval culture, despite the existence of writing, was still very much an oral culture. The written word was read aloud and was often deliberately constructed for oral performance. 31 Writing was a communal activity. By the twelfth century, however, silent reading began to emerge, first in monasticist scriptoria and then eventually spreading to universities and among lay aristocracy by the fifteenth century. 32 This new interest in solitary, silent reading flourished in the printing environment, which permitted the mass reproduction of smaller, more portable books. 33 In this way printing helped to define the social movement of the time to "create a new private sphere into which the individual could retreat, seeking refuge from the community." 34
Reading of printed books in a quiet, private place in turn fostered solitary reflection, and private, individual points of view. 35 Intellectual work became "a personal confrontation with an ever-growing number of texts," which encouraged, among other things, a more personal piety "not subject to the discipline and mediation of the Church." 36 Chartier calls this "privatization" of reading "undeniably one of the major cultural developments of the early modern era." 37 This new sense of privacy fostered by print may have encouraged some of the reconfigurations Ruggie describes:
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Consider, for example, analogous changes in the linguistic realm, such as the growing use of vernaculars, and the coming to dominance of the "I-form" of speech--which Franz Borkenau described as the 'sharpest contradistinction between I and you, between me and the world.' Consider analogous changes in interpersonal sensibilities, as in new notions of individual subjectivity and new meanings of personal delicacy and shame. These changes, among other effects, led to a spatial reconfiguration of households, from palaces to manor houses to the dwellings of the urban well-to-do, which more rigorously demarcated and separated private from public spheres and functions. 38 |
While no doubt the shifts Ruggie describes have their origins in a constellation of factors, we can see how printing encouraged such changes in "interpersonal sensibility" by detaching the individual from the communal performance of a manuscript culture, thus fostering isolation and separation. In print culture, private reading mixed with and encouraged new forms of literary intimacy and explorations of the self, which, in turn, demanded a more clear delineation of private spaces within households. 39 Ong elaborates:
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Print was also a major factor in the development of the sense of personal privacy that marks modern society. It produced books smaller and more portable than those common in a manuscript culture, setting the stage psychologically for solo reading in a quiet corner, and eventually for completely silent reading. In manuscript culture and hence in early print culture, reading had tended to be a social activity, one person reading to others in a group. private reading demands a home spacious enough to provide for individual isolation and quiet. 40 |
In sum, the gradual rise of individualism as both a prevailing symbolic form and a predominant moral idea flourished in the printing environment. The mass production of printed material favored newly circulating notions of authorship, copyright, and individual subjectivity, while the portability of printed books facilitated the trend toward silent, private reading and intellectual isolation and reflection. The pervasiveness of individualism and atomism as symbolic forms was in turn reflected in the architecture of modern world order, which transposed individual identity to the interstate sphere and thus helped to dissolve the Christian commonwealth of the High Middle Ages into autonomous sovereign state units.
Spatial Biases
As outlined above, political identification at both the individual and state levels came to focus on an autonomous center, "a single fixed viewpoint" in Ruggie's words. 41 Corresponding with this emerging self-image was a more rigid demarcation of political space, a clear separation between insiders and outsiders. In other words, spatial representations of political community became more pronounced in contrast to the medieval world order where borders were less fixed, indeed fading into one another at certain points. In Dodgshon's words, "The novelty in the way early states territorialized themselves stemmed from the fresh concepts which they imputed to spatial order." 42 Once again, the movement toward more rigid, linear demarcations of political space was the product of a multiplicity of factors reaching back into trends that originated in the Middle Ages. But one reason why this spatial bias resonated so strongly was that it "fit" the surface form and presentation of printing--especially its visual bias and linear representation.
As historians of the medieval imagination describe, medieval political rule was not conceptualized by the people of the time in spatio-territorial terms. It was Christendom that defined reality, and here the material world crossed over easily into a spiritual world beyond. 43 Indeed, nature was replete with abstract signs of the sacred, and geography was subordinated to a hierarchical conception of the universe. Notions of reality were more intense and fluid, and less exacting than our own. 44 Harvey notes how "external space was weakly grasped and generally conceptualized as a mysterious cosmology populated by some external authority, heavenly hosts, or more sinister figures of myth and imagination." 45 The absence of space as a basis upon which to demarcate political authority no doubt reflected the complex, heterogeneous nature of rights and obligations of the feudal era, but more subtly, it also reflected the prevailing oral-aural bias of communications. "Hearing," much more than "seeing," predominated both metaphorically and in actual practice. Clanchy describes how "medieval letter script was understood to represent sounds needing hearing." 46 Thus John of Salisbury was not out of the ordinary when referring to letters as vocum indices, or "indicators of voices." 47 Consider in this respect the way that the scrutiny of accounts was referred to as "auditing"--a label that reflects the fact that individuals primarily had texts read aloud to them even when undertaking commercial accounting. 48 In the predominantly oral environment of the Middle Ages, it is not surprising that the prevailing metaphors and symbolic forms tended to betray a bias toward hearing and speaking.
By contrast to the medieval world order, modern patterns of rule in western Europe came to be seen in terms of a rigidly compartmentalized political space. This linear spatial bias was most starkly apparent in the transformation of European maps, which by the fifteenth century were "highly linear, incredibly precise partitioned into distinct parcels, and continuous in the sense that, with only a few exceptions [they are] entirely filled." 49 The ideal of political authority gradually crystallized into a sense of spatial exclusion--into mutually-distinct, contiguous territorial spaces. Flat, rigid, and compartmentalized blocks of sovereign territories increasingly defined the legitimate mode of individuation in modern Europe. What accounts for this shift to a concern with rigid spatial representations of political order? The short answer is no one single variable. The "revolution in the European way of 'seeing' the world," as Buisseret explains, "no doubt emerged from a multiplicity of causes." 50
Certainly the prevailing notions associated with Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics were crucial components in determining the cultural forms of the period, as were changes in cartography, which accompanied expanding commercial interests around the globe. 51 The rediscovery of Ptolemaic cartography, which imagined how the globe would appear from a vantage outside and looking down on it, coincided with both a commercial and a security interest in the surveillance of territorial space. 52 And the confluence of the new physics with this reinvigorated penchant for map-making was especially important in accustoming Europeans to the idea that the world "might be described under a system of mathematical coordinates." 53 Also decisive were changes in Renaissance painting emphasizing single-point perspective, which "conceives of the world from the standpoint of the 'seeing-eye' of the individual." 54 New forms of realism in artistic expression helped overturn the symbolism of medieval art, which had subordinated accuracy of visual representation to religious hierarchy. 55
Given less attention than these other factors by some authors, but no less consequential, was the shift in the mode of communication to printing. One way printing favored this new mentalité was through the mass reproduction and distribution of printed maps--a topic that was discussed in the previous chapter with respect to state surveillance. The sheer numbers of printed maps circulating (particularly in standardized school texts) gradually accustomed Europeans to visual, grid-like representations of political order, to sharp divisions between "insiders" and "outsiders." Through their standardization and reproduction, they helped infuse a sense of order and fixity to national borders. Generations of students, state administrators, elites, and scholars would be increasingly acculturated into a view of political community derived from these standardized representations of flat, linear spaces.
But more subtly than the dissemination of maps, printing oriented communications away from the prevailing oral-aural bias of the Middle Ages to the visual bias of the early modern period. The dominant mode of communication shifted from speaking and hearing to silent, visual scanning of standardized printed documents. As this environment deepened and expanded, it crystallized with and reinforced other similar biases and symbolic forms, entrenching linear-ordered space as the predominant mentalité of the early Modern period. McLuhan elaborates on the connection:
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Psychically the printed book, an extension of the visual faculty, intensified perspective and the fixed point of view. Associated with the visual stress on point of view and the vanishing point that provides the illusion of perspective there comes another illusion that space is visual, uniform and continuous. The linearity, precision, and uniformity of the arrangement of movable types are inseparable from these great cultural forms and innovations of Renaissance experience. 56 |
As McLuhan was fond of noting, printing is a "ditto device" that precisely situates the word in space. 57 It is the mechanical reproduction of "the exactly repeatable visual statement." 58 Initially, early printed books resembled the idiosyncratic surface appearance of medieval manuscripts, varying in style and presentation depending on the printer or the region. But the nomadicism of the early printers, coupled with the expenses of cutting individual type founts and punches, led to a more uniform type-set over time. Once uniform, the surface appearance of the printed page, with its carefully measured margins flush along each border, its ruled lines and standardized roman lettering, conveyed a sense of visual order and linearity that mirrored the spatial bias of the times. 59 A number of innovations new to the printed text, such as alphabetical ordering, sectional divisions, and indexes further complemented an abstract, rational cognitive orientation favoring uniform spatial order and linearity. And the spread of standardized, printed pages, in turn, helped to shift the bias of communications away from speaking and hearing to silent, visual reading. A new "perceptual field" opened up, in Lowe's words, as typography became embedded in western European culture. This perceptual field was characterized by "the primacy of sight" and the corresponding "order of representation-in-space" facilitated by printing and "evident in the town planning, road construction, and landscape gardening of the period." 60
As with the new physics, geometry, and cartography of the time, a print culture also contributed to the spatial orientation of modern world order: visual, rational, linear thinking translated into a highly rigid and compartmentalized ideal view of political rule--an ideal to which state practice and the map of Europe gradually conformed. Printing helped reorient the bias of communications away from speaking and hearing to silent reading and visual order. Without the standardization of printing and the gradual increase in literacy that accompanied the mass distribution of printed material, the overwhelmingly oral-aural bias of the medieval period might never have been dissolved. The early modern stress on linear, parcelized, territorially discrete units of political authority flourished in the new typographic media environment, where the mode of communication was predominantly through the linear, standardized printed page.
Imagined Communities
One of the most important consequences of the new mode of communication for social epistemology as it relates to world order transformation was the way it fostered the emergence of a new, distinctly modern, imagined community: the nation. The development of printing helped fuse the idea of a distinct national language with a sense of common identity that would gradually become one of the central defining features of the modern European world order. As with other symbolic forms and social constructs discussed in this chapter, printing did not generate nationalism; its roots can be traced back prior to the development of the printing press into the Middle Ages. However, as will be argued below, it is unlikely that nationalism would have developed its essential "linguistic core" if printing had not standardized and fixed vernacular languages in early modern Europe. Furthermore, printing encouraged both directly and indirectly the "homogenization" drive undertaken by centralizing monarchs, which in turn gave rise to an imagined community based on a shared standardized language.
As with most other characteristics of modernity, a form of proto-nationalism can be traced back into the late Middle Ages. 61 Evidence of a fermenting national consciousness can be found in country names: by 1000 the word Polonia began to appear; in the twelfth century, Catalonia; in 1204 Philip Augustus used the description rex Franciae for the first time to refer to the Regnum Francie, or the Kingdom of France. 62 Although the existence of proper names indicates at least an embryonic sense of national consciousness, it was a dim consciousness. Not only was it subordinate to other overarching senses of group identity, but it also lacked the quasi-mythical attachment to a shared language as a "natural" mark of a people and a legitimate basis upon which to differentiate political authority.
To be sure, speakers of various local dialects recognized linguistic differences during the late Middle Ages, especially when diverse groups were brought together during the various Crusades. 63 At times these differences formed an elementary sense of collective identity. For example, when the University of Paris was established in the early thirteenth century, participants from around Europe grouped themselves according to their language, or nation. 64 But vernacular language itself was rarely a defining site of symbolic or political contestation as it was to become in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to Chaytor, "No ruler dreamt of attempting to suppress one language in order to impose another upon a conquered race." 65 Certainly Latin was used and thus established a sense of transnational identity among elites, but the various regional vernaculars and local dialects did not elicit strong emotional bonds among their speakers--at least not enough to form the fundamental basis of political differentiation and legitimation. As Guenee relates, in the thirteenth century "linguistic boundaries had no relation to political frontiers" and "no one would have thought that a State should correspond to a 'nation.' " 66
Apart from the hegemonic role of Church-Latin, an important impediment to the fusing of language and nationality prior to printing was the fluidity of language in an oral culture. Written languages never achieved the fixity that was established in print, following closely in their evolution the changes of the spoken word. "For this reason, the French of the Chansons de Geste, for example, in the twelfth century differs greatly from that written by Villon in the fifteenth." 67 As Chaytor explains:
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The written or printed language professes to represent the standard tongue; from this the spoken language tends continually to diverge, through its readiness to follow individual innovations which become fashionable. The bulwark of resistance to these is the printed language, which is modified only when new forms have become so widespread that they cannot be ignored. When this stage has been reached the basis has been laid for the formation of a national linguistic consciousness, and a language is felt to be the expression of tribal or racial characteristics. For print alone can secure the indispensable conditions of standardisation, the substitution of visual for acoustic word-memory. 68 |
In the sixteenth century, with the advent of printing, this type of "linguistic drift" slowed considerably. By the seventeenth century European vernacular languages assumed their current, modern forms.
Ernst Gellner has shown persuasively how this trend toward standardized, uniform national languages was closely bound up with the interests of centralizing state monarchies and the imperatives of industrialization. 69 For Gellner, a high level of competent vernacular literacy, coupled with the standardization of printing (what he calls a "standardized medium"), are critical tools in providing a "common conceptual currency" that is an essential prerequisite for a complex division of labor. 70 As a consequence, "the monopoly of legitimate education" in the early modern era became essential to the state in structuring the national work force, whose impersonal "communications must be in the same shared and standardized linguistic medium and script [sic]." 71 According to Gellner, one result of this deliberate homogenization campaign was that an imagined community based on shared linguistic identity began to emerge--one that was deliberately encouraged by centralizing monarchs through mass public education and the promotion of a literate, educated work-force necessary for the industrialization drive. 72 By the nineteenth century, this sense of community based on shared linguistic identity would gradually evolve into the powerful ideology of modern nationalism.
Gellner's explanation of the rise of nationalism is one that is shared by both Chaytor, and Febvre and Martin. According to Febvre and Martin, the printing press provided the means by which state ministers and cultural elites could encourage "a process of unification and consolidation which established fairly large territories throughout which a single language was written." 73 In all of the major countries in Europe, a process of vernacular standardization was undertaken--a process that was not only vastly encouraged by printing, but would have been virtually impossible without it. Through the means of mass printing, standardized conventions were established with respect to spelling, grammar, and vocabulary. 74 By fixing one dialect as the predominant mode of speech, printing helped reduce other local dialects to the status of regional or local patois, thus undermining more parochial identities while at the same time legitimating a common, standardized language within territorial boundaries. 75 The legitimating of singular "national" languages, in turn, became an important basis of differentiating people from people and state from state, fragmenting the transnational hegemony of Church-Latin with various national vernaculars. 76 It is then but a short step, as Chaytor argues, to regarding "the official language as the national heritage and an expression of national character," 77 especially if this national character is deliberately cultivated by state officials who have a strategic interest in the homogenization of the populace. 78 In other words, the properties of printing, in conjunction with a conscious unification and homogenization drive, led to the exaltation of language as a quasi-divine mark of shared national identity and a visible affirmation of political differentiation.
A slightly different, but no less persuasive, account of the relationship between printing and nationalism is developed by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities. According to Anderson, the very possibility of imagining the "nation" could arise only after the belief that sacred script-languages offered privileged access to ontological truth began to erode. The Word had to be stripped of its divinity. A further contribution to the emergence of the nation was a shift in temporal horizons from medieval cosmology to "homogenous, empty time." Both of these shifts, according to Anderson, can be attributed to the development of printing and its interaction with capitalism, which assured widespread distribution of the new mode of communication. "The convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation." 79
Unlike Gellner, Chaytor, and Febvre and Martin, Anderson places less emphasis on overt manufacturing of national identity by state elites, and more on the convergence of a number of largely contingent variables. However, the two interpretations do not detract from each other, as a state interest in homogenization would only further the "blind" convergence of other factors to which Anderson points. And Anderson's analysis complements those outlined above by bringing to light other, perhaps less consciously directed, factors that helped facilitate a sense of national-linguistic identity. For Anderson, the critical variable in this respect is the newspaper, which through its simultaneous daily consumption provides an image of "a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogenous, empty time"--an analog to the nation. 80 The newspaper provides a sense of shared national experiences, with each communicant aware that the same reading experience is undertaken simultaneously with thousands, perhaps millions, of others with whom s/he has had no personal contact. 81 Anderson's emphasis on the largely indirect role of the newspaper in the development of nationalism is similar to one developed earlier by McLuhan. Like Anderson, McLuhan argues in The Gutenberg Galaxy that through newsprint a people sees itself for the first time:
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The vernacular in appearing in high visual definition affords a glimpse of social unity co-extensive with vernacular boundaries. And more people have experienced this visual unity of their native tongues via the newspaper than through the book. 82 |
Although the emergence of nationalism as an ideological force did not reach its peak until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, its "incubation" period actually reaches back into the late Middle Ages. However, with the advent of printing a critical barrier to its development was removed; the linguistic drift of vernaculars that characterized the oral environment of the Middle Ages was arrested and a standardized "national" language emerged "below" the transnational Church-Latin and "above" the various local or regional dialects. As a result of the emergence of national languages, the deliberate cultivation of a homogenous population by state elites, and the widespread dissemination of printed material, a sense of imagined community arose throughout Europe based on a shared language of a people. Between the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this sense of imagined community became the legitimate mode of differentiating political authority, and one of the pillars of modern world order.
Changes in social epistemology are critical elements in the transformation of world orders. Shared symbolic forms and cognitive biases provide the critical "metaphysical underpinnings" of the architecture of political authority--in particular, the distinct ways in which political communities are imagined. Although positivists and materialists have for too long slighted the importance of mentalités collectives in structuring and orienting political behavior, a new theoretical sensitivity is emerging across the social sciences that takes culture and symbolic forms seriously. The historically contingent web-of-beliefs into which a people are acculturated are now widely recognized as a crucial aspect of differentiating culture from culture and epoch from epoch. A critical area of research, then, is the processes by which social epistemology undergoes transformation.
In this chapter, I examined the way the change in the mode of communication to printing contributed to the transformation of social epistemology along three dimensions, each of which was shown to have an important bearing on the character of European world order: First, in generating new forms of authorship and copyright, and by favoring the trend toward silent, private reading and intellectual separation, the printing environment contributed to the distinctly modern sense of atomism or individualism as a prevailing symbolic form and moral idea. The pervasiveness of this symbolic form was, in turn, mirrored at the world-order level by the emergence of autonomous sovereign states. Second, the linear surface appearance of the printed page helped reorient communications from an oral-aural to a visual bias. In doing so, it reinforced the emerging spatial bias of early modern Europe in favor of highly rigid and linear representations of political community. Lastly, the fixity and mass reproducibility of printing helped fuse a sense of group identity around fixed vernacular languages, thus contributing to the modern imagined community of the nation.
Undoubtedly, the medieval-to-modern transformation of European world order was driven by a wide confluence of factors, from broad environmental changes to changes in ideas, thus making it futile to suggest any single "master variable." In part 1 of this study, I have argued that the change in the mode of communication that occurred during this period was critical to altering the distribution of power among social forces and in rethreading the dominant web-of-beliefs of the time. Certainly the transformation would have been much different had there been no change in the communications environment. Centralized forms of political authority, which so often in the past had withered because of the predominantly oral-personalized form of rule characteristic of the feudal system, could not have evolved as fully or as efficiently as they did in parts of western Europe without the availability of mass-reproduced, printed documents. The rise of an urban bourgeoisie, itself a crucial link in the rise of the modern state, could not have developed such a complex commercial culture had their not been available a standardized medium, such as the newspaper, to facilitate commercial exchange. What if the fate of the Protestant Reformation, whose rapid spread and success was so closely tied to the availability of printing, had gone the way of previous heresies? Likewise the flourishing of a scientific humanist spirit? Both of these social forces not only "fit" the printing environment but were also critical in challenging the Church's place in medieval cosmology. Lastly, it would be hard to conceive of the changes to individual subjectivity, the flourishing of linear spatial biases, and the rise of a fixed national-vernacular language as the predominant way of imagining communities all occurring simultaneously without the availability of printing.
While communication technology was obviously an important factor, I would be contradicting my theoretical perspective if I argued that printing was the sole variable or prime mover responsible for this transformation. Nonetheless, because communications are implicated in all spheres of life, from production to security to culture, a focus on the mode of communication did provide a useful lens through which to view the transformation of political authority as a whole. Using the same analytical and theoretical lens, then, in part 2 of this study I turn to an examination of the contemporary transformation of world order at a planetary level.
Note 1: Ruggie, "Territoriality," p. 157 Back.
Note 2: Louis Dumont, Essays in Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 62. Back.
Note 4: See Ibid., pp. 23-60; See also, Richard Matthew, "Back to the Dark Age: World Politics in the Late Twentieth Century," (Paper delivered at the ISA Annual Meeting, Chicago, February 1995). Back.
Note 5: See Le Goff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages; See also, Guenee, States and Rulers, p. 32, for a link between the nominalism of William of Okham and individualism. Guenee notes how philosophical/epistemological beliefs often translated later into political doctrines in this way: "And so, for example, the great realistnominalist debate (where for so long the realists, convinced of the reality of general concepts, were set against the nominalists, for whom the individual alone existed) largely determined the poles of political thinking: whilst a realist readily sacrificed a part to the whole, the individual to the State, for a nominalist like William of Okham the individual was allimportant and the common good no more than the sum total of individual interests. The 'democratic' trends characteristic of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which set the conciliar movement against the Pope and Estates against the princes, coincided with an upsurge in nominalism." Back.
Note 6: Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, p. 432. Back.
Note 7: Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being. Back.
Note 8: As quoted in Guenee, States and Rulers, p. 43. Back.
Note 9: See Duby, The Three Orders; Rodney Bruce Hall and Friedrich V. Kratochwil, "Medieval Tales: Neorealist 'Science' and the Abuse of History," International Organization 47 (Autumn 1993); and Rodney Bruce Hall, "The Medieval 'State' and the Social Construction of Sovereign Identity," (Paper Delivered at the International Studies Association--36th Annual Convention, February 21-25, 1995, Chicago). Back.
Note 10: John Lyon, The Invention of the Self: The Hinge of Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), p. 37. Back.
Note 11: C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 3. Back.
Note 12: See Stephen Lukes, "Individualism," in David Miller, ed., The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 240. Descartes' radical individualism is, of course, well known. See Discourse on Method and Meditations, [Translated by Laurence J. Lafleur] (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1960); See also the excellent treatment of the social forces implicated in the Cartesian retreat to individuality in Ernst Gellner, Reason and Culture: The Historic Role of Rationality and Rationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992). Back.
Note 13: Charles Taylor, "Atomism," in Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985): 210. Back.
Note 14: Richard K. Ashley, "Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of the Anarchy Problematique," Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17 (1988): 230. Back.
Note 15: Ruggie, "Territoriality," p. 158. Back.
Note 16: Dumont, Essays on Individualism, p. 73. Back.
Note 17: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, [Micheal Oakeshott, ed.] (New York: Collier Books, 1962), p. 132. Back.
Note 18: as quoted in Dumont, Essays on Individualism, pp. 74-75. Back.
Note 19: Lyon, The Invention of the Self, p. 67. Back.
Note 20: Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 133. Back.
Note 22: Henry John Chaytor, From Script to Print: An Introduction to Medieval Vernaculars (London: Folcroft Library Editions, 1945), p. 1. Back.
Note 23: For McLuhan's discussion of the "authorless" Middle Ages, see Gutenberg Galaxy, pp. 160-163. Back.
Note 24: Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 131. Back.
Note 25: Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, p. 261. Back.
Note 26: Susan Reynolds, "Magna Carta 1297 and the Legal Use of Literacy," Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 62 (1989): 241; This passage from Reynolds is cited in Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, p. 265. Back.
Note 27: Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 133. Back.
Note 28: Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, p. 23. Back.
Note 30: Eisenstein, The Printing Press, p. 121. Back.
Note 31: Finnegan, Literacy and Orality, p. 28. Back.
Note 32: For discussion, see Chartier, "The Practical Impact of Writing," p. 125. Back.
Note 33: Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, p. 88. Back.
Note 34: Chartier, "The Practical Impact of Print," p. 111. Back.
Note 35: For an extensive discussion, see Roger Chartier, "The Practical Impact of Print," in Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, eds., A History of Private Life. vol. 3 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 111-159. Back.
Note 37: Roger Chartier, "The Practical Impact of Writing," p. 125. Back.
Note 38: Ruggie, "Territoriality," p. 158. Back.
Note 39: For discussion, see Orest Ranum, "The Refuges of Intimacy," and Jean Marie Goulemot, "Literary Practices: Publicizing the Private," both of which appear in Aries and Duby, eds., A History of Private Life. Back.
Note 40: Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 131. Back.
Note 41: Ruggie, "Territoriality," p. 159. Back.
Note 42: Dodgshon, The European Past, p. 164. Back.
Note 43: For a good overview, see Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, ch. 6; and Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, Part Two: Space and Time, pp. 47-82. Back.
Note 44: Donald M. Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 12. Back.
Note 45: Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 241. Back.
Note 46: Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, p. 285. Back.
Note 49: Edward W. Soja, The Political Organization of Space (Washington: Resource Paper no. 8, Association of American Geographers, 1971), p. 9. Back.
Note 50: David Buisseret, "Introduction," in Buisseret, ed., Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps, p. 1. Back.
Note 51: R. B. J. Walker, Inside/outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 129. Back.
Note 52: See Buisseret, ed., Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps, and Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, pp. 240-253. Back.
Note 53: Buisseret, "Introduction," p. 1. Back.
Note 54: Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 245. Back.
Note 55: See Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1975). Back.
Note 56: McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 157. Back.
Note 57: McLuhan and Fiore, The Medium is the Massage, p. 49. Back.
Note 58: Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 127. Back.
Note 59: Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, pp. 77-104 documents the visual appearance of the book. Back.
Note 60: Lowe, A History of Bourgeois Perception, p. 26. Back.
Note 61: For a discussion, see Guenee, States and Rulers, pp. 50-65. Back.
Note 62: Guenee, States and Rulers, pp. 50-51. Back.
Note 63: See Jonathan RileySmith, The Crusades: A Short History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); and RileySmith, The First Crusade. Back.
Note 64: See Le Goff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, pp. 73-74. Back.
Note 65: Chaytor, From Script to Print, p. 22. Back.
Note 66: Guenee, States and Rulers, p. 53. Back.
Note 67: Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, p. 319. Back.
Note 68: Chaytor, From Script to Print, p. 34. Back.
Note 69: Ernst Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983). Back.
Note 71: Ibid., pp. 34-35. I put [sic] here to indicate that what Gellner calls "script" is more properly termed "print"--a label that Gellner does not use explicitly, though as I point out above, is implicit in his notion of a "standardized medium." Back.
Note 72: Gellner's argument chimes with, among others, that of Charles Tilly, who suggests that statemakers had an "incentive" to "homogenize." First, because a more homogenous population was likely to be more loyal; and second, because "centralized policies of extraction and control were more likely to yield a high return to the government where the population's routine life was organized in relatively uniform ways." See Charles Tilly, "Reflections on the History of European StateMaking," p. 79; See also Anderson and Hall, "Absolutism and Other Ancestors," (p. 32) who briefly mention the role of printing in promoting "a more standardized vernacular language from the various dialects in their territory" which gradually undermined Latin. Back.
Note 73: Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, p. 319. Back.
Note 74: For an excellent discussion, see Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, pp. 319-332; See also Eisenstein, The Printing Press, pp. 117-118. Back.
Note 75: Chaytor, From Script to Print, p. 45. Back.
Note 76: In the long run, Latin became a "dead langauge," retained only in places, like the Catholic mass, that were bound to the old order through tradition. See Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, p. 319. Though the fate of Latin was "sealed" at this time, in the shortrun it stubbornly survived as an "international" means of communication, among many European scholars, for example. See pp. 322-323. In Benedict Anderson's words, " the fall of Latin exemplified a larger process in which the sacred communities integrated by old sacred languages were gradually fragmented, pluralized, and territorialized." Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 19. Back.
Note 78: See also, Luke, Pedagogy, Printing, and Protestantism, pp. 61-62. Back.
Note 79: Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 46. Back.
Note 82: McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 260. Back.
Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation
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