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"Schmidgen, Wolfram"
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Exquisite Mixture
The culture of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain is rarely credited with tolerance of diversity; this period saw a rising pride in national identity, the expansion of colonialism, and glorification of the Anglo-Saxon roots of the country. Yet at the same time, Wolfram Schmidgen observes, the concept of mixture became a critical element of Britons' belief in their own superiority. While the scientific, political, and religious establishment of the early 1600s could not imagine that anything truly formed, virtuous, or durable could be produced by mixing unlike kinds or merging absolute forms, intellectuals at the end of the century asserted that mixture could produce superior languages, new species, flawless ideas, and resilient civil societies.Exquisite Mixtureexamines the writing of Robert Boyle, John Locke, Daniel Defoe, and others who challenged the primacy of the one over the many, the whole over the parts, and form over matter. Schmidgen traces the emergence of the valuation of mixture to the political and scientific revolutions of the seventeenth century. The recurrent threat of absolutism in this period helped foster alliances within a broad range of writers and fields of inquiry, from geography, embryology, and chemistry to political science and philosophy. By retrieving early modern arguments for the civilizing effects of mixture, Schmidgen invites us to rethink the stories we tell about the development of modern society. Not merely the fruit of postmodernism, the theorization and valuation of hybridity have their roots in centuries past.
eBook
Appreciation After Critique
Long belittled as a sentiment that makes no measurable contribution to knowledge, appreciation is being reclaimed today. Postcritical writers, in particular, have turned appreciation into a model affect for how literary scholars relate to their objects of study. They have been empowered to do so by the flat ontologies associated with such thinkers as Graham Harman, Jane Bennett, and especially Bruno Latour. This essay argues that leaning on flat ontologies to rethink our relationship to aesthetic objects has led a significant number of postcritical scholars to flirt with the possibility of escape: escape from the fact that all seekers of knowledge are embodied and situated individuals and therefore different from the objects they investigate. In suggesting an escape from such difference, postcritical writers shirk ethical and political responsibilities that are central to the legitimacy of our disciplinary practices. Postcritical appreciation can have a more promising future, the essay concludes, when we heed the lessons of Donna Haraway and Hans-Georg Gadamer, who have proposed models for relating to objects that avoid the alternatives of detachment and attachment and can renew the commitment to objectivity in the humanities.
Journal Article
Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property
In Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property, Wolfram Schmidgen draws on legal and economic writings to analyse the description of houses, landscapes, and commodities in eighteenth-century fiction. His study argues that such descriptions are important to the British imagination of community. By making visible what it means to own something, they illuminate how competing concepts of property define the boundaries of the individual, of social community, and of political systems. In this way, Schmidgen recovers description as a major feature of eighteenth-century prose, and he makes his case across a wide range of authors, including Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, William Blackstone, Adam Smith, and Ann Radcliffe. The book's most incisive theoretical contribution lies in its careful insistence on the unity of the human and the material: in Schmidgen's argument, persons and things are inescapably entangled. This approach produces fresh insights into the relationship between law, literature, and economics.
eBook
THE METAPHYSICS OF \ROBINSON CRUSOE\
This essay argues that Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is a metaphysical text whose very preoccupation with the world of physical objects and actions unsettles the determinate structures of being to foster an enlarged sense of possibility and transformation. Defoe dares to imitate God’s infinitely various creation in his first novel, and he takes advantage of the sublime as a compositional mode that shakes up the hierarchy of species and causes. The hallmarks of realist representation--the physical, the particular, the individual, the circumstantial--have for too long been misinterpreted as the ends of Defoe’s fiction. In this essay, I argue that they are the means by which Defoe reveals the infinity of variety, the thinness of difference, and the plasticity of being.
Journal Article
The Science of Mixture
For centuries, mixture was a basic concept in science. From Aristotle’s and Galen’s influential writings to the Islamic reception of Greek learning by Avicenna and Averroes, through Duns Scotus, Thomas Aquinas, and Renaissance thinkers such as Julius Scaliger and Giacomo Zabarella, mixture was indispensable if you wanted to explain what a body was and how it behaved.¹ Minerals, plants, animals, and humans were all characterized by different mixtures of four basic elements. These bodies could be understood only if you had a theory of mixture—of its variations, its locations, its balances and imbalances. But despite this broad acceptance of
Book Chapter
The Politics and Philosophy of Mixture: John Locke Recomposed
Schmidgen discusses the question of John Locke's empiricism by following his thought from the contemplation of species to the discussion of identity to the account of the origins of the political right. Aside from addressing the problem of knowledge, it is also argued that Locke's ontology, politics, and epistemology draw on a mixture to reduce the difference between man, animal, plant and thing. Such a reduction allows Locke to project a profoundly interconnected world in which identity, freedom, and knowledge are communal effects. Moreover, in retrieving the importance of mixture in Locke's thinking, an attempt is made to contribute to the ongoing effort to wean eighteenth-century studies from the cloying diet of modernization narratives it has been fed for decades. Locke had no taste for the ingredients that make up such narratives, from individualism and realism to the separation of political, social, and sexual spheres. His thinking evolved around concepts of collection, association, and appropriation--concepts that emphasized the repeated crossing of boundaries and not, as one's favorite story about one's emergence from the past has it, their increasing enforcement.
Journal Article
Locke’s Mixed Liberty
My argument has shown that the attempt in seventeenth-century England to imagine and justify political bodies that share sovereignty between multiple parts was assisted by changing scientific definitions of natural bodies. Adopting a mediated relationship between first and second causes, a diverse group of natural and political philosophers in the first half of the century sought to legitimize mixture and multitude and normalize heterogeneity, deformity, and mutation. Their vision of natural and political bodies offered a fundamental challenge to the norms of political order promoted by royalists and absolutists. To be unified, powerful, and civil, the anti-absolutists argued, political bodies
Book Chapter
The Politics of Deformity
Renaissance ideas about natural magic, misinterpretations and critiques of Aristotle, the Calvinist taste for purity, the argument that nature was decaying, the revival of atomism—all of these factors populate the intellectual field that brought a number of seventeenth-century scientists to recognize mixture as a legitimate cause and fundamental reality. Whether that reality appeared as loose contexture, irreducible union, or heterogeneous assemblage made no ontological, theological, or moral difference. This view was radical. It threw out the idea that a proper body depended on the subordination of parts to whole, many to one, and matter to form. Atomists such as
Book Chapter