In order to provide any viable critique of twenty-first-century discourses -- whether signified by late capitalism, epistemological hegemony, cultural domination, or globalization (the catch-word for all of these) -- one must not employ an ahistorical or static lens; alternatively, one must dredge up and analyze the sediments that underlie current discourses, and many of these sediments are found in the eighteenth century. More specifically, by reading the thoughts of such writers as Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift, one is forced to read the links and antipathies between the discursive economies of epistemology -- philosophical, scientific, and economic -- which opened the way for multiple liberations but also for bourgeois-liberal globalization (postmodern imperialism). Consequently, people in the post-industrial West, particularly those on the political left, must answer the ethical and political call brought forth by postmodern currencies of knowledge.

Portals to Knowledge: Confluence and Conflict between Enlightenment and Postmodern Currencies [1]

Benjamin G. Lanier-Nabors

I. Windows and Currents

<1> In reading the discourses of the eighteenth century [2], especially those concerning the utility of science, one observes the postmodern condition. These readings suggest différance, Nazism, Civil Rights, late capitalism, increased higher education, the nuclear bomb, the information superhighway, and so forth. This is not to suggest that those things that one has come to mark as twentieth-century historical and philosophical events are eighteenth-century events. Instead, one can approach the currencies of the postmodern through the medium, or portal, of the eighteenth century [3] -- much in the same spirit as Walter Benjamin did when he used the nineteenth-century Arcades of Paris to comprehend the burgeoning twentieth century [4]. Such a tack, however, does not imply that the eighteenth century -- or the nineteenth, for that matter -- planned the twentieth, or even anticipated it. Rather, the sites of difference and commonality between the historical periods serve as critical openings, which can be employed to read and critique the present and to catch glimpses of the future.

<2> Observing, however, does not equal planning or anticipating -- it is nothing so rational. An equation would result in dehistoricizing socio-historical events and implies determinism. Such determinism attempts to foreclose the future: the Reign of Terror, Auschwitz, Selma, and Sarajevo are reminders of this. Determinism, though, is undeniably a violent gift from the Enlightenment. One sees it forged, for example, in the neo-Newtonian Royal Society, the poetry of Alexander Pope, the philosophy of John Locke, colonial economic exploits, imperial cartographic practices, and racist anthropological delineations. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to reduce the Enlightenment itself to determinism. Within the same epistemological currents that brought about determinism were the critiques of determinism [5]. Where there was determinism, there was "probabilism" [6]. Where there was a Pope, there was a Joseph Addison. Where there was a Locke, there was a David Hume. And where there were advocates for empire and all of its inhumane attributes, there were Jonathan Swifts and abolitionists. Even in view of the oppositions presented heretofore, one cannot reduce the thinkers and discourses of the eighteenth century to the binary oppositions, or the rationality, of Manichean logic.

<3> Despite what some current thinkers might believe or desire, there are no completely isolated camps, schools, or strands of the Enlightenment to continue or to save. The English political figure and writer Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and the Anglo-Irish satirist and political gadfly Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) are examples of this fact, and because of their representative quality, their thoughts will serve as portals into the postmodern and out of the Enlightenment, particularly when one considers the intertwining and interacting currencies of philosophy, commerce, imperialism, postmodern politics, and science.

<4> One can surmise that discussions concerning the eighteenth century's legacy are far from over. Indeed, the political and philosophical debates are sometimes more like battles than discussions. The current social and economic conflicts between Republicans and Democrats in the United States and between the Conservatives and Labour in Great Britain are indicative of investments made in eighteenth-century theories of knowledge, which are reflected in politics and cultural production. Further, the philosophical political stakes of the eighteenth century are deeply embedded in the conflicts between such liberal and leftist thinkers as Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, and Jean-Franˆßois Lyotard.

<5> German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1929- ), an eminent representative of the contemporary Frankfurt School, is credited with attempting to revitalize the German philosopher Immanuel Kant's (1724-1804) notion of objectivity in order to reinvigorate knowledge and liberal politics. Habermas bases much of his thought on the idea that certain strands of the Enlightenment -- particularly those that are not necessarily connected to empiricism, rationalism, and profit -- have been superceded by the more nihilistic, self-serving, and capitalistic tendencies also rising from the Enlightenment. Roughly defined, Habermas's project is one of recuperating those lost Enlightenment components in order to foster an "emancipation with an ultimate consensus" [7].This project is based on the premise of what Habermas calls "communicative reason," a universal and rational epistemological system that is uncovered "through the analysis of the already operative potential for rationality contained in the everyday practices of communication" [8]. Accordingly, Habermas believes that the emancipatory work of Enlightenment-based modernity is far from over.

<6> American philosopher Richard Rorty (1931- ) exercises a liberalism not too far removed from his German counterpart, except for a key difference: Rorty argues for anti-objectivism instead of the radical objectivism theorized by Habermas. Aligning himself with American pragmatic liberalism, Rorty believes that theorization stifles democratic discourses and possibilities, which are based on "ungrounded communitarian solidarity" deriving from a person's (the subject's) "capacity for self-determination" [9].

<7> Sharing Habermas's distrust for those who use knowledge for capitalist gains, and echoing in some ways Rorty's call for more radicalized discourses, French philosopher Jean-Franˆßois Lyotard (1927-1998) is one of the key leftist, deconstructionist thinkers of difference: he questions the ideological ground and implications of the projects of modernity, radical objectivity, and radical subjectivity. Credited as one of the founders of what many understand to be philosophical postmodernity -- if not the crucial early articulator of the postmodern -- Lyotard demonstrates throughout his oeuvre that the cat is out of the bag, as it were, concerning an emancipatory Enlightenment. To him, there is no question that the eighteenth century opened the door to many good and terrifying things: e.g., liberty in France and abroad, early abolition movements, scientific wonders, the Reign of Terror, the subjugation of non-Europeans and Europeans, the birth of modern totalitarianism, and the reduction of science to performativity. Knowledge becomes the tool of terror if it is controlled either by some transcendental objectivity or by some transcendental subjectivity.

<8> If one considers the fact that Habermas's view of objectivity is actually a net of subjectivity cast wide, and if one considers the fact that Rorty's view of subjectivity depends on an objective agreement concerning what constitutes a liberalized subject, then one can see how Habermas and Rorty are closely connected and why Lyotard's is a significant critique of what they represent. In fact, Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge has catalyzed a firestorm of intellectual debate, helped to irreversibly alter views of the artistic enterprise, examined the role of science in the current socio-political milieu, and thus destabilized the barriers between different discourses of knowledge [10]. Lyotard makes a critical intervention into the state of knowledge since the eighteenth century, in which he argues that Enlightenment discourses have proliferated, diversified, and interacted in such ways that any attempt to systematize, hierarchize, consolidate, or segregate them results in terror. Like Habermas, Lyotard questions the tendency in the last century or more to privilege one type of knowledge or narrative -- applied or practical science over theoretical or pure science -- over others, which for Lyotard betrays the intention of limiting and controlling knowledge. Because it serves corporate and government interests, most generally held postmodern knowledge is therefore no longer interested in asking questions, or finding truth, but is instead focused on the goal of "performativity -- that is, the best possible input/output equation" [11]. Lyotard questions the reduction of knowledge to its mere use value and profitability, which effectively questions the bourgeois liberalism of those such as Rorty. Further, in the subtext of many pronouncements in Lyotard's report is a direct challenge to Habermas's project of "emancipation with an ultimate consensus" [12].

<11> The current discussions concerning science, in particular, indicate a deeper antagonism in the West: Should knowledge first be consolidated into "an agreement between men [Habermas's vision], defined as knowing intellects and free wills, and . . . obtained through dialogue [Rorty's vision]," and, secondly, should knowledge through consensus be "a component of a system, which manipulates it [knowledge] in order to maintain and improve its performance"? [13] The implied answers in such questions are, one, some self-actualized elite (i.e., composed of bourgeois liberals such as Rorty) will be responsible for deciding through its own deliberations what the consensus is, and, two, knowledge reifies and thus self-replicates, thereby leading to more refined, more useful, and generally accepted knowledge.

<12> Moreover, what becomes apparent to Lyotard is that Habermas, who sounds more and more like Rorty, believes that humanity is "a collective (universal) subject seek[ing] its common emancipation through the regularization of the 'moves' permitted in all language games [heterogeneous discourses] and that the legitimacy of any statement resides in its contributing to that emancipation" [14]. In other words, if one follows Lyotard's thinking, the very Enlightenment discourse of emancipation -- once purified, homogenized, and established as the normative discourse -- actually becomes quite non-emancipatory: the French Republic becomes a proto-fascist empire, the German Volk becomes a machine capable of exterminating people, the remarkable amount of energy produced by the fission of atomic particles is first used to obliterate thousands upon thousands of human beings, and so on.

<13> If all discourses -- all types of knowledge -- must converge under one principle (consensus or radical subjectivity) and contribute to an epistemological system that allows for one outcome (communicative reason or atomistic self-determination), then knowledge forecloses itself by becoming hermetic: the process of knowing will consequently end. A universal subject would also undeniably depend on the assimilation and/or expropriation of those epistemologies, cultures, and peoples not fitting into the master logic or narrative of such an overarching subjectivity. Paradoxically, then, Habermas's own theory of emancipatory communicativity and Rorty's own call for bourgeois-liberal self-determination legitimize epistemological and thus socio-cultural systems that they, as a traditional liberals, would probably abhor -- totalitarianism, Nazism, and so on. Thus, according to Lyotard, such emancipations ultimately result in "terror" [15], but emancipations that come about through allowing and promoting the proliferation and contextually determined interaction of epistemological discourses -- through dissensus and radical discursivity -- are the only hopeful and most humane possibility.

<14> In view of the preceding, an apt critical obligation or problem emerges, one which follows the Lyotardian analysis of knowledge in general and the current uses of science in particular: In order to provide any viable critique of twenty-first-century discourses -- whether signified by late capitalism, epistemological hegemony, cultural domination, or globalization (the catch-word for all of these) -- one must not employ an ahistorical or static lens; alternatively, one must dredge up and analyze the sediments that underlie current discourses, and many of these sediments are found in the eighteenth century. More specifically, by reading the thoughts of such writers as Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift, one is forced to read the links and antipathies between the discursive economies of epistemology -- philosophical, scientific, and economic -- that opened the way for multiple liberations but also for bourgeois-liberal globalization (postmodern imperialism). Consequently, people in the post-industrial West, particularly those on the political left, must answer the ethical and political call brought forth by postmodern currencies of knowledge.

II. Philosophical Currency

<15> One might assume that philosophy is the obvious domain for considering issues of knowledge; even though this is a misconception of both philosophy and knowledge, one may remain with it for a moment to explore the interrelation of intellectualism and epistemology. Addison believed that knowledge is not and should not be restricted to philosophers and philosophical discourse; nor should philosophical discourse be restricted to the intellectual elite. The Spectator, No. 10, makes this evident:

Addison observes, much as Rorty does now, direct connections between lack of access to epistemological discourses, apathy, lethargy, and triviality. Addison negatively affirms, though, that the elite had dominated epistemological inquiry; otherwise, his editorial intervention would not have been necessary. This negative affirmation implies also that ignorance is an operative for tyranny. The important point to take from Addison is that philosophy should not be divorced from the daily life or, as Rorty might put it, from the discussions of those who compose the majority of the public, the non-elite. Nevertheless, this important point must be conjoined with an important caveat: Addison does not actually have in mind the socio-economically poor and near poor when he articulates his bourgeois-liberal critique and program. As Karl Marx theorized in the nineteenth century, the advancement of the bourgeoisie does indicate -- necessitate -- a dramatic power shift and the dissolution of the former, aristocratic elites, but the result of such a shift is that a new elite emerges: one composed of the sort of people who can afford to purchase a daily serial and to "dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee-Houses" -- a bourgeois elite. Addison, to some degree like Habermas, envisions a reasoned intersubjective communicativity, but this of course depends on the expropriation of those others who do not speak the discourse of a bourgeois-liberal consensus. However, with caveat in mind, Addison's deeper insight should not be discarded either: thought should not be divorced from daily life.

<16> The sense that thought and existence are integral to one another surfaces as well in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, particularly in book 3, "The Voyage to Laputa, Etc." Swift negatively presents the need for comprehending epistemology in terms of phenomenology [17]. The first clue of Swift's approach is the travel-log genre the author adopts. Knowledge does not come only from the mouths of the people Gulliver encounters, if it comes from them at all. Instead, Gulliver travels from one culture, system, or discourse to others create an environment in which the protagonist (this term also subsumes the reader) must wrestle with competing, frequently contradictory messages. (Does this wrestling not approximate but also exceed the classical maieutic or modern scientific processes?) This way of knowing is an undeniably messy process, as twentieth-century theoretical science attests. Often recursive, regressive, and transgressive, the path to knowledge is rarely a straight or transparent one. If encounters with information could be mapped, and if the creation of knowledge could be charted, one would have topography not unlike that of the Laputa system of islands (one island floats; some of the cities do not reflect the technological advances they house; and so forth). Any map would be in flux because of the instability, inconstancy, and mutability of knowledge. Thus, as some late-twentieth-century philosophers (e.g., Jacques Derrida) [18] and scientists (e.g., Stephen J. Gould) [19] would probably permit, epistemology is actually a provisional sketching of probabilities, and travel narratives are an extremely conducive demonstration of how epistemology operates. As Douglas Lane Patey observes, "the travel genre itself embodies . . . a certain view of experience and knowledge, a view we might call probabilism. [. . .] [T]ravel can serve as metaphor for fundamental epistemic commitments . . . wherein we encounter varied ideas for comparison (on which to exercise judgment)" [20]. Knowledge is, therefore, a process that is not predetermined or closeable, so what people do is constantly negotiate new epistemes with the tentative guide of former epistemic syntheses, a process that consequently entails the perpetual reconfiguration of the whole texture of knowledge. These are indeed opinions that one hears Lyotard echoing two centuries later. Such a probabilistic tack avoids prejudice and reification: one risks old knowledge to be questioned by new information in order to construct new knowledge: in Lyotard's idiom, different phrase regimes or discourse types interact with and open up others [21]. Ironically, probability opens the way for improbability, and it thereby negates the unhindered refinement of established systems, which flies in the face of what bourgeois-liberal currencies demand of, for example, politics and science [22].

<17> Book 3 showcases Swift's probabilistic approach to knowledge, but more importantly, this penultimate story of Swift's text underscores the ridiculousness and dangerousness of deterministic, zealously rational thought. The results of extracting and distilling knowledge from the material and corporeal are, at their least, laughably absurd and, at their worst, woefully destructive and inhumane. On the latter point, Swift offers an Enlightenment critique of the sort of transcendental objectivism later forwarded by Habermas.

<18> On the one hand, attempting to separate and isolate various discourses (cf. Rorty) culminates in existentially apathetic and socially uncaring information systems, and Swift finds that when taken to the extreme, theoretical practice can be a major culprit of such doomed and dooming programs (cf. Habermas). For example, even though the Laputan's "ideas are perpetually conversant in lines and figures," they "despise [practical geometry] as vulgar and mechanic" [23]. Gulliver goes on to note that the Laputans are

One consequence of disconnecting knowledge from the mundane, as the Laputans do, is existential paralysis and anguish, which keeps them "perpetually alarmed with . . . apprehensions . . . that they can neither sleep quietly in their beds, nor have any relish for the common pleasures or amusements of life" [25]. Another outcome of repressing the bodily -- the physical and even phenomenological -- are explosions of sexual desire that threaten to compromise the social integrity of the floating island [26]. Granted, the latter consequence displays undeniably misogynistic thinking, but negatively implied is the fact that phallocentric-logocentric endeavors are the actual downfall of social systems. The somewhat Rortian conclusion to be drawn from Swift's parodic interventions is key: purely intellectual endeavors effectively reach a point of diminishing returns, and once this point has been reached, the socio-cultural implications are not humorous at all.

<19> On the other hand, the application-without-qualification of philosophical principles to any and all human systems paradoxically repels human existence from conceptual models, morality, and so on. As humorous as such scenes are in chapter 5 of book 3, for example, the implications of purely applied or performative knowledge -- no matter how liberating the applications might seem -- are as foreboding as the implications of purely theoretical knowledge. This is an argument on which Habermas and Lyotard would probably agree. When Gulliver encounters a Projector at Lagado Academy who extracts energy from cucumbers to provide warmth for Balnibarbi and light for crops, Swift's underlying critique is not far from the surface of his mock-hero's words:

One would think that such an organic project would bring this Projector and his community closer to the concerns of everyday people -- that it would employ new knowledge and technologies to assist in increasing quality of life. However, Swift arrives at a key judgment, which is reiterated later by Lyotard: the drive for efficiency and performativity has rendered dead on arrival any epistemological and material gains or possibilities.

<20> The Projector's physical appearance reflects the futility of reproducing something that he could get with less explosive results by just walking out the door of the Academy. Furthermore, during the time that this Projector is trying to gather enough energy to provide warmth and light, the very natural resource he depends on for his experiment is becoming depleted, and even worse, Balnibarbi's food stores are dwindling. Much is the same for another Projector, whose "employment . . . was to reduce excrement to its original food, by separating the several parts, removing the tincture which it receives from gall, making the odour exhale, and scumming off the saliva" [28]. Indeed, these Projectors are indicative of the general state of Balnibarbi: to use Gulliver's observation, "The people in the streets walked so fast, looked wild, their eyes fixed, and were generally in rags. . . . I never knew a soil so unhappily cultivated, houses so ill contrived and so ruinous, or a people whose countenances and habit expressed so much misery and want" [29]. Paradoxically, extreme applications of performative knowledge become at least untenable and at worst self-destructive. The religion of input/output results in undermining either input or output, not to mention any vital interplay of objectivity and subjectivity.

<21> Further still, forcing concepts to equate to things -- rational logic par excellence -- creates an untenable human condition, in which knowledge and communication become slaves to themselves. Take for example the Lagadoan project "for improving speculative knowledge by practical and mechanical operations" in order to enable "the most ignorant person at a reasonable charge, and with little bodily labour, [to] write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, law, mathematics and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study" [30]. Such a project operates under the premise that knowledge can become transparent and radically transferable, a premise about which both Swift and Lyotard are suspicious. Moreover -- and this is where one glimpses an instance of Swift's interrogation of bourgeois-liberal motives -- this knowledge may be purchased at a reasonable charge: knowledge as commodity. More still, existential engagement and thinking will become elided: the exchange of unhindered, decontextualized information will subsume deliberative, messy knowledge with a more transparent and painless epistemological currency, which paradoxically reflects both the nightmare and the dream of such leftists as George Orwell (1903-1950), if not of Habermas and Rorty. This latter result is one which Swift signifies with the Lagadoan project "for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever," a project promising such an efficient transmission of epistemic materials that it would result in people carrying "about them such things [the objects themselves] as were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on" [31]. Radical streamlining of information systems composes a more cumbersome reality -- a point that Habermas seems to overlook. Thus, in every attempt to divide knowledge from existence or to use it as a means to master existence, the people of the Laputa system sooner or later confront the futility and destructiveness of their projects. Specialization is not the problem; the problem arises from the drive to end multiplicitous confluence among matter and energy, sustenance and speculation, one epistemic strand and others -- a problem that corporatized science blatantly ignores or flouts.

<22> Precisely because the physical and epistemological are implied in and dynamically engaged with one another, neither is permanently interior or exterior to the other. Thus, using the epistemological to determine the material and corporeal is a misleading and suspicious enterprise, and negatively implied in Swift's logic is that the opposite -- using the material and corporeal to master knowledge -- is suspect, too. This is a point to which Addison alludes in The Spectator, No. 519: the human "fills up the middle Space between the Animal and Intellectual Nature, the visible and invisible world" [32]. Granted, in such proclamations, Addison betrays also an imperialistic logic; however, what one might want to notice is the fact that an eighteenth-century thinker -- in the Age of Reason -- is not ready to concede that epistemology can be reduced or refined to such a degree that the process of knowledge becomes foreclosed for the purposes of mere exchange value. Addison is also not prepared to give up the idea that knowledge and existence are not mutually exclusive but are mutually inflected.

<23> Addison's and Swift's incursions into philosophical discourse represent two interconnected movements associated with the Enlightenment: 1) the moral obligation of breaking down the epistemological boundaries between the elite and the general public and 2) the resistance against simplifying to the point of mythologizing knowledge and existence. For the first movement, knowledge must not be controlled by or be used as a tool of domination by the old elites. For the second, the old mythologies that enslaved people (religion, feudalism, superstition, and so forth) should in many ways be dismantled; however, the new mythologies of reason and the like should not replicate the zealotry and tyranny of the older ones by reducing life to equations and transferability. However -- and in view of Addison's, Swift's, and later, Lyotard's analyses, one cannot stress this enough -- just as the physical and epistemological are implied in and dynamically engaged with one another, these philosophical Enlightenment movements cannot be segregated from one another; nor should they be taken as apolitical. If they are separate, though, their possible interaction should not be hindered or prohibited for the sake of consensus or transcendent subjectivity.

<24> It is at this time that one can observe current thinkers, such as Habermas and Rorty running into resistance from the very Enlightenment they wish to recuperate, as if eighteenth-century thought were any less complex and multivalent than twenty-first-century thought. Indeed, much like those whom Addison and Swift critiqued almost three hundred years ago, Habermas and Rorty and others wish to divide, determine, and save elements of eighteenth-century thinking. Rorty asserts, "There were two Enlightenment projects -- one political and one philosophical" [33]. In so doing, such philosophers desire to force instead of allow continuity between the postmodern and the Enlightenment, which often results in a conflation that neglects to honor either period. They also want to act as if politics does not affect philosophy, or philosophy politics. In effect, current liberal objectivists and subjectivists assert an epistemological vantage that is separate from and looks down on historical and material events, delineating for everyone else what means what. The condescension in such statements as the following is indicative: "Philosophers like me, the kind who get labeled 'postmodern' but do not relish the term, can imagine that human beings might some day, with a lot of luck, come to be morally grown up" [34]. Something to observe in such pronouncements is that thinkers such as Habermas and Rorty do not acknowledge the imperialistic currencies they are trading: as white, bourgeois liberals in two of the richest countries on the earth, they feel quite comfortable in partitioning thoughts and deeds while criticizing others such as Lyotard for being relativists, nihilists, and tribalists. In the segregation of discourses, a project in which Rorty and Habermas (despite his call for consensus) are apparently involved, one observes an almost automatic hierarchization of knowledge. The further implication of this is that the discourse that comes to gain mastery over the others (or consensus from others) subsumes the others, and knowledge becomes once again a story told or a currency exchanged by the elite, a story or currency that others must accept.

III. Scientific Currency

<25> Regardless of today's bourgeois-utopianists' wishes, the discursive economies of the eighteenth century are not so easily divided, as evinced by eighteenth-century philosophy and, moreover, by the integral relationship between philosophical and scientific currencies. Modern science grew out of philosophy; indeed, it is a positivist philosophy that has some of its roots in alchemy and was called Natural Philosophy during the eighteenth century and before. During that time, it would have been difficult to avoid Natural Philosophers, or scientists, studying and speaking on numerous topics: mathematics, what has come be known as biology, music, metaphysics, morality, astronomy, astrology, cartography, politics, and so on [35]. This tendency in the eighteenth century does not necessarily represent a reemergence of the Renaissance Man as much as it represents awareness of the reality that various systems intersect and inflect each other, also indicating the reality that different sorts of speculation work better in different contexts, as Addison suggests in The Spectator, No. 420: philosophical and imaginative "Contemplation" is very important for conceiving correspondences among things and ideas, but "Understanding," brought about by systematic "Speculation" or "Evidence of Demonstration," provides people with the tools to comprehend what contemplation by itself might not be able to ascertain [36]. The contemplative and the speculative thusly move together in a multifarious engagement. Such an ethos implies a tendency toward the provisional. Instead of determining everything, science allows one to engage a diversity of epistemes in a variety of ways in order to, as some deconstructionists might say, discover a truth within a given context.

<26> The use of science to dismantle and transcend existence, however, is the use of science as a tool for mastery, which is a use that Swift sharply critiques through parody in book 3 of Gulliver's Travels. The result of his critique is not the dismissal of science and the speculative thinking it entails. As Patey remarks, Swift is not "simply the Luddite antagonist of science some have imagined. Swift read widely and enjoyed lifetime friendships with many natural philosophers" [37]. Instead, Swift discursively tries to keep science from foreclosing other possibilities -- i.e., from eliminating further instances of hope: reducing ourselves to a single determinist or materialist "hope focused on perfection [which] is a nightmare from which we must be shocked awake" [38]. Even when he is laughing at the absurdities that Gulliver encounters in the Laputan system of islands, Swift negatively demonstrates the endearing qualities of scientific investigation.

<27> Swift's critical observations, therefore, should not be so quickly glossed when Gulliver expresses, for example, that the "only inconvenience" (indeed an understatement) in the Laputan system is "that none of these projects are yet brought to perfection, and in the meantime the whole country lies miserably waste, the houses in ruins, and the people without food or clothes" [39]. The key terms in this passage are "perfection" and "meantime"; arguably, the sentence that contains these terms is one of the most sophisticated commentaries Swift slyly sends through Gulliver. One could easily conclude that Swift is dismissing science, knowledge-acquisition, and so forth, but one should not neglect how many times Gulliver praises (though sometimes ironically) the theories and projects of the Laputans and Balnibarbians for being "ingenious" [40]. What Swift arguably does is demonstrate that science employed only for the end of reaching a utopia yet to come is paradoxically nothing but a means of ending any possibility of a better world: meantime is sacrificed in the name of an imagined perfection. However, one can also sense -- particularly when keeping in mind the Projectors discussed in chapter 5 of book 3 -- that future possibilities (not perfection) sacrificed in the name of the meantime promises an equally problematic end. Indeed, Swift seems extremely concerned about ends trumping means and means trumping ends. Like Lyotard, he looks toward a world in which epistemological regimes, such as those represented in currencies of science, are permitted to perpetually calibrate themselves to immediate concerns while also perpetually opening to epistemological breakthroughs. Swift's vision, as presented here, actually accords well with Addison's thoughts expressed in The Spectator, No. 420, and in fact counters the conservative optimism -- "WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT" -- asserted by such people as English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) [41].

<28> To philosophically and politically suggest such a provisional conception of the world, Swift himself embarks on an extremely complex and dynamic rhetorical journey. As Phiddian observes, Swift "plays" one discourse "off against another" and "leaves the reader strangely dislocated in the face of claims to truth and value" [42]. Such a rhetorical strategy destabilizes any attempt to arrive at perfection or an over-arching legitimation claim, as Habermas might call it [43]. If one aptly interprets Swift's multifarious rhetoric, it is when science is looking -- making -- final and grand Truths that it neglects the little questions and little answers (cf. Lyotard's petits recits) needed in the present, which are the questions and answers that move people in the present to the future. The Laputan effectively becomes Lilliputian in such instances of epistemological neglect.

<29> In at least two eighteenth-century minds, scientific knowledge is not, therefore, a reducible sort of knowledge; it is, alternatively, a process of knowing that is not divided from but interacting with other sorts of knowing. Science's goal may very well not be a utopian one; it may very well be a mode of questioning and a method of providing provisional knowledge. Instead of establishing a utopia, scientific thinking might be one portal -- one phrase regime, as defined by Lyotard -- among many through which to glimpse the possibility of something other, another or a new phrase regime.

<30> There is and should be, as Addison implies in The Spectator, Nos. 94 and 105, interplay between kinds of knowledge. In No. 94, Addison focuses primarily on the basic idea that those who are engaged with knowledge epistemologically "lengthen" or broaden their lives [44]. However, pedantic knowledge -- mere knowledge of facts, figures, and social trivia -- actually insults the knowledge indicated in No. 94 [45]and throughout Gulliver's Travels. It is in the face of such trivial knowledge that the interrelation between imaginative contemplation and systematic speculation becomes so important, for the "great deal of Knowledge, which is not capable of making Man Wise, has a natural Tendency to make him Vain and Arrogant" [46]. It is just these sorts of epistemological abuse -- vanity, arrogance, pride -- that concern both Addison and Swift.

<31> When confronted with such interpretations, Rorty in particular dismisses them as examples of postmodern nihilism, and thereby dismisses the postmodernists who arrive at such readings -- specifically, in this scientific context, those who abide by conceptions of amorphous, dynamic, non-perfectible, and libidinal knowledge. On behalf of himself and such thinkers as Habermas, Rorty dismisses those he calls "Heideggerian 'postmodernists'" -- which would include, among others, Derrida and Lithuanian born French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) -- in the name of liberating one kind of Enlightenment discourse (liberal politics) from another (rational thought) [47]. He even goes so far as to say that nothing "should be allowed to displace utopian political hope except the glimpse of an even better utopia than the one previously imagined. Dismissive attitudes toward bourgeois liberal politics persist, I think, for no better reason than force of Marxist habit" (stress added) [48]. But it is exactly the "Marxist habit" (at least demonstrated by such diverse thinkers as Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Donna Haraway, and Lyotard) [49] which has articulated that there is no transparent lineage of legitimate glimpses and that glimpses do not signal one totalizing possibility but do signal instead a proliferation of possibilities (which is at least Addison's and Swift's hope). Addison (a bourgeois-liberal Whig) and Swift (a one-time conservative Tory) were making such Marxist interventions in the century preceding the emergence of Marxist theory. Rorty conducts this critique, therefore, without even acknowledging that liberal (and leftist) politics and anti-rationalism were already extant as powerful, interlacing discursive threads during the eighteenth century: philosophy and Natural Philosophy. But if those are not enough, one more place to find liberal, sometimes anti-rational currencies is in early-modern liberals' conception of commerce.

IV. Commercial Currency

<32> If one accepts the notion that various discourses are not so easily segregated from one another, then one may allow that economics, though not a hard science in today's terms, is closely connected to philosophical and scientific currencies: faith in investments approximates metaphysics, and the circulation of trade alludes to physiology. Given how dependent -- if not religious -- the West of the twenty-first century is when it comes to commerce and capital, economics as an epistemological currency and socio-political force should not be too difficult to accept.

<33> In many eighteenth-century liberals' minds, a burgeoning credit economy and an increasingly mobile commerce promised to wrench the population of the new British empire from tyranny. Indeed, Addison's The Spectator, No. 3, provides a dreamlike vision of a female "Publick Credit" that undermines the power of real wealth, which would have been held only by the upper-middle classes and above [50]. In such a configuration, credit promotes an economy of desire, civility, and hope. Terry Mulcaire accordingly asserts that Credit as an icon represents a gigantic shift not only in economic trends but also in epistemology. Mulcaire explains that to "accept Credit's reifications as valuable in themselves is not only to compromise one's epistemological commitments to 'real' value; it is also to recognize a new concept of value and a new category of objects of value" [51]. Since Credit represented an anti-foundational sense of wealth -- an economics based on aesthetic values instead of an economics based on the truth of value [52] -- it subsequently represented a culture-wide shift as far as knowledge was concerned. Further, Credit marked a shift in what goods and services would be valued, replacing the dominant values of the gentry, aristocracy, and nobility. Ways of knowing the world, therefore, became contingent on the unleashed desires of some of the formerly oppressed, and these new ways of knowing the world often found their analogue in the purchases made by the increasingly mobile middle classes.

<34> Directly linking to this new epistemologically open economy -- if not enabling it -- was the liberal ideology of a freely circulating commercial economy. Reflecting natural, physiological processes -- the logic went -- an economy is healthiest when it is permitted to flow without hindrance. For hindrance would have been equated with tyranny. Addison's The Spectator, No. 69, is a lucid document of this physiological model mapped onto the early-modern world economy, and it negatively implies how the opposite of such a model would be tyrannical:

Addison's ecstatic celebration of heterogeneity (almost postmodern), of the free flow of humanity and its currencies, and of the practically guilt-free profits gained from such a natural dissemination and traffic definitely marks a change in a culture's economics and the economics of culture. Further, what Addison envisions as a market-driven resistance against tyranny is apparently difficult to dispute. The new economic corpus is one that seems to be extremely healthy, and this commercial body seems to have built a strong immune system to boot -- a radical self-determined subject. To the burgeoning bourgeois-liberal world, things could not be better. Nevertheless, there is perhaps a telling ambivalence in the liberal logic of the time and of today's time if one reviews Rorty's and Habermas's positions concerning a liberal utopia: How is it that an economy is unmoored from epistemological stability and tyranny when it is supposed to unwaveringly reflect healthy natural processes? The extreme volatility of "PublickCredit" (radical subjectivity) and the hyperbolic commercial body (radical objectivity) represented by the "'Change" might not be mutually exclusive; indeed, they might work in an anti-rational ethos, but the ambivalence between them and the consequences of either configuration being taken to an extreme prove to be extremely tyrannical.

<35> Swift in fact senses the antagonisms between the dual strata of bourgeois-liberal conceptions of commerce. Instead of referring to his more dogmatic and Tory responses, the current study refers instead to the Swift of Gulliver's Travels and "A Short View of the State of Ireland" [54]. When one looks to the inner-periphery of the British Empire, Ireland for example, one comes to realize how an economy not connected to local materiality and corporeality (regional resources, products, and labor) facilitates tyranny. As was the case for Irish, Scots, Africans, Native Americans, and Indians, the results were devastating for indigenous groups while exponentially profitable for English exchangers.

<36> The method England used in Ireland and Scotland was perfected when it came time for the British Empire to make its incursions into the African continent, the East, and the Americas. In the case of Ireland, along with the later cases in the outer-periphery, England had very little to lose: almost without hindrance, the Empire profited by using slave labor (a result of a long history of wars, political and religious policies, land displacements, absentee landlordism, rackrenting, and so forth), by exploiting the Irish people's natural resources (particularly wool, livestock, and produce), and by prohibiting trade rights and native pecuniary currency. Like Projectors in the Lagado Academy of Gulliver's Travels who exploited resources for either purely theoretical or purely applied knowledge, the exchangers exploited the resources and livelihoods of others for purely speculative or self-gaining commerce. All that occurred freely at the Royal Exchange in London, which supposedly flouted tyranny, depended on the enslavement, displacement, and destitution of others.

<37> Speaking to his fellow Irish, Swift responds to this predicament with ironic understatement, "our Misfortune is not altogether owing to our own Fault, but to a Million of Discouragements" [55]. In a more scathing tone, Swift continues by pointing directly to the cause of destitution in a "Country [Ireland] so favoured by Nature as ours, both in Fruitfulness of Soil, and Temperature of Climate," enumerating the effects of imperialism: "There is not one Argument used to prove the Riches of Ireland, which is not a logical Demonstration of its Poverty" [56]. Swift cogently uncovers how the imperial elite can, in the same move, observe prosperity elsewhere and relocate that prosperity from its material and cultural locales into an anti-foundational economy. Thus, when bringing into relation such burgeoning forces as a new credit economy with the realities of those on the inner- and outer-peripheries of the Empire, Addison's enraptured visions become less liberating. And when linked to the current activities conducted in the name of globalization by primarily Western nations that monopolize information and technology, the utopian notions of communicative reason espoused by Habermas and bourgeois-liberal emancipation espoused by Rorty also become less liberating.

<38> Further, the idealized notion of human physiology mapped onto commercial economies skewed things in bourgeois liberals' and, by extension, the Empire's favor. The equation of healthy human physiology to healthy economies reflected Calvinist ideologies, assumes Natural Law, inflects and is inflected by racist and sexist discourses, and ultimately applies a normative view of success founded on bourgeois standards -- efficiency, productivity, performativity. As David Porter observes, the liberal ideologies behind commercial trade -- however radical they might have seemed -- were underpinned by the concept of natural law and imperial interests [57]. For instance, as optimistic and humanitarian as Addison's ecstatic proclamations might seem in such texts as The Spectator, No. 69, there is always entailed a Western cultural bias and economic self-interest. The British view accordingly evidenced "an unshakeable and universalizing conviction that trade was the lifeblood of a prosperous society, and that, in turn, the free circulation of goods and capital was the lifeblood of trade" (stress added) [58]. If, however, another society did not see trade and cultural exchange exactly the way the English did, then that society would suffer economic condemnation and ultimately racist critique, which many nations, including Ireland, most definitely suffered.

<39> To the English, Irish people's Celtic ethnicity, their Catholic faith, their tightly woven kinship ties, their Hiberno-English dialects and/or Gaelic language, and so forth represented impediments to free-flowing trade and civilized society. In a physiological idiom, their non-occidental characteristics signified a potential clot in the Empire's circulatory system; therefore, the Irish themselves had to be bypassed while Irish resources had to be removed -- in as sterile a procedure as possible -- from the location of malignancy. As noted, this procedure was conducted by continuously fragmenting the material and cultural realities of Ireland.

<40> Interrogations of dominant laissez-faire liberalism in its physiological configuration, such as in Gulliver's scatologically charged observations for instance, can provide a rhetorical position from which to uncover the deep antagonisms in that economic and political ideology. Arguably for both present and the eighteenth centuries, it is apparent that commercial currencies are informed by philosophical and scientific currencies and that they significantly influence political currencies: as discussed, bourgeois-liberal commerce is justified by and provides the impetus for liberation and/or imperial tyranny -- radical subjectivity.

<41> It is with the particular equation of physiological systems and economics in mind that one might read the first paragraphs of chapter 6 in book 3 of Gulliver's Travels: according to Gulliver, all "writers and reasoners [of Lagado] have agreed, that there is a strict universal resemblance between the natural and the political body; can there be anything more evident, than that the health of both must be preserved, and the diseases cured by the same prescriptions?" [59] Gulliver continues to explain how doctors are charged to prescribe drugs to and remove portions of the brain from politicians [60]. As discussed earlier, when concentrating on the interlaced currencies of philosophy and science, Swift is undeniably mocking the very notion of equating different systems -- one physiological, the other political and economic. First, he boldly begs the question through the question posed by the Academy's "writers and reasoners," one of whom is probably the Projector attempting to extract food from excrement. Second, he shows the absurdity of using the medical practices employed in treating biological pathologies as means for treating socio-political problems, which would definitely include economic policies and practices.

<42> There is a great difference, if one follows Swift's logic and continues the logic of the current study, between the conflation of currencies and the confluence of currencies. As the Addison of The Spectator, No. 3, and Mulcaire so rightly point out in their understanding of credit economies, money does not equal the "thing" itself. This opinion undermines, as does Swift's critique, the notion that human biological processes and human social, political, and economic processes are equivalent: interconnected, yes; equivalent, no. Addison's celebration of a credit economy, nevertheless, neglects the fact that bodies are directly and often detrimentally affected by an economic system that is based only in the abstract, the conceptual, the philosophical. The problems presented by both currencies of bourgeois-liberal commerce bring back to mind the concerns Swift expresses when confronting extreme philosophical and scientific currencies.

<43> The important point to grasp here is that the commercial economic principles of the eighteenth century -- interplaying with philosophical and scientific principles -- entailed both emancipation and tyranny. Not the same as the Enlightenment world, though informed by it, the postmodern world observes its own ambivalence: interlaced postmodern currencies of information, technology, and economics provide for a multitude of freedoms and for the possibility of totalitarianism. Unquestioned systems can become destructive ones. The racist and classist exploits of the imperial British and, later, the imperial Americans buttress this point. Indeed, whoever has total access to these interconnected currencies does not see tyranny; however, whoever does not have total access sees only indebtedness, regulation, silence. Despite liberal interpretations, the notion of progress entailed in the logic of bourgeois economics -- a transparent, linear movement toward perfection or, as Rorty terms it, utopia -- is not necessarily healthy or progressive at all. Whether based in Habermasian objectivity or Rortian subjectivity, radically optimistic views of human progress elide the hopefulness and possibility of human imperfection, to follow a Lyotardian line of thought: because of its incompleteness, the human resists linearity, transparency, and thus foreclosure. Taken out of bourgeois-liberal ideologies, which have a penchant for transcendental systems, the interaction of anti-foundational and material currencies is no longer contradictory, for it is no longer the slave to a monolithic view of perfectible systems -- the bourgeois-liberal religion of self-fulfilling and self-evident progress.

V. Currency of Globalization and the Left

<44> The knowledge gained from studying the epistemological currencies of the eighteenth century -- philosophy, science, and economics -- can be and should be used as a portal through which to study a phenomenon that is popularly thought to be unique to the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries: globalization. Some liberal thinkers view globalization as a huge step toward a liberating, communitarian utopia. National barriers have been destabilized; interaction among cultures has increased; information and economic exchange has proliferated and is well on its way to maximum performativity. These effects, particularly the former two, are not essentially bad things; indeed, they provide glimpses of hope. However, when they begin to be absorbed or directed by an ideology that wishes to systematize and master them, then there is trouble. The implications of unchecked bourgeois liberalism emerge.

<45> Even though it is sometimes now called conservative, the liberal rhetoric has not, however, altered much since the eighteenth-century, and it fails to address now as it failed to address then the very non-liberational underpinnings and real human effects of dominant currencies -- whether philosophical, scientific, or economic. In view of this, one can observe that globalization is far from a mutual exchange and is at best a symbiotic relationship: globalization is profitable primarily to the globalizer and is rarely so for the globalized.

<46> As uncovered by bringing into critical relation Addison's and Swift's texts, unquestioned bourgeois liberalism and its uses of knowledge contributed in large part to the terrors of British imperialism and is contributing to the terrors of postmodern imperialism: a more common appellation is twentieth- and twenty-first-century globalization. Indeed, such postmodern thinkers as Zygmunt Bauman understand globalization in terms remarkably similar to the terms used by those who confronted imperialism in the eighteenth century: "The centres of meaning-and-value production are today extraterritorial and emancipated from local constraints -- this does not apply, though, to the human condition which such values and meanings are to inform and make sense of" [61]. For any empire, the refinement and increased performativity of currency transfer systems definitely means liberation; for those on the various peripheries of any empire, the situation is much different. Therefore, when Habermas, Rorty, and friends look for a specific Enlightenment political program, which is most assuredly a bourgeois-liberal program, then exploitative globalization is what will be found.

<47> Such liberals have very little to bemoan since their version of epistemological and material politics predominates. As a bourgeois liberal himself, however, Addison at least qualified his bourgeois overextensions with cultural and epistemological questions; one can find such instances throughout his articles in The Spectator. Despite some of its leftist rhetoric, however, postmodern liberalism strikes in one motion the pose of Ancient Tory provincialism and Modern Whig imperialism, whereas today's left employs (or should employ) critical approaches more like those of such thinkers as the Swift of Gulliver's Travels and the Irish writings, and the less celebratory and more contemplative Addison. This does not mean that old methods will work for the left, but it does mean that the left should at least move into multiple and publiclines of political, philosophical, and scientific discourse -- reflecting the radicalized intellectual and political notions of discursivity to which Lyotard refers in the once seemingly dated The Postmodern Condition, as well as throughout his later work. Such a move would indeed demonstrate postmodernism's filial connection to the eighteenth century, a relationship too often overlooked by those who are more interested in owning the Enlightenment (or weaving "together in a continuous narrative" its diverse currencies) [62] and rising above engagement than they are in discursively interacting on multiple levels in the present.

<48> With necessary contextual adjustments that reflect current cultural and material realities, the preceding characterizations of today's bourgeois liberals and leftists indicate a political and historical environment that is as complicated, as irreducible, and as rich as the Enlightenment's environment. This point must not be glossed over by any, whether by postmodern liberals or by the postmodern leftists they dismiss. Indeed, it is useful here to keep in mind that Swift and Addison -- regardless of their strong political and philosophical differences -- did not carelessly dismiss each other. They could not afford to. Neither can political, philosophical, and scientific minds do so today. This is particularly so when they must confront the fact that twenty-first century Anglo-American imperialism threatens to foreclose the possibilities embedded in postmodern currencies, and particularly so in view of the apparent fact that these currencies have been "tribalized" (deterministically segregated) without any real intention of actually allowing them to interact in any meaningful way.

<49> Even though they are more than likely well-meaning, the liberal communitarians -- such as Rorty and Habermas -- have effectively ruled out discussions (epistemological currencies) that do not fulfill or satisfy the dominant discursive warrant (as the rhetorician Stephen Toulmin would call it) designated by the liberal global elite. The left, on the other hand, has managed to nearly forfeit its effectiveness because it has not adequately (dis)engaged the bourgeois liberal currencies of progress. Leftists sometimes sound more like eighteenth-century Luddite conservatives, particularly when one reads their sometimes reactionary and unsophisticated anti-technological rhetoric [63]. Leftists seem to sometimes confuse demonstrations, as indispensable as they are, with revolution, thereby paradoxically reinforcing the dominant discourses: the WTO demonstrations in Seattle, Washington (2000); the IMF and World Bank protests in Washington, DC (2000); and the WSF protests in Porto Alegre, Brazil (2002) open the possibility of discourse, but they cannot by themselves adequately present sustained critique of and engagement with the power structures they protest. If protests are left to stand on their own, the global elite will absorb and possibly even exploit the impetus of protestors. Mass demonstrations must be followed with the kind of critique and engagement that enables more people, on an everyday basis, to become aware of their stakes in and the effects of globalization.

<50> Furthermore, merely dismissing liberal currencies will not do, as Swift demonstrated from the political right so long ago; instead, the left must use the links and antagonisms in the dominant liberal currencies (exchanged alike by American Democrat and Republican, British Labour and Conservative) as portals through which to glimpse other possibilities, but glimpsing alone will not fulfill any political or moral obligation. Doing away with its own self-righteous and elitist tendencies, the left must present the possibilities of information, of science, of economics -- of knowledge -- to the metropole and the periphery. Grandstanding and obfuscating are sometimes useful tools, but they should not be taken as self-evident or be conceived of as ends in themselves. This latter point is one on which Habermas, Rorty, and Lyotard can partially agree. Opening up discourse means appreciating and contextualizing for others discursivity, epistemology, and politics. Until the left takes it upon itself to open portals and redistribute currencies, as Addison and Swift did, it will flounder at the water's edge.

Notes

[1] I must acknowledge Keith A. Sandiford at Louisiana State University for his generosity: our conversations, his encouragement, and his critical comments all have contributed greatly to my thinking on this topic. Sandiford's own work on eighteenth-century discourses surrounding imperialism and colonialism, particularly those related to sugar production and trade, helped to inspire the current study. For more, please see Keith A. Sandiford, The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Sugar (Cambridge UK and New York: Cambridge UP, 2000). Moreover, my work here would not have been possible without Amy J. Elias at the University of Tennessee, who has during the last few years helped me form my own thinking about the postmodern, and it would not have been possible without Lila Miranda Graves at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, with whom I have shared many lively exchanges concerning the Enlightenment. [^]

[2] The current study focuses directly on the eighteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, which reflects the fact that philosophers Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, and Jean-Franˆßois Lyotard concentrate on the link between modernity, postmodernity, and the Enlightenment. The nineteenth century is notably a pregnant absence. This, however, should not be considered a slight against one of the most important centuries in modern history. Indeed, the twentieth-century events that help to spur this discussion are the culmination of the nineteenth century's engagement with the Enlightenment, as indicated by the political, economic, colonial, imperial, and scientific occurrences right before and during Victoria's reign. Moreover, Marx, Darwin, Freud, and others are indispensable in modern and postmodern thinking. The author keeps these facts in mind while focusing on a dialogue between eighteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century discourses. [^]

[3] The words "portal" and "currency" appear in the title and subtitle and throughout the paper. Portal is used as an indicator of a historical-materialist comprehension of eighteenth-century discourses. One should not invoke the past to impose it on the present or future; instead, one reads the present and future with the illuminations (the lightning-like glimpses) that, in this case, the eighteenth century might provide, thereby also illuminating the eighteenth century from a twenty-first-century perspective. The past is not solid ground to stand on but is a lens, or portal, to see through. One may use currency because it is internally dissonant. Etymologically, currency is derived from current: this implies both a flow of something, such as words in a discourse, and a temporal period that is occurring in the present. The term's meaning in commercial language is both affirmed and undermined by its own ambivalence: currency is supposed to determine the value of products and services, but in its movement through time, it proves to be quite unstable in itself. Currency's ambivalence makes currency valuable when considering discourses, which are continuously unpredictable, and which are both material and conceptual. Thus, in studying the relations between epistemologies of the eighteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, the use of portals and the reassessment of currencies seem apt. [^]

[4] German Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin's (1892-1940) The Arcades Project, along with such texts as "Theses on the Philosophy of History," models the historical materialist approach, which I borrow from in this study. For more, please consult Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap, 1999), and also see Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken, 1968) 253-264. [^]

[5] It is helpful to view this in terms of Antonio Gramsci's notion of "common sense," which is intrinsically neither "bad sense" or "good sense" but has the potential of being either.  See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, eds. David Forgacs and G. Nowell-Smith (Cambridge UK: Cambridge UP, 1984) 420-421. [^]

[6] In a reading of science in Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Douglas Lane Patey delineates different conceptions of epistemological methodologies, particularly determinism and, as it was called, "probablism." See Douglas Lane Patey, "Swift's Satire on 'Science' and the Structure of Gulliver's Travels," ELH 58.4 (1991): 809-839. [^]

[7] Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (London and New York: Routledge, 1995) 127. [^]

[8] Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1975) 196. [^]

[9] Bertens, 142. [^]

[10] Jean-Franˆßois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984). [^]

[11] "The State and/or company must abandon the idealist and humanist narratives of legitimation in order to justify the new goal: in the discourse of today's financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power" (Lyotard 46). [^]

[12] Bertens 127. [^]

[13] Lyotard 60. [^]

[14] Lyotard 66. [^]

[15] Lyotard 63. [^]

[16] Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. G. Gregory Smith, vol. 4 (London: Dent, 1907) 38-39. [^]

[17] Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, eds. Peter Dixon and John Chalker (New York: Penguin, 1967). [^]

[18] Jacques Derrida (1930- ), French philosopher. [^]

[19] Stephen J. Gould (1941-2002), American paleontologist. [^]

[20] Patey 824. [^]

[21] The reference here is to Jean-Franˆßois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele, (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988). [^]

[22] The American physicist Alan Sokal (1955- ) fiercely parodies and thus satirizes the effects of postmodern thinking on science, which demonstrates the dramatic antipathy held by some major scientists against postmodern thinkers and analyses. For more, consult Alan Sokal, "Revelation: A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies," The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2000), 49-53. [^]

[23] Swift 205. [^]

[24] Swift 205-206. [^]

[25] Swift 207. [^]

[26] "But the vexation is, that they [some of the women of Laputa and their lovers from the island below] act with too much security, for the husband is always so wrapped in speculation, that the mistress and lover may proceed to the greatest familiarities before his face, if he be but provided with paper and implements, and without his flapper at his side" (Swift 207-208). [^]

[27] Swift 223-224. [^]

[28] Swift 224. [^]

[29] Swift 219. [^]

[30] Swift 227. [^]

[31] Swift 230. [^]

[32] Addison, vol. 4, 170. [^]

[33] Richard Rorty, "The Continuity Between the Enlightenment and 'Postmodernism'," What's Left of the Enlightenment: A Postmodern Question, eds. Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001) 19. [^]

[34] Rorty 25. [^]

[35] Despite pressures to the contrary, there are also examples of twentieth-century intellectuals who engage in multiple discourses. Until his recent death, it was not uncommon to have scientist Stephen J. Gould speak out against the politics of race. Nor is it uncommon to see literature scholar Edward Said (1935- ) confront U.S. foreign policies in the Middle East, nor to see linguist Noam Chomsky (1928- ) or historian Howard Zinn (1922- ) engage seriously in U.S. political discussions. [^]

[36] Addison, vol. 3, 88-89. [^]

[37] Patey 814. [^]

[38] Robert Phiddian, "A Hopeless Project: Gulliver Inside the Language of Science in Book III," Eighteenth-Century Life 22.1 (1998): 56. [^]

[39] Swift 222. [^]

[40] Swift 224. [^]

[41] Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969) 157. [^]

[42] Phiddian 60. [^]

[43]Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1975). [^]

[44] Addison, vol. 1, 50. [^]

[45] Addison, vol. 1, 86-89. [^]

[46] Addison, vol. 1, 89. [^]

[47] Rorty 20-21. [^]

[48] Rorty 21. Rorty's use of "imagined" here is telling when considered in the light of what Addison has to say in The Spectator, No. 420, about privileging imaginative contemplation over systematic speculation. Also, it appears that Rorty is aware of some agreed-upon vision of utopia. In such instances, when he effectively dismisses heterogeneity, it is not clear how committed the American philosopher is to his own call for greater subjective self-determination. [^]

[49] Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), German philsopher. Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), German-American philsopher. Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), Italian philosopher and political leader. Donna Haraway (1944- ), American philosopher. [^]

[50] I saw towards the upper end of the Hall, a beautiful Virgin seated on a Throne of Gold. Here Name (as they told me) was Publick Credit. . . . [She was] subject to such Momentary Consumptions, that in the twinkling of an Eye she would fall away from the most florid Complexion, and the most healthful State of Body, and wither into a Skeleton. Her Recoveries were often as sudden as her decays, insomuch that she would revive in a Moment out of a wasting Distemper, into a Habit of the highest Health and Vigour. [. . .] What then must have been her condition when she saw [Tyranny and Anarchy, Bigotry and Atheism, the Genius of the Common-Wealth, and a young warrior]? She fainted and dyed away at the Sight. [. . .] There was as great a Change in the Hill of Mony Bags, and the Heaps of Mony, the former shrinking, and falling into so many empty Bags, that I now found not above a tenth part of them had been filled with Mony. [. . .] At [the entrance of Liberty and Monarchy, Moderation and Religion, and the Genius of Great Britain] the Lady revived, the Bags swell'd to their former Bulk. . . . (Addison, vol. 1, 13-15) [^]

[51] Terry Mulcaire, "Public Credit; or, the Feminization of Virtue in the Marketplace," PMLA 114.5 (1999): 1033. [^]

[52] Mulcaire 1030. [^]

[53]Addison, vol. 1, 261-263. [^]

[54] Jonathan Swift, "A Short View of the State of Ireland," The Writings of Jonathan Swift: Authorized Texts, Backgrounds, Criticism, eds. Robert A. Greenberg and William Bowman Piper (New York: Norton, 1973) 496-502. [^]

[55] Swift, "A Short View," 498. [^]

[56] Swift, "A Short View," 500-501. [^]

[57] David Porter, "A Peculiar but Uninteresting Nation: China and the Discourse of Commerce in Eighteenth-Century England," Eighteenth-Century Studies 33.2 (2000): 181-199. [^]

[58] Porter 181. [^]

[59] Swift, Gulliver's Travels, 232. [^]

[60] Swift, Gulliver's Travels, 233-234. [^]

[61] Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia UP, 1988) 3. [^]

[62] Rorty 25. [^]

[63] Susan Martinuk, for instance, dismisses on its face biotechnology. In a 24 May 2002 NationalPost (Canada) article, for example, Martinuk asserts in the first line, "A key problem with therapeutic cloning is that what is 'real' is often overshadowed by hope and by hype." She concludes, "Promoting embryonic stem cell research as the panacea for mankind makes a good story, but so far that's all it is. There's nothing miraculous about it." Such a neophobic antitechnological tack is not unlike that employed by the political far right. Furthermore, in view of the discussion above, such approaches are far from new. See Susan Martinuk, "Stem Cell Ethics May Yet Be Saved," National Post 24 May 2002: A18. [^]