Undoing the âDark Agesâ
I have always envisioned Petrarch rushingâwhether furiously home to pen a familiar letter to Cicero or from some remote monastery to Boccaccioâs residence, in order to confer about his latest classical find. Wherever Petrarch is heading, it is always, in my mindâs eye, with an urgency spurred by his conviction in humanism and his eagerness to illuminate, through study of the ancients, the âDark Agesâ in which he envisaged himself living.
It was the past spurring Petrarch to look optimistically toward the futureâor, so we might glean, based on his unfinished epic Africa (1338): â[A] more propitious age will come again: this Lethean stupor surely canât endure forever. Our posterity, perchance, when the dark clouds are lifted, may enjoy more the radiance the ancients knewâ (IX.637â641).1 One could argue his vision was eventually realized, given Marsilio Ficinoâs capacity in 1492 to extol his own century, which âlike a golden age, has restored to light the liberal arts, which were almost extinct.â2 In England, Robert Whittinton would contend that, by the early sixteenth century, âtrue knowledge of lernyng that long tym be hydde in profounde derknes by dylygence of men in this tyme is nowe brought to open lyght.â3
Of course, when Petrarch undertook his mission to cast off the shadow of those putatively dark ages, his Renaissance world (as distinct, say, from that of Michel de Montaigne or Miguel de Cervantesâor even Whittinton ) was, in many respects, more in keeping with that of the ancients. For, three technologies that were to transform the early modern western European worldâthe printing press, gunpowder , and the magnetic compassâwere still in their infancy or not yet invented.4 It would not be until the long sixteenth century, the very period with which this project deals, that these technologies would lead to three revolutions: in communication, warfare , and navigation. While premature for me to posit any claims at this juncture, let me at least put forth an enticing question: Given the radical transformations facilitated by print, powder, and compass, how could the cultural movement of the Renaissance, and humanism more particularly, not be deeply affected and unavoidably ârewrittenâ?
By no means have I selected these technologies5 indiscriminately. The instruments comprising this triptych are the very ones Francis Bacon foregrounded for their radical leverage. While philosophers before Bacon had argued something similar,6 it is his proclamation in the New Organon (1620) that has, in the English context certainly, withstood the test of time: âFor these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world; ⊠no empire, no sect, no star seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.â7 Baconâs anti-humanist position regarding print , powder, and compass (not to mention, his deific aggrandizing of European man, with unsettling shades of the colonialism to come) pivots on the dissimilarity between the life of men âin the most civilized province of Europe, and [those] in the wildest and most barbarous districts of New Indiaâ; and it does so in order âto justify the saying that âman is a god to man,â not only in regard to aid and benefit, but also by a comparison of condition. And this difference comes not from soil, not from climate, not from race, but from the arts.â8 For Bacon, possession of the mechanical arts of print , powder, and compassâconspicuously absent and unknown to the ancientsâwas also what set early modern man apart, and hierarchically above, his putatively superior antecedents.
But how to get from Petrarchâs enthusiasm for dispelling the darkness of his present via the classical past to this latter teleological emphasis on exceeding the past? Surely along the way these drives must have crashed, sometimes painfully, sometimes dynamically, into one another. Indeed, as Frank Lestringant describes with respect to Renaissance cosmography, it was from the oft-jarring dissonance between classical notions of a universally harmonious world and cracks that âwere appearing all over the ancient representation of the cosmosâ that cosmography gained its mobility and dynamism.9 Imagine thereby the difficultyâthe potential confusion and responsibilityâthat went hand in hand with any attempt to reflect on the altering cosmos or to situate oneself within it. Did one attitudinally invent or abstain from inventing?10 Did one challenge or hide? Reject or embrace? And what when the interpreter was himself a humanist, who tended thereby to be attitudinally deferent toward persons of authority?11 Here, then, lies the purpose of this project: to place literary culture more firmly back into the context of these emergent technologies; to see how that culture adjusted, how it was adjudicated, and, evenâborrowing here from the poetic lexicon of John Donneâhow it inter-animated12 with these technologies to produce new ways of seeing, of knowing, and of being in the world.
Technécology as Methodological Approach
Quite before the advent of media theorists, modern philosophers were tracing technologyâs sway on humankind. Karl Marx, for one, considered technology to be an extension of human forces,13 and Sigmund Freud more daringly asserted that all technologies, everything from writing to the car engine, removed limits that enabled man to make himself something of a prosthetic god.14 The jump to Marshall McLuhanâs contention that media technologies operate as extensions of man is not hard to spot. McLuhan maintained that, with each new communication invention, an entirely new environment was createdâin fact, media were environments , he urged, emphasizing particularly the impact electronic media had on sensory perception and social conditions.15 The implication hereâfully extendable to non-communication technologies, I would argueâis that the relationship of any subject to its object, including the possibility of separating the two, is hardly strict, stable, or even viable. Or, if we prefer the words of a more recent philosopher of technology, âMediation does not simply take place between a subject and an object, but rather coshapes subjectivity and objectivity.â16 As the theoretical underpinning of what follows subscribes to this shift-shaping relationship between instruments and the humans who wield them, I have elected not to address until the final chapter the issue of technological determinism (always worrisomely attributable to any project foregrounding technologies). My preference is for readers to experience how I negotiate the inter-animation between thing and individual, or between thing and society, before adducing where, or whether, this project fits into a scheme of instrumental causation.
Like Peter-Paul Verbeek, the theorist whom I quoted above, I eschew a polemicistâs approach to technology, the sort woefully anchored in restricting binaries of âgoodâ or âbadâ and frequent in more mass publications on the subject. I am also similarly interested in making space for the more capaciously philosophical, phenomenological , and even metaphysical when it comes to relations to, and the ramifications of, technologyâbut always, cruciall...