New Media, Nonesuch: A Response to Matt Cohen

Abstract

New Media, NonesuchA Response to Matt Cohen Joseph Tabbi (bio) In challenging “the assumption that textuality is the one underlying constant of what we do,” Matt Cohen in some ways transports Roger Williams’s 1652 critique of the singular, favored nation from the realm of politics to “the material conditions of representation.” Specifically, the preferred location of New England among other nations resonates in the essay with the location of textual discourse among nontextual media. Williams, in denying the exceptional and favored status of nations, may have benefited from what was exceptional and favored about print: its consistency with spoken discourse (books and sermons both use words, and so do private individuals when we stop to reflect); its ability, also like a sermon, to fix attention long enough to intervene in a reader’s daily, utilitarian activity and create a social conscience; its assertion of meaning against the noise of culture; and its capacity to appear in consistent editions both in England and (eventually) in the colonies, where Williams’s tract was banned initially. In no small part it was the unique, temporally extended, and cognitively insulated power of print that allowed Williams and later advocates for the separation of church and state to prevail. This has been a lasting secular achievement, even if the Bible was, as Cohen points out, the one book among all others that was capable of concentrating the attention of many individuals toward a consensual, radical “disjunction with the past that allowed new paths to the future.” American studies claims to be at a similar disjunction today, as we move self-consciously toward “global systems” and a more internationalist stance. Why, then, are we so intent on demoting print among other media, with its proven powers of effecting radical change in thought as a precondition to collective action? “[E]arly Americanists,” Cohen writes, “are asking us to rethink our archives and our evidence, as we try to bridge cultures and polities.” But in doing so, by rejecting textual media as “a fulcrum . . . for debate,” do we not risk losing [End Page 295] the very means of temporal continuity and cognitive coherence that the print medium can offer, alone among others? I could not respond, in kind, to Cohen’s argument using gestures, sounds, images, and computations. Neither, I expect, could Cohen have isolated the power of print in the formation of a secular state without first framing his thoughts in a textual form. So, how are we to take the current political implications of the revisionary scholarship that Cohen here summarizes and apparently promotes? Cathy Davidson may have demonstrated an interweaving of “the political world and the imaginative life of fiction,” but the former, political world is unrecognizable as a world without the distancing effect that readers achieve simply by focusing attention on words gathered between covers and narratives that develop without interruption from events as they occur in actuality, in the lifeworld. The work of fiction, like politics, is work made mostly of words and capable of representing, not directly enacting, events. But the key difference is that words in print fiction are never directed at readers with an expectation of immediate response; and the events represented in a novel or story are directed by the exercise of narrative imagination, not by direct participation in, or subjection to, events. Where imaginative literature and politics do combine productively, the convergence is more likely to be in the sense given by Michael Warner in his Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (1990). But in Warner’s Habermasian framework, we find not a conflation of the literary and political imagination, and not a globalism that will be sped along by new media, but rather an extended period of co-development that could be nearing its end with the eclipse of print. A national consensus and a “notion of limited participatory governance” may have been achieved through “new imaginations of the reach of print and new forms of public discourse,” as Cohen says in paraphrase of Warner. But consensus is consolidated only in the minds of an individual seeker, characterized as “deep-feeling, but constitutively insecure.” The persistence of print...