The Citizen of the World

Abstract

Let us consider the notion of ‘experimentality’ prior to the professionalization of Science and against the backdrop of a particular visual apparatus of the nineteenth century. It is often in the realm of literary fiction that relevant social truths, political attitudes and scientific dramas unfold. Writing was a more holistic field before the systematic codification of information fields had begun to seek out a radical divide between the humanities and ‘pure’ science. The key to experimentation as a social enterprise could be said to lie in oppositional models of thought, which captured the imagination of artists, imperial administrators, merchants and explorers alike, as they determined the course of Western modernity at the roaming intersections of empirical and rational experience. While living ‘outside’ of familiar grounds to surrender unto swarming oceans, people and pluralistic culture, knowledge-gathering in Europe became mobilized within the reach of industrial prowess, missionary zeal and the continuum of Empire. Several remarkable figures of this era may be understood to perform as ‘a proliferation of hybrids’1 as their fragmented lives were antithetical to those who eventually became official guardians of disciplinary regimes and the emblematic association between the state and science as a corporation. ‘The English seem as silent as the Japanese, yet vainer than the inhabitants of Siam. Upon my arrival, I attributed that reserve to modesty, which I now find has its origin in pride.’ Letter IV ‘To The Same’ from ‘Chinese Letters’ (1760–61) The Letters From A Citizen of the World, To His Friends In The East by Anglo-Irish poet, playwright, and essayist Oliver Goldsmith (1730–1774) first appeared under the title ‘Chinese Letters’ in The Public Ledger — a reputable British journal on agro-industry, trade, political commentary, and literature. These letters presented a fictitious travelogue ‘penned’ by Chinese philosopher-traveller Lien Chi Altangi. In them the author developed a character portrait rich in social commentary as well as a literary account on the terrain of cultural life and mannerisms, the question of slavery, and the political condition of England and her neighbors in the mid-eighteenth century. Altangi’s letters were entirely fashioned by Goldsmith himself — who never set foot outside Europe — and thus belong to the genre of epistolary fiction.2 Himself an ambiguous figure, Goldsmith grew up in rural Ireland and later travelled across Europe on foot.3 He then ended up in London, where he gained acclaim as a prolific writer with a penchant for gambling. The author’s position as an ‘outsider’ in British society was inextricably folded into the character traits of his travelling protagonist, Altangi. Expressing the familiar in unfamiliar terms, Goldsmith crafted a selfconscious historiography that doubled as a satirical take on his milieu as well as a lexicon of exaggerated ‘likenesses’ and difference between the West and the Far East. Letters From A Citizen of the World may be interpreted as a ‘stereoscopic’ endeavor as it suggests a continuity between two dialectical forms: the traveller and the author. Put simply, stereoscopy is a technique in which two separate images, when viewed through an optical instrument, visually merge in such a way so as to suggest a sense of dimensionality and solidity. While photography sought to document external ‘truth’ as a flat image, the stereoscope, whose origins precede the daguerreotype,4 made it possible to capture the elusive depth of images. In so doing, it advanced an argument for a ‘binocular’ vision that bestows the viewer