Why I Do Not Speak Early Modern

Abstract

Why I Do Not Speak Early Modern Madhavi Menon (bio) In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault famously notes that "the 'Enlightenment,' which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines." His book is about the panopticization of the world in which power is everywhere and nowhere at once, and in which "visibility is a trap." But it is also an argument about the nexus of power and knowledge, in which the generation of power is realized through an endless production of knowledge. Thus we go to universities and collect degrees in order to become productive citizens of the world. The less useful our degrees become, the less we are rewarded for pursuing them until finally unemployment looms. Foucault's point is that the production of knowledge is never an innocent project—rather, it works hand-in-glove with the imperative to produce, and re-produce, social institutions. This is why there are more and less envied subjects and jobs—because some further the military-industrial complex, or late capitalism, to a greater degree than others. My question here is why even those of us who should and do know better reinforce state-sanctioned oppressive structures through our scholarship? Why have we internalized the compulsions of productivity to such an extent that we measure our worth in it? In the absence of monetary productivity, we fetishize the scholarly kind in which the more books and articles we publish, the more we are worth. And even worse, this urge to be productive is based on the active dissemination of division and difference. Thus the model for the liberal arts is one in which the embrace of the imperative to divide is followed by the seemingly large-hearted attempt to undo those divisions. We separate literature from physics, because we believe in the division of subjects. And then we encourage the breaking down of those divisions by promoting research across subjects. Both multiculturalism and interdisciplinarity, for instance [End Page 161] (there are others), are versions of what Foucault diagnosed as the workings of power-knowledge. They both insist on rigid separations to further the project of generating knowledge—different cultures, ethnicities, and races in the one case, and different subjects and objects of study in the other—before benevolently herding together the people and things that have already been separated. Both multiculturalism and interdisciplinarity insist that you state your true affiliation before being allowed to go off in pursuit of subjects that have been deemed different from yours. Division and difference—these are the two ways in which the panopticon proposes architecturally what society takes on in general. In Jeremy Bentham's structure, the prisoners are all separated from one another, and the difference between the inmates and the inspector is clearly demarcated. These two ploys—so simple, really—are sufficient to keep an entire people in check. They contain within them the entire apparatus of disciplines masquerading as liberties, teleology passing as progress, and particularity refusing universality. An investment in difference allows us to feel like we are confronting and defeating the specter of Enlightenment universalism, while division permits us to claim the moral high ground of rigorous knowledge. (I am using the Enlightenment as an example because it is what Foucault uses, not because I want to subscribe to its being a separate and separable period during which people suddenly started speaking about Reason. Indeed, perhaps contrary to Foucault, I am using the Enlightenment here as a term from the history of ideas that denotes an instance according maximum importance to Reason, no matter in what epoch, rather than as a period of teleological history.) No matter how little or how much we may like it, our belief in the "early modern" bears the mark of every one of these Benthamite reforms. It insists on dividing history into periods, and then tries to join two historical periods together. Thus the "early modern" is a teleological term that presages the advent of modernity. It satisfies our cravings for scholarly rigor by chopping up history into bite-sized pieces and then inviting a connection between two periods that have already been separated from one another. The early modern also caters to the idea of...