Representational practices in eighteenth-century London : a prolegomenon to historiography of the Enlightenment

Abstract

Rather than focusing on the long or wide eighteenth century to explore the operations of the Industrial Revolution and of the Enlightenment, Kobialka's research draws attention to fragments — the events and the representational practices — which register the process of their detachment from the operations of mercantile culture and their becoming subordinated to an act of public/academic thought. This act of abstracting, when given a concrete shape, remains visible to us today as an architectural style, a playtext, or a pamphlet.

And to be more precise, in order to re-open a discussion on the Enlightenment in the twenty-first century, Kobialka's project points to the process of abstracting cultural and societal norms by the operations of the emergent capitalism of the Industrial Revolution; to the constraints of what can be enunciated about the self’s contingent existence in print, in public, or on stage and, inevitably, in the archive; as well as to the national embodiment of these norms in England.