Print, Chaos, and Complexity : Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Media Culture [1 ed.] 9781936249503, 9780874130324

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Print, Chaos, and Complexity

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Print, Chaos, and Complexity Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Media Culture

Mark E. Wildermuth

Newark: University of Delaware Press

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䉷 2008 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [978-0-87413-032-4/08 $10.00 Ⳮ 8¢ pp, pc.] Other than as indicated in the foregoing, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (except as permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law, and except for brief quotes appearing in reviews in the public press). Yale University Press has kindly granted permission to reprint the following materials from their edition of Johnson’s Works: Rambler essays 145 and 156, in vol. 5 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Walter Jackson Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969); Idler 40, in vol. 2 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Walter Jackson Bate, John M. Bullitt, and L. F. Powell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963); and ‘‘Observations on the Present State of Affairs’’; ‘‘The Bravery of the English Common Soldier’’; ‘‘Introduction to Proceedings of the Committee on French Prisoners’’; and ‘‘Taxation No Tyranny,’’ in vol. 10 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Donald J. Greene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

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The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wildermuth, Mark E., 1956– Print, chaos, and complexity : Samuel Johnson and eighteenth-century media culture / Mark E. Wildermuth. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-87413-032-4 (alk. paper) 1. Johnson, Samuel, 1709–1784—Philosophy. 2. Johnson, Samuel, 1709–1784— Political and social views. 3. Printing—Great Britain—History—18th century. 4. Printing—Social aspects. 5. Transmission of texts. 6. Mimesis in literature. 7. Authors and readers—Great Britain—History—18th century. 8. Books and reading— Great Britain—History—18th century. 9. Great Britain—Intellectual life—18th century. 10. Pope, Alexander, 1688–1744. Essay on man. 1. Title. PR3537.P5W55 2008 828⬘609—dc22 2007051719 printed in the united states of america

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This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother Dorothy.

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Contents Acknowledgments

9

Introduction

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1. Textual Instability, Print, and Complex Dynamics in the Johnsonian Mediated Cultural Milieu

25

2. Pope as a Precursor to Johnson: The Mediation of Chaos and Order in An Essay on Man

62

3. Complexity and Mediated Culture in Johnson’s Moral Periodical Prose

88

4. Johnson’s Politics in the Milieu of Informatics

109

5. Samuel Johnson, Mediation, Representation, and the Aesthetics of Complex Dynamics

135

6. Conclusion

163

Notes

171

Bibliography

186

Index

194

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Acknowledgments I MUST THANK THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AND THE DUNAGAN ENDOWMENT for gracious financial support during the writing and the researching of this book. Special thanks also go to Anita Voorhies and the Interlibrary Loan Staff at the University of Texas for their outstanding performance in providing materials for researching this study. I am also grateful to my research assistant, Beverly Roberts, who provided so much useful information for this book. Many thanks go to Kevin Cope, Regina Hewitt, Philip Smallwood, and Kate Hayles for allowing me to share some of the ideas presented in this book with colleagues at the SCSECS, De Bartolo, ASECS, and MLA conferences, respectively. In each case, audience feedback was invaluable. Finally, I must thank those grand scholars of the University of Wisconsin, Phillip Harth, Eric Rothstein, and most especially my mentor Howard Weinbrot, who taught me the value of discipline, theory, and historical research.

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Print, Chaos, and Complexity

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Introduction I shall not think my employment useless or ignoble, if by my assistance foreign nations and distant ages, gain access to the propagators of knowledge, and understand the teachers of truth . . . —Samuel Johnson Preface to A Dictionary of the English Language

IN THE CONCLUSION OF HIS EXTRAORDINARILY DETAILED STUDY OF PRINT culture, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830, David McKitterick concludes that it remains that the chasm of understanding between the implications of how texts are produced, multiplied and changed, and how they are received and reinterpreted, remains only imperfectly bridged. Much of the present book impinges directly . . . on critical theory, on theories of reading, and on bibliographical theory and practice. Though in some respects criticism and bibliographical understanding have moved closer together in the past two or three decades, the detailed application of this book to such theories must remain for another occasion.1

McKitterick’s words represent a significant call to action for students of critical theory and print culture, because his work, like his predecessor Adrian Johns’s 1998 The Nature of the Book,2 is an iconoclastic gesture questioning the conception of print culture in the world before 1800 as something to be associated with fixity and textual stability. This concept was first promoted by Eisenstein’s 1979 The Printing Press as Agent of Change and subsequently promoted by other studies of print culture like Alvin Kernan’s 1987 Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson—and both studies are given careful scrutiny by McKitterick.3 He argues that, ‘‘There are many difficulties in the background assumptions of Eisenstein and Kernan’’ (225), for the history of print reveals that ‘‘Books, like the words, images and other signs of which they are partially composed, are endlessly malleable, often transient, and always mutable.’’ Thus, ‘‘in all of this, we may 13

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say that we are examining not fixity, but inconstancy, and the nature of difference’’ (224). Indeed, there is an evolution in print culture reflecting concern about textual stability and authorial intent from the inception of print to the present day. McKitterick indicates that ‘‘authorial intention’’ was seen as a ‘‘moving target’’ from at least ‘‘the sixteenth century’’ to the present (225). Any editor from the fifteenth century to the present could explain the problems involved with maintaining textual stability—it is not always easy for printers and editors to infer the intention of an author even when the author is present to help edit a text; and corruption of texts seems inevitable with a technology that can reproduce not only sound texts endlessly, but textual errors and corruptions as well. Such concerns over textual instability remained in the eighteenth century: ‘‘The printing trades were to make their own contribution to this renewed anxiety at the instability in print, by gradually imposing their own set of rules on authors and their texts’’ (203), even as increasing attention on technology, innovation, and accuracy led to ‘‘A striving for manufacturing precision . . . attained by a systematic exactness that is missing from most earlier printing’’ (191). The desire to stabilize texts as representations of authorial intent, and their representations of the world shared by readers and writers, led to attempts to stabilize the language and prevent it from decaying, but these attempts did not show universal success. In truth, ‘‘Despite an ever growing demand for textbooks and basic spelling guides in the eighteenth century especially, there was little consent among them’’ (198). McKitterick’s predecessor Adrian Johns brings even more precise focus to the pivotal time of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and shows where Eisenstein’s approach misrepresented the period and print culture in general. According to Johns, her print culture is placeless and timeless. It is deemed to exist inasmuch as printed texts possess some key characteristic, fixity being the best candidate, and carry it with them as they are transported from place to place. The origins of this property are not analyzed. In fact, the accusations of technological determinism sometimes leveled against Eisenstein may even be wide of the mark, since she consistently declines to specify any position on the question of how print culture might emerge from print. . . . Readers consequently suffer the fate of obliteration: their intelligence and skill is reattributed to the printed page. To put it brutally, . . . Eisenstein’s print culture does not exist. (19)

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The cure for this misconception of the culture is to see ‘‘fixity not as an inherent quality, but as a transitive one.’’ For ‘‘fixity exists only inasmuch as it is recognized and acted upon by people—but not otherwise’’ (19). Textual stability thus ‘‘becomes the result of manifold representations, practices and conflicts, rather than just the monolithic cause’’ of some kind of ‘‘print logic’’ as Kernan called it, ‘‘imposed on humanity.’’ Hence we must recognize that ‘‘texts, printed or not, cannot compel readers to react in specific ways, but that they must be interpreted in cultural spaces the character of which helps us to decide what counts as proper reading.’’ Our job as historical critics of literature, in short, is ‘‘to recover the construction of different print cultures in particular historical circumstances’’ so that we may learn to read those texts of the past in the context of their perceptions of textual fixity versus instability (20). Johns thus points to the means whereby we may, as literary critics, rise to the challenge presented by McKitterick in his study’s conclusion. The challenge is to describe how the impact of perceptions of textual stability and instability (as mediated by the printed sign itself ) affects the ways readers decode texts through history. In short, we must show how conceptualizations of print mediation affect not only the practices of readers but the critical theories of those times as well. McKitterick indicates that printed words are ‘‘simultaneously fixed and yet endlessly mobile’’ and textual ‘‘stability may itself be a delusion’’ for the ‘‘modern concept that equates an edition with uniformity forgets the burden of such terms: that they imply series of compromises which are the results of manufacture’’ that always impact the representation of referents, meaning, and intent. Hence, textual instability and mobility are augmented ‘‘in another way, in that each generation and each individual applies subjective as well as received understanding to what is seen, and so interprets differently as societies and as individuals’’ (222). In short, Johns’s plea for recovering the localized specific print cultures mediating experience and interpretation for readers must be augmented by an awareness of the unity and variety of reading response in any given time within the context of the culture’s perceptions of textual instability and the problems posed thereby for critical theories of reading and interpretation at the time. It is my intention in this study of Samuel Johnson’s nonfiction moral, political, and aesthetic prose to do precisely what McKitterick and Johns recommend. Their focus is on bibliographic history, but their studies show how bibliography and critical theory are related

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historically. The purpose of Print, Chaos, and Complexity: Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Media Culture is to show how eighteenthcentury awareness of the interplay between fixity and instability in print helps us contextualize and comprehend the role print played in developing Johnson’s awareness of the ways in which print mediation impacted human beings ethically, socially, and aesthetically as users of signs. My argument is that we cannot fully appreciate the connectedness and continuity of Johnson’s ideas in these disparate areas without considering how important print mediation was for Johnson’s conception of the dilemmas facing his generation since the beginning of the eighteenth century. I argue that Samuel Johnson, like modern media theoreticians such as Jean Baudrillard, Friedrich Kittler, and Paul Virilio,4 seeks to understand the impact of contemporary forms of mediation on human epistemology and ethics. In short, I say Johnson’s awareness of print media allows him to take a stand on issues like the necessity to stabilize categories of truth and virtue in a fashion showing sophistication equal to what we see in media theory today. In the course of this study I will also focus on the issue of how Johnson and his contemporaries dealt with issues of representation of order in society and nature (mimesis) in the context of their own culture of mediation in print. I argue that Johnson refines contemporary notions of complexity and order— specifically conceptions of orderly disorder in both natural and human-made texts—that rival modern theories on chaos and complexity for completeness and depth of insight. I will do this by way of the method implied by Johns and McKitterick—specifically by looking at what the period in general says about these matters and then describing in context what Johnson as an individual also says. I thereby hope to show how eighteenth-century perceptions of the fixed yet mobile sign showed some degree of unity amid variety— what we might expect in a mediated print culture like Johnson’s. My method is thus meant to be historical, though it will entail looking at theories of reading, chaos, and complexity from times past and times present. It is not, therefore, my intention to read Johnson and his contemporaries purely through the lens of modern theories on textual instability and chaos, although I will focus on modern and eighteenth-century theories in the study. My aim here is instead to show how modern theories do have some foundation in the past because both early modern and postmodern theorists show concern about the impact of mediation on human cognition, soci-

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ety, and communication. I will not deny, of course, that hindsight plays a role here. I fully agree with what Daniel R. Headrick says in his 2000 study When Information Came of Age: If Europeans and North Americans created and improved elaborate systems for handling information in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, does that allow us to call these systems an information revolution, or are we simply forcing a late twentieth-century concept upon our ancestors? Is the historian’s job to recount the events of the past as people experienced them at the time, or is it to use hindsight to find the origins of today’s world? I prefer history as hindsight, for it is a historian’s job to interpret the past in the light of the present and the present in the light of the past. . . . Since we now live in an age of information, we need to understand how we got here. Our ancestors . . . also lived in an age of information without realizing it.5

Headrick’s wonderfully rich historical account of ongoing information revolutions in human history is persuasive testimony to his thesis, as we will see in the next chapter. The Age of Johnson, like the Restoration and the Renaissance, was an age of information. And, as we will see, Samuel Johnson, whether he is playing the role of the lexicographer, the aesthetician, the moral essayist, or the political writer, is deeply aware of the fact that he is living in an age of information. This awareness impacts all of his reflections on the culture in which he lives. As we will see in ensuing chapters, he is deeply concerned that human ethical, political, and artistic progress matches the technological and informational progress he sees in his own times and anticipates in the future. Ultimately Johnson emerges here, as he does in so many areas of interest to him, as a cautious optimist who believes that media can represent our perceptions and something of the world’s complex order in a manner that is conducive to human improvement in the areas of ethics, politics, and aesthetics. This he does, despite some very dark perceptions he has regarding the potentially dangerous nature of technological mediation in an information culture, perceptions he shares with predecessors and contemporaries alike. I hope to show that print and mediation connects our culture with Johnson and his age materially and thus, in more than one way, conceptually and philosophically. As McKitterick has shown, while conceptions of print may change, concerns about to what degree texts represent stable or unstable bodies of information constitute recur-

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ring topics in the cultures of print media (9). Likewise, there are recurring questions about to what degree print stabilizes or destabilizes individuals and their societies. And if these themes still strike us as significant today with the rise of so many other media in our culture, specifically electronic media since the beginning of the age of print, it is because these issues persist in the context of those media cultures as well. As Jeffrey Sconce shows in his excellent study of electronic media culture, Haunted Media, although ‘‘ideas of an animating sentience in electronic communications [have] changed across history and media,’’ the overarching concerns about their impact is a recurring theme.6 He is able to ‘‘argue that electronic presence, seemingly an essential property of telecommunications media, is in fact a variable social construct, its forms, potentials, and perceived dangers having changed significantly across media history’’ (6). And it is much the same with print. It is literally seen through much of the eighteenth century as potentially threatening, something that can corrupt youth, increase the selfish material tendencies of the culture, perhaps destabilize societies and whole nations. Language in general is suspect at the time, in the wake of still lingering Protestant attitudes on corruption of all human faculties and their associated instrumentalities (including words) after the Puritan revolution. Attempts to find ways to stabilize such disorder and confusion through print, in short, reveal much about the culture and the individual authors who engaged in this battle at the time. We will see that much is revealed about Johnson as a writer and thinker in his engagement with print. Consistent with the tendency of readers and critics to produce a unity of perspectives on reading and writing amid a variety of attitudes on these topics in media cultures, Samuel Johnson is both of his age and apart from it. Print culture is involved in the process whereby he individuates his viewpoint and declares a special kind of authorial presence that makes him a friend of truth and virtue, not by imposing a fixed print logic, but rather by understanding the instability of texts, both constructed and natural, within the context of continuing debates on mediation, representation, and systems of order in his time. We will see that Johnson’s attitudes toward print and mediation evolve in a nonlinear fashion, much as the attitudes of his culture show continuous modification. This study therefore requires sufficient scope to illustrate the major ethical, social, political, psychological, and epistemological is-

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sues of print to contextualize Johnson’s place and role in addressing them. I will describe how these controversies evolved after the end of the Puritan revolution and during the Restoration, where mediation becomes a significant topic as the monarchy is restored and the culture seeks to develop a rhetoric to justify its existence by at first attempting unsuccessfully to design a monological discourse where signs will be made to point unambiguously to things—an effort that fails with the rise of new forms of empirical inquiry that point to the difficulty of representing a cosmos and a polis whose complexity seems to defy the capacity of semiological systems to represent or fully explicate them. Here I will focus on the works of writers attempting to describe new types of order in the culture of the fixed yet mobile sign in a survey that includes such notables as Lucy Hutchinson, John Dryden, and John Locke. After discussing the period of 1660–1700, I will go on to describe continuing efforts to deal with complexity in the works of early eighteenth-century writers and thinkers between 1700 and 1750. Alexander Pope emerges in this period as someone who, by drawing on the systems of inquiry posited by predecessors like Newton and Leibniz, evinces the eighteenth-century’s gradual but growing confidence in the capacity of the fixed but mobile sign to evince some representational and explanatory power in the face of the increasing complexity of the polis and the cosmos—this, despite lingering (and powerful) reservations about the larger import of media culture expressed by prose writers like Thomas Baker who, unlike Pope, cannot resolve the tension between faith and doubt in signs prevalent in the culture before 1750. Building on the scholarship of Johns and McKitterick, and focusing on the writings of essayist Vicesimus Knox, I will illustrate how the culture’s confidence in print grows stronger in the later eighteenth century from 1750 to 1790, even as some writers still show awareness of the problematic nature of mediation. Moreover, I will show how Johnson in this final period of this study helps to test notions on the issues associated with print wherein he helps to shape public awareness of them in a much more systematic and pragmatic fashion than his predecessors and contemporaries. Johnson articulates a means for describing the ethical and epistemological problems in the period and proposes solutions that acquire greater complexity and detail as he moves from his periodical prose, his lexicography, and his political tracts of the 1750s and 1760s to the editorial and aesthetic work of the mid-1760s and the early 1780s. The pattern that emerges is one wherein Johnson paints in

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broad strokes as he shows awareness of complexity and mediation from 1750 to 1761, but his strokes become finer, as does the detail of his comprehension of complexity and mediation from 1765 to 1781, as manifested especially by his poetics. In his aesthetic work from 1765 forward, Johnson most fully addresses the question of the reliability of representation in a media culture within the context of textual instability. Here he provides a complete explanation of how signs can stabilize categories of truth and virtue despite the problematic nature of print culture discussed in his periodical moral essays and his political prose. Nevertheless, Johnson’s intellectual evolution is not perfectly linear; he exhibits periods of backsliding, where the particular circumstances of certain roles he must play as a prose writer sometimes temporarily impairs his capacity to use what he has learned about the positive aspects of textual instability and complex mediation. We see an example of this in his lexicography where his role as a legislator of linguistic practice leads him, at least initially, to try to impose order over the word at the atomic level implementing methods that recall the monological hegemonic tendencies of the Restoration and that contradict his appreciation of the complex dynamics of language at higher discursive levels. However, he learns from this experience, and in his 1765 ‘‘Preface to Shakespeare’’ (reflecting his years of work as an editor of the plays beginning just after the Dictionary’s publication in 1755), Johnson begins to apply his notions of complexity at every level of the language, thereby enabling him to develop his most advanced conceptions of complexity, mediation, and representation in his work on Shakespeare and especially later in Lives of the English Poets. We will, nevertheless, see him forsaking some of his better intuitions and conceptions of complexity in the rhetoric informing the 1775 political tract Taxation No Tyranny; but, again, this is due to the rhetorical situation, which causes him to assert an oppressive monological stance atypical of his earlier progressive dialogical political works in its implicit desertion of his complex conception of the hierarchy in the body politic. But even this tract evinces some of his other more progressive attitudes toward complexity in the polis—so Johnson’s progress is surprisingly steady despite the many challenges posed by the print culture of his time. He thus posits a model of complexity that supersedes that proposed by his immediate predecessor Alexander Pope, whose Essay on Man proves too politically and theologically controversial, too lim-

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ited in its overreliance on deductive modes of proceeding, to fully reach the broad audience of early (and later) eighteenth-century British print culture. Johnson’s ideas, by contrast, are compatible with the period’s reigning paradigms in politics, theology, psychology, and epistemology, even as he lends to them greater persuasive power while greatly extending the intellectual horizons of his reading public. His empirical approach allows him to describe in pragmatic terms the significance and necessity of free and responsible choice in ethical contexts. With surer and more consistent methodology than any of his predecessors and contemporaries, he shows how moral, social, and political progress can keep pace with technological progress in the information culture, despite the many potential pitfalls of that still-developing age. The key to securing moral progress for him is to encourage dialogical flow of information that stems the opposing tide of oppressive monological absolutism exemplified by eighteenth-century France. This he hopes to accomplish by instituting dialogical rhetorics of inclusion that balance stabilizing deductive rationalist arguments with fluid empirical surveys that allow the mind to repose on stable truths that emerge from the chaotic milieu of the culture of fixed yet mobile signs. What emerges here is a portrait of Johnson entirely consistent with Bertrand Bronson’s still viable assessment of Johnson,7 even in the wake of postmodernity, one that eschews the image of Johnson the dogmatist for that of Johnson who, even while supporting a stable hierarchy and monarchy, still defends the rights of individuals. And this includes those who are less fortunate materially and financially, as he sees them not as deviations from political and social norms but rather as the very core of a free society. I focus on Johnson’s nonfiction prose rather than on his poetry, fiction, or drama, where notions of complexity also occur, because my task is to explicate Johnson’s most self-conscious attempts to elucidate a philosophy on information culture and complexity. This allows a clearer assessment of his stand on print culture vis-a`-vis other writers like Baker and Knox (as well as Pope whose poetic essay and prose works cited below also exhibit reflexivity on mediation and complexity). I describe the substance of Johnson’s philosophy on informatics in the following chapters, which are arranged to illustrate the nonlinear but still progressive evolution of Samuel Johnson’s thoughts on complexity and mediation in the context of his still-evolving information culture. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the crises in communication

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and representation that stem in part from concerns about textual instability in the Restoration and early and later eighteenth-century culture after the Puritan revolution. We will see how those attitudes changed somewhat in the later eighteenth century, but there nevertheless remained concerns about the impact of the fixed yet mobile signifier for Johnson and his age. These concerns, however, help inspire new conceptualizations of order—or, more specifically, orderly disorder—that prove very productive for Johnson and his contemporaries in many contexts of thought. Chapter 2 describes one of the most significant early eighteenthcentury attempts to deal with orderly disorder before Johnson, namely, Pope’s An Essay on Man. The Essay is sufficiently complex to merit a chapter of its own. This chapter also provides significant backgrounds on the attitudes of early eighteenth-century culture, Pope, and his Scriblerian brethren toward mediated culture and what it implies for how Pope discerns order in disorder aesthetically, politically, and morally. It points to the genuinely problematic nature of Pope’s ideas on chaos, thus setting the stage for describing how Johnson’s attempts will prove more successful in middle to late eighteenth-century British information culture. Chapter 3 describes the progress of Johnson’s periodical prose wherein he finds artful ways to bring classical and modern intellectual contexts to current mediated culture to assess its impact on the moral and epistemological character of England in his time. Johnson begins to experiment with conceptualizations of complexity and orderly disorder in society and politics, which will enable him later in his aesthetics to articulate conceptions of complexity rivaling postmodern complex systems’ analysis for depth and productiveness, especially with regard to the issues of representation and mimesis. He also shows in his periodical prose how critical awareness of the positive and negative aspects of media culture, combined with a dialogical approach to engaging audience response, can develop potentially liberating strategies for writers and readers seeking to mitigate and resist the worst tendencies of media culture that do have potential for manipulating and controlling audiences. Chapter 4 shows how Johnson analyzes the impact of mediation on political theory and practice. Emerging here is Johnson’s sense of a complex social and political hierarchy that promotes stability and mobility, much like the natural and printed texts of his time. He also assesses how information cultures can either maintain or endanger the potential for human liberty in mediated culture depend-

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ing on whether the power of mass mediation is used for evil or good. Johnson’s emphasis on dialogue and free information flow in the state shows how his moral and political theories work together to promote ethical and technological progress in information culture. Chapter 5 fully assesses Johnson’s intellectual growth from the time of the Dictionary’s publication to his aesthetics post-1765. Johnson’s reflexive grasp on complex dynamics in aesthetic contexts suggests that a theory of mimesis based on complexity is feasible in the context of the culture of the fixed yet mobile signifier. Chapter 6 sums up the significance of Johnson’s theories not only for the eighteenth century but for our time as well. I argue that his thinking is sufficiently sophisticated to be taken seriously in our current mediated cultural milieu. In the course of this study we will therefore sense continued affinities with Johnson’s age and ours. Samuel Johnson, of course, did not invent the topics that concern us today about mediation. Rather, Johnson, like us, inherits the themes and topics that dominate an age where there is fear that textual instability can destabilize meaning, human psychology, and our capacity to perceive the truth and act on it as a society in an ethically responsible and genuinely progressive fashion. In typical Johnsonian fashion, however, he does not accept that inheritance passively. Instead, he reviews it through the lens of the classical traditions and early modern philosophies that he uses to assay the value of information culture in his time. As we will see, that information culture is indeed part of the impetus that leads him to combine classical and modern modes of proceeding to create the kind of reflexive, critical mind-set he will use to make sense of the information texts of his time on ethics, politics, and aesthetics. The result is his own interdisciplinary (almost somehow postdisciplinary) approach to information that embodies a conceptualization of order where unity and variety, harmony and discord, emerging simultaneously from the froth of textual instability, yield, somewhat unexpectedly for Johnson and his age, a new and very real sense of stability for individuals and the information-based society they created.

 A shorter version of chapter 2 appeared in my article ‘‘ ‘And Anarchy without confusion know’: The Dynamics of Chaos in Pope’s An

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Essay on Man,’’ The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 39.1 (1998): 85–103. Chapter 5 appeared in a different version in my article ‘‘Samuel Johnson and the Aesthetics of Complex Dynamics,’’ in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 48.1 (2007).

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1 Textual Instability, Print, and Complex Dynamics in the Johnsonian Mediated Cultural Milieu . . . to suppose that the maze is inscrutable to diligence, or that the heights inaccessible to perseverance, is to submit tamely to the tyranny of fancy, and enchain the mind in voluntary shackles. —Samuel Johnson Rambler 137

CONSISTENT WITH MY ASSERTION IN THE INTRODUCTION THAT A CENTRAL material connection between our time and the eighteenth century, the medium of print, can help illustrate the historical significance of both information cultures, let me briefly suggest a parallel between the worlds of today and yesterday. Both the twenty-first century and the long eighteenth century began with cataclysmic events that shook their symbolic orders to their very foundations—in ways that underscore the significance of media cultures for comprehending the role information plays in the shaping of human history. These events show how such perturbations in mediated systems of order can evoke responses in the polis that raise profound questions in the realms of ethics, epistemology and communication. For example, in a 2005 PMLA article, James Berger describes the impact of 9/11 on political discourse in the contemporary mediated culture of America’s current national security regime. The collapse of the World Trade Center recapitulates the fall of the Tower of Babel, and this ‘‘is the characteristic post-apocalyptic symptomatic response [to trauma]: the world of semantical moral ambiguity has fallen and been swept away’’ for the ‘‘logic and desire of terrorism and antiterrorism are to restore . . . perfect correspondence between word and thing.’’1 Briefly, in the mediated postapocalyptic culture of the present, a return to traditional hegemonic paradigms predi25

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cates the ushering in of a semiotic that tries to erase the noisy ideological complexity of multicultural postmodernity and replace it with a single monological discourse ‘‘articulated in a single language of ‘homeland security’ ’’ (343). This is a cause of concern for this American media scholar of Jewish faith who not only senses the potential for political oppression in such a cultural climate, but also fears its potential violation of the Midrash Rabbah’s assertion that ‘‘the singleness of Adamic language is a unity in idolatry’’ (341) for God likely ‘‘smashed this natural signifier, this excrescence of Adamic meaning’’ (Babel) ‘‘and henceforth authorized only multiple and divided significations’’ (342). The Babel trope is indeed disturbing, especially for critics immersed in the postmodern milieu that has sometimes emphasized the positive potential of multivalency and dialogical interaction in contemporary culture, but for students of the long eighteenth century, it may also evoke a powerful sense of de´ja` vu. As Robert Markley and Richard W. F. Kroll remind us,2 the Babel trope’s awful edifice was resurrected at the end of the seventeenth century and at the beginning of the Restoration after Britain’s dabbling in apocalyptic aesthetics and politics during the Puritan revolution and the ensuing Protectorate (the years 1642 to 1659). In the Restoration of 1660 and the early eighteenth century, somewhat like today, the thrust of the trope and related semiological efforts to institute the restoration of the political hierarchy was to reintroduce and restabilize something like the previously intact symbolic order that had been so deeply shaken during a cataclysm where a king had quite literally lost his head and the hegemonic tendencies of the culture had been disrupted by a theocractic agency (Puritan rule) that leveled the hierarchy deemed earlier as essential to social order in a country ruled by a sovereign sharing power with Parliament. But as both the 1660s and the events since 9/11 suggest, restoring symbolic orders is a task much more easily prescribed than done, and it will seldom follow the prescriptions of monological hegemony. The cultural milieu of Restoration England, like our own, was extraordinarily complex, and the response to the trauma induced by rending the symbolic order was not easily overcome. Indeed, the task of the Restoration required serious inquiry in many cultural contexts, including the newly evolving areas of epistemology and linguistics, which now focused on assessing the value and nature of symbols and signifiers in an England still facing the influence of posttraumatic shock. One significant result was the careful consider-

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ation throughout the long eighteenth century of the capacity of words to represent the world and stabilize communication and signification for the purposes of stabilizing the social and political order, which, as the culture would eventually argue, was necessary for stabilizing the capacity of the individual to discern truth from falsehood, and virtue from vice. The lessons of that culture, I would argue, are sufficiently sophisticated to be worthy of study, and perhaps in some cases may even be worthy of emulation or reconstitution in the world of today. I begin this study of Samuel Johnson (1709–84) and his interaction with his mediated cultural milieu via aesthetics, moral periodical prose, and political writing by focusing briefly here on the crisis atmosphere of the Restoration because I hope to show how significant Dr. Johnson’s role was in shaping and instantiating the symbolic literate cultural order that became late eighteenth-century Britain, often called the Age of Johnson. Johnson’s role in this effort was different from, but no less significant than, predecessors like Alexander Pope, and for many reasons; but of especial interest here is how Johnson’s role can be differentiated with regard to his interaction with a mediated culture of print that continued to evolve from the time of Dryden and Locke through the time of Pope and Swift, until finally the time of Johnson. I use the term mediated culture, under the influence of Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide (1986), as a more precise and appropriately neutral alternative to the terms ‘‘culture industry,’’ ‘‘mass culture,’’ or ‘‘mass mediated culture’’ that, as Huyssen showed, were unfortunately associated with negative stereotypes of the masses as passive, irrational, and effeminate, a stereotype he believed dated back to the nineteenth century.3 All of these terms focus, as Huyssen says, mainly on the idea that mass or media culture is somehow ‘‘ ‘impressed from above’ in a gender-specific sense’’ that implies media culture can only be hegemonic. In this sense, the mass mediation of culture can seldom be seen positively, and, as Huyssen rightly warns us, this can lead us to underestimate the positive potential of the kind of culture of mass mediation and consumption that we live in: ‘‘The thesis of total subjugation of art to the market . . . underestimates possibilities for emancipation inherent in consumption; in general, consumption satisfies human needs and even though human needs can be distorted to an amazing degree, every need contains a smaller or larger kernal of [human] authenticity. The

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question to ask is how this kernal can be utilized and fulfilled’’ (152). I argue in my study that this is precisely the kind of question that Samuel Johnson, like his Scriblerian predecessors, asked of the information-based mediated culture of his time. Johnson, like Huyssen, focuses on the impacts of media in an information culture with potential to touch the lives of individuals suddenly finding themselves included in a mass demographic, or sets of demographics, that everyone from publishers to politicians, from novelists to statisticians sought to influence for various purposes (though they lacked modern methods for defining or testing those demographics). And since Johnson was able to discern both the negative, potentially oppressive aspects of this culture, plus the more positive and potentially liberating aspects of it, I prefer to speak of his information culture using what I hope is a more neutral terminology, which allows me to describe the full spectrum of his thinking and the thinking of contemporaries and predecessors that influenced him. In any event, by mediated culture I refer to the kind of culture that arises in the world after the invention of movable type in the fifteenth century and which establishes an information-based society where various technological agencies of communication—which will later include telegraphs, telephones, radios, televisions, and computer-based textual systems—create a kind of cultural network of information that is shared by individuals of the culture who do not necessarily need to interact with each other directly to participate in the dissemination and assimilation of information texts. As Daniel Headrick has shown, ‘‘the Information Age . . . is as old as humankind’’ for there ‘‘have been many information revolutions,’’ including ‘‘the late seventeenth and most of the eighteenth’’ century.4 The term mediated culture also points to what Kroll underscores in his study of the ‘‘material word’’ in the eighteenth century; namely, the idea that with mediated cultures comes a sense that words are not transparent signifiers that point directly to the world, but rather, as Wittgenstein might say, they have bodies as well as souls. Mediation implies that something comes between the user of words and the referent, the world itself, the signifier or sign that cannot be seen simply as a window on the world or a mirror of a speaker’s intentions. Mediation complicates conceptions of two things: the capacity of words and texts to represent things and their capacity to represent an author’s ideas—in short, it raises questions about

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the capacity of texts to perform truthfully and accurately in the realms of both mimesis and communication. The phrase mediated culture also points to the special kind of reflexivity that is prompted by such cultures, for not only are things and ideas mediated by words, but so too are the culture and its own information machinery, which should be the sources of categories used to stabilize conceptual norms concerning truth and ethics. However, the very fact that such disparate souls as Samuel Johnson and Andreas Huyssen can ask themselves serious questions regarding the benefits and dangers of their mediating cultures shows that representation and communication of the information culture itself is as complex morally and epistemologically as representations of referents and the intentions of speakers and writers in the culture. Hence questions of the nature of truth and virtue, stimulated also by the agencies identified by McKeon in Origins of the Novel,5 are further complicated by the sense that any attempts to understand the nature of reality and ethics are rendered more complex by virtue of the fact that they are pursued in the context of a culture that is itself a process of mediation begat upon other processes of mediation. Emerging eventually from the often anxiety-producing noise of such cultures is the concern that words may point only to words; that signifiers ultimately refer to their own processes of signification and mediation, with the result being that meaning could be endlessly deferred. That concern continues to be in evidence today in the works of postmodern writers like Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard. Such a concern is not to be taken lightly in information cultures because they come to depend on mediating technologies for their very economic, political and social existence. These modes and systems of informatics become the means by which order is not only conceptualized but also maintained at every level in the state. Informatics, as N. Katherine Hayles says in How We Became Posthuman,6 constitutes the core of such cultures: in note 4, page 313, Hayles indicates that informatics refers to all of ‘‘the material, technological, economic and social structures that make the information age possible.’’ Informatics therefore includes ‘‘the patterns of living that emerge from and depend on access to large data banks and . . . transmission of messages,’’ plus the ‘‘reconfiguring of the human body in conjunction with information technology.’’ It refers not only to Donna Haraway’s concept of informatics as a potential mode of domination,7 but also to the study of the ‘‘cultural impact and significance of information technologies.’’ As Headrick shows, in-

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formatics and the mediating technological sign systems that constitute its machinery were an essential part of the long eighteenthcentury’s cultural milieu because ‘‘The rising demand for information was stimulated by the growth of population, production, and trade on both sides of the Atlantic.’’ Hence ‘‘demographic and economic growth lead to new and better information systems’’ (9). The result was a mediated culture where the symbiotic relationship between information, information systems for communicating and storing data, and the political infrastructures that they instantiated and authorized eventually constituted what Benedict Anderson has called the Imagined Community of the nationalist state in Great Britain (and similar states elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, including colonial America).8 As Anderson shows, the products and informatics of these states were fashioned in a print-based mediated culture that made possible conceptualizing them as a by-product of serialized reproduction of signs. Hence, the serialization of information via the printing press made possible a new conceptualization of the nation-state and the informatics that instantiated its infrastructure: ‘‘Serially published newspapers were by then a familiar part of urban civilization. So was the novel, with its particular possibilities for representation of simultaneous actions. . . . The cosmic clocking which had made intelligible our transoceanic pairings was increasingly felt to entail a . . . serial view of social causality; and this sense of the world was now speedily deepening its grip on Western imaginations’’ (194). The resulting colonial nationalist state created a ‘‘style of thinking about its domain.’’ The ‘‘ ‘warp’ of this thinking was a totalizing classification grid, which could be applied . . . to anything under the state’s real or contemplated control: peoples, regions, religions, languages, . . . monuments, and so forth. . . .’’ Meanwhile, its ‘‘ ‘weft’ was what one could call serialization: the assumption that the world was made up of replicable plurals’’ (184). The nation-state that was also evolving into an empire, what John Brewer calls a fiscal military state,9 was a product of mediated culture with profound epistemological and ethical implications for the individuals inhabiting that culture. An empty chronological time took the place of millennial symbolic time, allowing individuals to conceptualize themselves as members of a community constituted mainly by the mediated sign with relatively little personal interaction with other members of that culture. The potential for controlling a large populace solely by imaginative interaction in something like a

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virtual realm conjured up by print created opportunities, as technological revolutions always do, for both constructive enterprise and serious harm. As Headrick says, people in information based cultures often: ‘‘. . . confuse the two meanings of progress: the instrumental and the moral. Instrumental progress relates to the means of achieving a goal. . . . Moral progress judges the goal. In ethical terms, the human race has made little or no progress in the past three centuries. But the instrumental progress has been phenomenal’’ (12). It is the purpose of my study to describe the ways in which Samuel Johnson’s expressed concern that moral progress match instrumental progress in information or mediated culture reveals the nature of his moral stance concerning this important aspect of his thinking. This study also highlights his special contribution to questions on stabilizing the symbolic order epistemologically and ethically (truth and virtue) in his mediated cultural milieu. Describing his thinking in these areas will require that I examine his moral prose, his poetics, and his political philosophy as they relate to the print mediated culture of his time. But before I can fully present my thesis in this introduction, I wish to return to where I began—with the linguistic and epistemological crisis that emerged in the culture of the Restoration. I hope to show first how perceptions of mediated signs in the age of print in England made this task especially challenging for people in the Restoration and the early eighteenth century, while at the same time it created an environment that would foster useful speculation on how to conceptualize emergent order in texts of human origin as well as those from the book of nature. As we will see, questions about mediation, representation, and communication in print culture lead to questions concerning how texts in culture and nature are organized and to what degree human texts can represent natural order, the order of the referent, in print. I will discuss the first stage of the print culture in question, from 1660 to 1700, when issues of complexity in nature and culture first arise and cause much alarm. Then I will situate Samuel Johnson first in the early eighteenth century (1700–1750) when that alarm still exists, and next in the years after 1750, the later eighteenth century, when alarm begins to subside and confidence in print grows in the British public. After this discussion of the culture, I will then conclude my chapter with a complete description of my thesis on Johnson.

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Mediated Culture and Textual Instability, 1660–1700 Much eighteenth-century scholarship, including that of the now largely discredited work of R. F. Jones,10 has attempted to underscore the difficulty with which the Restoration and the early eighteenth century initially proceeded in attempting to establish epistemological and moral (as well as theological) norms after the times of the civil war and the Protectorate. Of special interest, however, is the more recent research of Robert Markley, Richard W. F. Kroll, and Kevin Cope, particularly as it emerged in the early 1990s.11 All of these scholars brought to their readings of the culture critical and theoretical sensibilities that reflected their own awareness of the role that mediation and signification played in considerations of how to establish and justify a hierarchical system of social and political order that would help stabilize the categories of truth and virtue. Each writer drew significant conclusions regarding the remaking of order and its relation to issues of representation and communication in the period, and these will bear some close examination here, for more than one reason. First, their theories are sufficiently complex to merit textual explication. Second, their prose provides an opportunity to represent the complex texture of the information culture, its unity and variety, from the Restoration to the beginning of the eighteenth century. And third, their approaches to mediation will be supplemented in this study with developments of new conceptualizations of print mediated cultures appearing since the beginning of the twenty-first century. (Hence my tendency to provide examples of the specific language used by these scholars to describe the mediated culture as it is necessary to understanding the scope and the limits of their models for describing mediation in the last decade of the twentieth century.) The importance of that supplementation should become clear when my exegesis then helps me describe their work in the context of their scholarly milieu. Markley’s Fallen Languages successfully shows that old declining hierarchic modes of proceeding from pre-Restoration culture, and the monological idealized semiotic systems of correspondence associated with them, became threatened by an emerging postscientific culture that initially implied that the cosmos was more complex than anticipated and might not be susceptible to accurate or complete semiological representation. Such systems also ignored the complexity of the multicultural polis in order to establish hegem-

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ony. Therefore the book of nature was destabilized along with other texts of human and divine origin. Thus Markley argues that none of the reigning assumptions and theories underlying the discourses of politics and theology could be asserted without strong efforts to explain and defend them (38). This was no mean feat: ‘‘Each effort to reassert the logic of general equivalents runs into Augustine’s dilemma: attempts to justify the ways of God to man reproduce the very gaps, the divisions, they are supposed to explain.’’ Nevertheless, ‘‘these attempts are very productive; they generate new information, new and more complex modes of representation that displace the older forms of explanation’’ (32–33). Consequently, the ‘‘politicizing of the [biblical] Logos led . . . to a number of attempts to supplement the authority of the Bible by constructing synthetic systems of representation that would reveal the harmonious structure of a divinely ordered creation.’’ Thus the ‘‘universal language schemes that proliferate in England between 1640 and 1680 attempt to accomplish what the Bible could no longer offer: semiotic encoding of the order of the material and political worlds, an ideal of noisefree communication that, in theory, would transcend political and theological controversy, what John Wilkins called ‘that Humour of Skepticism and Infidelity which hath late so much abounded in the world’ ’’ (63). The hope in the times of Boyle and Newton was that mathematics could transcend the culture’s noise (68–69) as part of an implicit program to use a transcendental discourse to help establish a stable hierarchic political order, but this did not comes to pass immediately and only increased the anxiety of an ‘‘elite committed to achieving political, theological, and socioeconomic ends by stabilizing and regularizing forms of communication’’ (72). Indeed, the efforts of men like Newton offered further testimony of the irreducibly complex quality of nature and the inherent difficulty in representing it with signs (8). For them, theological inquiry became a ‘‘reservoir for noise, complexity, and chaos’’ while their work led to ‘‘increasingly complex forms of semiotic mediation’’ in the culture (33), instead of a stabilizing system of unambiguous representation. The challenge of the complex and chaotic nature of the world could only lead to attempts in the Restoration and the eighteenth century to create similarly complex modes of discourse in the information-based culture. This is a central topic in the work of Richard W. F. Kroll, who argues that in the print culture of the Restoration

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and the early eighteenth century, awareness of mediation led to the adoption of Lucretian and Epicurean atomistic conceptualizations of language that emphasized the necessarily opaque nature of the signifier: ‘‘signs . . . mediate between us, the world, God, and others, and even our cognitive processes,’’ Kroll says, so that ‘‘representation must accommodate itself to our partial ways of knowing,’’ our ‘‘limited means of perception’’ (63). ‘‘Language, then, follows Nature, not because it provides a transparent window on the world, but because its symbolic devices are made to echo and enforce our partial means of access to it, one constructed by inference and analogy’’ (66). The result with this ‘‘atomistic’’ model of the material word is a mediated culture whereby ‘‘knowledge issues from action, in this tissue of locutions’’ that creates the fabric of a culture that rejects the ‘‘unmediated and totalizing forms’’ of absolutism (75) and dispels ‘‘the fragmented claims of dissent by appealing to skeptical modes’’ (77). So Kroll, with his wider focus than Markley, and his strong tendency to anticipate later developments in the long eighteenth century, shows that mediation in the culture could suggest a means to create a social and political order that would establish a practical rather than an idealized base for social hierarchy, not despite the skepticism necessitated by the times and by the new conceptualization of signification, but partly because of these factors. What emerges—and this really does seem to capture the flavor of many of the post-Lockean models of communication of the time—is a dramatistic approach to achieving consensual communication and representation based on a shared need to establish moral, ethical, and political modes of proceeding in a world where moral, epistemological, and political absolutes were deemed much more elusive than before. By recognizing the limits of language, eighteenth-century people could emphasize the limited capability of the signifier to represent the world and agree to progress cautiously and consensually with regards to matters of truth and virtue. The cure for inadequate representation was careful communication that recognized the need for caution as blind men approached an elephant near the edge of an epistemological and ethical precipice. Kevin Cope sees similar implications in the post-Lockean epistemic that so strongly influences the English milieu of the 1690s and beyond. Locke is unlike predecessors such as Rochester, Halifax, and Dryden who ‘‘conclude’’ their epistemological and ethical inquiries ‘‘by concluding nothing’’ because they see ‘‘mediation as a reactive counterattack on more aggressive threats.’’ Locke instead

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presents ‘‘human knowledge as a device for comprehending everything . . . His politics is epistemological; it lets one know how to formulate and explain why one may believe in some one government or some one ideology’’ (93–94). Going ‘‘beyond Dryden, he uses his reconciling discourse to define and displace the conflict itself ’’ (95). Capitalizing on and promoting the kind of dramatistic interactive discourse that Kroll also sees working elsewhere in the culture, Locke fosters a bloodless ‘‘public revolution in public discourse,’’ for the framework of his world is ‘‘the stuff of interactions, mediations, and processes; its substance is an aggressively public system of human laws, artifacts, and procedures.’’ The very basis of the polis is the capacity of its members to achieve consensus through dialogue reflecting complex epistemological modes of proceeding (95–96). Therefore, ‘‘Lockean ideas include rather than represent or correspond to things’’ for ‘‘They don’t disclose, but they do postulate, control, and involve the percipient with ‘things’ and ‘powers’ ’’ (98). Cope therefore subsequently argues that the thinking and representation of post-Lockean writers of the early eighteenth century like Pope, Swift, and Adam Smith capitalizes on Locke’s groundwork and reflects an increasing complexity in representational systems that shows the culture’s increasing confidence in the capacity of mediation to work toward still-elusive means to epistemological and ethical stability. To sum up then: Markley demonstrates the profound epistemological, theological, moral, and political nature of the crises involving representation and communication in the Restoration and beginning of the eighteenth century, while Kroll and Cope show how contemporary conceptualizations of mediation in the culture might help suggest solutions to the emerging crises. Nevertheless, as the language of these writers shows, the above studies focus on mediation in a relatively abstract sense necessitated by their breadth, and reflective of the current critical contexts available for discourse on mediation in print culture in the early 1990s. None really focuses on the material presence of print in the culture in terms of how the culture’s experiences with and perceptions of that means of mediation may have influenced their conception of the mediation issue with regards to symbolic ordering of life, language, and politics. Kroll does note that the ‘‘Restoration frequently resorted to the metaphor of printing to emphasize this plastic quality in language’’ (14), and he says the print trope is ‘‘pandemic, serving both the language of hegemony and of dissent’’ (21), but he does not take the

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matter any further. Given that such metaphors were so prevalent, what do they reveal? What indeed would print represent to someone living in the Restoration? The early eighteenth century? Or the middle and later part of that period? Does our contemporary metaphor of plasticity help us to translate here or does it hinder our understanding? How, in short, might print have impacted issues of mediation, communication, and representation in a culture dealing with an epistemological and moral crisis? When Markley, Cope, and Kroll were writing in the early 1990s, the reigning study of print culture, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, which dated back to 1979, described the print medium and the culture it created, as Alvin Kernan said in his 1987 study Print Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson, as evincing ‘‘multiplicity, systematization and fixity’’ (54), the same qualities as movable type itself.12 But since that time, as the recent media textual criticism of a new generation of eighteenth-century critics like Janine Barchas and Stephen Karian attests, we have come to embrace a new conceptualization of early print culture that has emerged in the late 1990s and early twenty-first century with the work of Adrian Johns and David McKitterick.13 Johns’s 1998 study is particularly iconoclastic, arguing that the principle characteristics that Eisenstein identified with print actually were not associated with that medium until well into the eighteenth century, say somewhere between 1750 and 1790 (373). Indeed, the establishment of the reliability of print depended on securing the reputation of the printing profession itself—a battle that was waged by printers, stationers, and even members of the Royal Society (54–55; 188). This problem was aggravated by current perceptions in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that reading and assimilating printed material could actually lead to psychological aberration by overstimulating the imagination and subverting moral capability (383–93)—something necessitating a new psychology of reader response that would keep reason in control; textual instability and mental instability seemed to go hand in hand. Other problems included the potential for mischief when serializing information; ‘‘mechanical uniformity’’ meant possibly ascribing works to the wrong writer since plagiarism and piracy ran rampant (182). It also meant, as John Evelyn said in his Memoirs, that ‘‘Errors repeate & multiply in every Edition’’ (quoted here in Johns, 215). The serialization of information, in short, might be a bad thing. So for people in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,

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‘‘Both the promise and the perils of print became starkly evident to them as they strove to articulate agreed understanding of the universe in which they lived’’ even as ‘‘their representations of nature were changing at an unprecedented rate and in unpredictable ways’’ (444). These struggles also reflected the ongoing conflict in a society that had established a governing hierarchy naturalized by the idea of inherited status (class) but nevertheless saw new power structures emerging in the politics and economics of the printing profession itself (paralleling that emergence in other areas of the society). In disputes, for example, over patenting, one could see the shift in the political and social dynamic reflected in ‘‘the very different consequences of a print culture governed by Stationers from one overseen by crown-appointed gentlemen’’ (262). In the end the ‘‘king and lord mayor could intrude favored Stationers into senior positions’’ but ‘‘the assistants could indignantly denounce those intrusions’’; and the civility that kept the unusual arrangement going ‘‘was not recognizable from classical maxims’’ even though ‘‘it was nonetheless, real, complex, and consequential’’ (ibid.). It was as if the conflict between hierarchical Royalists and Leveling Republican Puritans in the 1640s was recapitulated in a print culture that somehow needed to find a way to wed a rigid and often idealized hierarchy to a noisy chaotic society clamoring for a freer approach to not only enterprise and material success, but also to information and expression. David McKitterick underscores all of the elements in this mediated culture that kept the noise levels high and continued to raise issues even after 1750. As he notes, ‘‘In the eighteenth century many of the preoccupations and anxieties’’ of the previous generation ‘‘remained; but even as they weakened . . . so . . . society . . . had adjusted to a fundamental realignment of the old arguments concerning its dangers’’ (206). People still wondered about the impact of the proliferation of the book on society; in 1778 Vicesimus Knox warned that the book’s ‘‘promiscuity was a danger’’ (207). Concerns for maintaining quality in ‘‘repetitive, standardized production’’ (211) remained, and the ‘‘view of printing as ars conservatrix, the skill and means of conserving knowledge, . . . was modulated in the eighteenth century as understandings of its possibilities and limitations were ever more widely understood and discussed’’ (211). Long before the age of the word processor’s flickering signifier came the realization that ‘‘the most arresting quality of the printed word and

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image is that they are simultaneously fixed and yet endlessly mobile’’ (227). The paradoxical quality of this new textuality, one that seemed to destabilize even as it sought to stabilize representations of nature and systems or ordering conceptualizations of truth, virtue, and the political order, contributes to the rise of an information culture wherein texts, both natural and human constructed, could be reconfigured to posit new forms of order and signification that could meet old needs in dazzlingly new and creative ways. This media culture had implications for the thinking of men before 1700 like Dryden and Locke, implications that become highly discernable when their work is examined closely. They struggle to conceptualize a different kind of order, a different kind of paradigm for understanding the relationship between order and disorder via the mediation of the fixed yet mobile signifier. This eventually yields a conceptualization of order that I argue is essential for contextualizing Johnson’s moral and epistemological stances in the age of print, in the age of a new dynamic in signification. The implications for the political views of writers in this context were also significant, as we will see. A case in point: Markley notes a curious passage in Dryden’s introduction to Annus Mirabilis, ‘‘An Account of the Ensuing Poem in a Letter to the Honorable, Sir Robert Howard,’’ that points to ways in which the Restoration milieu prompted speculation on new ways of conceptualizing order. Markley says, ‘‘Although local instances of a universal order can be intuited . . . , the emphasis for . . . Boyle and Newton . . . falls on what Dryden, in a different context, called ‘Nature in disorder’ to justify both God’s and their own intervention in the material world. The paradoxical state of nature—as both chaotic and mysteriously unified—cannot be regarded as a neat dialectic; the discourses of order and disorder dialogically interpenetrate, (re)producing the crisis in theory’’ (108), and hence arises the ongoing quest in science (and other contexts) ‘‘to negotiate the chasm between the semiotics of the material world and theocentric ideals of order’’ (109). One of those ideals is a social hierarchy that reflects the once great chain of being that was already on the road to being discredited, even as Dryden, a commoner, is addressing a man in his preface who, on no certain epistemological grounds, is still deemed in their society a superior by rank. Meanwhile, the nature that Dryden describes and Ovid somehow represents seems not so neatly ordered either; Ovid, says Dryden, ‘‘images more often the movements and

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affections of the mind, either combating between two contrary passions, or extremely discomposed by one: his words therefore are the least part of his care, for he pictures Nature in disorder, with which the study and choice of words is inconsistent.’’14 And this, says Dryden, ‘‘is the proper wit of dialogue’’ and ‘‘Drama, where all that is said to be suppos’d the effect of sudden thought; which, though it excludes not the quickness of wit in repartees, yet admits not a too curious election of words, . . . or, . . . any thing that shows remoteness of thought, or labor, in the Writer’’ (1:54). Dryden seems to say that some kind of signification exists wherein the dialogical and dramatistic interplay of conflicting elements in the referent can somehow be represented intelligibly. This is a remarkable passage. While the natural philosophers, theologians, and political theorists of his time are all scrambling to deal with the brave new world they find themselves in, Dryden breezily asserts to a man of higher rank than himself that language somehow can reflect the disorderly quality of nature in an orderly and comprehensible way, through some unspecified dialogical method that reproduces the process of nature while not necessarily being a part of it. And he even has a name for what it is that enables the poet to do this, a quality called wit, which he describes in one of the most savory passages in the history of English criticism as the ‘‘nimble Spaniel’’ that ‘‘beats over and ranges through the field of Memory, till it springs the Quarry it hunted after; or, without metaphor, which searches over all the memory for the species or Idea’s of those things which it designs to represent.’’ Moreover, the wit uses language to set ‘‘before your eyes the absent object, as perfectly and more delightfully then [sic]nature’’ (1:53). Dryden, immersed no doubt as he is, a man so literate as he, in the mediated culture of the fixed yet mobile signifier, seems to suggest that fixed yet mobile signs might be as much of a boon as a bane. If reality is itself an unstable text, reflecting as it does the complex dialogical interactions of human (and perhaps implicitly nonhuman?) agents, perhaps a fully fixed text would be an unreliable thing for the purposes of representation and communication. Indeed, the less one prepares, polishes, and thinks about imitating the orderly disorder of nature, the better one does at representing it. Shockingly, Dryden, in his pre-Romantic world, seems to suggest sometimes it is better simply to go with the turbulent flow of nature and signification. Or at least this seems to be one implication of his essay—but it is

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difficult to say with certainty since Dryden’s text seems to embody what it describes in words that, because they are perhaps in some ways not premeditated, do not offer a rigid or especially stable theoretical framework to contextualize and fully explicate what he means. A certain degree of categorical instability seems to disrupt the passage. The image of the spaniel is wonderfully vivid, but one might ask, just how does that particularized image relate to the more general concept of the species of imagery that the wit secures for the poet? One thinks of Johnson’s critique of Denham where somehow with the analogy of the river in Cooper’s Hill, the relationship between the particular and the general, the genus and the species, the thing and the abstract notion of the figure, is not completely clear.15 Nor is it entirely clear how texts deliver what Lord Kames might call Ideal Presence, shared literary contexts between Dryden and Kames notwithstanding. Dryden glimpses a kind of complexity for which neither Restoration science nor theology (that sometimes stabilize texts for him) could provide any terms to directly define his perceptions of orderly disorder.16 He can only do what the ancients had prescribed for such occasions: implement an analogy or metaphor. But if Dryden’s wit outstrips his contemporary critical vocabulary, his description of some sort of concordia discors could only fuel the theoretical and epistemological fires set by the textual instability implicit in print culture and the book of nature that it mediated. His succeeding philosophical counterpart, John Locke, however, necessarily shows as much perspiration as inspiration in his attempts to deal with fixed yet mobile signifiers in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.17 In one section devoted entirely to the topic of language, Locke concludes that ‘‘it is easy to perceive what imperfection there is in Language, and how the very nature of Words, makes it almost unavoidable, for many of them to be doubtful and uncertain in their significations’’ (3.9.1–2). Locke is concerned about words since they can only stand for ideas, not things, and their relationship to the signified is purely arbitrary. Hence, ‘‘Where the Ideas they stand for have no certain connexion in Nature; and so no settled Standard, any where in Nature existing, to rectify and adjust them by’’ (3.9.18–20) there are problems with representing and communicating ideas derived from nature. This is a serious matter, for if human beings ‘‘will be understood, when they speak of Things really existing they must, in some degree, conform their Ideas to the things they would speak of: Or else Men’s Language will be like that of Babel; and every Man’s Words, being intelligible only to himself ’’

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(3.6.28). Hence, problems in communication—what Locke really wants to focus on—are exacerbated by the inherent problem with words and representation, something he knows cannot be fully resolved. This is the case for two reasons: the book of nature is bafflingly complex and unstable, and so is language in its attempts to create categories that will prove useful for conceptualizing the things we perceive in the natural world. Nature, it turns out, creates monstrosities, strange aborted things like fetuses, and this implies that nature’s categorical boundary work is fuzzy and unpredictable. ‘‘Wherein,’’ asks Locke, ‘‘would I gladly know, consists the precise and unmovable Boundaries of that Species? ’Tis plain, if we examine, there is no such thing made by Nature and established by Her amongst Men.’’ One could not even discern the species of a fetus if asked. Such confusion ‘‘could not happen, if the nominal Essences, whereby we limit and distinguish the Species of Substances, were not made by Man, with some liberty; but were exactly copied from precise Boundaries set by Nature’’ (3.6.27). This complex boundary work is evident in other creations of nature, not just the aberrations: ‘‘So uncertain are the Boundaries of Species of Animals to us, who have no other Measures, than the complex Ideas of our own collecting’’ (ibid). The problem is exacerbated by the tendency of the mind to multiply essences that are human constructs out of touch with nature, created merely by the tendency to multiply species and genera without consideration to whether this is consistent with nature. In Locke’s post-print mediated conception of language, error can be multiplied serially and destabilize our conceptions and representations of an already unstable nature: ‘‘But if we would rightly consider what is done, in all these Genera and Species, or Sorts, we should find, that there is no other Thing made, but only more or less comprehensive signs whereby we may be enabled to express, in a few syllables, great numbers of particular Things . . .’’ (3.6.32). This leads Locke to conclude that ‘‘the boundaries of Species . . . are made by men’’ and are ‘‘seldom adequate to the internal Nature of the Things they are taken from’’ (3.6.37). For Locke’s money, a ‘‘Spaniel and an Elephant’’ no more constitute distinct species than a ‘‘Shock and a Hound’’ (3.6.38). For modern eyes this business about spaniels and elephants seems to be an absurd conclusion to draw—and so it would seem to later eighteenth-century naturalists as well. But what they and we have in

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common, and what Locke, like Dryden, lacks in this early period of his mediated print culture, is what Headrick would call a postLinnaean and later eighteenth-century informational sensibility that has come to recognize and make full use of the sheer power of a systematic mode of categorization of genus and species in mediated culture. The categories, of course, go back at least nominally to ancient Greek philosophy, but in the new information culture they take on increasing significance and usefulness when augmented by the full feedback mechanisms of print culture. Such modes of organization actually create information by promoting meaningful connections between genus and species in such a way that they enhance the explanatory power of science and related branches of knowledge in a mediated age. For, as Headrick shows, without such an organizational system, itself a product of mediated information culture, there could never have been the succinct analysis that led to Darwin’s Origin of the Species (32). Such information systems seem, quite literally, to organize themselves spontaneously as new information is assimilated into them, and their systems of organization suggest a complex dynamic wherein the boundary between orderliness and randomness is not always clearly defined. This is the case even as information systems somehow are proving their reliability and usefulness as the eighteenth century progresses beyond the confusion that Locke and Dryden initially experienced in their attempts to comprehend the implications of the world of fixed yet mobile texts. The unity and variety of texts both natural and cultural does become apparent to men like Dryden and Locke. But half a century or more must pass with minds interacting with information machinery and learning to use this complex form of categorizing and creating information, before more conceptual categories emerge to help writers feel more confident that they can know, represent, and describe in depth the types of orderly disorder emergent in mediated culture. Here we see the difference between the perceptions of people like Locke and Dryden at the foundation of a print and scientific culture, and the perceptions of those like Johnson living after the efforts to legitimize print that include not only the work of Stationers, printers, and scientists in the social milieu that Johns describes, but also the sheer productivity and usefulness of media in storing, analyzing, and helping humans to conceptualize emergent patterns of order in raw and seemingly disorganized data. For again, as Headrick reminds us, this is the age where the nascent science of statisti-

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cal analysis will make possible finding meaningful patterns in apparently random data. (That inveterate Scriblerian, Dr. Arbuthnot, Headrick reminds us on page 64, quite literally saw ‘‘the hand of God in population statistics.’’) The advancements in cartography and other fields also contributed to the rise of a new sensibility in the culture of the fixed yet mobile signifier. Categories do indeed breed categories and make meaningful connections between otherwise disconnected bits of data, but in ways that can prove extraordinarily productive. For Dryden and Locke, things ought to be either orderly or disorderly based on what the culture’s systems of order and signification have inculcated in their minds. And yet their experience, plus vaguely defined yet intriguing classical categories like concordia discors, points them toward conceptualizing an alternative, a third category for comprehending and representing the complex patterns of nature in this mediated culture. Such a conceptualization takes time to nurture but has profound implications for their culture as it has for ours and Samuel Johnson’s, as we contemplate the implications of mediating the world with signs that are simultaneously fixed and mobile in emerging texts of information cultures. In short, the increasing productivity and success of print culture in producing and storing information helps writers from Dryden to Johnson to better appreciate and comprehend how this unity and variety of perspectives in mediated culture points to a category of orderly disorder with profound implication for society and the body politic. Dryden is just beginning to explore these possibilities; Johnson will look back over the decades and attempt to explain how they point to practical means of representing orderly disorder in the medium of poetry. (And, not surprisingly, as we will see in chapter 5, Johnson will find inspiration for his theory of complexity and mimesis not so much in Dryden’s theory as in the practice of Dryden’s prose and poetry.) Before Johnson, before Pope, others attempted to represent complexity, and sometimes with greater success than Dryden or Locke due to different epistemological, political, and even theological assumptions from mainstream post-Restoration thought. One can see an early and productively reflexive discussion of this third category of implicit order in Lucy Hutchinson’s poem Order and Disorder published in 1679.18 Hutchinson was, as her modern editor and commentator David Norbrook reminds us, someone very different from Locke and Dryden. She resisted the attractor of emerging Restoration mainstream culture, remaining true to her religion, which was

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Puritan, and her politics, which were staunchly Republican and antiRoyalist, or to put it more plainly, antiestablishment. But she was not entirely secluded from the new culture’s influences; previously to writing Order and Disorder, her grandly Miltonic, poetic re-imagining of the book of Genesis, Hutchinson had translated Lucretius, whose binary vision of deterministic order and utter randomness had, as Norbrook says, deeply unsettled her (xxxii). As Hutchinson says in her preface to the poem, exposure to both Lucretius and Ovid had left her in a quandary, and her poem is the remedy to this dangerous encounter with print: ‘‘These meditations were . . . fixed upon to reclaim a busy roving thought from wandering in the pernicious and perplexed maze of human inventions’’ that ‘‘filled my brain with such foolish fancies, that I found it necessary to have recourse to the fountain of Truth, to wash out all ugly impressions’’ (3). As Norbrook says (xxxiii), this strangely precautious conceptualization of informational brainwashing is unsettling, though entirely consistent, as Johns would remind us, with contemporary theories in her mediated culture of the power of print to coerce and even deform the mind. Even in her nostalgia for a vanishing Puritan culture, Hutchinson is a woman of the post-Restoration world. Returning to the book of Genesis was an extraordinarily courageous way for Hutchinson to begin the project of her psychological and spiritual reconstruction after the trauma of exposure to these texts, amplified by her witnessing of the destruction of her old world, the world that had produced a revolution and works like Paradise Lost before the onset of increasing uncertainty and instability in the world of a now increasingly secularized and probabilistic system of fixed yet mobile signs. Locke’s Essay would later note how even the text of the Bible had been destabilized in their time (3.9.23); and as Norbrook says, Calvinists like Hutchinson were keenly aware of Genesis’s ‘‘instability’’ as a text (xxxiii). In her time, ‘‘there were early stirrings of a movement towards a historicist fragmentation of the Pentateuch’’ raised by such notables as Thomas Hobbes (1651), Isaac de la Peyre`re (1655), and even her relative John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, who sardonically noted the ‘‘Incoherence of Style in the Scriptures, the odd transitions, the seeming Contradictions’’ in Genesis (as quoted in Norbrook, xxxiii). As Norbrook says, since Hutchinson had ‘‘had to grapple in her own work on Lucretius’’ with similar textual concerns, the issues concerning authorship and consistency in Genesis could not have escaped her; though she and

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her colleague John Owen remained convinced that Moses was indeed the author (xxxiii). She yearned for a fixed and stable text in Genesis, but her own experience as an editor and translator would illustrate the process whereby even biblical texts could lose their fixity with subsequent translators, editors, and even writers of unknown origin perhaps corrupting the text. In an age where, as Johns shows, piracy and plagiarism could undermine the certainty of authorship and the accurate communication of the original author’s intended meaning, the epistemological base of knowledge can begin to slip even for the most devout and faithful readers of a sacred language only apparently preserved in print. But for Hutchinson, it is as if her own poetic vision of the text will stabilize it, simultaneously with her effort to stabilize the book of nature in a world of change and uncertainty. To some degree this is an article of faith with her; like Dryden she asserts in her preface that unrestrained and unpolished language will somehow allow her to represent what, as Norbrook says, would appear to be a disorderly fallen world through the lens of her Calvinism (xxviii)—though one hastens to add that she is also seeing it under the influence of her encounter with an evolving mediated culture that looks quite intimidating to her and to her contemporaries. Hence, she says that her readers ‘‘will find . . . no charms of language . . . ; for I would rather breathe forth grace cordially’’ without affectation. Her language cannot fully express her spiritual encounter with God, but like many Protestant poets before her, she will give herself up to the task of simply speaking her heart (5). Dryden offers no explanation or theoretical construct for describing how words effect the ends he discusses; Hutchinson, however, embodies her theory in the form and argument of the poem that also embodies God’s grace and harmony. In the beginning she is uncertain how to proceed, but a solution emerges: In these outgoings would I sing his praise, But my weak sense with these too glorious rays Is struck with such confusion that I find Only the world’s first Chaos in my mind, Where light and beauty lie wrapped in seed And cannot be from the dark prison freed Except that Power by whom the world was made My soul in her imperfect strugglings aid, Her rude conceptions into forms dispose And words impart which may those forms disclose. (2.30–36)

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The words and style are entirely consistent with the Protestant ‘‘poetics of grace’’ and its synthesis with classical invocations of the Muse,19 where, as in the case of Paradise Lost, the Muse takes the form of the Holy Spirit. But the apparently alchemical conception of this process of beginning the poem (a seed is being fertilized and opened as God and the poet interact) is arresting, coupled with the passage’s emphasis on form. Form here seems to embody a birthing process through the animation of the poetic imagery, which releases the enargeia of the argument that not only represents ideas but also connects them in a lively fabric that embodies form not as a static entity (say, like George Herbert’s hieroglyphic representation of ‘‘The Altar’’ or ‘‘Easter Wings’’), but rather as an unfolding of emergent traces in a text that is fluid yet no less lucid for its almost cinematic capacity to capture an idea that not only glows but bursts forth and pulsates with its own felt life. As Norbrook says, the major thrust of the poem is ‘‘to evoke the divine order through the beauty of form’’ (xxxiii). Certainly, but if one approaches the poem expecting the kind of form that Plato or Aristotle describe, or even the architectonics of Sidney and Herbert, one is in for a shock, because that is not the kind of structuring principle that preoccupies the mind of Lucy Hutchinson. She begins with a kind of chaos that is the antithesis of order but leads her to a description and an embodiment of an order that does not oppose order to disorder but implies that they are intimately related. After the biblical floodwaters come and recede in the eighth canto, Hutchinson discovers the order she has been looking for embodied in the natural world, in human artifice and in her verse: As women, with their proud fantastic care Ne’er satisfied, set and unset their hair A thousand times ere they themselves can please: So played the soft gales on the varied seas, Now crisped, now marbled the successive streams, Now weaved them into bredes with glittering beams Whose permeations changed their sullen hue While gold appeared through the transparent blue. What will Restoration be, if this But the first daybreak of God’s favor is? (8.19–28)

Some nineteen years after the Restoration of Charles II, that final question was pregnant with meaning for Hutchinson and her gener-

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ation. What she would like Restoration to mean is a return to order but one that is consistent with her tradition while recognizing the impact of the strange new world of the fixed yet mobile signifier in a more skeptical context where none of the traditional answers can be presented in the old style; instead, a new sense of form needs to emerge that could embody order by re-imagining its earlier conceptions to meet old needs in new ways (or, as Samuel Johnson will say decades later, the process must embody something at once natural and new). Norbrook quite rightly asserts that the Calvinistic Hutchinson saw a ‘‘strong predestined divine pattern behind the apparent chaos’’ (xxx), but her way of figuring forth that pattern was quite different from her Protestant predecessors. This is no sudden yoking together of a profane and sacred image where one’s soul is a usurped town, or two lovers are the legs of a compass. The profane is certainly here in Hutchinson’s imagery—the vanity of women is alluded to, as Norbrook says, but there is a redemptive process here that is, as he says, ‘‘not a static product’’ (xxxi). Indeed, a divine order emerges in the rippling form of the waters and the women’s hair that is not like Eve’s wanton ringlets in Paradise Lost, to be contrasted with the orderly composure of her sublimely rational and physically dominant mate. Rather, for Hutchinson, women’s hair and the braided waters are testimony through figuration in formal beauty of an ordering presence at once divine in its complexity and yet very material in its instantiation. It is, in short, something very much like the printed word; it fixes in the mind a notion of order that is stable yet also mobile, animated, and fluid without being completely disorderly. Mediation, it turns out, can take you closer to God and the order of physical nature because it represents a kind of vibrant isomorphism that the mind can embrace as it interacts with the word and the referent. The mediated sign can stabilize the mind even as it destabilizes it because, as Hutchinson’s poetic clearly shows, order and disorder are not always exclusive terms. Indeed, as her energetic poetic shows us, Godly order can exist within disorder, and this process can be represented graphically and embodied linguistically when the reader’s mind interacts with the sign that, in the process of mediating nature and the human consciousness, allows us to experience a third state of being between the deterministic order and the total randomness that Hutchinson contemplated in Lucretius but ultimately learned to contextualize in a new and productive manner. A text made of signs that offer equal potential for fixity and mobility

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could be a text featuring a kind of dynamic combination of stability and instability that can figure forth for the mind such types of orderly disorder observed in nature, whose text features a similarly complex dynamic. Why was she able to configure this so elegantly when Dryden and Locke (among many others) found the task at times so daunting? After all, they too had access to the tradition of enargeia and were aware of its animating effects; they too could contemplate the classical concept of concordia discors and its elusive but still evocative Heraclitean underpinnings. The answer probably lies in her different cultural background. As Norbrook says, Hutchinson had made a clean break with the court and its hierarchical Royalist politics. God alone stands above humanity; so in Norbrook’s words, ‘‘God works in history by breaking down the idols of false orders and elevating the humble’’ who have wrongly been characterized as the ‘‘forces of disorder’’ when their rebellion actually represents an alternative order to the current Royalist usurpers (xxxvi). Her theology and leveling politics afford some of the tools she needs to discern and reconstruct a new sense of order to restore balance to her world. She does not need to find a way to integrate something as seemingly static as a hierarchical political order into her fluid and lively mediation of the world. She need build no palaces, nor courts, nor divided Station houses of printers and booksellers in her turbulent yet selforganizing visionary kingdom; the eminence and immanence of God’s complex dynamic ordering principle are all too clear in the rush of the waters, in the dynamic mimetic style of a poetic that materially manifests complexity in a text of fluid yet divinely dynamic signs. Such is the power of her newfound (or renewed) faith. Such too was the power of her politics, which liberated her from any need to integrate hierarchic social structures into her thinking that would make difficulties for thinkers of Dryden’s and Locke’s generation, who would find it difficult to embrace complexity while showing also some partiality to traditional and static notions of hierarchic stability. As we will see, Pope, before 1750, will integrate hierarchy and complexity, but with results only somewhat less controversial, politically and theologically, than what Hutchinson had in mind. However, Johnson will integrate hierarchy and complexity without debilitating controversy from 1750 to 1780. Of course, neither Pope nor Johnson could have fully embraced Hutchinson’s system, had they known of it, since it represented what both men no doubt would have identified as a kind of Republican fanaticism.

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Indeed, her discovery could not bear wide dissemination in her mediated culture as a result of her politics; and her marginalized status as a woman would no doubt present, as Anne Finch attested in her unpublished poem ‘‘The Introduction,’’20 its own set of obstacles. But concepts of orderly disorder eventually would bear wide dissemination, once more politically and theologically acceptable means of conceptualizing it became available—and they did, particularly in Johnson’s work. Hutchinson, like others entering the world of the eighteenth century, had conceptualized a kind of orderly disorder that we have come to describe in our own mediated culture as pseudorandomness. This, at least, is the term used in contemporary chaos theory (complex dynamics) to describe states of organization that do not fit into the traditional categories that distinguish order and disorder as if they were always completely discrete categories. A brief review of today’s mediated conceptualization of orderly disorder will help to define earlier conceptualizations of orderly disorder in the Restoration and the early and later eighteenth century, so let me briefly discuss how order is conceived in modern chaos theory and how this relates to the topic of mediation before turning to the cultural milieu of the eighteenth century.

The Role of Mediation in Conceptualizations of Chaos and Complexity To begin with, it should be emphasized that modern chaos theory does not imply that we should not at least nominally distinguish between deterministic order and pure randomness, total disorder. To do so would defy what we can observe in the real world. Clear examples of deterministic order exist; indeed, it would be difficult for us to function without deterministic principles. Dr. Johnson’s joke about watches and dictionaries notwithstanding, nobody would want a watch that does not run predictably and thus deterministically. We expect simple mechanisms to work predictably and, like many mechanisms in the real world, they can and must be counted on to do that. As chaotician Edward Lorenz, discoverer of the butterfly effect, says, ‘‘A deterministic sequence is one in which only one thing can happen next; that is, its evolution is governed by precise laws.’’ And, by contrast, ‘‘Randomness . . . is therefore identical with the absence of determinism.’’21 As Lorenz points out, it is possible, though, according to modern

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chaos theory, that pure randomness does not exist since one can find order within disorder, but mathematically speaking, and practically speaking, one needs the concept of total randomness to conceptualize determinism and pseudorandomness. Thus one can conceptualize purely unpredictable and disorderly mechanisms at work in the world. For example, no one could ever earn a reputation as a professional gambler by flipping coins and betting on the outcome—the chances will always be fifty-fifty on how that activity will turn out. Some patterns statistically might emerge in flipping coins (indeed Lorenz would technically argue the activity is pseudorandom on some level), but by and large the toss is unpredictable, hence the reliance upon coin tosses in sporting events. There is no underlying pattern that allows even an educated guess as to the outcome. One could, however, make a living by playing cards or working a pinball machine, because games of chance (a recurring motif in eighteenth-century literature, one notes with interest) are not completely chaotic. Good card players and gamblers in general can read emerging patterns in the seeming disorder of everything from fivecard stud to ombre—if they have good memories and a certain capacity for mathematizing the stochastic aspects of such activities. And more complex forms of nonlinear mathematics can help describe, represent, and even predict seemingly chaotic events like the eye movements of schizophrenics, weather patterns, and various types of turbulent flow. That is because, as Lorenz says, at some level these activities do involve some degree of deterministic behavior that we cannot describe fully unless we study them mathematically. These activities constitute dynamic systems whose deterministic qualities and random qualities vary with time, like a wave breaking over a rock, which is highly deterministic in some aspects of its behavior but unpredictable in others. These are what are known as complex dynamic systems featuring ‘‘seemingly random and unpredictable behavior that nevertheless proceeds according to precise and often easily expressed rules’’ (ix). Because these deterministic functions exist along with random qualities within these systems, they are often described as self-organizing systems whose organization seems to suddenly emerge and hence is described as emergent order or implicit or implicate order. N. Katherine Hayles and chaotician Robert Shaw speculate that the human mind is geared to perceive and achieve balance (tone) with such systems because it is itself a dynamic system22 —so this may

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be one reason why perceptions of pseudorandomness predate the modern science of chaos, which can trace its roots to the work of Henri Poincare in the 1800s but does not actually crystallize until the 1970s with the works of people like Prigogene. But equally worthwhile to consider, with regard to the emergence in human history of ideas on pseudorandomness, is the impact of systems of mediation for conceptualizations of chaos. One of the reasons that Lorenz was able to formulate his conceptions of weather systems as dynamic systems featuring sensitive dependence—systems where small-scale causes can yield large-scale effects, thus masking their subtly deterministic and pseudorandom tendencies—was that Lorenz had a computer. Indeed, part of his discovery seems to have happened as a result of leaving a computer unattended as it performed a simple task of computation. Left so, it fed the results of the computations back into itself until it had produced surprisingly nonlinear results from successive iterations of simple deterministic procedures. Suddenly one of nature’s secrets was apparently revealed; complex dynamic systems could be created by simply repeating a deterministically simple operation until they featured complex behaviors that seemed unpredictable. A kind of orderly disorder was created, one paralleling the complex geometrics created by Benoit Mandelbrot, who found that shapes containing an infinite amount of detail, fractals, could be created via simple finite operations repeated iteratively.23 Coincidently, such shapes existed in nature, in the forms of coastlines, mountain ranges, and other natural objects created by simple, deterministic operations (waves hitting shorelines repeatedly, for example, or the unfolding of simple genetic codes into increasingly more complex physical structures such as your body) that resulted in infinitely complex and irregular forms like coastlines. Without computers, such precise descriptions, re-creations, calculations, and representations of natural processes and forms would have been impossible. The mediation of reality by the computer was a process guiding human conceptualization, perhaps even human perception, of orderly disorder. In the Restoration and eighteenth century, very similar conceptions of orderly disorder emerged in the mediated culture of the fixed yet mobile signifier, though eighteenth-century people did not have the kind of nonlinear math to enable them to describe them with the precision of today’s science of chaos. (The calculus of Leibniz and Newton, however, was certainly pointing them in that direction, as we will see in chapter 2 on Pope and his milieu.) This is not

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to say that some kind of linguistic determinism is suggested here, along the lines of at least one offshoot of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis that implies language directly shapes perceptions. Quite the contrary; if McKitterick is correct, the fixed yet mobile signifier is as old as writing; scribal cultures showed awareness of it and were influenced by it as were the print cultures preceding the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What is significant here is how other issues and influences in the culture affect or help coalesce certain perceptions of print that in turn affect conceptions of signification, mediation, and the representation of order or disorder (and orderly disorder) in the referent. Note that Hutchinson’s belief systems hailed back to her predecessors like Milton, but under the pressures of a changing culture in the Restoration where virtually every kind of epistemological assumption one might have was perceived as being under attack, she was forced to see new significance in the mobile signifier and in the instability of human and natural texts. Neither Herbert, nor Donne, nor Milton attached such significance to the signifier because acts of mediation were not sites of this kind of controversy for them. Milton’s magnum opus is written ten years earlier than hers and only seven years into the Restoration—and unlike Hutchinson, Milton is not preparing translations and critical editions of those particular classical writers who, as Kroll noted above, play pivotal roles in recontextualizing the epistemological significance of mediation in post-Restoration culture. Hutchinson is caught between the mediated realities of Milton’s generation and Dryden’s, and thereby illustrates the difficulty and necessity of adjustment even for someone who wished ardently to reject the changing mediated culture. That culture and its signs provided her with the opportunity to find her own way of comprehending and dealing with the challenges of that culture—but the unique quality of her solution, especially evident in contrast with Dryden’s and Locke’s early efforts, testifies to the nondeterministic nature of human interaction with print. The paradox of the fixed yet mobile text allows her and others following her, like Pope and Johnson, to address a potentially oppressive, threatening mediated cultural environment and seek some kind of liberation in the designs of its complex and often unstable dynamic. Many others following her find fascinating and still compelling solutions in the eighteenth century to the problems that Hutchinson and her generation of writers before 1700 identified for the literate mediated culture that followed. In my interpretation of Samuel

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Johnson, I depart from Alvin Kernan’s concept of Johnson as a champion of some kind of ‘‘print logic’’ and a textual fixity that clearly could not inform Johnson’s preparation for a life of writing. I focus instead on Johnson’s interest in the complex dynamics of texts in nature and in human culture. Johnson is able to build on the foundation laid by Locke, Pope, and others to fashion a system of ethical conduct, political philosophy, and poetics that takes full advantage of the dynamic mediated sign to establish a system of representation shaped by the epistemological and ethical dilemmas posed in the new mediated milieu. Specifically, Johnson is able to do so because as a moral essayist he addresses the major ethical and related epistemological problems posed by the mediated culture. He takes full advantage of the passage of time since the Restoration to engage these issues with a degree of reflexivity and cognitive distancing not available in the Restoration. Likewise, his political philosophy sees the inherent threats in the imagined mediated community of the fiscal military state and outlines ways in which a hierarchy can function as a complex dynamic system that ensures both freedom and stability. And finally, his poetics will solve the particular problems of signification and representation that he first notes in his lexicography, which will allow him to conceptualize poetry as a complex system that enhances our capacity to find stability in the seeming discord of natural and human-constructed texts. The fixed yet mobile signifier is the key to a complex system that, instead of destabilizing the reader’s mind, promotes a healthful psychology that allows the mind to complexify categories of truth and virtue to achieve tone with the perturbations introduced to the mediated culture after the Restoration. Indeed, as print develops a reputation for reliability and stability, as Johns notes above, after the 1750s, Johnson also evinces a wariness of the potentially oppressive quality of such seeming textual stability and insists in his political prose on underscoring the dynamic quality of language and its capacity to liberate the individual, as Huyssen might say, even in an information culture of consumption and mediation. There can be little doubt that a man of Johnson’s experiences would be aware of the conflicted nature of the mediated culture of fixed yet mobile texts. Nevertheless, let me briefly point to particular contexts in the early and later eighteenth century wherein Johnson encountered this culture, both theoretically and in his own life as a writer. These will serve to show how the impact of this culture would help him shape his stances, morally and epistemologically, with re-

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gard to his interest in mediated culture and his perception of its importance in moral, political, and aesthetic contexts that underscore and outline the epistemological foundation of his thinking.

Johnson, Savage, Thomas Baker and Vicesimus Knox: Reflections on Writing in a Mediated Culture (1700–79) That Johnson’s own experiences as a Grub Street writer enhanced his sensitivity to the complex and double-sided nature of signs and the mediated culture they produced cannot be doubted. There is ample testimony of Johnson’s awareness of the dangers and potential benefits of mass mediated print culture in his life of Richard Savage, the writer who helps introduce Johnson to the changing fortunes of the writer’s life when a relatively young Samuel Johnson acclimates himself to the rigors of this profession in London in the 1740s. In his portrait of Savage, Johnson shows that he has learned the terrific significance of the themes of virtue and truth for writers at a time when those categories still are difficult to stabilize. And ironically, Johnson shows, print culture is the key to what necessitates stabilizing them while it also provides ways of stabilizing them actively in the writer’s life even if conceptually and philosophically they remain highly elusive. Specifically, Savage demonstrates for Johnson the importance of authorial presence and rhetorical stance as stabilizing agencies of ethical and epistemological action instantiated in the conflicted yet dynamic milieu of print, long before Johnson will deal with the larger epistemological and ethical issues implicit in information culture in his moral and political prose and his aesthetics after 1750. Savage’s life, first of all, at least in Johnson’s eyes, demonstrates literally the power of the media to destroy or resuscitate a writer’s career or reputation by marshaling the opinion of the many via its persuasive force and its capacity to shape perceptions of people linked primarily by the medium of print. When Savage is put on trial for murder, his life is saved by an account of his life. Johnson says, ‘‘The peculiar circumstances of his life were made more generally known by a short account, which was then published, and of which several thousands were in a few weeks dispersed over the nation; and the compassion of mankind operated so powerfully in his favour that he was enabled by frequent presents to not only support but assist Mr. Gregory [also accused of the crime] in prison; and when

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he was pardoned and released, he found the number of his friends not lessened.’’24 Johnson is clearly aware of the role of media technology in this rescue; an entire nation is exposed to this information in a relatively short period of time, and in more than one way they are able to act on it. But, as we will see later in this study, Johnson is also intensely aware that the cutting edge of this technology is double in nature; it cuts in more than one direction. When Savage is later in trouble again, the same story boosted by the same media mechanism is no longer effective; the story becomes ‘‘less affecting, because it was no longer new’’ and his enemies ‘‘were sufficiently industrious to publish his weaknesses’’ (375). An inherent problem emerges here; a mass audience that receives fast communication of information and that is constantly bombarded with it will not react to old news the way they do to fresh; attention spans in such a culture are affected by novelty and disaffected by sameness and serialization. And the swiftness and power of the press can be commandeered as quickly by one’s enemies as by one’s supporters. He who lives by the double-edged sword of mediated culture can just as easily die by it. Johnson’s biography of Savage reveals the material danger of a mediated culture that is driven by profit and by consumption of the informational product. It is a culture of competition that publicly links high and low social ranks through its demographics of mediation, but in its private institutionalization recognizes the possession of economic power as the only real guarantor of status. Learning and talent are subordinated to the drive for profit: ‘‘the learned and ingenious are often obliged to submit to very hard conditions, or to avarice, by which the booksellers are frequently incited to oppress that genius by which they are supported’’ (367). It is in truth an often bleak and repulsive social institution, this information trade. The gift of genius is subordinated to the greed of the publisher. One might ask how such a cultural milieu could stabilize categories of truth and virtue when its own infrastructures seem to subvert both categories in a media business that is often ruthless and thereby seems to subvert any hope for stable signification that might stabilize the greater society at large. Johnson, in short, easily can corroborate everything Adrian Johns alleges about the conflicted nature of this culture, especially before 1750. Nevertheless, part of the thrust of Johnson’s analysis and rhetoric in Savage is to pointedly argue for alternatives to the effects of this system and to the kind of role Savage found himself playing in it

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until it destroyed him. Johnson shows that Savage’s blindness to the dangers of mediated culture was deadly. Fashioning himself after the earlier image of the genteel seventeenth-century man of letters with patrons and an aristocratic background (see Kernan, page 79), Savage, at the beginning of his career, is already a disillusioned anachronism who cannot adjust or adapt to the new world of print where authorial ethos is vastly more fragile and vastly more threatened in this openly opportunistic and materialistic print culture that ignores cultural and societal hierarchic ideals for the harsh leveling reality of the business world. Savage never realizes what both Adrian Johns and Samuel Johnson know; in a world where categories of truth and virtue are destabilized, along with the media that represents and defines them, reputation and personal integrity are the only things worth more than gold. Unlike Pope and Johnson, who so deftly manage their personae even when on the attack in satires, Savage loses integrity by failing to manage his ethos consistently by falling into the trap where the author ‘‘is only considered at one time a flatterer, and as a calumniator at another’’ (360). Savage fails to construct a trustworthy persona that takes a consistent stand on issues in the mediated culture without creating the impression that he merely uses the milieu and the audience for material gain and as an expression of selfish ego. To do so is to embody the worst aspects of print culture in its potential for destabilizing truth, virtue, and human society. This pitfall can only be avoided by developing an ethos when assuming a rhetorical stance that focuses very self-consciously on devotion to truth and virtue (a strategy Johnson may well be lifting in part from that famous friend of virtue Alexander Pope). Johnson’s language bears quoting at length, for it is worth examination: To avoid these imputations, it is only necessary to follow the rules of virtue, and to preserve an unvaried regard to truth. For though it is undoubtedly possible that a man, however cautious, may be sometimes deceived by an artful appearance of virtue, or by false evidences of guilt, such errors will not be frequent; and it will be allowed that the name of an author would never have been made contemptible had no man ever said what he did not think, or mislead others but when he was himself deceived. (360)

Building on that post-Lockean dramatistic approach that Kroll and Cope rightly describe emerging in the earlier part of the period,

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Johnson recognizes that virtue and truth will remain unstable conceptually especially in a world where willful deception can undermine attempts to stabilize these concepts even when they seem to find stability in the world of shared values instantiated by social action. Nevertheless, one can stabilize these concepts in that world of social action through consistency of effort that reveals one’s commitment to the mission of stabilizing them even if those efforts are sometimes defeated. One should not be like Savage who one minute decries the evils of mediated culture by railing against the abusive ‘‘uncontrolled freedom of the press’’ and then the next minute abuses its power (360). The stance one assumes on moral and epistemological issues must be honest and can reveal integrity through consistency of effort and consistency of the principles one defends. There can be no guarantee that one will always discover the truth or know one is pursuing a path toward virtue—but consistent effort will cultivate and perhaps inculcate dedication to principle all the same. To do otherwise is to risk being destroyed by the instability of the cultural text that presents these challenges to the writers of texts whose integrity will not be assumed. In an unexpected way, the instabilities of various aspects of print culture can actually help define and perhaps even promote the pursuit of excellence if one learns from examples like Savage and avoids the traps that await producers and consumers of texts. In the context of this mediated culture, someone as literate and as intelligent as Samuel Johnson could draw no less insightful a conclusion. In his 1775 political tract Taxation No Tyranny, Johnson quotes Thomas Baker’s Reflections Upon Learning, first published in 1699, and subsequently reprinted in the early 1700s.25 In this essay, Johnson would have seen an early testimony to the slippery nature of signification in print culture, as well as issues reflective of the deepening concerns typical of Restoration and early eighteenth-century culture. Baker initially seems to provide support for Markley’s thesis that all language is seen as fallen in the late seventeenth century, printed and otherwise: ‘‘Languages being the Chanels by which most of our Learning is convey’d, it is necessary to the attaining of knowledge, that these should be kept clear and open; if the Streams in these run muddy, or are corrupted, all the knowledge that is conveyed by them, must be obscure: words at the best are no very certain signs of things, they are liable to ambiguity, and under that ambiguity are often subject to very different meanings’’ (7). It is an interesting pas-

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sage since, at least in terms of tone, it features some ambivalence or ambiguity. It is unclear whether Baker feels reform of language is possible; an initially somewhat positive assessment on reporting truth through language seems to be giving way to a rather fatalistic assessment of the situation. This negative aspect seems partly confirmed in later passages where he says, ‘‘the inconveniences from Languages are chiefly two, First, Their variety, and secondly, their mutability.’’ Learning would be enhanced if there were ‘‘only one Language in the world’’ (8), and hence Baker revivifies the Babel trope with which we began: ‘‘The Division of Tongues was inflicted by God as a curse on humane Ambition, and may have been continu’d since for the same reason; . . . nor are we to hope to unite that which God has divide[d]: The Providence of God may have so ordered it for a check to Men’s pride, who are otherwise apt to be building Babels, were there no difficulties to obstruct and exercise them in their Way’’ (19). Hence, contrary to the initially monological and hegemonic trends of the Restoration, Baker, while he uses the Babel trope to contextualize the textual instability issue, does not support the attempts of people like Boyle and Wilkins to discover some kind of Adamic transcendental system of signifiers that would speak the object unambiguously. Quite the contrary, like our own James Berger he thinks such efforts are misguided, pointless, and possibly blasphemous. Not surprisingly, Baker attacks Wilkins’s Real Character on the grounds that, while it may appeal ‘‘in Theory’’ it will in truth be found ‘‘upon tryal’’ to be ‘‘an impracticable thing’’ (18). Does this mean Baker feels attempts to use print to instill fixity and reverse linguistic corruption are useless? Yes and no. Words are mutable: ‘‘were their nature fix’d and their condition stated, the measures that are taken from them might be more steddy,’’ but ‘‘Words like other things are subject to the common fate of vicissitude and change; they are always in Flux, ebbing and flowing, and have scarce any period; for being govern’d by Custom . . . and the humour of the People, it is scarce possible it should be otherwise’’ (11). Even in Roman times Latin succumbed to corruption (12). Language is subject to ‘‘Decay,’’ and the profusion of dictionaries meant to arrest this process only ‘‘breed confusion’’ (15–17), a conclusion that seems to prefigure some of Johnson’s frustrations with the Dictionary as he attempts to institute reform of the English language. Nevertheless, Baker does believe that grammarians have imparted

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some purity to the language. Indeed, ‘‘they have writ with much greater Purity, than most of the Antient Grammarians have done’’ (22). However, if grammar was ‘‘fram’d originally as . . . Immutable,’’ nowadays ‘‘we must suit it to our business as well as we can, but are not to expect it should be uniform and not liable to any exceptions’’ (25). Grammar should be conceived of as a flexible science serving present need—or so he seems to say until two pages later when he complains that ‘‘exceptions’’ to the rules are nevertheless ‘‘vexatious’’ (27). Similar ambivalence seems evident when Baker announces that perhaps alphabets could evidence fixity (25) while he nevertheless insists that etymological evolution is purely ‘‘the effect of chance’’ (26). So are texts fixed or mobile for Baker? Apparently McKitterick is right—for many people at the time, they are both stable and unstable, like the signifiers that comprise them. Baker, in short, is divided, and displays the doubts one might expect in someone before 1750, in concurrence with what Johns and McKitterick argue. And, again as McKitterick shows, the issues Baker raises do not completely vanish after 1700, or even 1750. This is plain in Vicesimus Knox’s Essays Moral and Literary of 1778.26 Like Baker in a later section of his work, Knox complains that the arts of eloquence are in decay (1:22) because of a ‘‘voluntary compliance with the taste and genius of the nation’’ (1:24). As Johnson also argues in his periodical prose (which we will examine in chapter 3), we live in an ‘‘AGE OF AUTHORS’’ (1:34) and too many texts are produced for profit (1:36– 37). Nevertheless, grammarians and lexicographers (Knox alludes to Johnson here) have supplied some ‘‘fixed rules’’ (1:74) to fight textual corruption. At the same time, good and evil are bound together in the medium of print. Print has promoted ‘‘gentleness and humanity; but it has also superinduced a general indolence, refinement and false delicacy.’’ It represents both virtue and vice with equal power to ‘‘a corrupt imagination’’ (1:368). And this has serious political consequences for ‘‘Men by reading were led to reflect, and by reflexion discovered, that they had been under an error when they looked up to their governors as to a superior Order of Beings; but at the same time they learned the happiness of living under a well regulated constitution, the duty of obedience in return for protection, and the political necessity of subordination’’ (1:374) even if print has been ‘‘the means of encouraging licentiousness, of animating sedition, and kindling the flame of civil war’’ (1:375).

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Print, in short, had equal capacity for making or breaking society and its concomitant system of political order. Overall, though, Knox seems convinced that print’s positive aspects can win out; he seems more confident than Baker, writing decades before 1750, that he can sort through the good and bad aspects of the medium. Knox believes that standards for textual fixity are being met by the ‘‘Clarendon Press at Oxford’’ whose people ‘‘join to the ornamental excellencies of exquisite type and paper, the minutest accuracy’’ (1:365). Owing to the ‘‘mechanical mode’’ of producing books, ‘‘Philosophy . . . has now diffused its influence on the mean as the great’’ (1:367). The result is a better nation-state: ‘‘The lust of dominion which disgraced the iron reign of the sullen, unlettered tyrant, was succeeded, in the enlightened father of his people, by a spirit of his people’’ whom he respected (1:374). Hence, Knox hopes that ‘‘the love of money, shall no longer multiply treatises tending to teach people a false philosophy, an erroneous belief, or a factitious conduct,’’ but instead print culture will promote a spontaneous and ‘‘unsophisticated virtue’’ (1:382). Asked today what are the relevant benefits and dangers of the Internet, you might offer speculations similar to either Baker’s or Knox’s. Media are indeed double-edged, and this notion prevails in Johnson’s time much as it does in ours. And like today’s media theorists, the Jean Baudrillards and the Friedrich Kittlers, Johnson seeks to bring greater focus and attention to the problem of the impact of mass-mediated signification in print culture with regards to its effects on cultural values and the interactions of individuals in that information-based society.27 His concern is indeed that the progress of information technology be matched by the progress of ethical human application of that technology as he begins to show in the piece on Savage. Ultimately Johnson proves to be optimistic about the information revolution and its texts of fixed but mobile signifiers, but, for good reasons, his is a cautious optimism. He studies his information culture in greater depth and more methodically than either Baker or Knox, pointing systematically to problems with mediated culture while also suggesting possible and practical solutions. And again, as we will see, unlike his predecessor Pope, he does so in a fashion fully compatible with reigning paradigms in politics, psychology, and religion. The result is a system that successfully addresses anxieties about print and complexity while fostering solutions geared to appeal widely to a concerned British reading public. And eventually, after 1765, Johnson in his po-

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etics proposes answers to the questions about representation that are as sophisticated as the best thinking on mediation today. I now turn to Pope’s thinking on the topic of signification and its relation to representations and conceptualizations of order and disorder in the first half of the eighteenth century in the Essay on Man. Pope, unlike Baker, tackles questions of complexity head on and outlines possible solutions to the representation crisis. Pope is a significant pre-1750 predecessor to Johnson, and his thinking will help illustrate what is special about Johnson’s approach to textual and linguistic complexity later in the century. It will also help illustrate how thinking on complexity and chaos was evolving from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the middle of the period. As one might expect, that evolution was nonlinear, and, as always, at least to some degree, unpredictable, but all the more enlightening for it.

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2 Pope as a Precursor to Johnson: The Mediation of Chaos and Order in An Essay on Man I appeal to the People, as my rightful judges and masters. —Pope to James Cragg, July 15, 1715

ALEXANDER POPE’S RELATION TO MEDIATED PRINT CULTURE IS SUFFIciently complex to have engendered diverging yet sometimes complementary points of view on the matter among scholars in the past twenty years. In his 1987 work, Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson, Alvin Kernan sees vast differences in attitude toward print between the views professed by Samuel Johnson and Alexander Pope.1 Depicting Johnson as the champion of ‘‘Print Logic’’ and the fixity of the text, Kernan argues that Johnson ‘‘stands out as the only writer of stature who fully understood, acknowledged and acted upon an awareness that print was now inescapably the primary fact of letters’’ (17). Johnson is therefore the complete antithesis of Pope: ‘‘Where Pope saw only disasters in print,’’ especially in The Dunciad, Johnson found literary opportunities,’’ for if ‘‘the printing press produced a flood of books which threatened in their numbers to cheapen . . . all writing, then Johnson could also point out in Rambler 23 that a printed text has a peculiar fixity . . . and hence a special ontological and epistemological authority’’ (18). By contrast, the best-selling Pope is blind to all of this: he thought ‘‘print is a dullish, mechanical, undiscriminating, repetitive mass medium, a true instrument of Dulness that gives extraordinary opportunities to those already inclined that way, greedy booksellers, vain, dull gentlemen, poor scribblers, pedantic schoolmasters.’’ Pope might agree with Marshall McLuhan, who argues that print ‘‘plunged ‘the human mind into the sludge of unconscious engendered by the book’ ’’ (15). Other Pope scholars have taken exception to this view, or have 62

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modified it in ways that are instrumental to sharpening and making more accurate our perception of Pope’s role in helping us understand Johnson’s stance toward the mediated milieu that made them both literary giants in their time. An example of this is James McLaverty’s 2001 work, Pope, Print and Meaning.2 McLaverty argues that Kernan’s reading is ‘‘not quite right’’ (4) for Pope both loved and hated print, but ‘‘Whether as lover or hater of print, Pope understood the layers of culture so well that he could move subtly within them, adopting a variety of roles, denying his agency when necessary or even implying it when it was not there’’ (1). In short, ‘‘Pope’s love of print was never pure, uncontaminated by self-consciousness and suspicion’’ (2) for ‘‘As he grew more antagonistic both to the London book trade and to the court culture that represented its alternative, Pope found print an essential form of self-expression but one involving necessary deformation’’ (3). McLaverty thus reminds us of the fact that Pope’s attitude was not static or monolithic, and hence different attitudes will emerge in Pope’s work in different contexts, always an important aspect of Pope’s style and rhetoric to consider. Equally important to bear in mind is Pope’s awareness of the aesthetic and ethical implications of his interactions with print—a point that emerges in the useful and sometimes overlooked discussion of Pope and the Scriblerians in Roger Lund’s 1998 article on ‘‘The Eel of Science: Index Learning, Scriblerian Satire, and the Rise of Information Culture.’’3 He argues that an important context for the satires of Pope and Swift is the Grub Street Journal, which ‘‘reflects a peculiar nostalgia for an age before the general dissemination of knowledge’’ when ‘‘there were no ‘helps’ to learning’’ like indexes or prefaces or dictionaries, those user-friendly devices of print that did not exist in ‘‘the Renaissance’’ (21). The Scriblerians showed disdain for indexing because of ‘‘their backlash against the democratization of knowledge, the professionalization of literature in general, and the reduction of knowledge itself to mere information’’ (39). Indeed, such attitudes do not end with the Sciblerians, but are evident later in writers like Samuel Johnson, who in his Dictionary ‘‘was responding to the uncontrolled expansion of index learning, insisting that his own dictionary was an attempt to correct and regularize a form of literature’’ that was out of control (21). But for all that, says Lund, Pope’s career as a translator and bestselling author prevents him from separating himself completely from this culture, and so he turns to classical norms to distance him-

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self from this culture: ‘‘In the face of this welter of new information, Pope’s insistence that nature herself reveals a ‘Chain of being’ (an outmoded taxonomy to be sure) or models of ‘order in variety’ may be seen as evidence of his attempt to find coherence in a new ‘information age’ defined on the one hand by ‘miscellaneity’ . . . or on the other by ‘system’ ’’ (30). Hence Pope’s obsession with the concept of concordia discors as a prime agent in poetics (29). Both Pope’s and Johnson’s resistance to the miscellany and the system makes them anachronisms in their age, says Lund; ‘‘As Defoe makes clear’’ in his vindication of the printing press, ‘‘the wide moral survey Johnson had in mind had already been replaced by inventory’’ when Johnson was composing works like The Vanity of Human Wishes, for like Pope he ‘‘was already out of step’’ (29). In one sense, perhaps they were out of step with their contemporaries, but in another they may have been quite literally ahead of their time. If in the process of contextualizing Pope’s and Johnson’s conceptualizations of order within mediated culture we focus solely on the eighteenth century, they may indeed seem out of step. But if we include in the context their connection to the continuing development of mediation beyond their time, then we will see them differently. For, as I show below, conceptualizations of orderly disorder do not end with the eighteenth century. Indeed, they are more popular now in mediated culture than ever, especially in the areas of physics and cosmology (not to mention literary theory). I will leave my full discussion of Johnson’s approach to concordia discors and its relation to Pope’s conception of it for the fifth chapter where we can see Johnson’s ideas in the context of their evolution throughout his moral and political prose. Presently I wish to focus solely on Pope’s exploration of the concept of orderly disorder in his Essay on Man. I believe it to be a more telling testimony to Pope’s attitudes toward print culture, mediation and complexity than The Dunciad. As McLaverty implies in his answer to Kernan, The Dunciad seems to be mainly an attack on particular individuals who abuse the instrumentalities of mediated culture, rather than an assault on print culture in general. As McLaverty shows, Pope’s focus on print in The Dunciad is ‘‘wavering,’’ and his views may not always ‘‘coincide with the Scriblerians’’ and their view on print (4). The Dunciad typically does not focus on ‘‘technological change or influence’’ and there ‘‘is no culminating criticism of modern mass market’’ (4–5). Dullness, in short, seems to be the real culprit, not print. By contrast, I argue, Pope’s Essay on Man reveals his genuine estima-

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tion of the positive potential of mediation within the larger and more illuminating context of Pope’s ontology and epistemology. In the process it reveals much more about Pope’s stand on the larger issues of representation and mediation in print than The Dunciad. The Essay also will allow us to appreciate how Johnson’s discussions on chaos prove more amenable to reigning paradigms in politics, psychology, and theology especially in the second half of the eighteenth century. The poem nevertheless will prove to offer sophisticated ideas on complex dynamics that will compare favorably with any postmodern conceptualizations of complexity. It will also shed light on how scientific and philosophical ideas in Pope’s milieu could help him describe complexity and represent it in ways that make the concept of concordia discors far more coherent than any comparable conceptualizations emerging previously in classical or neoclassical culture. This will lend support to one of Roger Lund’s points, namely, that Pope shows ‘‘tacit recognition that for even the most pious Augustans the grounds of criticism were shifting’’ (35). In his many acts of translation, ‘‘Pope is forced . . . to measure the value of the ancients by standards that are applied to other useful things’’ in the increasingly utilitarian contemporary culture of print (36). In the process, however, I argue that Pope interacts with the culture of the era’s fixed yet mobile signs and the complex kind of text produced by them to devise and represent through his poetics a new conceptualization of orderly disorder with profound implications for aesthetics, ethics, politics, and society. Johnson’s own complex reaction to this first systematic examination of orderly disorder over the course of his career as a writer of prose has equally significant implications for his generation and our own—as I will show by the conclusion of this study. For Johnson and others the poem failed to persuade fully on epistemological, theological, and ontological grounds—issues made more difficult by the poem’s radical approach to poetic genre as a cite of experimentation.

The Context of Chaos: Genre, Rhetoric, and Complex Dynamics in An Essay on Man In a 1992 essay on critical responses to Pope’s An Essay on Man, Harry Solomon describes two centuries of critical consensus that proclaim Pope’s poem to be ‘‘fundamentally flawed.’’4 Solomon ar-

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gues that the consensus results from the failure to create a mode of critical discourse appropriate to a poem that combines poetry with philosophy. In his 1993 study, The Rape of the Text, Solomon argues that the solution is to create a critical discourse that avoids the extremes of logocentrism and aestheticism by conjoining logical and affective aspects of language (119) in recognition of the equal emphasis Pope places on performative and constative functions of language (95–97) in the Essay.5 Solomon’s solution is theoretically sound, but it is clear that in practice it requires that readers abandon the idea that, in addition to being a system of ethics, the Essay is also a theodicy with profound cosmological and metaphysical implications. In The Rape of the Text, Solomon indicates that we must deemphasize the Warburtonian notion of the Essay as a theodicy or metaphysics (38), for if we read the piece by Leibnizian standards, the poem necessarily fails (39) because its metaphysics cannot be judged by logocentric standards as the poem is meant to be read as a system of ethics that embraces human paradoxes (64). To avoid joining the logocentric camp, we must read the poem as a Horatian epistle on ethics, not as a (sometimes) Lucretian verse essay on humanity’s place in the cosmos— even if, as Solomon asserts, the poem sometimes displays ‘‘Lucretian scorn’’ (106). To do so, however, seems to deny the poem of some of its rhetorical coherence and force, not to mention its mythic and cosmic resonance. If the poem demands a critical discourse placing equal emphasis on logos and pathos, then we cannot ignore the fact that the persuasive and aesthetic thrust of the poem depends on the grounding of its ethics in a cosmology and theology that are at least Lucretian in scope. Generations of critics have demanded that the poem’s logos and pathos, metaphysics and ethics cooperate coherently—while the possibility of Pope’s combining Horatian and Lucretian modes of proceeding need not be precluded.6 Clearly, Solomon has correctly described the problem—but can we create a critical discourse grounded in eighteenth-century culture that can reclaim and recontextualize the poem’s metaphysics as well as its ethics? Part of the solution is implied by Solomon’s call for ‘‘a thicker intertextual description’’ to battle controlled meaning (37). I propose that modern critical discourse based on what is popularly known as chaos theory (or chaology) can point to ways in which Pope’s Essay can be naturalized for modern readers while still

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grounding critical discussion in relevant aspects of the poem’s original cultural context, one that was learning to embrace the mediated culture of the fixed yet mobile sign.7 This is possible because, as chaologists have asserted since the 1970s, chaos and conceptions of self-organizing structures in dissipative systems have played important roles in systems of order and inquiry since ancient times, even before, though clearly including the rise of print culture. Indeed, as Robert Markley has indicated, the efforts of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientists to redeem or legitimize fallen nature through scientific language and mathematics caused thinkers like Newton to realize that the cosmological order is ‘‘irreducibly complex, beyond the explanatory power of the various semiotic systems . . . he uses to analyze it.’’8 This increased awareness of chaos and complexity in nature has profound implications, socially and ethically, for an eighteenth-century culture that attempted to use signs to imitate, represent, and defend a natural hierarchy that ‘‘preserves notions of liberty and complexity and contains them within the notions of scientific thought’’ (182). Pope’s experimental approach to genre thus allows him to create a poem of great scope that persuades—but only if one detects and at least nominally accepts the underlying assumptions of the poem represented by the synthesizing tendencies of Pope’s approach to poetics, cosmology, ontology, epistemology, and ethics. Otherwise his attempt to do what held no interest for someone like Lucy Hutchinson as we saw in chapter 1— namely, to discern how a notion of hierarchy in society is compatible with chaos and complexity—will fail to persuade readers. His assumptions on these topics and on the capacities of mediation are essential to the poem’s argument, to its marriage of hierarchy and complexity. In this chapter I will show that theories on chaos and its relation to self-organizing complex systems in Pope’s mediated culture were much more sophisticated than has often been reckoned. Both Isaac Newton and Gottfried von Leibniz formulate theories on chaos and order that anticipate important elements of twentieth-century chaology. The systems of order they outline bear an isomorphic relationship to Pope’s Essay, which adopts a monadic structure that enables Pope to demonstrate the relationship between the global and the local in the cosmos. Enfolding Newton’s chaogenic materialist metaphysic in Leibniz’s fractal schema of plenitude, Pope describes how seemingly random and disorderly events nevertheless participate in the organizing principle of a that which humans can observe only in

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part but can comprehend as a whole, a priori, by virtue of the monadic structure of the cosmos that circulates information globally and locally. This metaphysic, in turn, validates the poem’s ethics, psychologically and socially, by representing the anarchic yet orderly schema of human social and psychological systems of order as local manifestations of the global, nonrandom fractal hierarchy of nature, which finds its parallel in society and presumably in its body politic. For Pope, the text of nature is simultaneously orderly and disorderly, and his poetics show that the fixed yet mobile text of poetry can represent nature in ways that embody and explicate the complexity that only seems beyond human comprehension. Pope’s reliance on Leibniz and his failure to make specific references to Scripture in his argument would, of course, disturb some members of his reading public. But this does not prevent him from presenting an argument that is coherent and in many ways anticipatory of developments in chaos theory today, things that are entirely evident when the poem is approached properly. Pope’s aesthetic representation of the relationship between the local and the global shows that his poem anticipates a significant aspect of modern chaos theory, as does Leibniz’s monadology. As Hayles says in Chaos Bound, ‘‘chaos theory achieves globalization . . . by correlating movements from one level to another’’ (211). Modern chaoticians have shown that local, seemingly insignificant events can have large-scale effects in complex systems; hence, ‘‘Chaos theory has . . . changed expectations about proportionality between cause and effect’’ (211). In complex systems, ‘‘clarity and haze, local variation and global form, intermingle’’ (235). Pope, like Leibniz, anticipates this conceptualization of the global and the local in modern physics. As Prigogine and Stengers say in Hermes, the language of today’s dynamics has become Leibnizian: ‘‘The world of trajectories determined by forces can henceforth be thought of as being identical to the Leibnizian system of the world in which every point locally expresses the global law.’’9 Although Pope provides a poetic/philosophical description of these dynamics, rather than a mathematical one, he nevertheless anticipates, conceptually, the evolution of modern theories of dynamics in mediated culture. Moreover, through his reliance on both Newtonian and Leibnizian approaches to comprehending complex systems, he anticipates what Prigogine and Stengers call in Hermes, the successful attempt of late eighteenthcentury physicists to inscribe ‘‘Newtonian physics as a special a posteriori case in the a priori conceptual framework of Leibnizian

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physics’’ (142). And all of this, as we will see, depends on the technologization of information and communication in Pope’s mediated cultural milieu.

Sites on the Feedback Loop: Newton, Leibniz, and Pope Michel Serres, in his study of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (an important precursor of Pope’s Essay,) has shown that long before the eighteenth century, the aesthetics of the ancients described the complex interaction of chaos and order—and also combined the philosophical and the poetic in literary texts.10 This should come as no surprise since, as Hayles notes in Chaos Bound, Hesiod’s accounts of order rising out of chaos serve as an early mythic precursor to philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic theories on chaos (21–23). Such mythic representations were available to Pope and contemporaries such as Newton and Leibniz, who attempt to translate them into philosophical discourse before Pope assimilates their theories into the kind of mythopoeic discourse that could voice Western civilization’s conceptions of chaos (pseudorandomness) as an organizing principle. Pope’s poem demonstrates how the first half of the eighteenth century’s print culture was a reservoir of ideas on chaos and complexity in mediation, awaiting an author who could read these ideas and help resolve the vacillation and uncertainty evident in writers like Thomas Baker as we saw in chapter 1. A useful tool for outlining the interaction between the poetic, the philosophical and the theoretical is the feedback loop model as described by Prigogine and Nicolis—and expanded upon by Hayles in Chaos Bound.11 For Prigogine and Nicolis, the model can help illustrate evolutionary processes whereby fluctuations in environment invoke change and adaptation in organisms—such morphology making possible still more changes in the organism, which in turn may begin to precipitate more flux in the whole dynamic interaction between environs and organism (442). Hayles implements the loop as a means for describing the isomorphic parallelism between different disciplines and sites in a given culture. Various disciplines, arts, sciences, theories, and even new technologies influence one another in exchanges of information that provoke isomorphic adaptations within the given ecology of the mediated culture. Hayles says, ‘‘This position implies . . . that scientific theories and models are culturally conditioned, partaking of and rooted in assumptions that

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can be found in multiple sites throughout the culture.’’ Thus, ‘‘the feedback cycle connected theory with culture and culture with theory through the medium of technology’’ (xi–xiv). Hayles applies the model mainly to describe communication and information flow in postwar culture, but given the technological developments in printing associated with Pope’s time, as we saw in Headrick’s discussion of eighteenth-century informatics in Chapter 1,12 the model, to some degree, applies to eighteenth-century culture, where the kind of technology of mass communication described by Hayles finds its roots. Such a feedback loop no doubt facilitated the rise of scientific and rationalist culture—and must also have helped precipitate the rise of the novel with its strong connection to probabilism in mathematics and philosophy.13 Information flow and the circulation of texts in eighteenth-century print culture contributed to the collusion of philosophy and aesthetics in the novel and, as we will see, in eighteenth-century poetry as well, especially in the boldly experimental Essay on Man. Newton’s thinking is a testimony to the ways in which different disciplines and theories influenced one another via the loop. Often seen as someone who kept his religious thinking, his physics, and his alchemical speculation separate, Newton has been described by scholars like Markley, Dobbs, and Castillejo as a thinker whose work represents a multidisciplinary approach to matters cosmological and philosophical.14 (Markley sees Newton engaging in ‘‘bootstrapping’’ disparate sources but, like Dobbs and Castillejo, senses Newton desires to unify these different approaches even if he is forced to recognize their limitations—see 134–35 in Fallen Languages.) Newton’s conception of chaos as an ordering principle in his scientifictheological-alchemical work helps illuminate an aspect of eighteenthcentury culture that is especially significant for comprehending the role of the Essay on Man as a channel for circulating and interpolating ideas on chaos and order in eighteenth-century mediated culture. As we will see, Pope will adopt the trope of the womb of chaos from Newton and the alchemists as an element figuring in the genesis and organization of matter at all levels. Newton’s alchemical treatises are especially helpful for understanding how mythological conceptions of order rising out of chaos, handed down from classical culture, informed philosophical and scientific approaches to conceptualizing self-organizing complex systems in nature. As Castillejo shows in his critical commentary on Newton’s alchemical texts, Newton believes that modern scientific

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principles were revealed to the ancients in the archetypal symbolism of mythology and religion as manifested not only in sacred texts but also in ancient disciplines like alchemy (84). Likewise, Dobbs discusses Newton’s belief that alchemical treatises could work in conjunction with scientific efforts to describe motion and forces like gravity, a point on which she and Westfall concur (4). Newton’s alchemical texts reveal his notion that chaos can be understood, symbolically and philosophically, as a womb that fosters beneficial reorganization, differentiation, and metamorphosis. A strong parallel exists between the interaction of attractive and repelling forces Newton observes in the physical universe (as described mathematically in the Principia) and the interaction of the feminine and masculine principles described in his alchemy as necessary to enlivening and fertilizing the womb of chaos. Castillejo indicates that such forces operate ‘‘in the radiation of light, in chemical composition, in biological growth and [in] . . . the mind and behavior of human beings’’ (15). As it appears in the excerpts of manuscript 746 Sotheby presented by Castillejo, ‘‘Chaos’’ is a gaseous, creative matrix composed of and used to ferment various elements in order to precipitate ‘‘the blood of the green Lyon, our Venus, our wine, our dry water, our Mercurius duplatus’’ (25).15 Properly implemented, the process eventually yields, as Castillejo indicates, the ‘‘philosopher’s stone,’’ necessary for transforming dross substances into spiritually purer substances such as gold. The chaotic matrix fosters a natural process of generation and reorganization of structures as elements recombine and reorganize their structures to resituate themselves at a higher niche in the elemental hierarchy. As Markley says, alchemy, like mathematical symbolism, is another attempt to redeem fallen nature (127–30), here through an ancient semiotic where the masculine and feminine cooperate and create order in the chaotic mixture. Newton seems to reject, at times, Christian conceptions of creation, quoting Hesiod’s Theogony in his History of the Church, and, as Newton says in the Castillejo reprint of the manuscript, at least temporarily embracing a pagan conception of creation as a ‘‘production out of nothing’’ (59). For Newton, the most significant symbol of this creative power is the star regulus of antimony. It is a magnet, used to draw the spermatic seed out of metal and, as Dobbs says in her earlier study The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, thereby complete the perfecting process of minerals begun in nature.16 Dobbs identifies this attractive power with gravity (150), the force binding

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the universe together and drawing elements magnetically to ‘‘matrices’’ that create new forms (153). As Dobbs indicates, Newton seeks to relate the global and the local in one chemical and cosmological system: ‘‘Newton looked for no less than the structure of the world in alchemy—a system of the small world to match his system of the greater.’’ Nevertheless, he remained ‘‘unsatisfied,’’ still hoping to discover the forces ‘‘which governed the action of small bodies’’ (88–89). Such a quest was necessarily quixotic. Even as an alchemist, Newton was drawn to a corpuscular model of the universe and materiality that describes the behavior of large bodies based on the individual behavior of particles separated from one another and unified only by the action of external forces operating upon them according to universal laws. Newton could see and appreciate the symbolic and scientific/philosophical implications of the selfsimilar, chaogenic forms he observed in alchemy—but he could not translate what he intuited regarding self-organizing systems into a linear, mathematical atomic model that would connect the global and the particular in a single universal system. Newton’s attempt to invoke dialogue between alchemy’s symbolic representation of chaogenic principles and the new physics’ mathematical description of particles could not succeed. As Markley shows, Newton eventually realized that ‘‘the mathematization of the physical universe exacerbates the tensions between nature and theology, matter and ideal, that seventeenth-century efforts to define and defer theory mediate’’ (130). The semiotics of chaogenesis could not be translated from alchemy to conventional theology and mathematized science—Newton cannot resolve the conflicts Markley describes as part of the Baconian crisis in the Restoration (130). No thinker of the time could fully appreciate complex and chaotic systems before the invention of the internal combustion engine and the theoretical conception of entropy came to full fruition in the nineteenth century.17 Nevertheless, Newton’s contemporary and sometimes competitor, Leibniz, devises a system in his Monadology and in his unpublished works that at least allows some communication between the local and the global within the confines of a materialist metaphysic. As we will see, this becomes the basis for the formal and epistemological thrust of Pope’s Essay, which allows him to consider the relation of order and disorder in the text of nature in even more sophisticated ways than his philosophical contemporaries.18 Leibniz has long excited the interest of twentieth-century chaolo-

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gists and physicists since his work anticipates modern physical paradigms in many ways. For example, Leroy Loemker notes that ‘‘Leibniz foresees the advance of physics beyond the stage of its naive analogies of bouncing billiard balls and pelting hailstorms to the subtler mathematical and dynamic analogies of fields of force.’’19 Stengers and Prigogine, responding to Serres’ discussions of Lucretius and Leibniz in Hermes, characterize Leibniz’s system as an anticipation of the monadlike, noninteractive universe of quantum physics (146). Nevertheless, Prigogine and Stengers note that while similarities exist between Leibniz and the moderns, Leibniz posits a model of the cosmos that is essentially deterministic while quantum physics helps support the more modern chaotic view of a universe whose processes are essentially irreversible (147). Similarly, Mandelbrot credits Leibniz with a sophisticated appreciation of fractals and self-similar forms that might provide models for schema that can relate the global and the local, but implies that Leibniz, like Aristotle and other early thinkers, focuses mainly on nonrandom fractal hierarchies.20 In short, while much of Leibniz’s monadological philosophy and interest in fractal geometry seems more sophisticated than Newton’s thinking by modern standards, Leibniz, like Newton, seems limited by a metaphysic that prevents him from fully appreciating the value of randomness in destabilized systems. These assessments of Leibniz’s thinking seem accurate, but I hasten to point out that a tension exists in Leibniz’s theories, which indicates that, like Newton, he was reaching for a more sophisticated appreciation of chaos than his work might initially imply. Leibniz’s papers and letters show that, like modern chaoticians, Leibniz was convinced that the same principles governed both the certain, predictable phenomena of the universe and those that were contingent. In Specimen calculi universalis (a. 1679), Leibniz argues that the certain and the contingent can be understood mathematically: The difference between necessary and contingent truths is indeed the same as that between commensurable and incommensurable numbers. For the reduction of commensurate numbers to a common measure is analogous to the demonstration of necessary truths, or their reduction to such as are identical. But as, in the case of surd ratios, the reduction involves an infinite process, and yet approaches a common measure, so that a definite but unending series is obtained; so also contingent truths require an infinite analysis which God alone can accomplish.21

Leibniz implies that comprehending the contingent requires an infinite degree of precision—much as modern chaoticians argue that

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predictions in complex systems with strange attractors can be made only if we can measure the starting point of their behavior with infinite precision. Moreover, like modern chaoticians, Leibniz is not opposed to a statistical approach to comprehending the contingent. In ‘‘On the General Characteristic’’ (a. 1679), Leibniz says, ‘‘reasons can be weighed, as if by a kind of statistics. For probabilities, too, will be treated in this calculation and demonstration, since one can always estimate which of the given circumstances will probably occur.’’22 Leibniz realizes that mathematical models could be useful for describing that which is contingent and uncertain—though, of course, without a nonlinear system of equations, he could never have found a means of describing what he seemed to recognize intuitively—namely, that the cosmos was somehow at once deterministic in principle while still unpredictable in some aspects of its behavior. In the end, for Leibniz, as for Newton, no purely physical, mathematical, or rational model could be devised to help comprehend a cosmos that paradoxically seemed to design itself according to modes that were at once chaotic and orderly. Newton turns to alchemy for answers that are comprehensible only mythically and symbolically. Likewise, Leibniz posits the existence of a God who comprehends through his infinite intelligence the interaction between contingent and necessary events in a monadological universe, which paradoxically seems to allow individuals freedom while prescribing their actions by laws that make the nonrandom but self-similar structure of the cosmos cohere. Two of the best minds of the period therefore suggested that a rational philosophy admitting the significance of randomness could cohere only through a symbolic, seemingly suprarational conception of the universe that seemed to recall some of the original mythopoeic and symbolic conceptualizations of the cosmos first invoked by ancient thinkers and artists like Hesiod and Lucretius, but no doubt finding new currency in the age of the fixed yet mobile signifier. Newton and Leibniz, in short, provided the opportunity for someone to enter the loop, to return to the dialogical point of origin and explore ways in which poetry and philosophy might again cooperate in an age of rationalist and empiricist inquiry. Pope, of course, is the poet in print who rose to the occasion—though his effort demonstrated the difficult and dangerous nature of such an enterprise in the eighteenth century when poetry became a site for experimentation in the extreme.

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Pope and the Dynamics of Chaos Pope’s fascination with chaos and irregularity in aesthetics, metaphysics, and ethics has long been noted by Pope scholars, 23 so it should come as no surprise that, more recently, the importance of the chaotic in Pope’s Essay has received renewed critical attention. For example, David Morris notes similarities between Pope’s interest in relational knowledge evinced in the Essay (and elsewhere) and Chew’s theory of bootstrapping wherein the unpredictable nature of subatomic particles known as hadrons is described by conceiving of them not as ‘‘discrete entities’’ but as a ‘‘network of interrelated structures and forces.’’24 Morris shows that one way to comprehend Pope’s insistence that conflict and disorder are necessary for harmony (106–7) is to adopt a critical discourse that follows Pope’s lead in his eclectic Essay on Man, which, like many of Pope’s works, recognizes the need to implement mutually consistent but individually incomplete systems of inquiry to create a ‘‘network of thought in which the deficiency of one model is offset by the strength of another’’—though only in part (105). Morris’s awareness of Pope’s predilection for probabilism is matched by Michael Srigley’s assertions that strong parallels exist between Pope’s thinking in the Essay and the new science of chaotics where ‘‘flux and pattern are simultaneously present.’’25 Clearly Pope’s thinking, his bootstrapping of disparate systems of inquiry, his awareness of flux and turbulence point to the usefulness of such postmodern modes of discourse—as long as we focus closely on how Pope contextualizes his own thinking on chaos and helps us consider to what degree he anticipates modern discourse on the subject and to what degree he does not. Although Pope’s thinking on the chaotic and the irregular is represented more lucidly in An Essay on Man than anywhere else in his works, his interest in the wild and unpredictable in artifice and nature as expressed in his prose certainly shows that these themes were overriding concerns throughout his career.26 Moreover, he seems to evince none of the angst Markley notes above in the work of thinkers in the Restoration and early eighteenth century like Newton who struggle to redeem fallen feminized nature. At least outwardly, Pope has great confidence that nature’s capacity as a self-organizing system can benefit human beings who seem to have an intuitive capacity to follow nature’s example. In Spectator 404, Pope says, ‘‘Nature, if left to herself, leads us on in the best Course, but will do nothing

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by Compulsion and Constraint; and if we are not satisfied to go her Way, we are always the greatest Sufferers by it.’’27 As Pope later argues in the Essay, nature can lead us to ‘‘moral or intellectual Excellence’’ (40) so we must ‘‘Follow Nature’’ (41). Like some of the gestalt theorists of the early twentieth century responding to the perceived epistemological threat of relativism, Pope seems entirely confident that the same forces shaping nature, both chaotic and orderly, shape the mind and what it constructs through language and metaphor, and thus a harmonics of nature and human artifice is possible. (Samuel Johnson’s theory of mimesis will draw similar conclusions, but under the rubric of more purely inductive approaches, as we will see in chapter 5.) In Spectator 408, he invokes a metaphor he will implement again in the Essay on Man that describes how human beings can achieve harmony inwardly and outwardly with the irregularity of (human and external) nature: ‘‘Passions . . . are to the Mind as the Winds to a Ship, they only can move it, and they too often destroy it.’’ Thus ‘‘In the same Manner is the Mind assisted or endangered by the Passions; Reason must then take the Place of the Pilot’’ (45). Such a creative interaction between the destructive and the constructive aspects of nature is especially observable in the intuitive insights and talents of genius: ‘‘for little irregularities are sometimes not only to be born with but to be cultivated too, since they are frequently attended with the greatest Perfections . . . All great Genius’s have faults mixed with their Virtues, and resemble the flaming Bush which has Thorns among Lights’’ (48). Thus, Pope argues in Guardian 173, ‘‘Persons of Genius . . . are always most fond of Nature, as such are chiefly sensible, that all consists in the Imitation and love of Nature.’’28 Small wonder that Pope praises Homer’s Iliad for being ‘‘a wild Paradise, where if we cannot see all the Beauties so distinctly as in an order’d Garden, it is only because the Number of them is infinitely greater.’’29 Likewise, Pope admires the ‘‘irregularity’’ of Shakespeare’s drama, which makes it like ‘‘an ancient majestic piece of Gothic Architecture’’ that is ‘‘strong’’ and strikes us ‘‘with greater reverence tho’ many of the Parts are childish, illplac’d, and unequal to its grandure.’’30 (It should be noted that twentieth-century fractal geometer Benoit Mandelbrot also evinced interest in the self-similar forms of Gothic architecture on page 25 of The Fractal Geometry of Nature.) Pope is certainly not the first critic to praise the irregularity of genius, but his fascination with wildness and chaos eventually blossoms

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into the aesthetic and metaphysic of the Essay on Man, which was so complex and rich in its comprehension of chaos that critics from the eighteenth century to the present have struggled with its argument and design. Many critics have described the rejection of Pope’s Essay on Man by eighteenth-century thinkers on religious and philosophical grounds31—but Solomon’s assertion, noted in the beginning of this essay, regarding the poem’s evasion of generic categorization, is of special interest here. As Solomon argues in both of his studies of the Essay, Samuel Johnson seems to be the pivotal figure in the history of the poem’s reception for, unlike Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant, who admired the poem (and who felt comfortable with straying from eighteenth-century cultural norms), Johnson rejected the Essay, largely for what he perceived to be a lack of substance. Solomon argues that Johnson saw the poem as impious, though Johnson’s summation of the poem’s weaknesses suggests that what also troubled him was the misuse of grand poetic style to state the obvious. Ironically, Johnson believes that Pope’s poem exemplifies the false sublime: ‘‘This Essay affords an egregious instance of the predominance of genius, the dazzling splendor of imagery, and the seductive powers of eloquence. Never were penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised.’’32 In chapter 5 I will point to even more significant differences between Johnson and Pope on the topic of chaos as they emerge from Johnson’s critique. Johnson will not embrace the poem’s epistemic, its lack of reliance on scriptural authority—but most important, he will define orderly disorder differently from Pope, focusing on states of order existing within disorder, instead of order arising from disorder as Pope does. Moreover, for Johnson the poem does not call imagination to the aid of reason as it should; it fails to teach new ideas in an appropriate style that captures the reader’s imagination to inform reason of truths at once familiar and new.33 The Essay thus violates Johnson’s inductive approach to the inculcation of virtue by appealing to reason and imagination as described in Pope and throughout Lives of the English Poets. As we will see in chapter 4, Johnson can combine deductive and inductive modes of proceeding, but he will insist that arguments always be based on what is directly observable when dealing with anything but maters of faith. Judged by the standards of Johnson’s inductive aesthetics and rhetoric, then, the Essay must indeed seem to be a failure—as Solomon implies, an incomprehensible attempt to subordinate logos to pathos in a philosophical poem. Indeed, Johnson’s successors appear to assume that

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the poem implements an inductive survey much like Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes and makes assertions that the poem’s epistemology cannot support effectively.34 This is understandable because Pope’s language in the first epistle suggests a purely inductive mode of proceeding: ‘‘Observe how system into system runs,’’ says the speaker to Bolingbroke, asking him and the readers to ‘‘tell why Heaven has made us as we are.’’35 Pope seems at first to avoid any kind of deductive thinking. Moreover, he seems to reject or parody the Leibnizian monadological structure that will inform his argument when he raises the rhetorical question, ‘‘can part contain whole?’’ (1.32). In truth, however, Pope is only establishing his ethical focus with the question and is not rejecting the deductive mode of proceeding, which he will implement to create a monadological matrix grounded in a Newtonian chaogenic metaphysics. In the next verse, Pope makes clear that deduction is viable in a system made by a just, all-knowing God where the relation between part and whole, between the local and the global is discernible deductively: Of systems possible, if ’tis confest That Wisdom infinite must form the best, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Then, in the scale of reas’ning life,’tis plain There must be, somewhere, such a rank as Man; And all the question . . . Is only this, if God has plac’d him wrong? (1.43–50)

The answer to the rhetorical question is clear—and not based on the inductive survey informing the questions posed in a piece like The Vanity of Human Wishes.36 Instead, Pope implements an enthymematic mode of argumentation assuming an interrelatedness of part and whole discernible to any reader familiar with and sympathetic to the philosophical, poetic, and rhetorical subtexts of the poem and Pope’s special chaological synthesis of them in his rhetoric. Showing his sensitivity to what Morris calls the relational quality of knowledge in complex systems, Pope argues that Man’s place is right ‘‘as relative to all’’ (1.53)—an idea that helps prepare the way for subsequent arguments regarding some startlingly fresh ideas on the relation between chaos and order presented in the context of the schema Pope is just beginning to outline at this point.

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Here one could easily dismiss Pope’s rhetoric as simple deduction based on obvious truisms and cliches about God, Nature, and Man, but to do so would be to miss the real thrust of Pope’s argument, which is simultaneously metaphysical and poetic. Pope’s argument takes form and animates itself in the Leibnizian monadological matrix, one that allows free play of symbols and signifiers that create a fluid yet stable text. Pope assumes a preestablished harmony within which each monadic unit operates according to its intrinsic design while also reflecting the larger design of the cosmos. Simultaneously, however, as we will see, Pope adopts and implements a conception of matter having the capacity to organize itself complexly (and hierarchically), in the Newtonian/alchemical sense—despite the fact that, as A. Rupert Hall suggests, Leibniz was opposed to such a conception of matter.37 Pope enfolds Newtonian materiality in a monadic design through the poem’s rhetoric and aesthetic. To do so perhaps defies many metaphysical tenets and much common sense—although as Prigogine, Stengers, and others argue, much of later eighteenth-century physics seems to follow suit.38 Pope attempts to find an aesthetic/ philosophical means of describing and representing a cosmos that is ordered hierarchically and yet, through its fractal self-similar structure, allows for the individual monadic (atomic) unit a degree of play, of freedom.39 Leibniz was often frustrated in his attempts to create such a system philosophically—but the structure and rhetoric of the Essay affords Pope possibilities that are excluded in logocentric rationalism. Ultimately, the monadic structure forms the basis of the poem’s ethics: pride is the denial of a paradigm that relates the global and the local while maintaining a hierarchy in a selfsimilar structure. Pope’s poetic affords a greater sophistication in describing such a structure than that permitted by Leibniz’s logocentric philosophy. The Essay’s metaphysics and aesthetics admit an element of randomness in the fractal structure described—something missing in Leibniz’s thinking on self-similar forms. This randomness manifests itself in the poem as catastrophe in the natural world and as passion in human nature: Better for US, perhaps, it might appear, Were there all harmony, all virtue here; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . But ALL subsists by elemental strife;

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The genr’al ORDER since the whole began, Is kept in Nature and is kept in Man. (1.165–72)

But how does the chaotic figure into the larger cosmological design? One could describe it in logocentric terms—the disorderly is balanced and corrected by the orderly. But Pope’s poetic implies a more complex design, one that is truly fractal, the variant scale of the nonlinear design ensuring that small-scale causes can have largescale effects: From Nature’s chain whatever link you strike, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The least confusion but in one, not all That system only, but the whole must fall. (1.241–50)

The complexly organized yet fluid structure of Pope’s own verse reflecting the matrix he describes, Pope confidently asserts, ‘‘All nature is but art unknown to thee; / All Discord, Harmony, not understood; / All partial Evil, universal Good’’ (1.289–292). For Pope the ‘‘Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus’d’’ (2.12) is comprehensible in the context of a larger scheme, realized by the interaction between ‘‘Self-love, to urge, and Reason, to restrain’’ (2.54). As in his periodical essays, Pope makes clear (2.59–80) that reason alone could not help human beings secure their proper ends. Though passion is ‘‘meteor-like . . . lawless’’ (2.65), it prevents the ‘‘rot’’ (64) that would result from the deadly inertia of reason. The rationalist system must be sufficiently destabilized by passion if the human organism is to interact constructively with its environment. Pope seems to anticipate modern chaotic approaches to biology, described by Prigogine and Nicolis (445) when he asserts that too much flux would destroy the organism’s equilibrium (and its life) while too little would have equally deadly effects for an organism dealing with an ever-changing environment. Pope invokes the traditional concept of discordia concors to realize poetically an advanced philosophical conception of the delicate relation between order and disorder in the human organism’s psyche and in the natural environs: The rising tempest puts in act the soul, Parts it may ravage, but preserves the whole,

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On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail, Reason the card but Passion the gale; Nor God alone in still calm we find, He mounts the storm and walks upon the wind. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . But what composes Man, can Man destroy? Suffice that Reason keep to Nature’s road, Subject, compound them, follow her and God. (2.105–16)

Pope argues that reason should follow nature—but to do this is to admit chaos as part of an organizing principle that makes life possible. To follow God is to recognize that order (and reason) cannot exist categorically without disorder (and passion)—but more importantly, it also is to realize that God (the chaotheistic symbol of the poem’s metaphysic and complex dynamic sign system) is the God of calm and the storm, of order and chaos, reason and passion, ideas that not only interact categorically but, as the poetic demonstrates, sustain and create material existence as they constitute the living process of destruction and generation. The discrete and inanimate bipolar categories that Leibniz and Newton struggle with form a circuit charged by Pope’s passionately argued chaological rhetoric. Pope, through his poetic, circumvents the logocentric categorization of logos and pathos, which denies philosophical poetics and obscures the chaotic organizing principle of life and existence described in the poem. Hence, perhaps, the lack of anguish and tension in Pope that one does indeed sense in Newton and Leibniz as they deal with chaos—of course signs and symbols can represent these things; everything in the cosmos is organized, and disorganized, in this way. All things feature this dynamic embodied by the poem. To argue such an idea, to embrace the poetic paradoxes, is to simultaneously exalt reason and passion, order and disorder, God/ Nature the creator, God/Nature the annihilator in ways that critical theory and philosophy traditionally discredited or ignored. Pope’s ethos in the Essay shares more in common with the chaotician who fully appreciates how the very rational principles that allow us to discuss chaos also point to the limited nature of human knowledge. Unlike Einstein, modern chaoticians do not believe that the universe is fully comprehensible, though they do believe that the principles that have designed it can be elucidated.40 Similarly, Pope’s

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aesthetic reflects a partly rationalistic approach to chaos that nevertheless helps support Pope’s ethical purpose to show us how human reason is limited, despite its capacity to discern the basic principles underlying harmony and randomness in the physical universe. As a moralist and a metaphysician, Pope sees in his paradigm a sophisticated model for understanding how the human psychology he has described is linked to his ethical argument. Like Newton, Pope draws on alchemical signs and symbolism to represent how instability can be beneficial to a system seeking to reorganize itself more complexly and more effectively. As Dobbs asserts in The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, alchemy’s link to psychology and the drive for human perfection is long-standing (40–43); Pope draws on this tradition to show how destabilizing passion can interact with reason to promote a socially and ethically useful reorganization of the psyche: Th’ Eternal Art educing good from ill, Grafts on this [ruling] Passion our best principle: ’Tis thus the Mercury of Man is fix’d, Strong grows the Virtue with his nature mix’d; The dross cements what else were too refin’d, And in one interest body acts with mind. (2.175–80)

Like Newton, Pope believes that the forces at work in the womb of chaos will promote a creative and beneficial matrix. Here, the serpentlike ruling passion, potentially destructive to the psyche, interacts with reason to promote ethics: ‘‘The surest Virtues thus from Passion shoot, / Wild Nature’s vigor working at the root’’ (2.183– 84). Reason guides this process just as the horticultural planter makes ‘‘savage stocks’’ bear fruit (2.181–82). But both the planter and reason can do so only if they recognize the necessity of allowing enough of the wild chaotic nature of the plant, or the mind, to enter the system, be that system an orchard or an ethical philosophy. Thus, Pope asserts that every moralist must realize that no ‘‘Virtue, male or female, can we name, / But what will grow on Pride, or grow on Shame’’ (2.193–94). Ethically speaking, Pope says, only a well-informed conscience can comprehend the dynamics of such a complex system: ‘‘This light and darkness in our chaos join’d, / What shall divide? The God within the mind’’ (2. 202–3). Somewhat like modern chaologists,

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Pope (both in the Essay and in the prose works cited above) evinces faith in what we could call intuitive mental processes that are equipped to deal with complex and unpredictable self-organizing systems.41 Vice and virtue can be mixed like light and dark in a painting, Pope argues—yet still we can recognize them and distinguish them in our heart: If white and black blend, soften and unite A thousand ways, is there no black or white? Ask your own heart, and nothing is so plain; ’Tis to mistake them, costs the time and pain. (2.214–16)

Pope does not naively argue for an infallible good sense; he merely asserts that we have the capacity to recognize vice and virtue. When we do fail, as the rest of epistle 2 argues, we can still rely on human society to help us make meaningful distinctions (2.231–94). Not surprisingly, Pope next argues in epistle III that human society reflects the same chaotic yet orderly structure of the universe, where ‘‘All forms that perish other forms supply’’ (3.17). The complex organization of human society is discernible in nature, as reflected in the monadic structure of insect societies: Learn each small People’s genius, policies, The Ant’s republic and the realm of Bees; How those in common all their wealth bestow, And Anarchy without confusion know; And these forever, tho’ a monarch reign, Their sep’rate cells and properties maintain. (3.183–87)

Hence animal instinct demonstrates how the seemingly anarchic can be orderly and useful—with self-love in human society still the ‘‘cause of what restrains’’ man through ‘‘Government and Laws’’ (3.271–72). Such arguments as this inevitably drew criticism in the eighteenth century since they could easily be interpreted to say that self-control was unnecessary and selfish vice was good. Furthermore, the theological implications of the Essay also earned it its share of detractors, most notably Crousaz. The question of the role of free (ethical) choice in the chaotic milieu also seemed to be ignored or underemphasized—a theme that we will see Johnson, by contrast, emphasiz-

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ing in all of his prose on the responsibility of individuals in mediated culture. Johnson’s approach is much less abstract and distinctly more pragmatic in its application than Pope’s. Nevertheless, Pope’s argument for ‘‘Health, Peace and Competence’’ (4.80), as Solomon reminds us in his 1992 essay, was greeted warmly by some of the early eighteenth-century reading public, especially before Bolingbroke’s name was inserted in the text (251). Clearly the poem succeeded for some readers who could either accept or overlook the poem’s destabilization of literary and philosophical categories. The role of chaos in systems of order, as described in Pope’s rhetorical poetic, especially in the final epistle, also seemed to justify the idea of a hierarchical society that preserved the worth of the individual. That society’s hierarchic form seems to emerge spontaneously out of the chaotic interplay of forces in the poem and points to ways in which the hierarchy might be conceived in less idealized and less static ways than it had been by men like Boyle and Wilkins. This is something that we will see opens up possibilities for reconceiving hierarchical modes of proceeding in politics that will prove useful to Johnson’s political theory in the context of mediated culture. Pope’s political faux pas was not mainly theoretical; his was a guilt based mainly on association with a discredited Bolingbroke. But he had at least pointed to one way in which hierarchic modes of proceeding in society could coexist with chaos and complexity—something that men like Boyle and Wilkins had not seen, something that Lucy Hutchinson, as we saw in chapter 1, had no interest in. Pope’s accomplishment was significant as indeed would be Johnson’s when he later explored similar notions in his more purely inductive and less controversial thinking after Pope post-1750. The result was a more cautiously optimistic approach than Pope’s in his Essay, since Johnson’s concerns with the darker side of mediated culture focus not only on individual abuses of communication, as McLaverty sees in The Dunciad, but rather on the potential for damage to human society and psychology inherent in print culture itself. Thus, again, the significance of exercising free will and choice ethically in mediated culture becomes more significant for Johnson than for Pope. Pope, on the other hand, no doubt aware of some of the epistemological and theological crises Markley mentions above, nevertheless asserts confidently that human intuition can harmonize the artificial and the natural in a turbulent yet orderly book of nature. As Mack indicates, and as McKeon and Markley imply, such an idea

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was certain to find popularity with at least some early eighteenthcentury readers who could take comfort in the idea that the reigning socioeconomic paradigm reflected the design of the benevolent universal order.42 However, the Essay did more than support that paradigm—it developed a poetic embodying what has been called the simultaneous rage for order and for chaos in the period.43 Moreover, Pope’s poem still testifies to the sophisticated ways in which the eighteenth century attempted to describe chaos as a disruptor of and contributor to the principle of order in the cosmos. Pope could not conceive of dissipative systems as we do—there was then no conception of entropy that could help him fully comprehend the irretrievable loss of information and irreversible nature of processes in complex systems as we do. Nevertheless, in the Essay, Pope intuits the importance of pseudorandomness for conceptualizing the interaction of the local and the global in dynamic systems. His poetic makes possible an intelligent consideration of the significance of linear versus nonlinear cause and effect relationships. Given the endurance of the Essay on Man, despite its detractors, we must continue to assess the impact that Pope and his contemporaries had on the evolution of chaos theory in literary and scientific contexts. Pope has helped sustain the presence of eighteenthcentury chaotics in the postmodern feedback loop contributing to the dialogue on chaos in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His philosophical poetic thus contributes significantly to our own paradigms for describing complex, self-organizing systems. And, most significantly, Pope’s poetic serves as a reminder of how the feedback loop can provide opportunities for theory to explore new ways of devising critical discourse for describing poetry that destabilizes conventions and philosophical categories in ways that are as challenging for us to comprehend today as they were two hundred years ago. Within the context of the eighteenth century, his poetic text has equal significance. Pope’s poetic text combines discourse from Leibnizian and Lucretian philosophy, Newtonian physics, alchemy, and poetics to create a text that by its very constitution in its mediated milieu demonstrates the power of the fixed yet mobile mode of signification to represent the complex processes of nature on the local and the global level. This is prefigured by the confidence he shows in the capacity of earlier writers like Homer and Shakespeare to capture the complex self-organizing dynamic of the natural world with signs. And it makes perfect sense that he would have this confidence

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in the mediated sign. As he points out in his letter to James Cragg, July 15, 1715, quoted in the headnote of this chapter,44 he had been Homer’s translator and experienced the power of the printed word to stabilize the potential for chaos in mass mediation: ‘‘I (like the Tories) have the town in general, that is, the mob, on my side’’ for ‘‘I translated Homer for the public in general’’ (1.306). And while he writes to Bolingbroke on April 9, 1724, that ‘‘Our English Stile is more corrupted by the Party Writers, than by any other cause whatever’’ (sounding somewhat like Sprat, Wilkins, and Addison on this topic), he also believes (unlike Thomas Baker) ‘‘that it is not always a consequence that Languages must decay as governments fall.’’45 If in many of his letters he complains about piracy of his texts and the corruption of London booksellers and the texts they violate, he nevertheless maintains his faith in the capacity of signification to makes sense of the world, epistemologically, ethically, and politically; An Essay on Man is ample proof of that. For by combining the different discourses he borrows from ancient and modern sources, he devises a text of figures and symbols that configure the cosmos and human society and psychology in all of their complexity. It was a text not without its detractors, and in its strong reliance on deductive rather than purely empirical modes of proceeding made Pope’s text look more archaic than it actually was. Nevertheless, for all that, it set an important precedent. It showed what much eighteenth-century literature was showing, that genre could be a fluid site of experimentation that could produce useful and unexpected results. It also lent epistemological and moral weight to poetics as it fashioned a text of philosophical depth and scope that could perhaps only be embodied in the rich complexity of a poetic text. For Johnson this will represent an important precedent. His reading of the Essay was sufficiently eventful for him to recall it and write about it with rhetorical power in his critique of the Essay in his Lives of the English Poets. And Johnson does not seem to let go of the topic of chaos in texts, society, and ethics in the writings before his final critical masterwork. As we are about to see, many of his prose works return to these topics with regularity and insight that eventually enable Johnson to articulate a philosophy on dynamic complexity and representation in mediated culture. The result is a discourse that compares human progress in the realms of both informatics and ethics and seeks means to ensure that efforts will be made equally on both parts to increase, as Johnson would say,

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human happiness, or the fortune of society in an information-based society. I will return to Pope’s poetics and system of mimesis in chapter 5 when we can discuss it more fully in comparison with Johnson’s theories of mimesis in the context of their evolution from Johnson’s discussions of chaos in his periodical and political prose. Johnson, unlike Pope, will emphasize the role of human choice, not only ethically, but also in the role of comprehending and shaping the mediated culture to the benefit of all society. Johnson will demonstrate this via an empirically based rhetoric that prompts the distancing of the reader from the mediated milieu to ensure the reader’s freedom to resist the more negative and coercive aspects of print culture. I turn in the next chapter to the beginning of Johnson’s quest to effect these ends in the periodical prose he writes from 1750 to 1760. Herein he will lay the foundation for his analysis of the best and worst aspects of informatics in his mediated social and political milieu in a survey that weighs the positive and negative aspects of mediated culture more systematically than Pope does in his Essay on Man or elsewhere. What will emerge is an essentially optimistic view that the mediated milieu of the fixed and mobile signifier shows positive potential as an agent of ethical and social progress.

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3 Complexity and Mediated Culture in Johnson’s Moral Periodical Prose . . . he who is confined to no single topic, may follow the national taste through all its variations, and catch the Aura popularis, the gale of favor, from what point soever it shall blow. —Samuel Johnson Rambler 1

THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER TESTIFIES TO POPE’S GENIUS, WHICH IS IN PART A representation of the genius of his times. Pope synthesizes many elements in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century cultural milieu to present in An Essay on Man a powerful epistemological, ethical, and social paradigm that represents the best hopes of his time for achieving a unified vision of the polis and the cosmos that embraces uncertainty without forsaking stability in the world of a rapidly evolving and often self-doubting mediated culture. It was, however, as we noted, not an untroubled vision; Crousaz and Johnson raised serious questions about its rhetoric and its relationship to sound inductive logic, to Scripture, and to Christian tradition. Clearly, to formulate a truly persuasive and iconic solution to the problems posed by eighteenth-century mediated culture, one needed to proceed with more tact than Pope; a more rigorously inductive approach was needed that could achieve a balance between the traditions and transformations of the literate mediated culture, one that exercised more caution in winning over an audience whose sheer breadth and complexity would require strategies oriented to energizing a still cautious but no less curious readership. As he inherits the mediated milieu and post-Newtonian cultural context after Pope, Samuel Johnson in the 1750s appears to begin a search for such a course of action in his periodical prose. This body of work constitutes a significant portion of his quest for coping with 88

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the problems posed by his mediated culture as he works his way to the sophisticated answers he will pose and refine later in his life as a writer from 1765 to 1781 in his most advanced discussions on chaos and specifically the issue of representation in poetics. From the 1750s, when he begins his work on the Rambler, to the 1760s and 1770s his intellectual life evinces trials and triumphs; his struggles with the Dictionary alone (which we will view in detail in chapter 5 as an important counterpoint to his aesthetics) present challenges for understanding limits and capabilities of language systems, while on the political front (which I examine in chapter 4) he is deeply concerned with the expansion of British colonialism that will lead to the Seven Years’ War. Johnson is worried about the impact of mediation on the body politic in his political prose of this time, and, appropriately, he shows concern about its impact on the individual and society in his ethical writings in the periodical essays he writes in the 1750s. Unlike Pope, he will carefully examine the harmful and beneficial aspects of mediation on both individuals and the culture in general. And both his philosophy and his rhetoric in his periodical essays will, unlike Pope’s Essay on Man, examine carefully the means whereby free ethical choice can be exercised productively, despite the negatively coercive aspects of mediated culture that can adversely affect individuals ethically and psychologically. These writings show a Samuel Johnson cautiously testing the mediated milieu to come to conclusions about his culture that will eventually enable him to articulate conceptualizations of complexity that will significantly impact his political philosophy and his aesthetic theory of the 1760s and ’70s, where his fullest explication of complexity, and especially mimesis in mediated culture, appears. The brief periodical essay of the time is the perfect instrument for beginning such a quest in a mediated culture whose sheer complexity and whose worth could not easily be assessed in more traditional modes of proceeding. The essay allows Johnson the opportunity to implement a form that, since the time of Montaigne, had been associated with experimentation and open-ended inquiry. And, following the example of Addison and Steele, it was also a medium that enabled the writer to play tradition against modernity, with wisdom here being introduced to coffeehouses and other intimate contemporary locales so that readers of various backgrounds could mingle as easily as they do today in Internet cafe´s.1 The difference, of course, is that Johnson can influence the participants in this milieu far more directly and with far greater potential for creative and pro-

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ductive interaction than in any of the above real-world counterparts. The result for Johnson and his readers is an emergent field of philosophical activity that crystallizes into a consistent system of value wherein Johnson, after weighing the potential threats and promises of the mediated culture, begins to conceptualize a paradigm of complex dynamics in society. This will allow him to promulgate a political theory based on a complex hierarchical social dynamic that he will explore in more detail in his political prose, showing, like Pope, that hierarchies can be conceptually and philosophically compatible with chaos and complexity. Ultimately what emerges in his periodical prose is a lengthy mental experiment wherein he begins to formulate broad models of complexity in mediated culture that will fruitfully inform his theories on politics and aesthetics, especially from the 1760s onward. The headnote from Rambler 1 clearly shows that Johnson was capable of voicing the kind of optimism about print culture that one might expect with the dawning of the 1750s; as Adrian Johns says, and as I noted earlier in this study, the serious efforts to redeem print as a respectable and potentially moral force in the society began to pay off at this time.2 But Johnson shows a special kind of reflexivity in all things, and one of the lessons he clearly learns from the mediated culture is never to take anything for granted, especially if it is being promulgated as, to borrow a phrase from Bill Gates, the Next Big Thing. Johnson’s wariness and insightfulness is dazzlingly apparent a few short essays later in Rambler 4 where he discusses the art of the novel and, to put it plainly, invents modern media studies. Building on the tradition of reader response dating from, as Adrian Johns says (383–93), the seventeenth century, Johnson ponders the possible effects of print media on the psychology and ethical conduct of readers, especially young adults. The conclusions he draws are startlingly perceptive and show a comprehension of mediated culture that is vastly ahead of Johnson’s time, while still being grounded in the print culture that previously had raised serious issues concerning the impact of print on human psychology and society. Johnson argues that the mimetic tendency of a new medium that forsakes traditional modes of representation is potentially dangerous since it does not foreground its mediation of the world but rather creates the illusion of a kind of transparent representation of reality. Here print’s capacity for presenting an unstable (or specifically unguided, amoral) and potentially harmful text is masked by a

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naive misperception in the culture that negates the reader’s awareness of its potentially harmful mediating effects. The result is a species of discourse that can, for the novitiate, easily be mistaken for the real world and hence influence behavior in ways that can be dangerous. Johnson’s description of how this process operates is telling: ‘‘if the power of example is so great, as to take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will, care ought to be taken that, when the desire is unrestrained, the best examples only should be exhibited; and that which is likely to operate so strongly, should not be mischievous or uncertain in its effects.’’3 Johnson brings to mind classic analyses of media influence, such as Vance Packard’s 1957 work The Hidden Persuaders.4 This study presents research on the advertising field indicating that commercials and ads are designed to appeal to what the writer refers to as the sub-subconscious, a level of unconscious activity that affects behavior of consumers in such a way that their conscious strategies of purchase are affected by unperceived, subconscious processes that had been revealed in what the ad men referred to as ‘‘depth analysis’’ of buying behaviors (3–24). Johnson is aware of such modes of influence in this literary context because he is also aware of them in the nonliterary context of eighteenth-century advertising. A few years later, Johnson, in Idler 40, examines the expedient exaggerations of advertising he has studied in that time and concludes that advertisers ‘‘play too wantonly with our passions.’’5 And he concludes, much as he does in his discussion of the novel, that the ‘‘abuses [ought] to be rectified’’ but fears no action will be taken (2:128). Johnson, of course, does not take his argument to the extreme that Packard cannot help embracing given the evidence he had. Johnson nevertheless says that under the right circumstances print can affect the psyche almost without the intervention of the will. As Walter Jackson Bate, Robert Voitle, and Carey McIntosh (among others) show, free will and freedom of choice are recurring themes in Johnson’s moral prose, for freedom to choose is essential for Johnson’s moral stance.6 His awareness of the potentially coercive and unethical quality of mediated culture leads him to emphasize choices more consciously and emphatically than Pope. Johnson is aware of the power of the printed word to limit or subvert the powers of reason and will; hence, he carefully examines just how mediation can impact human capacity for choice. Here, as in his political prose, Johnson implicitly argues that one step toward liberating

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the audience from the potentially oppressive effects of mediated culture is cognitive distancing from the culture’s media products. The awareness ensuing from this helps an informed readership, and informed writers make better ethical choices as consumers and producers of texts. With this strategy in mind, Johnson goes on to say in Rambler 4 that the art of the novel represents a potential danger since it can create the kind of boundary work problems that Locke rightly feared in the context of his print culture, as we saw in the introduction of this study. Novels all too often ‘‘confound the colours of right and wrong, and instead of helping to settle their boundaries, mix them with so much art, that no common mind is able to disunite them’’ (3:23). The answer is for the writer to exercise free will in resisting these tendencies and thereby make the medium work to the society’s advantage; novels should be written to ‘‘increase prudence without impairing virtue’’ (3:23). The virtual realm of the novel can, after all, provide young readers (and perhaps older ones) with the opportunity to do mock combat with evil in safer circumstance than reality affords.7 Hence, ‘‘when the choice is unrestrained, the best examples only [of human character] should be exhibited; and that which is likely to operate so strongly, should not be mischievous or uncertain in its effects’’ (3:22). Dangerous as it can be, the novel nevertheless offers great potential for social reform since novels ‘‘convey the knowledge of vice and virtue with more efficacy than axioms and definitions’’ (3:22). At least this is possible when the consciousness of readers and authors has been liberated by the kind of cultural analysis that Johnson engages in here, wherein the larger context of mediated culture is examined to show its potentially positive and negative effects on human psychology and morality. Johnson insists that the complex epistemology inherent in the novel’s mediation of society and reality can be a double-edged sword; the morally responsible thing to do is to choose the correct side of the sword in order to use the novel’s complicated dynamics to effect a positive influence. This represents in some sense the bedrock of Johnson’s faith in dealing with mediation—though it is a faith based on his own empirical experience of print cultures past and present. The movement of his mind through the essays is genuinely dialogical, always looking at the question of mediation from every angle conceivable and considering its capacity for stabilizing the categories of truth and virtue. He also seems to involve the

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reader imaginatively in the dialogue. His emphasis in this essay, for example, on the impact of the novel on youth, and his clear call to action that asks writers and readers to be responsible (while eschewing the possible exercise of monological assertion of authority through censorship), points to a dialogical rhetoric of reader/writer cooperation via the commonwealth of mediated culture. This dialogism is the key to liberating readers from the potentially oppressive monological tendencies of print culture that can subvert free will via the subconscious ‘‘passions,’’ as Johnson would call them, in order to coerce readers and control their patterns of behavior en masse. Without such an agenda in the minds of writers and readers, free and responsible ethical choice cannot exist. And Johnson’s approach is dialogical in another sense, much the same way his later criticism will be; it embodies a dialogue between the ancients and the moderns, between the principles of classical literary culture and the eighteenth-century contemporary mediated culture.8 Writers like Bate and Edinger note this movement between classicism and an empirically based reader response criticism in Johnson’s mature critical works,9 and I will argue in my fifth chapter that this emerges from Johnson’s grasp of complexity that is forming at this time in his critical essays. The critical essays that force him to bring wisdom to a lay audience afford the opportunity for him to apply classical and neoclassical principles and see their uses and their limits in this new evolving mediated culture. This is clear in both Rambler 4 and Idler 40. Rambler 4 takes the advice of Horace and contemporary classicist principles quite literally; entertainment is not enough—literature must also enlighten. Just as Johnson will later imply in Milton, there is a kind of hierarchy of principle in literature, where the moral theme of the piece takes precedent over every other aspect of the work—or, to put it another way, the moral predicates the arrangement of all of the other parts.10 But with the novel, Johnson must complexify those principles. Like Fielding in the preface to Joseph Andrews (which Johnson claimed he never read), Johnson has defined the novel as a kind of comic romance epic; but he is also profoundly aware that it outstrips the comic and epic modes owing to its different way of mediating human experience, society, and culture. Again, it is clearly the novel’s capacity to erase its own mediating presence that concerns Johnson. This is nothing like the arena of the Shakespearean play where, as we will see in more detail in chapter 5, Johnson claims the reader is always self-possessed and is reflexively aware of the fictional quality

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of the action. Any type of literature that can assault nonconscious thought processes like the novel is potentially dangerous, and therefore requires an adaptation of critical principles. To ensure, as Headrick would say, that the technological progress of print (here as a persuasive agency) instantiated by the novel does not outstrip human moral progress, Johnson uses the classical ethical matrix and one consistent with Christian values that might be held by any of his readers, regardless of their station in life. To borrow a page from Adrian Johns, Johnson is establishing with the essay a moral presence similar to those held by printers and booksellers (whose places of business typically took the forms of respectable middle-class homes) (113–14; 118), where a persona is established conveying a sense of domestic stability and tranquillity in the world of fixed yet mobile signifiers that must be controlled without exercising the old royal practice of censorship but also without promoting licentiousness or other types of destructive behaviors. The lessons that Johnson had learned from Savage’s failure to establish a proper and morally responsible authorial presence (see chapter 1) still resonates with Johnson. Ethos is also key to raising the consciousness of readers via the reflexivity instituted by dialogical discourse. Johnson can establish such a presence with his uniquely double perspective; he is a refined man of taste and a scholar who also knows the street reality of the publishing world from his experience at this time as a Grub Street writer. The result is an extraordinarily complex and adaptable approach to reader response and mediated culture that draws on the same empirical and scientific culture that Pope uses, but is put to work to create a kind of practical criticism adapted to the needs of virtually any member of the literate culture who might be inclined to consider Johnson’s arguments. This is evident in Idler 40 as well. Here Johnson clearly uses classical critical principles, plus a solid dose of inductive good sense, to ridicule the shallowness, silliness and amorality of this new element in the mediated culture of the newspapers. Here Johnson draws on classical dramatic doctrine on comedy and tragedy to underscore the ways in which advertising conflates the sublime with the ridiculous: ‘‘It has been marked by the severer judges that the salutary sorrow of tragick scenes is too soon effaced by the merriment of the epilogue; the same inconvenience arises from the improper disposition of advertisements. The noblest objects may be so associated as to be made ridiculous.’’ His examples evince the sharpness of Johnson’s satirical eye: ‘‘The camel and dromedary themselves might

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have lost much of their dignity between ‘The True Flower of Mustard’ and ‘The Original Daffy’s Elixir’; and I could not but feel some indignation when I found this illustrious Indian warrior immediately succeeded by ‘A Fresh Parcel of Dublin Butter’ ’’ (2:127). Johnson pursues the critique of advertising culture by using postAristotelian and post-Lockean political and social models focusing on the public good and promotion of happiness to provide another context for questioning the other value issues associated with these aesthetic atrocities. Once again, he shows that awareness of the designs emerging from mediated culture, especially in its commercial application, can effect a kind of liberation for consumers and producers. He recognizes the sheer vastness and complexity of the advertising media industry, but because it is a human agency, he reasons that the humans who implement it can bring some sensibility to the work that may curb its more vicious tendencies: The trade of advertising is now so near to perfection, that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercised in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions, as when the register of lottery tickets invites us to his shop by an account of the prize which he sold last year; and whether advertising controvertists do not indulge asperity of language without any adequate provocation; as in the dispute about ‘‘straps for razors,’’ now happily subsided, and in the altercation which at present subsists concerning Eau de Luce. (2:127)

Ridiculous these disputes may be, but if the goal of society, government, and the arts that support them is happiness of the individual balanced with the need for a stable system of subordination, advertising is violating all of those principles by appealing to passion and human ego. Indeed, it promotes instability by engaging in antisocial behavior that surely and willfully antagonizes people: ‘‘In an advertisement it is allowed to every man to speak well of himself, but I know not why he should assume the privilege of censuring his neighbor. He may proclaim his own virtue or skill, but ought not to exclude others from the same pretensions’’ (2:127). Johnson proposes a remedy to this selfish usurpation of the rights of others, this violation of subordination; each advertiser ‘‘should remember that his name is to stand in the same paper with those of the King of Prussia, and the emperor of Germany, and endeavor to make himself worthy of such association.’’ Casting an eye to posterity might also curb the

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human ego of these ad people; for other human agencies will save and preserve these periodicals written for the moment, and: ‘‘When these collections shall be read in another century, how will numberless contradictions be reconciled, and how shall fame be possibly distributed among the tailors and bodice-makers of the present age.’’ But if the potential for reform is there, the mediated culture itself makes it problematic, for these ad people have been given an instrumentality that can ignore the hierarchy: ‘‘what all have the right of doing, many will attempt without sufficient care or due qualifications’’ (2:127–28). The genie really is out of the bottle in such a culture as this—print can destabilize culture, politics, society, and the mind; it can demean the human enterprise in many ways. But in the time span intervening between Rambler 4 and Idler 40, while Johnson observes the damaging effects of this instability, he cites the benefits with equal candor. He realizes that the way to deal with the problems associated with mediated culture is not to try to reverse this process of human interaction with technology. If the genie will not go inside the bottle again, one must trick it out of its potential mischief. In the process of developing this strategy, Johnson’s analysis reveals to him the interconnectedness of the negative and positive aspects of mediated culture, and in the process he also develops at first sketchy but nevertheless sophisticated conceptualizations of the interdependence of what is orderly and disorderly in mediated culture. This tends to support his hope that liberation and free choice are indeed feasible in the mediated culture. And it helps him emphasize the practical necessity of a hierarchy in a society of such complexity. Johnson’s courage in considering the negative effects of the media is evident in his willingness to consider its potential for doing harm in not only the present but the future as well. This is especially evident in Idler 7. He shifts his focus here to ‘‘those minute historians, the makers of the news, who, though contemptuously overlooked by the composers of heavy volumes,’’ namely, gentlemen scholars and academicians who ‘‘are yet necessary in a nation where much wealth produces much leisure, and one part of the people has nothing to do but to observe the lives and fortunes of the other’’ (2:22). Johnson’s tone is especially interesting here, since his contrast between the academician and the newsman seems calculated to underscore the necessity of the journalist’s role in the culture. But, by the same token, that culture is being characterized in less certain terms; its hunger for information seems based less on pragmatic

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need than on a desire to find a way to use up empty time. The image of this mass audience coolly observing the rest of the populace is also a bit unsettling; a kind of voyeuristic decadence might easily emerge from such a mediated culture. It is, of course, not at all unusual for Johnson to begin an essay with this kind of precarious balance and then surprise the reader by suddenly upsetting that balance; and this is precisely what Johnson does with telling effect in the next section of the essay. Johnson does not deny that to an outsider this dissemination of timely information seems positive: ‘‘All foreigners remark, that the knowledge of the common people of England is greater than that of their own vulgar,’’ due to these ‘‘rivulets of intelligence, which are continually trickling among us’’ (2:23). Nevertheless, this ‘‘web’’ of information,11 as Johnson later calls it in the essay, ‘‘certainly fills the nation with superficial disputants . . . and affords information sufficient to elate vanity, and stiffen obstinacy, but too little to enlarge the mind, into complete skill for full comprehension’’ (2:23). Johnson once again concludes that this system of communication ironically has the effect, at least potentially, of sewing the seeds of social discord, not to mention misinformation (a theme that is often reflected in twentieth- and twenty-first-century media theorists like Jean Baudrillard,12 though the grounds of the argument have since changed). Johnson boldly predicts that the situation will only worsen if the speed of communication increases in the future. Comparing journalists to spiders combining their efforts to create a stronger form of silk, Johnson envisions the creation of a ‘‘more extensive web’’ (2:24) of information where the public might become a nation of information consumers obsessed with the developments of a story, no matter how minute the details. He imagines how differently a recent battle between a British and a French warship might be presented with such an information web wherein a Tuesday morning report of an engagement between the two ships lasting two hours would be followed by a report on Tuesday evening indicating that ‘‘The account of the engagement . . . was premature’’ (2:25). In the end, the information web provides only more opportunities for misinformation, since the final account of the battle tells us nothing more than what we would have known before the advent of the web information network. Johnson, in short, does show how the multiplication of these networks will only impede communication and expedite the rise of a voyeuristic culture that will be glued to the web 24/

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7. One can only express one’s relief that none of this, of course, ever came to pass. The essay does not draw any conclusions for us but instead ends with the web reports that are carefully constructed to allow us to draw intelligent conclusions about information culture and the way we interact in it. Johnson again uses a dialogical strategy, with this one inviting us to resist the coercive tendencies of the information culture. This points again to the underlying strategy of most of these essays: counter the potentially coercive and destructive antisocial tendencies of this culture by cultivating a reflexive reading strategy in the public. As McKitterick says, one way to deal with destabilizing texts is for readers to play a more active role in completing and creating those texts.13 It has often been said that the critical theory of Johnson and others in the eighteenth century is in essence a theory of reader response; in Johnson’s periodical essays focusing on the effects of information culture, we see some perhaps previously underappreciated reasons for why Johnson insists on the necessity of this kind of criticism. Johnson’s combination of classical and postempiricist critical strategies seeks to enhance the cognitive distancing of this new kind of reading public from its mediated culture. The text that can inculcate the detachment needed for a voyeuristic approach to reading can also lead to an enlightened and socially responsible detachment if Johnson can turn the eyes of the reader to the strategies by which they can be manipulated to the detriment of society. (And here Johnson clearly parts company from his postmodern counterparts like Baudrillard, who, as Connor says,14 do not believe such a positive detachment can be implemented successfully.) This is again the means to liberating readers and, at least potentially, society to exercise free and critically informed ethical choices. Once again, the mediated milieu proves to be a double-edged blade that can be made to work against its potentially bad effects, at least to some degree. Johnson can demonstrate this by playing various critical traditions and innovations of his time against one another. He also, as an empiricist, draws analogies from the book of nature as mediated by the science of his time to look for ways to describe how various forms of stability and instability in the constructed and natural complex systems he knows might reveal stability within seeming chaos. Evidence of this kind of thinking is clear in Rambler 156 where he notices certain degenerative tendencies in the texts of society, culture, and nature. He notes that, ‘‘Every govern-

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ment, say the politicians, is perpetually degenerating towards corruption, from which it must be rescued at certain periods by the resucitation of first principles, and re-establishment of its original constitution.’’ This is something such human constructs have in common with ‘‘Every animal body’’ (5:65). Human information systems, even our collected bodies of wisdom, feature similarly isomorphic tendencies: ‘‘In the same manner, the studies of mankind . . . are perpetually tending to error and confusion.’’ This happens because ‘‘Of the great principles of truth which speculists first discovered, the simplicity is embarrassed by ambitious additions, or the evidence obscured by ambitious additions, or the evidence obscured by inaccurate argumentation; and as they descend from one succession of writers to another, they lose their strength and splendour, and fade at last in total evanescence’’ (5:66). It seems a recapitulation on a grander scale of the capacity of print to serially multiply error. The process here is additive but goes beyond a single error repeated successively. Instead, the repetitions here work like the iteration process later associated with Lorenz’s approach to chaos in weather systems that we described in the introduction to this study. With Lorenz, a simple iterative process creates an ever more complex form by feeding its results back into itself and producing a complex nonlinear dynamic featuring a vastly more complex field of information than one would normally expect from a seemingly deterministic repetition of a simple equation. In similar fashion, Johnson perceives a linguistically based equivalent of this in information culture, which leads to destabilization of an intertextual system. Note that it is not just the popular press this time that is the source of the problem; wisdom brought forth by scholarly discourse succumbs to the same instability and confusion as the mass-mediated culture. The result is a kind of cascade effect that in modern chaos theory is associated with overcomplexification of dynamic systems that lead to the kind of informational meltdown that the human nervous system experiences with heart attacks, seizures, strokes, and nervous collapse. In Johnson’s example, the information overload is not associated with such particularized scenarios but is happening with many genera of systems of order and inquiry that should represent the best of human wisdom. But the multiplication of information sources can lead to obscuring the original epistemic mechanism of the system and push local error into a global disintegration—and system failure is the result. The cure is simpler, as one might anticipate, than the cause. A

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combination of human industry and natural principle will lead to the streamlining effect that will dam up the overflow and decrease the turbulence. Johnson says, ‘‘The systems of learning therefore must be sometimes reviewed, complications analised into principles, and knowledge disentangled from opinion.’’ How does one do that? Simple, says Johnson: ‘‘The accidental prescriptions of authority, when time has procured them veneration, are often confounded with the laws of nature, and those values are supposed coeval of reason, of which the first rise cannot be discovered’’ (5:66). Hence, Johnson concludes, ‘‘It ought to be the first endeavor of a writer to distinguish nature from custom, . . . that he may neither violate essential principles by a desire of novelty, nor debar himself from the attainment of beauties within his view by a needless fear of breaking rules which no literary dictator had authority to enact’’ (5:70). Johnson, showing some real post-Newtonian zeal, argues that natural principle can be explicated and distinguished from the unnecessary complications of information culture that sometimes so directly violate those principles. Johnson expects that at the level of the species, certain types of universals based on natural principle will emerge that will correct the error of human artifice if nature will be consulted. (Recall, as we saw in the introduction, in an earlier stage of this information culture, Locke voiced less confidence that one could distinguish between species that were purely the result of human invention and those that Nature created. Not so for Johnson.) The rest of the essay proves this by implementing the kinds of attacks on classical dramatic criticism that Johnson implements with greater detail and complexity in the ‘‘Preface to Shakespeare.’’ Here he reveals the reason for his confidence in classical and empirical approaches to texts; they are both guided by natural principles that stand the test of time when properly implemented. Johnson is evincing a belief that however unstable human and natural texts can sometimes be at the local level, at the global level some kind of order will emerge that will allow us to discern some stability despite the confusion. Johnson, in Rambler Number 158, indicates that ‘‘criticism . . . has not yet attained the certainty and stability of science’’ (5:76), and he feels this is detrimental to the progress of aesthetics: ‘‘As vices never promote happiness, . . . so confusion and irregularity produce no beauty, though they cannot always obstruct the brightness of genius and learning’’ (5:78). Not only genius and learning prevail, but so do nature and providence. Johnson says in Rambler 184, ‘‘Since life itself is uncertain, nothing

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which has life for its basis, can boast much stability’’ (5:204). Nevertheless, ‘‘it sometimes happens, that cross winds blow us to a safer coast . . . and that negligence or error contribute to our escape from mischiefs to which a direct course would have exposed us’’ (5:204– 5). Patterns of order do emerge from the seeming chaos, and for Johnson, as for Lucy Hutchinson earlier in the period (as we saw in the introductory chapter), the most feasible explanation for this is theological: ‘‘In this state of universal uncertainty,’’ says Johnson, it is nevertheless clear ‘‘that nothing is in reality governed by chance . . . ; that our being is in the hands of omnipotent goodness, by whom what appears casual to us is directed by ends ultimately kind and merciful’’ (5:205). Johnson’s conception of the reading public and the collective agency of print takes on similar attributes of complexity. Johnson senses the power of the perception that print lends a sense of fixity (as Kernan noted)15 and authority to texts in Rambler 23: ‘‘the different temper with which the same man reads a printed and manuscript performance’’ is notable. ‘‘When a book is once in the hands of the public, it is considered as permanent and unalterable; and the reader accommodates his mind to the author’s design. But if the same man be called to consider the merit of a production yet unpublished, he brings an imagination heated with objections to passages, which he never heard’’ (3:127). Print again here shows its double edge—for this is, after all, a perception of the public, not necessarily a reality, and for Johnson it underscores the degree to which print has power not only over audiences but over authors as well, as a legitimizing agency (though, as the other essays show, its power may not always be used to pursue morally legitimate ends). Johnson does not dismiss the power of the public and the medium; he merely wishes to gauge their power with regard to the freedom of the individual writer. It is a question once again of the politics implicitly at work in the social dynamic of print. Johnson has shown above that print can be something of an antisocial medium, and Johnson wants to discern what this implies about the individual writer’s place in the larger mediated cultural and social whole, its role in the hierarchy, as it were. Johnson in Rambler 23 does have faith in the collective will of the reading public: ‘‘there always lies an appeal from domestick criticism to a higher judicative, and the publick, which is never corrupted, nor often deceived, is to pass the last sentence upon literary claims’’ (3:128). But Johnson still insists that ‘‘an author has a rule of choice pecu-

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liar to himself ’’ (3:129). Authorial integrity, as his earlier experience with Savage showed, is necessary—the public may not like something presently being published, but Johnson’s faith is in the wisdom that comes with time; in short, the value of something written may not emerge until later. One must not become like the advertisers and feed on or react solely to public whim; one must keep an eye fixed on posterity because that is the text wherein resides what Johnson will call in the ‘‘Preface to Shakespeare,’’ the stability of truth. Johnson is speaking from experience; as he reveals in the course of this essay, he has received criticisms from the readers who have encountered here a kind of periodical essay not always resembling predecessors like the Tattler and the Spectator. Moreover, his critical principles on poetics have not always met with favor from his readers. What strategy to implement? The answer brings together many of the threads of Johnson’s inquiry on the chaotic with remarkable clarity and energy: ‘‘I cannot but consider myself amidst this tumult of criticism, as a ship in a poetical tempest, impelled at the same time by opposite winds, and dashed by the waves from every quarter, but held upright by the contrariety of assailants, and secured, in some measure by the multiplicity of distress’’ (3:130). Since his audience in this mediated culture is ‘‘at variance with each other,’’ Johnson can only ‘‘endeavor to gain the favor of the publick, by following the direction of my own reason, and indulging the sallies of my own imagination’’ (3:130). This is a very significant moment in Johnson’s thinking. He is dealing with a phenomenon that, at least in his time, almost defied analysis: the collective agency of a mass audience whose will is by no means to be represented by a single vector, but that nevertheless is deposing his agency as an individual writer. It would be easy to simply defy, or to succumb through conformity, or to surrender to defeat through inaction. Johnson—the man whose very existence before the Dictionary and his pension is as precarious as it got for writers in those days—decides to take a stand, and a very special one it is. He uses the energies of his complex, multifaceted audience to instantiate the sustaining force of his dynamic as a rhetorician, a critical theorist, and an author. He uses this complex dynamic to create a boundary that is firm yet permeable, like the wall of a cell, that allows energy and information to be exchanged between author and mediated environment (what we might call a literary ecosystem) while maintaining the integrity of the author. Neither the author’s presence nor the public’s is allowed to become oppressive; despite

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antagonism, the dialogical tensions will help Johnson define his course and stay on track with his desired goal, a rhetoric and a poetics of lasting value. This is a courageous act to take in an age when true demographic analysis does not exist and Johnson’s readers could include individuals from the lower middle class to the aristocracy.16 Nevertheless, he has faith in his complex, dialogical method. Ironically, this achieves the goals of those early Spectator and Tattler essays in a more sophisticated way than they did: it develops a discourse that does not make a potentially divided audience more so; rather, it weaves its text via a dynamic that is at once respondent to instability but calculated to channel that instability into a sustaining principle of progressive evolution toward instantiating the antithesis of the potentially divisive and discordant strains of the mediated culture. Johnson’s text is mobile, but no less cogent, no less ethical, no less psychologically whole. If an earlier generation had ignited fears of print culture promoting psychological instability, Johnson’s confident description of how his reason and his imagination will cooperate in this enterprise,17 to his own and his readers’ benefit, clearly shows that this fixed yet unstable medium can help promote a healthful and productive balance between reason and his ‘‘own imagination’’—something that Johnson will demonstrate with exquisite detail and clarity in his critical works later on. Johnson, in short, evinces a confidence in a print culture that balances the needs of the individual with the needs of the society as efficiently as possible, and one can see here the emerging dynamic not only of his poetics, but of his political and social theory as well. Johnson eventually articulates a political scheme in which the hierarchy testifies to the worth of the individual and the lower ranks of society as part of the sustaining dynamic of the body politic, not as local variances or deviation from the global norm represented by the highest ranks of society. The hierarchy has a complex structure, not unlike that discerned by Pope in his Essay on Man, where part recapitulates whole, but here, as he will in his political tracts and his poetics, Johnson, unlike his predecessor, conceptualizes this structure in purely empirical and highly pragmatic moral terms. His vision of the society of writers in mediated culture anticipates and informs this political and social vision that will emerge most clearly for Johnson as the 1750s draw to a close and the events of the 1760s and 1770s motivate him to further articulate his political and social paradigm, as we will see in the next chapter. This is evident in Rambler 145 wherein he rejects the easy distinc-

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tion between the relative value of high and low mediated culture by arguing for the worth of the Grub Street writer. He notes Dean Swift’s estimation that ‘‘The authors of London’’ numbered in ‘‘the several thousands’’ and confirms that ‘‘only a very few can be said to produce, or endeavor to produce new ideas, to extend any principle of science’’ for most ‘‘can only be considered as drudges of the pen, as manufacturers of literature, and like other artificers, have no other care than to deliver their . . . wares at the stated time’’ (5:10). They are like the printing press itself, serially producing literature that may not have any internal merit. They ignore ‘‘posterity’’ for ‘‘the sound of the clock’’ (5:11). Johnson plays on the cliche´ of the hack in order to humble the reader by deflating expectations—for such writers perform more than one moral purpose in the essay. Johnson argues that despite appearances, ‘‘they may be exempted from ignominy and adopted into that order of men which deserves our kindness though not our reverence’’ (5:11). For in this fast-paced information culture, these writers provide vital social service: ‘‘These papers of the day, the Ephemerae of learning, have uses more adequate to the purposes of common life than more pompous and durable volumes. If it is necessary for every man to know . . . the events which may immediately affect his fortune or quiet, than the revolutions of antient kingdoms . . . [then] the humble authors of journals and gazettes must be considered as a liberal dispenser of beneficial knowledge’’ (5:11). The entire hierarchy is a complex whole (much like that which Pope presents in his Essay on Man) where each part is codependent upon the rest for its successful function: ‘‘As every writer has his use, every writer ought to have his patrons; and since no man, however high he may stand, can be certain that he shall not be soon thrown down from his elevation by his criticism or caprice, the common interest of learning requires that her sons should cease from intestine hostilities, and instead of sacrificing each other to malice and contempt, endeavor to avert persecution from the meanest of their fraternity’’ (5:12). Human vanity inspires the meanness of this mediated culture, and humility is its antidote. However, this is a humility not based on abstract moral principle but instead on an empirical ethics emerging from the dynamic of a print culture that demonstrates quite specifically and materially how rank is a necessary construct but not based on an ideal order descending from above. Print links everyone in a society that is itself a construct, a result in part of an information machine that must be organized hierarchically to serve

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various purposes but that is highly dependent on those harmless drudges below for survival. Once again, the design emerges from direct observation of human interaction via mediation; no grand cosmic schemes are needed to make the argument here as in the Essay on Man. Any experienced literate reader can test and assent to these conclusions. Such are the observations of the Grub Street scholar, a writer of dictionaries, cheated of a finished Oxford education, wandering the streets of London, placing coins in the pockets of children sleeping in the street, seeing it all first through an outraged perspective, informed by the likes of Richard Savage, but now seeing with more perspicuity in his early middle age the great concatenation of causes and effects in a mediated culture. He has not, of course, achieved complete peace with this system; he sees too acutely into its problems. In Idler 85 he still ponders the impact of the ‘‘multiplication of books’’ (2:264) and he is deeply concerned that great works are ignored and ‘‘plagiaries encouraged’’ (2:265). (Indeed plagiarism is a recurring theme throughout his moral essays.) But even in his late essays, a balanced view emerges; from the multiplication of texts, ‘‘new combinations of images are produced’’ (2:266), and the implication is that the defamiliarization of common ideas benefits the public, as a kind of educational device. And, of course, this concept is an important part of the critical principles (concerning true wit as something natural and new) that Johnson will later articulate more fully, as we will see in chapter 5. Johnson, in short, shows extraordinary sophistication in his attitudes toward print culture and conceptualizations of print complex dynamics that he is able to infer from the milieu of the fixed yet mobile signifier. Given this, the linguistic conservatism that Johnson sometimes shows during this period is perhaps difficult to comprehend; one might expect him to espouse a theory of language and style that would be more progressive, less fearful of change. This is not quite the case, however, as Johnson’s remarks in his final Rambler essay, Number 208, clearly indicate: Whatever shall be the final sentence of mankind, I have at least endeavored to deserve their kindness. I have labored to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations. Something, perhaps, I have added to the elegance of its construction, and something to the harmony of its cadence. When common words were less pleasing to the ear, or less dis-

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tinct in their signification, I have familiarized the terms of philosophy by applying them to popular ideas, but have rarely admitted any word not authorized by former writers; for I believe whoever knows the English tongue in its present extent, will be able to express his thoughts without further help from other nations. (5:319–19)

As Bate and Strauss point out in note 5 on page 319, not everyone agreed with Johnson’s attitudes here; ‘‘The Cottager,’’ number 36 in the London Chronicle in March 1762, took issue with Johnson’s idea that one should avoid words not previously used by authors. Johnson is making a choice here, to preserve a certain kind of purity and style by arresting time, resisting change, and thereby maintaining quality. To some extent this is to be expected from Johnson at this time; he is, after all, when he writes this in 1752 (ten years before ‘‘The Cottager’’ took him on) writing the Dictionary, and he does see his role as a lexicographer as one entailing resistance to at least the worst effects of innovation. As Cohen says, Johnson pictures himself as occupied in an epic struggle: ‘‘Johnson hopes ‘to fix the English language.’ . . . In this, he sees himself as an explorer, as one who, though he may not ‘complete the conquest . . . shall at least discover the coast, civilize part of the inhabitants, and make it easy for some other adventurer to . . . settle them under laws.’ . . . He does not seek innovation in orthography and dismisses those who ‘take pleasure in departing from custom.’ ’’18 As McKitterick points out, Johnson was by no means unique in this approach to linguistic reform; ‘‘Such concerns . . . had preoccupied French and Italian writers since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and others . . . as well,’’ including the Dutch and the English (198–99). Indeed, McKitterick says, from the publication of Johnson’s Dictionary to 1780, some twenty-three dictionaries would be produced in England, ‘‘all of them inevitably looking back . . . to Samuel Johnson and all of them embodying . . . a new concern for a language that could be reduced to a uniform practice.’’ Tradition and nationalistic pride, McKitterick notes, were powerful influences on Johnson and others like him (198). Hence, Robert DeMaria argues that ‘‘Johnson chafes at corruptions of usage,’’19 for Johnson ‘‘expresses a conviction that linguistic change is inevitable and inevitably bad’’ (168). Nevertheless, says DeMaria, ‘‘There are a few occasions in the Dictionary when Johnson explicitly recommends or supports innovation’’ (171). Indeed, ‘‘The strength of Johnson’s response to improper and innovative usage varies a good deal, and it is not always easy to tell why’’ (174).

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Part of the reason may be that as a lexicographer and a stylist, Johnson’s attitudes are always extremely complex. Indeed, even in the passage I quote above from Rambler 208, Johnson is not defending a strictly conservative agenda. While he seeks to preserve the purity of English, he is also innovating, introducing the ‘‘terms of philosophy’’ when necessary and also familiarizing them for the audience when more common language was inadequate for his purpose. Johnson shows respect for traditional usage but also respectfully departs from it when needed for the sake of clarity. He also adds elegance and harmony to English style; and additive processes do not imply a lack of innovation.20 There is, in short, in Johnson’s (all too brief ) discussion of style, a sense of dialogical balance between tradition and transformation, as if in anticipation of the debate in Johnson studies concerning Bertrand Bronson’s concept of the double tradition (mentioned above in chapter 1 and discussed in more detail in chapter 5). Johnson’s attitudes toward the fixed yet mobile signification of his time is somewhat divided but shows signs of a more fully realized emergent pattern of order. His situation calls to mind in some ways the state of modern physics today. At the level of the subatomic particle, quantum physics tells us we can expect to see nothing but disorder and unpredictability, a destabilized text. But at the global level, Einstein’s God never plays with dice, and there are signs of a still-lingering classical stability, even in the absence of absolute frames of reference and the prevalence of relativity. However, without a general field theory (whether it comes from the string theorists or Heim or some other source), one is left with an essentially schizophrenic universe. Johnson’s linguistic cosmos, at least while he is writing his periodical essays and planning the Dictionary, shows similar propensities but is also evincing a capacity for some unity. As we will see in chapter 5, he is temporarily overwhelmed at the atomic level of the word itself, especially in the field of oral activity, which exhibits greater complexity than he feels he can comprehend. He feels it is his duty as a lexicographer to resist corrupting influences, and in the process he often neglects much of what he has learned about the complex dynamics of language and mediation at the global cultural level in the course of writing his periodical essays. But at that level, he is able to see patterns of order in the complex field of the fixed yet mobile medium of print. The dialogical social interaction between writers and readers allows him to apply classical tradition and empirical ob-

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servation to discern in larger discursive units the complex interplay between order and disorder in his mediated milieu. Johnson seems to be experiencing a kind of bifurcation process, a periodic doubling between viable alternatives. He sees order sometimes as a concept that is discretely separate from chaos; but he also intuits some kind of relationship between the stabilizing and destabilizing elements in mediated culture. His essays collectively imply a kind of dialogical search for the truth about order that can, as I said earlier, be best explored in the periodical essay that brings the world of the street where stationers and mercurial vendors hawk their wares into close contact with all the learning that the ancients and the moderns can afford. Emerging is a conceptualization of a society that derives its capital, vibrancy, and energy from the mediating power of the printed word. That word sometimes seems an obstruction to productive communication and construction of a social fabric, but more often than not it enhances the imaginative and productive interactions of individuals in this new nationalist community that is at once imagined and fully embodied through real social interaction, at least in Johnson’s thinking. Emerging from the froth of this culture is Johnson’s conception of modern Britain as a state where a hierarchy can exist and show the same complex embodiment of stability and (occasionally upward) mobility and dynamism. That paradigm undergoes further refinement and adjustment in Johnson’s political writings where he will once again bring the ivory tower in contact with the reality of the street. And, of course, he will go beyond the street, to the global level of England’s emergent geopolitics, drawing conclusions about the impact of mediated culture upon the interaction between Britain and her subjects, as well as her interaction with other nation-states. And, as in the case of Johnson’s periodical writing, this also represents an experimental stage wherein Johnson will refine ideas before the final stage where he can describe a system of orderly disorder with greater authority and clarity especially with regard to the issue of representation in his poetics. That stage, as we will see, clearly benefits from the intense focus and concern Johnson experiences as Great Britain first prepares for war with France and then comes to face an even greater contest in a war with America.

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4 Johnson’s Politics in the Milieu of Informatics . . . it is the duty of those in authority to promote the happiness of the people. They are to look upon their power and their greatness, as instruments placed in their hands to be employed for the public advantage. —Samuel Johnson Sermon 24

DONALD GREENE ARGUES THAT SAMUEL JOHNSON ‘‘ACCEPTED . . . LOCKE’S interpretation of the conservative and individualistic basis of the British political system; and there is no evidence that he ever lost faith in this fundamental concept.’’1 Johnson, as Green indicates, believed in the necessity of a system of ‘‘social organization and . . . authority’’ as it was necessary to exert some kind of restraint over the individual (242). By the same token, Greene says, Johnson clearly believed that people had the right to rise against an oppressor (244). This is because Johnson ‘‘had an empiricist’s faith that by certain observation and analysis, improvement can be brought about . . . ; and he had the rationalist’s conviction that absurdity and ignorance and obscurantism are absolute evils, to be combated at all times’’ (235). Hence, despite his association with the apparently static and predictable label of Tory, Johnson’s acceptance of it points to just the opposite tendencies in his political nature: ‘‘it committed him to absolutely no fixed political dogma, but left his mind free to range and draw whatever conclusions it would from what he saw’’ (236). Writing some forty years after Greene, Clement Hawes presents a similar portrait of Johnson’s politics,2 where Johnson once again is characterized as someone who seems to defy easy categorization while somehow not completely eschewing any association with categories and polarities; instead Johnson seems to play them against one another, pointing to the need for political and ideological 109

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boundaries while at the same time insisting on their permeability. Not surprisingly, Hawes argues that Samuel Johnson, vis-a`-vis the geopolitical scene, always remains ‘‘outside the mainstream of nationalism’’ (41) and therefore embraces a kind of cosmopolitan nationalism (37). In this chapter, in full concord with Greene’s and Hawes’s assessments of the complexity of Johnson’s politics, I argue that a still underappreciated aspect of Johnson’s political theory is its focus on the significance of informatics and mediation for its ethical and epistemological core. Except for some brief discussion of print culture and Johnson’s politics in Kernan and Hawes (38–42),3 the role of mediated culture in Johnson’s political vision has not garnered much attention. Johnson’s vision of a hierarchy that exists, as the head quote shows, and as Greene and Bate have argued,4 to protect the people in society’s lower echelons from exploitation, is clearly much in debt to Locke and the British Constitution for this complex post-Newtonian vision of a society that balanced individual need with hierarchy and social stability. But Johnson’s own take on the feasibility, necessity, and complex structure of such a system, globally and locally, is also powerfully influenced by his immersion in the information culture that he interacts with and analyzes, as we saw in the previous chapter. He presents a paradigm of a complex hierarchy based on empirical observation using a dialogical rhetoric, as in his periodical prose, inviting readers to liberate themselves from the more oppressive aspects of mediated culture. Indeed, he insists that free dialogical information flow is the key to a healthy British polis if it is to resist the monological tyranny of absolutist France. I argue that Johnson’s conceptualization of mediated culture is so complex that it enables him to comprehend the strangely conflicted and potentially unstable dynamic of nation-states in an information age. Like contemporary twenty-first-century media critics such as Lynn Spigel,5 Johnson recognizes that the information base of nationalism to some degree plants the seeds for its dissolution. Mediated cultures are linked by information systems that conceptually and materially make unstable the very nationalistic boundaries they establish. Cultural narratives shared via information grids make possible the exchange of ideas that allow disparate cultures to shape and influence a constitution of their own, and the nationalistic identities of other countries and cultures. Economic codependence also enhances this phenomenon as has become lately manifested in the controversy of the outsourcing of work. (The person on the phone

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helping you with your recalcitrant computer may be in Delhi.) This does not, however, lead Johnson to conclude, like some modern media critics, that these nationalistic boundaries will eventually dissolve. Rather, he sees national states as dynamic systems continuously renewing their boundaries and subverting them as they interact with other nationalist systems they typically seek to dominate—a realistic assessment at a time when economic outsourcing and cultural exchange were not abetted as they are today by electronic communication technologies (although, given all the nationalist rhetoric appearing in the world after 9/11, Johnson’s vision may yet prove to be the more accurate). The result is that nation-states become involved in a dangerous dialectic where the doubling of the nationalist state with its mediated antagonistic doppelga¨nger constantly threatens the integrity of the British nation’s inherent moral and political integrity. The concomitant result is that, barring resistance of this mediated process through critical reflexivity (as we saw previously, a major technique also in Johnson’s periodical prose), the British will become more like their enemies and violate the principles of liberty outlined by such figures as John Locke and William Blackstone. The key for Johnson’s philosophical theories on politics is his recognition of the interplay of stability and instability in the mediated text of British politics that allows him to build on the work of thinkers like Locke and Blackstone to posit a political fabric that features a kind of complex dynamic ensuring the liberty of the individual and the stability of the hierarchic society.

Johnson Brings Informatics to the Mediated Political Milieu Writing on the British Constitution of 1765, William Blackstone testifies to the dynamic conception of the interaction of the branches of government made possible by Newtonian mechanics in the milieu of the fixed yet mobile signifier. He argues that ‘‘It is highly necessary for preserving the balance of the Constitution, that the executive power should be a branch, though not the whole, of the legislature.’’6 He quite consciously compares this complex yet balanced whole to Newton’s dynamic celestial systems: ‘‘Thus every branch of our civil polity supports and is supported, regulates and is regulated by, the rest: . . . Like three distinct powers in mechanics,

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they jointly impel the machine of government in a direction different from what either, acting by itself, would have done; but at the same time in a direction partaking of each, and formed out of all; a direction which constitutes the true line of the liberty and happiness of the community’’ (89–90). David L. Keir indicates that the intention here was to create a hierarchic system that nevertheless avoids the potential pitfalls and extremes of alternative political systems like monarchies and aristocracies by combining their best attributes: ‘‘Much more important was the application to the Parliament of the systems of checks and balances which characterized the constitution as a whole . . . The merits of monarchical, aristocratic and popular government were thus combined, and the demerits to each were avoided.’’7 And the proof of this theory was in its implementation where a kind of complex synthesis was achieved: The units of government were divided . . . There . . . was check and balance. But there was no complete separation. Indeed, the experience of the prevailing century strongly suggests that separation led . . . only to deadlocks in which the executive quarreled with the legislative and judges were either deprived by the crown or impeached by the Parliament. To produce harmony, the strict letter of the constitution must be supplemented by constitutional connections such as the seventeenth century had failed to devise. (295–96)

As Hume argued in his 1758 ‘‘Of the Origin of Justice and Property,’’ such combinations of forces are essential to the dynamic of society: When every individual person labors apart and only for himself, his force is too small to execute any considerable work; his labor being employed in supplying all his different necessities, he never attains perfection in any art . . . Society provides a remedy for these . . . inconveniences. By the conjunction of forces our power is augmented; by the partition of employments our ability increases; and by mutual succor we are less exposed to fortune and accidents. It is by this additional force, ability and security that society becomes advantageous.8

This complex organization is reflected in the dynamics of humanity’s psychological and moral being: Human nature being composed of two principal parts, . . . the affections and the understanding, it is certain that the blind motions of the former,

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without the direction of the latter, incapacitate men for society . . . The same liberty may be permitted to moral, which is allowed to natural philosophers; and it is very usual with the latter to consider any motion as compounded and consisting of two parts separate from each other, though at the same time they acknowledge it is itself uncompounded and inseparable. (36)

Each of the above thinkers illustrates the growing awareness in the eighteenth century that complex interactions between elements show how boundaries between the elements are fluid and dynamic, existing as permeable entities that allow exchanges of matter, energy, and information between the individual components. Implicit in these dynamic designs is a grasp of how a hierarchic political and social system can be dynamic and allow individual liberty without endangering the need for and maintenance of subordination required for the productive cooperation of the various elements constituting the interactive whole. Johnson clearly endorses such a conception of human society in his conclusion to Adventurer 67 (written in 1753): To receive and to communicate assistance, constitutes the happiness of human life: man may indeed preserve his existence in solitude, but can enjoy it only in society: the greatest understanding of an individual, doomed to procure food and cloathing for himself, will barely supply him with expedients to keep off death from day to day; but as one of a larger community performing only his share of the common business, he gains leisure for intellectual pleasures, and enjoys the happiness of reason and reflection.9

To the extent that Johnson shares this kind of complex vision of society and politics (and, as we will see in the next chapter, of human psychology as well), he is quite typical of his time. However, what is much less typical is Johnson’s awareness of the impact of mediated culture on these conceptualizations. Not only is he aware of the constructed character of such systems in information culture, but he also perceives the benefits of and dangers to the society and its political systems represented by those information systems that, as he argues in his political prose, quite literally can make or break such political, moral, and social systems. Johnson insists that rulers and ruled, producers and consumers, writers and readers alike must remember the great lesson of the lives of men like Richard Savage as we saw in chapter 1. One must stay focused on the rules of virtue and an unvarying regard for truth. If information culture is to avoid

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conceptual and ethical vortices, free information flow and dialogical examination of the truth are essential for maintaining the integrity of the British polis. Johnson’s awareness of the importance of information and communication in the kingdom leads him first of all to develop an even deeper and more complex sensibility regarding the interaction between the government and the governed with special regard to the role played by the individual in the culture. Speaking again in Sermon 24, Johnson says, ‘‘The happiness of a nation must arise from the combined endeavors of governors and subjects. . . . The laws will be easily obeyed by him who adds to human sanctions the obligations of conscience; and he will not easily be disposed to censure his superiors, whom religion has made acquainted with his own failings.’’10 This is why Greene concludes that ‘‘in the long run’’ for Johnson ‘‘the character of a society must depend on the character of the individuals who comprise it’’ (229). It is therefore not surprising that Greene would see that implicitly Johnson ‘‘believed in rank, to be sure; but there is no evidence that he believed in class, which, in later senses of the word, is an entirely different matter’’ (234). The distinction between rank and class is extremely important for it underscores Johnson’s strong sense that the system is at least in part constructed by human artifice and allows interaction between the various members of the hierarchical structure. More importantly, the political and social system requires communication, specifically dialogical interaction, between its constituents to ensure that its information base will make a positive contribution to maintaining the whole. This is clear in some of Johnson’s later political pieces,11 like ‘‘Thoughts on a Coronation’’ (1761) and ‘‘Considerations on Corn’’ (ca. 1755). In the coronation piece, Johnson critiques the present style of ‘‘inauguration’’ ceremony because it will no longer ‘‘impress upon them [royalty] a due sense of the duties which they were to take, when the happiness of nations is put into their hands’’ for it no longer allows as many spectators among the commoners to ‘‘openly acknowledge their sovereignty by universal homage’’ (293). This implies that the rhetoric of visual spectacle must work much like the rhetoric of Johnson’s essays, as we saw in the previous chapter; Johnson seems to expect the audience will interact with his prose to complete and stabilize the text—here the text being the ceremony as a kind of icon of the state that reflects the willful cooperation of the people with their sovereign, governors, and nobility.

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But in the presently corrupted state of the ceremony, the nobles are malign and destroy the meaningful interaction between governing and the governed: they ‘‘display their riches only to themselves’’ (293). The coronation therefore needs to be redesigned for ‘‘the gratification of the people’’ for ‘‘the impatience of the people . . . always produces quarrels, tumults, and mischief ’’ (300). The pride and individualism of the people must be harnessed through the dialogism of spectacle and its implicit rhetoric; otherwise it becomes a destructive agency. The state constitutes a complex and dynamic web of relationships, as Johnson also makes evident in his ‘‘Considerations on Corn’’: ‘‘scarcity is an evil that extends at once to the whole community; that neither leaves quiet to the poor nor safety to the rich; that in its approaches distresses all subordinate ranks of mankind, and in its extremity must subvert government’’ (305). The links between high and low are material and informational; and they must be established in such a way as to decrease turbulence in the system and increase dynamic flow that maintains the kind of complex dialogically based order that Johnson discerns in the mediated culture of the stable yet mobile signifier. Johnson’s complex hierarchy is conceptualized with a degree of detail, in an ethical context, missing in Pope’s model as discussed in chapter 2. Pope could come under attack for seeming to imply that free choice hardly mattered; it was as if these hierarchies were automatically good by definition. Johnson’s approach fills in these gaps. For Johnson such hierarchies in mediated culture are good only if sustained by dialogism between ruler and ruled that permits free and responsible choice by all in the society. It therefore comes as no surprise that Johnson is a proponent of freedom of information that promotes free thought and the productive contribution of a well-informed public toward the running of the nation-state. As Donald Greene says, Johnson is not afraid to write manifestos ‘‘against the forces of thought control’’ (55), the ultimate abuse of media, from Johnson’s point of view. In his 1756 ‘‘Observations on the Present State of Affairs’’ Johnson insists on government informing its populace: ‘‘the time is now come in which every Englishman expects to be informed of the national affairs, and in which he has a right to have that expectation gratified’’ (185). For ‘‘when a design has ended in miscarriage or success, . . . it is the proper time to disentangle confusion and illustrate [i.e., explain] obscurity, to shew by what causes every event was produced, and in what effects it is likely to terminate . . . and honestly to lay before

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the people what inquiry can gather of the past, and conjecture can estimate of the future’’ (186). Johnson is beginning to develop in print his argument concerning the interactions of nation-states and how those interactions are based at least in part on the dynamic whereby information is exchanged or shared by the governors and the governed in respective nation-states. Johnson in ‘‘Observations’’ is focusing on the differences between the informatics and political organization in a French absolutist state and a constitutional monarchy like England. Looking back to the time of Colbert under Louis XIV, Johnson says, Colbert had means of acting which our government does not allow. He could inforce all his orders by the power of an absolute monarch; he could compel individuals to sacrifice their private profit to the general good; he could make one understanding preside over many hands, and remove difficulties by quick and violent expedients. Where no man thinks himself under any obligation to submit to another, and instead of cooperating in any one great scheme, every one hastens through bypaths to private profit, no great change can suddenly be made . . . (141)

Johnson, writing at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War with France, is showing that country to be a formidable opponent. The vertically integrated structure of their society results in a simpler dynamic for communication and control than exists in the more complex and unstable English state. The French do not question orders or think about how the truth is represented; they simply do as they are told. The result is rapid change brought on by enhanced communication, command, and control in this state where individuals are not as fully differentiated by the system of society, politics, and economics as they are in Britain.12 Presently Johnson progresses to describe even greater potential dangers in the coming conflict with France because this will be an information war as well as a material one, and the danger lies in the instability of the social and political texts that wars and battlefields in America will produce. Like Locke, as we saw in the introductory chapter, Johnson shows concern for how permeable and changing boundary systems can create epistemological problems. But unlike Locke, the boundary problems Johnson describes are not reflective solely of an irreducibly complex natural dynamic. For the ones Johnson describes are also human-made; in truth they are produced by human information systems that at times seem to feature so much

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complexity as self-organizing systems that they almost have a life of their own. Johnson points to the difficulty, first of all, in resolving the conflict in America where the complexity of the natural environment will make territorial boundary disputes all the more difficult to resolve with the fixed linear logic of law: ‘‘The forests and desarts of America are without land-marks, and therefore cannot be particularly specified in stipulations; the appellations of those wide extended regions have in every mouth a different meaning, and are understood on either side as inclination happens to contract or extend them.’’ Hence, in this situation where boundaries cannot be set physically any better than one could ‘‘divide the Atlantic Ocean by a line’’ in these ‘‘unmeasured regions,’’ the disputing parties will use this ambiguity to an advantage that Johnson shows to be merely apparent. The French and the British will both engage in a deliberate attempt to control information flow and manipulate public opinion and the law to what they perceive to be their advantage. Fuzzy territorial boundaries will lead to similarly obscure moral and legal boundaries that are used to obscure cause and effect relationships; in such a situation ‘‘a cause of dispute will never be wanting’’ (189) even though the causes are purely manufactured through the isomorphic disruption of boundary disputes in the physical and the geopolitical/informational landscapes. The upshot for Johnson is that the British will come to resemble their absolutist enemies in their manipulation of information to liquidate any nonpartisan assessment of or dialogical dissent to the war. Both sides will deliberately destabilize categories of truth and virtue to gain control over territory and over not only their respective populaces but also the real victims, to Johnson’s mind, in all of this—the Native American population. Johnson marshals his evidence with devastating efficiency. He quickly shows the American dispute was predicated by purposeful obfuscation of territorial boundaries: ‘‘the French and the British quarreled about the boundaries of their settlements, about grounds and rivers to which, I am afraid, neither can shew any other right than that of power, and which neither can occupy but by that of power, and which neither can occupy but by usurpation, and the dispossession of the natural lords and original in habitants.’’ Indeed, the land grants obtained from the Native American population were most probably the results of ‘‘new modes of usurpation, . . . new instances of cruelty and treachery’’ (187).

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This new mode of oppression was enhanced by a concerted campaign of misinformation: ‘‘those who robbed have also lied’’ (187). Boundary disputes were used to obscure larger moral and legal issues to the point where anything comparable to a nonpartisan stance, anything resembling an unbiased assessment of the truth, is almost completely indiscernible: ‘‘Through this mist of controversy it can raise no wonder, that the truth is not easily discovered. When a quarrel has long been carried on between individuals, it is often very hard to tell by whom it was begun. Every fact is darkened by distance, by interest, and by multitudes. Information is not easily procured from afar; those whom the truth will not favor, will not step voluntarily forth to tell it, and where there are many agents, it is easy for every single action to be concealed’’ (188). The analysis is as compelling as it is disturbing. Here Johnson displays the detestable side of the information culture he lives in. The mediation machinery is used to full deceitful advantage in this situation where the British public cannot test the evidence through the witness of their own senses. The mass-oriented aspect of this mediation process is particularly unpleasant. So many sources of the truth with so many participants in these acts of savagery against an unsuspecting native population yields an information field where anonymity and mass mediation obscure the agency that has perpetuated falsehood and a sick lust for expansionism at any cost. Nobody in particular is responsible, but somehow this has happened. The individual has disappeared, as in the French system; but this time it happens not despite a lack of information dissemination, but partly because of it. More than one kind of boundary is being subverted here with terrible and telling effect; this willfully destabilized text seems designed (under the mask of an authoritative and stable political text) to consume the truth and lose virtue in the mists of geopolitical expediency. This misinformation campaign is in turn abetted by a perversion of the law that contributes to this informational sinkhole: ‘‘It is likewise to be considered, that contracts concerning boundaries are often left vague and indefinite without necessity, by the desire of each party, to interpret the ambiguity to its own advantage,’’ and ‘‘thus it will happen that without great caution on either side, that . . . the rights that had been disputed are still equally open to controversy.’’ In short, the various types of textual instability, in reading the books of natural boundaries, political boundaries, and legal boundaries, leads to a kind of domino effect where textual instability

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is multiplied across many kinds of discourses. It might stop if ‘‘great caution’’ were applied by the French and British, but such caution has been eliminated by selfish interest abetted by the enhanced instability that further blinds the disputants to the larger implications of their actions. A kind of tipping point seems to have been reached wherein it would take a considerable act of will to slow down or arrest this process. Instead, there emerges ‘‘a perpetual ground of contest’’ (189) where all parties ‘‘are now disputing about their boundaries, and each is endeavoring the destruction of the other by the help of the Indians, whose interest it is that both should be destroyed’’ (188). The European powers, infected with this sickness of greed for power, are pulled irresistibly into the implosive informational vortex of their own creation that destroys any pretense to a stable moral or epistemological perspective. They have, in short, invented a new kind of criminality, though its results are no different from older kinds: ‘‘The American dispute between the French and us is therefore only the quarrel of two robbers for the spoils of a passenger’’ (188). The seemingly moralistic and legal rhetoric of the two nationstates has led in short to a kind of nihilistic stance that disguises itself as its opposite. Johnson, however, does not despair of finding the truth; nor does he surrender anything like his national identity or love for his country. He admits that there is legitimacy to the claim that the French deliberately built forts to trap the British colonies and forts with their backs against the sea, and so he argues, ‘‘Here then, perhaps, it will be safest to fix the justice of our cause; here we are apparently and indisputably injured, and this injury may, according to the practice of nations, be justly resented’’ (190). Johnson’s language in this section is interesting; the use of ‘‘perhaps’’ and ‘‘apparently’’ points to a balance between skepticism and a drive to find a firm basis for a conclusion. The style here calls to mind Greene’s indication that Johnson has a way of balancing an inductive skeptical mind-set with a more sweeping and authoritative rationalist deductive stance, and that nicely helps to illustrate Johnson’s rhetorical and epistemological stance in this section of the political tract. Johnson is by no means certain that he has drawn a necessary and indisputable inference from the available evidence and therefore calls for more inquiry: ‘‘Whether we have not in return made some incroachments upon them, must be left doubtful, till our practices on the Ohio shall be stated and vindicated.’’ Nations bordering on each other will often see ‘‘war . . . kindled with plausible pretenses on

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either part’’ (190–91), and hence a certain degree of uncertainty is inevitable. But that needn’t lead him or his readers to surrender to the nihilistic tendencies of the information vortex that represents a reprehensible and unnecessary abuse of the potentially unstable aspects of mediating texts. However much the present conflict has propagated a kind of blackout of access and lack of rhetorical, epistemological, and ethical grounding, we still have had access, Johnson implies, to broader and less obscure fields of information prior to this time that make it feasible to reason deductively about the present situation. However ‘‘obscure in its original is the American contest,’’ Johnson supposes ‘‘it is not to be doubted, that after the last war, when the French had made peace with such apparent superiority, they naturally began to treat us with less respect in distant parts of the world and to consider us as a people from whom they had nothing to fear, and who could no longer presume . . . to contravene their designs, or to check their progress.’’ They therefore did not hesitate to form ‘‘a line of forts behind our colonies,’’ something the British quite rightly should object to since ‘‘it can never be supposed, that we intended to be inclosed between the sea and the French garrisons’’ (190). The reasoning here is fascinating; certain kinds of assumptions seem to be reasonable by rule of deduction—the French, given their system of government and national character naturally became aggressive and we British inevitably would respond with equal aggression. The French are to blame, and yet the inductive evidence shows that the English have also committed their share of blunders. Clearly the French system, with its deterministic outlook on society and its informatics, is highly predictable and represents a highly stable element in this text of events, even if its ultimate end is to destabilize that text. That being the case, the British can see them as a causal agent in this process—but so too are the British. Given the predictability of the French, one should have been able to anticipate their reaction to any perceived weakness on the part of Britain. The British have a right to defend their forts—if no new empirical evidence leads to a chain of inductive reasoning that would destabilize that chain of reasoning in this still primarily empirical form of argument. If this combined deductive/inductive paradigm remains intact, perhaps the British have a case and should prosecute it against the French on the American frontier. Given the complexity of the situation, this is a brilliant deduction

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informed by an equally brilliant method. At the beginning of all this, we were looking at an information vortex that seemed as irresistible in its nihilistic power as a black hole. Now Johnson has negotiated a moral and political stance that seems surprisingly stable, given the circumstances. What is fascinating about the stance is the way it balances destabilizing epistemological forces (the turbulent flow of empirical data) versus more stable forces (deductions based on events from the past that are more governable with hindsight than current events) to weave a moral and epistemological political text that features fixture and useful mobility (as it stands ready to promote future consideration of data as it is made available). A complexly dynamic text emerges here that seems to bear an isomorphic relationship with the complex dynamic of events. Johnson discerns order implicit in the field of information on the war in such a way that prevents an epistemological blackout that would render impossible any stabilizing of the categories of truth and virtue. Johnson’s own mediation of events does not preclude the possibility that the whole paradigm could shift instantly if new information subverts the premises of his conclusions. Unlike the politicians, he will not willfully (and certainly not deceptively) impose order here or deliberately obfuscate the reality of the situation while pretending to do the opposite. He will let the information flow, and flow turbulently, if necessary, while he patiently awaits some kind of shape to emerge from the torrent. He has learned much about the dynamics of information culture in his periodical essays, and gradually a kind of faith in an unusual type of order existing within disorder is emerging in Johnson’s mind. (And Johnson will maintain this focus on order within disorder—unlike Pope with his main focus on order arising from disorder—even in the ‘‘Preface to Shakespeare’’ and Lives of the English Poets, as we will see in chapter 5.) He teaches, in short, by example here, and the lesson is one everyone, regardless of rank and station, could absorb. What the politicians, the warriors, and (perhaps unwittingly) the journalists have done is not inevitable, nor need it remain in its present state of uncontrollability. Alternatives exist, as Johnson’s own prose style shows, and this gives Johnson enormous rhetorical leverage. He can blame the house of Hanover for not anticipating this situation: ‘‘This design of the French has been long formed, and long known, both in America and Europe, and might at first been easily repressed had force been used instead of expostulation’’ (192). He can also lend powerful support to his argument in the beginning of the tract that

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argued free information is essential to combat the French; it is what prevents us from becoming like them and from succumbing to the seeming advantage of their system. Near the end of the essay he clearly shows that nothing has changed since the time of Louis XIV, for the ‘‘French compose one body with one head. They have all the same intent, and agree to pursue it by the same means.’’ Thus ‘‘Designs are therefore formed without debate, and executed without impediment.’’ But if this makes them dangerous, it also makes them violate the most essential goal of government for they are ‘‘accidentally more formidable as they are less happy’’ (195). The convergence between the British and their enemy brought on by their information war clearly must be avoided. And, as Johnson indicated at the beginning of the piece, the best way to accomplish this is via free exchange of information and dialogical exchange between all levels of humanity, in the complex hierarchy. The essay’s rhetoric and dissemination of information proves this feasible and laudable in mediated culture. Johnson is sufficiently impressed by the French menace to return to this theme again in ‘‘The Bravery of the English Common Soldier’’ (ca. 1760) where he considers the virtues of the English culture in this new light. He strives here to further contrast the French and English systems by analyzing them as systems of order; he concludes that the British system of order balances stability with instability to create a whole that is superior to the French system. The British social and political system is not only designed to maintain the freedom of the individual within a hierarchy but also channels the individual’s energy to sustain that system’s group sense of integrity morally and politically. This is by no means a smooth kind of structuring process; the individual is not integrated into the whole like a part fitting into a mechanism; rather, the form is roughly configured by individuals whose integration into the whole generates stresses that could easily tear it apart were it not for the complicity of individuals curbing their will without ever extinguishing it. This complicity maintains the state’s dynamic created by forces of attraction and repulsion that call to mind the systems of Newton and Blackstone, along with Pope’s assessment of society and psychology in his discussion of fractal hierarchies in An Essay on Man. This is at least the implication of this political tract that builds on the previously discussed piece’s description of the differences between the French and British information-based cultural systems by exploring how they are reflected in the mind-sets of the fighting

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men in these respective nations. Johnson begins by pointing to a salient difference in their attitudes toward their superiors: ‘‘[A] French count . . . remarks how much soldiers are animated, when they see all their dangers shared by . . . their masters, and whom they consider beings of a higher rank. The Englishman despises such motives of courage; he was born without a master; and looks not on any man, however dignified by lace and titles, as deriving from Nature any claims to his respect, or inheriting any qualities superior to his own’’ (283). The remark on Nature is especially interesting here since it seems to underscore Johnson’s sense that the system of rank, especially as manifested in the French culture, is indeed artificial and in France denies the significance and power of the individual. Johnson is using the military life to provide a microcosmic look at how the interactions between individuals can secure freedom for the nation without extinguishing the distinctiveness of the participants in the system. Indeed, the implication is that the French culture denies the strength of both the individual and the larger society by not supporting the frequently chaotic interaction between individuals that provides the hierarchy with a life-sustaining complex dynamic. The English soldier’s tendency toward ‘‘dissolution of dependence . . . obliges every man to regard his own character’’ (283). The soldier’s individualism is even more extreme than that of individuals of higher rank in the society; he represents and must deal with the realities of life as they exist at the lower part of the hierarchy. His world is one where the major motive for performing duty cannot be property or an abstract notion of liberty for ‘‘Liberty is, to the lowest rank of every nation, little more than the choice of working or starving’’ (283). He avoids ‘‘servile arts’’ for ‘‘he may always have wages for his labor; and is no less necessary to his employer, than his employer is to him.’’ The result is a kind of liberty that is not abstract but very much embodied by and grounded in the social reality of his life; ‘‘having nothing to abate his esteem of himself, he consequently aspires to the esteem of others.’’ His liberty is located in a culture that is based solely on individual respect stemming from ‘‘courage’’ and ‘‘honor’’ for in his world ‘‘the fame of courage is most eagerly pursued.’’ And it is pursued only ‘‘among those of his own rank’’ with the result that the soldier is ‘‘disdainful of obligation’’ and neglectful ‘‘of subordination.’’ Even ‘‘the power of the law’’ cannot preserve in such an individual the ‘‘reverence’’ for or ‘‘the proper distinction between social ranks’’ (284). Such an individual might actually seem to be a threat to order

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rather than a defender of it, but Johnson insists that such is not the case. Rather, he points out that ‘‘good and evil will grow up in this world together; and they who complain, in peace, of the insolence of the populace, must remember, that their insolence in peace is bravery in war’’ (284). They reflect the character of the English people: ‘‘The equality of our privileges, the impartiality of our laws, the freedom of our tenures, and the prosperity of our trade, dispose us very little to reverence of our superiors’’ (282). Presumably, when Johnson says this of the English soldier—‘‘Regularity is by no means a part of their character’’ (282)—this also applies to the rest of the population. Indeed, Johnson contrasts the British soldier with his counterparts in other countries by using the metaphor of the mechanism: English armies do not ‘‘produce’’ in their soldiers ‘‘a kind of mechanistic obedience to signals and commands like that which the perverse [and French] Cartesians impute to animals’’ (281). A different kind of organization is implicit in the British system; it is not like a machine where part is not just subordinated to whole but subsumed by it. Rather the whole seems to recapitulate the part and vice versa. Johnson has described here a special kind of order that will influence his aesthetics and lead him away from purely linear classical conceptions of order to embrace empirically based conceptualizations of it that in many ways bring to mind the idea of the modern fractal that I will describe in more detail in relation to Johnson’s aesthetics. This is an exciting way for Johnson to envision the political state in the wake of his critique of the British and French abuse of informatics in his tract on territorial disputes in America. If the enemy is a country that organizes the state to create a deterministic system of information and behavioral control, then the antidote is a country that does very much the opposite without losing its capacity to maintain internal order and respond to external security threats. Britain is such a state, at least potentially. Clearly this is the case if Britain, as Johnson says, ‘‘may boast, beyond any other people in the world, of a kind of epidemic bravery, diffused equally through all its ranks’’ (281). A system that promotes a dynamic wherein deep structuring of order emerges within apparent disorder, where deterministic elements nevertheless allow for a system that can complexify in response to perturbation, much as a real animal does (not the imagined and false Cartesian mechanistic animal model) can achieve things the French system cannot. Indeed, its flexibility and adaptability should allow it to defeat the mechanistic approach of

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the French. But only, Johnson implies, if we have the intelligence to see how the British soldier typifies the true character of the nation at its unruly yet courageous best. Johnson also considers another alternative to the abuses of the information state in his political writing. In his 1760 piece ‘‘Introduction to Proceedings of the Committee on French Prisoners,’’ he considers the condition of Gallic prisoners of war who are being kept by the underprepared British under inhumane conditions. Johnson has been hired by Thomas Hollis,13 member of a charitable committee working on the behalf of the prisoners to secure them aid, to write an introduction to their proceedings on this issue, but Johnson does more here and offers arguments to support the activity of this committee. Johnson’s main concern reflects his alertness to the dangers of his mediated culture; he is not just worried that patriots might ‘‘censure’’ the efforts—of equal concern is that even if ‘‘A good example has been set’’ by this committee that has asked for no rewards, ‘‘it may lose its influence by misrepresentation’’ (287). He decides to meet such a thrust of misinformation, cutting it off at the pass, so to speak, by representing it faithfully and annihilating it before it can finish disembarking from the mass-mediated consciousness of misplaced patriotism: ‘‘Against the relief of the French one argument has been brought; but that one is so popular and so specious, that if it were to remain unexamined, it would by many be thought irrefragable. It has been urged that charity, like other virtues, may be improperly and unseasonably exerted; that while we are relieving Frenchmen there remain many Englishmen unrelieved; that while we lavish pity on our enemies, we forget the misery of our friends’’ (288). Johnson is drawing on his recent experience with the periodical essay—he knows all too well the darker side of mediated culture; just as courage can become an epidemic so too can moral cowardice, unmitigated selfishness, and unnecessary cruelty in the world of the fixed yet mobile serialized signifier. Johnson immediately detects the all too apparent speciousness of the popular logic that promotes a rhetoric of ‘‘Us’’ versus ‘‘Them’’ without considering the possibilities that Johnson has raised in his other political work—namely, that this can implicate ‘‘Us’’ in an epistemic whirlpool whereby we gradually acquire the traits of our adversaries and forgo the blessings of complexity in mediated culture for a selfimposed, self-defeating, and utterly unnecessary absolutist informational determinism. As before, he combines difficult-to-contest deductive logic with

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the elegantly confluent strain of empirical evidence to break the back of the simplistic thinking of his mediated interlocutor. ‘‘To do the best,’’ says Johnson, ‘‘can seldom be the lot of man; it is sufficient if, when opportunities are presented, he is ready to do good.’’ Moreover, empirically, there is no evidence to support the claims of the opposition of ill effect to the British: ‘‘It is far from certain, that a single Englishman will suffer by the charity to the French.’’ That being the case, how can the opposition possibly sustain such an argument? Deft media critic and classical rhetor that he is, Johnson discovers what we would call a subtext, what an earlier generation of rhetorician might have described as a topological trope, and what any sensible reader will instantly recognize as an utterly invalid analogy. Continuing in its empirical vein, Johnson’s prose is worth quoting in full here: New scenes of misery make new impressions; and much of the charity which produced these donations may be supposed to have been generated by a new species of calamity never known among us before. Some imagine that the laws have provided all necessary relief in common cases, and remit the poor to the care of the public; some have been deceived by fictitious misery, and are afraid of encouraging imposture; many have observed want to be the effect of vice, and consider casual almsgivers as patrons of idleness. But all these difficulties vanish in the present case: we know that for the prisoners of war there is no legal provision; we see their distress, and are certain of its cause; we know they are poor and naked, and poor and naked without a crime. (288)

Johnson realizes that much of the cruel indifference incited in this case is not only the result of adversarial nationalist rhetoric but also the result of an English society that has found it all too easy to dismiss the plight of the disenfranchised lower echelon of society. To do so, of course, for Johnson, is to dismiss the moral base of the complex society that really does depend on those tough, independent men with the muskets to keep the peace; to do so is to forget what makes the British system in this mediated world so different from the French. Johnson will have none of this and insists that the public look again at these prisoners and realize that none of these spiteful attitudes toward the poor can have any application in this case. A special form of misery requires a special form of charity. Johnson deftly avoids naming the overarching motive for mistreating these soldiers, revenge disguised as patriotism, for he does not seek new adversaries but rather invokes a rhetoric of conversion

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(there is more than one reference to Scripture in the piece) whereby he will undermine the ‘‘acrimony of adverse nations’’ and appeal instead to ‘‘fraternal affections.’’ This he does in the end by pointing to transcendental forms of signification that are embodied in specific acts of charity and promote cooperation between nationstates instead of combat. Johnson perceives a middle ground here that is in part cultural, in part theological, that can serve as a means of promoting a different kind of information exchange between the warring nations. He sums up the plan eloquently in his final paragraph that ends with a reference to Luke 6:27: ‘‘The effects of these contributions may, perhaps, reach still further. Truth is best supported by virtue; we may hope from those who feel or see our charity, that they shall no longer detest as heresy that religion [Anglican Protestantism], which makes its professors the followers of Him, who has commanded us to ‘do good to them that hate us’ ’’ (289). Truth and virtue emerge here as mutually supportive categories that can be defined and stabilized through the right kind of human action. The action required is one where there can be no discernible advantage to the party initiating it; the act of charity is purely beneficent and all the more powerful since the gesture is made by an England that is doing well enough at this point in the war to actually acquire some prisoners. It is a gesture that also embodies the best qualities of the British nation, whose complex social and informational structure reflects the benevolence implied in the role of the governing body to protect the rights of the governed, especially those who cannot fend for themselves. No deception and no duplicity can possibly be inferred here. Emerging from the noise (and fog) of wartime informatics comes this clean and unmistaken signification as Johnson creates a text that capitalizes on the often turbulent flow of information during the conflict while searching for emergent universal human tendencies that will anchor the rhetoric in stable axiomatic assertions to prevent textual instability from becoming a liability to this charitable cause. As Donald Greene notes in his introduction to this piece in the Yale edition, small wonder ‘‘that two centuries later, the official journal of the International Red Cross reprinted’’ this text ‘‘in French translation, noting it . . . as the expression of the ideal that was only to begin to come to realization, through the efforts of Henri Dunant, in the later nineteenth century’’ (286). The complexity of Johnson’s informational milieu is not to be underestimated, however, and if he helped to institute the first efforts

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in the eighteenth century to create international relief organizations, he nevertheless sometimes became involved in nationalistic disputes—and while he championed the cause of an enlightened approach to mediation, he could also prove susceptible to the powerful ideological crosscurrents and undertows that made mediated culture then, as today, a milieu fraught with very real dangers. This is all too evident in his 1775 piece Taxation No Tyranny, which has proven to be something of an enigma and sometimes an embarrassment to Johnsonians in times past. To put it plainly, Johnson’s piece seems to signify a failure on his part to heed his own advice about the implicit dangers of information culture—and this seems to happen at least in part as a result of a peculiar rhetorical situation where Johnson’s purpose is not so much to persuade as to lay down the case against the America revolutionary cause as if the two sides presently have no hope of establishing a rhetorical middle ground. As Greene says in his introduction to the piece in the Yale edition, ‘‘the time for propaganda, for discussion, for ‘dialogue’ was long past’’ (402). In many ways Johnson seems to be drawing a line in the sand in his critique of the American Congress; he does not seem to invite a reply, and his dialogical technique perhaps necessarily deserts him. As in the case of his Plan for the Dictionary and the frustrations he expressed in its preface, Johnson plays a role that is not natural for him, one that forces him to adopt a rhetorical and epistemological stance that blinds him to what he has learned about complexity and chaos in the often dangerous world of mediated culture. (Indeed, as we noted in chapter 1, Johnson even invokes Thomas Baker in Taxation (449) as if to return to the linguistic prescriptivism that informed the Plan of Johnson’s Dictionary. Johnson does this to express his wish that he could prevent the colonists from abusing terminology on slavery. He seems unwittingly to indicate that this political tract represents a return to an earlier mind-set where he had played the role so atypical of him, the monological legislator, a role I will discuss in more detail in the context of Johnson’s theories on mimesis in chapter 5.) Even as one recognizes the peculiar quality of the rhetorical situation, clearly one unlike Johnson’s other political writings, and even as one notes Greene’s thesis that Taxation is consistent with Johnson’s political philosophy in general, the tone and stance of the essay nevertheless are clearly uncharacteristic of him, notwithstanding DeMaria’s thesis that Johnson’s politics do evolve and show increasing conservatism after 1762.14 The rhetorical thrust and the

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epistemological grounding of the tract seem unlike Johnson’s methodology in the preceding pieces. Typically, Johnson will focus on boundary disputes in these essays and try to settle them by detecting where boundaries have been subverted in such a way as to prevent truth and virtue from working as mutually supportive categories that make possible defining a line of action. This is clearly the case when he criticizes how the French and the British obfuscate boundaries and abuse informatics to justify their aggression and imperialism in America; he deftly uses his rhetoric to define the only real issue at hand and thus points to real possibilities for taking action. Likewise he stabilizes boundaries in the piece on the French prisoners; the stereotyped and cliche´d notions that are used to justify the abuse of the impoverished in England cannot apply to the French soldiers to justify their abuse because the prisoners represent a completely different category (or ‘‘species’’ as Johnson would say) of people. For Johnson, genus and species are stabilizing categories that work with facility for him that was not always as easily accessible for earlier thinkers in this print culture like Locke and Dryden, as we saw in the introductory chapter. Johnson discerns these categories in the mediated noise of his opponents who ignore them to establish assumptions and attitudes that have actually destabilized the text of the political argument rather than lent it balance. The typical pattern with Johnson is to look at the abuse of the mediating faculties in the culture, identify how they have been abused, and then suggest a corrective strategy. The desire for such an approach is certainly voiced early on in Taxation when Johnson says, ‘‘To perplex the opinion of the public many artifices have been used, which, as usually happens when falsehood is to be maintained by fraud, lose their force by counteracting one another’’ (412). Johnson is identifying an abuse of the information machine but his tactic here seems simplistic in comparison to his other tracts; his claim is merely that the logic of his opponents is so full of contradiction that it will undo itself. Indeed, he proceeds, in the next few paragraphs, to show that pity is excited one moment for the poor Americans, who have barely survived the harshness of the frontier, and then fear is excited of these colonists who have nevertheless grown too powerful to be challenged by Britain (413). But if the contradictions are so obvious as to undo themselves in such an obvious manner, then why must they be pointed out at all? Johnson seems to ignore, at least temporarily, the inherent boundary dispute involved here while making his own contribution

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to categorical instability. He does not begin by clearly addressing the American argument of whether taxation is fair without representation. Such an argument, like those made by British supporters of the American cause (like Burke), requires one to focus on categorical and boundary disputes from the start. Can colonists claim rights similar to those of British citizens and seek representation or does a categorical imperative prevent such an assertion from being made? Johnson does not begin by focusing on this interesting problem; instead he does something highly uncharacteristic of his rhetoric in political and informational contexts. He begins by all but completely excluding an empirical initiative from his mode of argument: In all the parts of human knowledge, whether terminating in science merely speculative, or operating upon life private or civil, are admitted some fundamental principles, or common axioms, which being generally received are little doubted, and being little doubted have been rarely proved. . . . It is difficult to prove the principles of science, because notions cannot always be found more intelligible than those which are questioned. It is difficult to prove the principles of practice, because they have for the most part not been discovered by investigation, but obtruded by experience, and the demonstrator will find, after an operose deduction, that he has been trying to make seen what can be only felt. (411)

An example of this is ‘‘the position, that ‘the supreme power of every community has the right of requiring from all its subjects such contributions as are necessary to the public safety of public prosperity’ ’’ (411), that is, taxes, a truth that Johnson, to coin a phrase, holds to be self-evident, so much so that deductive modes of proceeding already begin to dominate here, with the result being a very different kind of political discourse for Johnson. The dynamic interplay between empirical and deductive modes of proceeding usually helps Johnson avoid the potentially tyrannical top-down modes of rhetoric that he discerns in the organization of mediated absolutist states like France, but presently he proceeds to claim that the kind of truth involved here does not need to embrace such a system embodying fixity and mobility. And that is because he does not need such modes to justify the view from the top—which is mainly what he presents here. This shift in perspective, however occasional, is apparent in Johnson’s language when he defends the principles of government. ‘‘All government is ultimately and essentially absolute,’’ says Johnson.

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‘‘An Englishman in the common course of life and action feels no restraint . . . but an English individual may by the supreme authority be deprived of liberty, and a colony divested of its powers, for reasons of which that authority is the only judge’’ (423). As Greene says in his gloss of the word absolute on page 423, this does not necessarily indicate an assertion of absolutism, but if readers have sometimes read that meaning into Johnson’s language, it is understandable because this is a rare occasion where Johnson’s description of the system of subordination seems to exclude the individual’s even limited dialogical interaction with the system in a mediated culture. Instead, the perspective focuses solely on the empowering perspective of the governor who has final say in the interpretation of the system and the implementation of its laws and codes. Johnson makes this clear in the rhetorical amplification that follows: ‘‘In sovereignty there are no gradations. There may be limited royalty, there may be limited consulship; but there can be no limited government. There must in every society be some power or other from which there is no appeal, which admits no restrictions, which pervades the whole mass of the community, regulates and adjusts all subordination, enacts laws or repeals them, . . . extends or contracts privileges, exempt itself from question or control. . . .’’ (423). Johnson insists on the power of that governing force: ‘‘this power . . . is not infallible, for it may do wrong; but it is irresistible, for it can be resisted only by rebellion, by an act which makes questionable what shall be thenceforward the supreme power’’ (423). And at what point is that rebellion permissible or necessary? Johnson does not say, though elsewhere in his political philosophy he had implied it was necessary. But the voice that insisted on the necessarily unruly nature of the English soldier for maintaining the country’s liberty has gone here. What takes its place is one that at times angrily insults its perceived enemy: ‘‘These lords of themselves, these kings of Me, these demigods of independence, sink down to colonists governed by a charter’’ (429). Johnson accuses his opponents of appealing mainly to ‘‘Passion’’ (412), but his own occasionally inflammatory rhetoric can hardly be said to avoid this tactic entirely. Johnson does, of course, eventually turn to the question of taxation without representation but he takes a very hard line predicated from his opening statement on the unquestionable necessity of taxation. He is aware of the argument that ‘‘The Americans unrepresented cannot consent to English taxations, as a corporation, and they will not consent as individuals’’ (426). Nevertheless, while be-

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fore leaving England such an individual ‘‘perhaps had a right to vote for a knight or a burgess: by crossing the Atlantick he has not nullified his right; but he has made its exertion no longer possible’’ and ‘‘by his own choice’’ (430). The rhetoric here has a legalistic narrowness, quite purposefully, to deny any potential destabilization of the boundary between colonist and citizen. Nor will Johnson consider the possible significance of the fact that a former possession and present member of the United Kingdom like Ireland is now represented by a parliament of their own for they are recognized by the British Parliament under their own law, ‘‘6 Geo. I. Chap 5,’’ no less (435). The American situation will be judged according to the principle laid down by the introduction to the essay and by the deductive logic of the law: ‘‘To the Americans their charters are left as they were, nor have they lost any thing except that of which their sedition deprived them’’ (435). Johnson’s rhetoric reflects his conviction that a point of no return has been reached; the colonists ‘‘have armed the militia of the provinces and seized the public stores of ammunition. They are therefore no longer subjects, since they refuse the laws of their sovereign’’ (438). Perhaps if Johnson had been addressing the situation before it had reached this state, his rhetoric would have reflected his typically more tolerant stance to effect an inclusive as opposed to an exclusionary rhetoric. As DeMaria says, Johnson’s ‘‘political invective’’ here ‘‘cannot be comfortably assimilated to his underlying humanistic assumptions’’ (256), while the attack on Whigs (in the still fragmented and incomplete ending of existing texts) that suggests they were ‘‘dangerous revolutionaries’’ seems to be a rhetorical faux pas (256). In any event, Johnson’s desertion of his usual style is apparent in every aspect of the essay—his clean, fluid, balanced sentences give way to a prose that lacks its usual grace and elegance even formally. But the most disturbing aspect of the essay is the desertion of the emphasis on the complex political dynamic of English society. Clearly in the other essays, the energy of that dynamic comes from a system where those in authority derive their power from their devotion to a populace that contributes to the whole even when they cannot always show or feel respect for those of higher rank. The contrast here is not so blatant as to make Johnson’s politics seem strongly hypocritical, but it does point to the dangers Johnson faced in his information culture. His tone in Taxation sufficiently resembles that of his absolutist adversaries to suggest that the capacity of mediation to cross boundaries, to penetrate real borders and intel-

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lectual ones, was not to be underestimated. The temptation to assert authority powerfully would resurface in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France under similarly destabilizing pressures emerging after 1789. Johnson’s rhetoric in Taxation No Tyranny accomplishes its implied purpose, but even when viewed in its original historical and rhetorical context, its authoritarian posturing is at times disturbing and does indeed seem inconsistent with the humanitarian thrust of Johnson’s other political and moral prose. But even if his tone and approach differ here, his dialogical tendency to see political questions from marginalized perspectives in the society does not completely desert him. As both Voitle and DeMaria show,15 Johnson’s attack on the hypocrisy of Americans crying for freedom when they still hold slaves is compelling and helps contextualize and make understandable Johnson’s anger with America. Johnson maintains the moral stance here of his periodical essays and his other political tracts as he demonstrates in the section on slavery in Taxation where the obfuscation of moral boundaries does make extremely problematic the American political cause epistemologically and ethically. And this focus on marginalized groups is clear in his characterization of Native Americans and French prisoners as disenfranchised and abused individuals. It is one of the keys for evoking sympathy and dialogical participation from the audience that learns to transcend divisive boundaries in mediated culture to embrace and endorse more globalizing perspectives. And this focus on the marginalized members of society is consistent with the progressivism, the politics of hope that Johnson promotes earlier in his 1757 rebuttal to Soame Jenyns (to be discussed again in more detail in the context of Pope’s and Johnson’s theories on chaos in chapter 5): To entail irreversible poverty upon generation after generation only because the ancestor happened to be poor is in itself cruel, if not unjust, and is wholly contrary to the maxims of a commercial nation, which always . . . [will] offer every individual a chance of mending his condition by his diligence. Those who communicate literature to the son of a poor man consider him as one not born to poverty, but to the necessity of deriving a better fortune from himself. . . . I hope the happiness of those whom education enables to escape from . . . [poverty] may turn the balance against that exacerbation which the others suffer.16

It is Johnson’s hope that in an information-based culture, education, exposure to ‘‘literature,’’ and the judicious inculcation and dis-

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tribution of information can promote happiness and progress. Cycles of poverty can be broken like the chains of slavery (as Johnson’s powerful logic certainly shows in his 1777 ‘‘Brief to Free a Slave’’). This aspect of Johnson’s thinking is still potent and present in Johnson’s just critique of slavery as an indicator of American hypocrisy in Taxation No Tyranny. The angry tone and aggressive stance of the piece cannot completely efface Johnson’s better intuitions regarding political oppression in an information age. Altogether, Johnson’s progress with understanding the larger implications of mediated culture from 1750 to 1775 was impressive. His prose fleshed out a model of a complex body politic that maintained rank and usually emphasized the role of the individual in maintaining the complexity of its dynamic that helped face challenges to order and security both internally and externally. Now we will turn to his critical theory where his capabilities show themselves off at their most refined state of development. This will afford us the opportunity to consider Johnson’s critical stance and his conceptualizations of complex dynamics vis-a`-vis our own postmodern culture’s reflection on chaos. Once again Johnson will prove himself to be a formidable thinker, far ahead of many of his contemporaries and still capable of teaching readers significant lessons regarding the complex mediated milieu of culture and aesthetics. His ideas on representation, which he refines and addresses fully for the first time from 1765 onward, shows the growth in his thinking on chaos and mimesis that still challenges us today.

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5 Samuel Johnson, Mediation, Representation, and the Aesthetics of Complex Dynamics The pebble must be polished with care, which hopes to be a diamond: and words ought surely to be labored when they are intended to stand for things. —Samuel Johnson Rambler 152 (1751)

AS IN MY CHAPTER ON POPE’S AESTHETIC OF COMPLEX DYNAMICS, I NEED to discuss Johnson’s poetics not only in their original eighteenthcentury context but also in relation to our own postmodern milieu. This is necessary in order to complete part of the mission I prescribed for myself in the preface; for it is my intention to show how the apparent affinity between Johnson’s modes of proceeding in poetics, rhetoric, and politics and our own today can sometimes be illuminating or sometimes misleading, depending on how one contextualizes that perceived affinity. I have attempted in this study to show how history and theory can cooperate productively without disabling our capacity to appreciate the significance of Johnson’s thinking for his generation and our own. Let me begin, therefore, in this chapter by pointing to how Johnson’s ideas on complexity and textual instability have led us to read him sometimes through the lens of an either/or reasoning that the best students of Johnson have resisted in times past for reasons that I hope to show are as persuasive today as they were previously. I think this will prove especially true when we see Johnson adapting to the mediated world of fixed yet mobile signs that proposed challenges for him not unlike those we face today in our also complex information culture. My discussion will help us appreciate the increasing precision and complexity of Johnson’s conceptions of complex dynamics emerging in 135

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relation to the issue of mimesis that Johnson discusses in great depth in his aesthetics from 1765 onward. In the context of Johnson’s development as an editor of texts and as a critic, we will see that his earlier struggles with the Dictionary just prior to this period assisted him eventually in his quest to understand the complex dynamics of language from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic level in mediated culture. As I noted briefly in the preface of this study, after Bertrand Bronson, Johnsonians have been aware of the double tradition beginning in the 1700s and lasting into the twenty-first century.1 One side argues for Johnson the Tory conservative, dogmatist, defender of classicism, church tradition, and the social order. The other depicts him as a progressive whose skepticism exists in tension with his religious faith and respect for tradition. Many critics have followed Bronson’s suggestion that the later conception of Johnson is more accurate, but some late modern readers of Johnson have suggested that this tension is an uneasy one that leads not to balance but to irreconcilable contradiction. Steven Lynn cites a number of critics who have underscored Johnson’s incoherency and tendency to reverse ‘‘polarities’’ in a list that includes such notables as Earl Wasserman, Irvin Ehrenpreis, Charles Hinnant, Boyd White, Jean Hagstrum, and others.2 Indeed, a new generation of Johnsonians has pointed to strong affinities between Johnson’s skepticism and post-structuralism. Alex Segal and Helen Deutsch offer deconstructive readings of The Life of Savage—readings that support Raman Selden’s contention that if we read Johnson deconstructively, ‘‘we arrive at a more acute perception of the uncertainty . . . of his writing, an uncertainty which is sometimes expressed and sometimes repressed.’’3 As Selden notes, this tendency to link Johnson with the postmodern seems a logical development from Bronson’s readings, which argued that in Johnson’s writings a ‘‘radical energy went hand in hand with a concern for order and authority’’ (280). But to read Johnson deconstructively also problematizes Johnson’s double focus on order and disorder—and increases the likelihood that, ultimately, the debate underlying the double tradition will return to its starting point and perhaps reinforce the image of Johnson the dogmatist that Bronson and others like W. J. Bate have challenged. For example, Thomas Reinert’s postmodern reading of Johnson (alluded to in chapter 1) insists that Johnson is indeed a conservative, whose politics do ‘‘not so much follow from his conservatism as offer imaginary consolation for’’ a potentially nihilistic

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skepticism.4 Thus Reinert disagrees with Greene’s interpretation of Johnson as a progressivist ‘‘gadfly’’ (143) and insists that the tension between faith and empirical skepticism often leads to ‘‘simple’’ authoritarianism (161). If this is true, then Johnson’s focus is not double but shifting and perhaps evidence of a retreat—Johnson’s skeptical, deconstructive tendencies may lead him to embrace dogma and conservatism, in quest of what Lynn calls a ‘‘transcendent Other’’ (14). Reinert’s findings may seem harsh to those who view Johnson through the lens of more traditional critical paradigms, but the relationship between Johnson’s skeptical, apparently deconstructive tendencies and his respect for tradition has proven as difficult to explain in a postmodern context as it was in earlier twentiethcentury criticism. Nevertheless, in this chapter, building on the evolution of Johnson’s ideas on complexity described in earlier chapters, I suggest another way, in the wake of postmodernism, to contextualize Johnson’s double focus on order and disorder, on universal global norms and localized variation—here with particular regard to his literary criticism emerging in the wake of lexicography (and other prose writings), wherein we find his most lucid and fully developed discussion of an uncertainty principle informing his epistemology and aesthetics of mimesis. Within the context of eighteenth-century and postmodern conceptions of complex dynamic systems, we can see that Johnson is neither a dogmatist nor a nihilist, but, in matters aesthetic as well as political and ethical, he is instead an early modern chaologist, a student of chaos. His response to the perturbations introduced by politics, science, and philosophy in the eighteenth century leads him to describe in his aesthetics a complex mimetic system tracing emergent structures in the field of literary criticism implicated by the interplay between classical tradition and the new empirical skepticism. Thus, Johnson emerges as a writer and a thinker whose significance as a major figure of the eighteenth century, and as a contributor to modern discourse on aesthetics and chaos, demonstrates how Johnson’s extraordinary grasp of the intimate relation between order and disorder in complex systems prefigures current developments in critical theory and the study of chaos or complex dynamics. His focus on the complex mediated culture in his moral and political prose allows him to build on the work of Pope and others and their conceptualizations of harmony in discord to create a critical discourse that depends on textual instability

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to conceptualize and promote a mimetic theory of complex dynamics. Critics like Bate and Edinger underscore the interaction of classicism and empiricism in Johnson’s writing,5 but as we bring Johnson into the context of complex dynamics, we can elaborate upon Johnson’s conceptualization of the interdependency of order and disorder in his critical episteme. As we will see, Johnson’s criticism anticipates (and probably helped make possible) the modern chaologist’s view of complex dynamics where, as Hayles says in Chaos Bound, ‘‘chaos is envisioned not as an absence or a void but as a positive force in its own right.’’6 For chaos, as she says, is ‘‘the engine that drives a system toward a more complex kind of order . . . because it makes order possible’’ (23). Johnson (who, once again, as we will see, in some ways resembles his predecessor Pope, and in some ways does not) realizes that deterministic order and utterly random disorder do exist, but he also recognizes that a third category of systemic organization exists, pseudorandomness, the orderly disorder that is the focus of complex dynamics and chaos theory today. Pseudorandomness emerges as a principle of organization in language and the world it represents under conditions whereby, after the breakdown of more deterministic and predictable systems of order in the face of environmental flux and perturbation, semiological and physical systems can reorganize at higher and more complex levels to preclude system failure. As we saw in the first two chapters, initially chaos and complexity are not seen positively in the Restoration and early eighteenth century; they instead cause much anxiety at the dawn of a new empiricism and a new cosmology. As Robert Markley says in Fallen Languages, efforts in the early eighteenth century to redeem fallen nature through empiricism forced the culture to realize that the cosmos is ‘‘irreducibly complex, and beyond the explanatory power of semiotic systems to analyze it.’’7 Such an increased awareness of complexity in nature had profound implications for a society seeking to defend a hierarchy that ‘‘preserves notions of liberty and complexity and contains within them the notions of scientific thought’’ (182). Previously, in chapter 2, we saw how Pope draws upon some of the chaological speculation of ancients like Lucretius and moderns like Newton and Leibniz to generate the philosophy and aesthetics informing the Essay on Man—and I will add in this chapter some discussion on how this also informs the Essay on Criticism. Again, Pope is a key figure here, since his synthesis of classical and

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contemporary discourse on chaos sums up what modern perceptions of chaos implied for early eighteenth-century culture and aesthetics. Thus we must briefly turn to Pope again to help us appreciate Johnson’s contributions to this discourse on chaos in the later eighteenth century as he works out in detail questions of language and representation in the context of mediated culture. As we saw in chapter 2, Pope, integrating information on the feedback loop of chaological discourse, in the Essay on Man, enfolds Newton’s chaogenic materialist metaphysics in Leibniz’s monadic fractal schema of plenitude to represent poetically how seemingly random and disorderly events participate in the organizing principles of the universe, which humans can observe only in part but comprehend as a whole, a priori, by virtue of the monadic structure of the cosmos that circulates information globally and locally. To better understand the significance of Pope’s gestures for Johnson’s aesthetic and theory of representation, we must now review Pope’s achievement in the context of mimesis and the modern conceptualization of the complex form known as the fractal. In a very real way, Pope’s conception of monadic structure anticipates key concepts informing modern fractal geometry as described by one of the founders of contemporary chaos theory, Edward N. Lorenz. As Lorenz says, ‘‘[Benoit] Mandelbrot coined the term fractal to describe systems [of complex order] with fractional dimensionality.’’8 He continues, ‘‘A property of many fractals is selfsimilarity: in many fractal systems, several suitably chosen pieces, when suitably magnified, will become identical to the whole system’’ (170) or they will be ‘‘statistically self-similar; small pieces, when magnified, will have the same general type of appearance’’ (171). Lorenz says that Mandelbrot, the inventor of fractal geometry, argued rightly that ‘‘fractals with infinite resolution are abundant in nature’’ (173) in the forms of leaves, trees, coastlines, mountains, and cloud formations that, despite their apparently random structure, are mathematically and formally organized in their monadic, self-similar forms that, individually, represent ‘‘a dynamical system—a mapping’’ (174) of pseudorandom complexity. Order is implicit in the form of such individual systems because while each ‘‘has an infinite number of variables . . . there are only a finite number of variables that any variable can assume’’ (175). These finite values are the ‘‘strange attractors’’ of the fractals (176), the points that recur and trace emergent order in the seeming chaos of the complex system. These traces show, according to Bossomaier and Green, that

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these complex forms are ‘‘like the Flying Dutchman . . . compelled to wander forever in phase space, never returning to the same point’’ but nevertheless exhibiting order because they do not ‘‘visit every point in phase space.’’9 Hence, they say, ‘‘the attractor is different from a completely random system’’ for ‘‘it is restricted to a limited volume’’ and features ‘‘limited dimensionality’’ as the ‘‘attractor is a fractal’’ (135). Thus, says Lorenz, the fractal is a mapping of pseudorandomness and, as a representation of ‘‘advancement in time’’ affords ‘‘an especially economical means of simulating fluid motion’’ (175), the turbulent flow often exhibited by complex systems. Small wonder that fractal geometry can be used to reproduce or represent complex forms in nature. They are produced by the same mathematical principles that generate complex phenomena in nature and hence can figure forth the complex forms of nature quite ably. Emerging from his own turbulent yet organized monadic cosmology is Pope’s intuitive, nonmathematical but postscientific vision of society as a fractal, a pseudorandom schema where individuals naturally assume their proper place in the hierarchy via the attractive principles of the system’s dynamics. Societies organize themselves locally according to the same global principles that create and sustain the cosmic plenum. For Pope, ‘‘All nature is but art unknown to thee; / All Discord, Harmony, not understood; / All partial Evil, universal Good.’’10 Society thus reflects the virtue of the individual as it does the value of the hierarchy because the values are themselves generated by the dynamic forces that shape the values of the individual and the sociopolitical system—namely, the conflicting forces of self-love and social love. Pope insists on the aesthetic, complex nature of this unity, and its connectedness to natural principles of unity, because of his own intuitive aesthetic perception of the role of chaos in nature and literature as expressed in An Essay on Criticism. In the Essay Pope praises the irregular shapes in the natural world that inspire and inform the complex structures of mimetic poetry: Great wits sometimes may gloriously offend, And rise to Faults true Critics dare not mend; From vulgar Bounds with brave Disorder part, And snatch a Grace beyond the Reach of Art, Which, without passing through the Judgment, gains The Heart, and all its End at once attains.

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In Prospects, thus, some objects please our Eyes, Which out of Nature’s common Order rise, The shapeless Rock, or hanging Precipice.11

Good critics, as the rest of the Essay attests, can perceive the rightness of such seeming disorder because they understand that whatever serves the larger aesthetic purpose of the work is justified. Art, too, is organized monadically; parts should be seen as reflections of the larger self-similar aesthetic and rhetorical matrix. Texts can reflect the complexity of the world through their own orderly yet disorderly sign systems of signifiers that exhibit orders of fixity within mobile, seemingly random, forms. Pope’s reading of concordia discors in the wake of Newton and Leibniz fosters in him this intuitive and chaological leap of faith, enabling him to resolve the problem of representation based on his perception of the connectedness of local and global manifestations of complexity. The mediating trope of concordia discors allows him to make the connection cosmologically via his chaotic aesthetic. The chaotic aesthetic of Pope’s Essay on Criticism met with Samuel Johnson’s approval, while the chaotic cosmology of the Essay on Man did not—and this helps illustrate how Johnson’s ideas on chaos differ from Pope’s, despite some similarities. Their differences parallel distinctions between today’s chaoticians. For example, some who study dynamic systems believe evidence indicates that the complex fractal schema we see at the local level in the forms of coastlines and mountain ranges are reflected globally at the cosmic level; thus the entire universe is a fractal. But others argue that without more empirical evidence, this is only a hypothesis. Indeed, the empirical evidence suggests that the universe is not a fractal, its structure not seeming to differ from what classical physics implies about its form.12 Also, modern chaoticians tend to differ with regard to what types of chaos and ordering dynamics they focus on. Some focus on the order that arises out of chaos after perturbations are introduced into an environment and the subject achieves tone with (finds equilibrium with or within) the chaos through complex reorganization often manifested as the generation of self-similar structures. Others focus on the order implicated while a subject is in a state of chaos and perhaps vacillating in a doubling route between an original attractor and newly evolving strange attractors in the system’s environment. As Hayles shows, the former school typically produces more abstract philosophical speculation while the later yields more practi-

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cal real-world results.13 This pattern occurs with Pope and Johnson as well. Because he is a more methodical empiricist than Pope, Johnson is highly skeptical about not only Pope’s but also Soame Jenyns’s assertions regarding the global aspects of chaotic dynamics at the macrocosmic level.14 Johnson instead focuses on the local dynamics of chaos in art and nature, and tends to be more interested in ordering dynamics existing within unresolved chaotic states than in order arising from and supplanting chaos. Johnson, in the Review of Soame Jenyns and in Pope’s Life, clearly shows he cannot accept assertions about order arising from chaos globally, when too little evidence for the hypothesis exists. The Pope/Jenyns hypotheses of a universal fractal hierarchy may be ‘‘of good use upon our own globe, but [can] have no meaning with regard to infinite space.’’15 Both thinkers, Johnson argues in the Review, make propositions about ‘‘what is equally hidden from learning and from ignorance’’ (64). Hence, in Pope, Johnson concludes of the Essay on Man that Pope’s ‘‘Leibnizian reasoning’’ is insufficient as ‘‘the poet was not sufficiently master of his subject; . . . and supposing himself master of great secrets, was in haste to teach what he had not learned.’’16 On the global level, therefore, Johnson sees no reason to abandon the cosmological paradigm implied by Christianity and by the classical aspects of Newton’s physics. In Rambler 184 Johnson asserts that, ‘‘In this state of universal uncertainty, . . . nothing can afford any rational tranquility, but the conviction that . . . nothing in reality is governed by chance [for] . . . the universe is under the perpetual superintendence of Him who created it.’’17 Barring better empirical evidence, Johnson will not abandon the convictions derived from his faith for a system that seems to ignore or obviate Scripture without hard data from the book of nature. Nevertheless, from the 1750s to the 1780s, Johnson’s study of chaos on the local, sublunary level enables him to embrace and expand upon the more localized chaotic aesthetics he finds in Pope’s Essay on Criticism, which he describes in Pope as ‘‘a work which displays such extent of comprehension, . . . such acquaintance with mankind, and such knowledge both of ancient and modern learning, as are not often attained by the longest age and longest experience’’ (406). But Johnson must labor for decades to fully articulate for himself a practical inductive system for conceptualizing complexity and for describing representational systems within his own theoretical rubric. Johnson’s observations on Pope in Lives thus reflect, as we have

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seen, a lifetime of inquiry into the relationship between order and disorder and its relatedness to linguistic instability. Johnson’s initial encounter with textual instability, chaos, and self-organizing human systems in his study of lexicography would in the long run prove both discouraging and useful for him, later, in his criticism. As noted in chapter 3, Johnson inherits from the tradition of lexicography a desire and a sense of obligation to exert control over linguistic decay that precludes him from applying his sensibilities regarding order and pseudorandomness in mediated culture to the study of language. His desire expressed in the Plan to the Dictionary to reform the language and prevent further decay results in a kind of linear logic that initially prevents him from seeing the problem of textual instability in the context of linguistics in the same fruitful way he conceptualizes it when he is considering the larger cultural implications of the fixed yet mobile sign in his periodical essays and his political tracts. In short, his epistemological stance as a lexicographer unwittingly allies him with those thinkers before him in the Restoration and early eighteenth century who sought to revive the Babel trope through schemes of universal languages and such that sought to impose monological linguistic order to inscribe a hierarchy that denied the multivalency and complexity emerging in the new mediated culture.18 The result is initial frustration when Johnson deserts his better intuitions about language, as he perceives it in larger discursive and cultural contexts, when he attempts to play the more conservative role of the lexicographer whose function seems to require a more rigid approach to the individual sign than Johnson evinces when viewing it more holistically in the context of rhetorical argument and dialogical cultural analysis. Johnson, in short, plays a role that sounds more like the dogmatist postmodernists sometimes discern in Johnson in contradistinction to what Bronson’s school of thinking more accurately describes as a Johnson who typically sought more genuinely progressive modes of thinking. But even as Johnson attempts to play the role of the monological lexicographer, he learns from his errors and lays the groundwork for conceptualizations of language and discourse that will help him clarify for himself and his readers how complex dynamics work at every level of human discourse, from the microcosmic level of the word to the macrocosmic level of communication reaching its highest level of development in poetic mimesis. Hence, after his optimistic Plan for the Dictionary comes Johnson’s recognition in his ‘‘Preface’’ that he cannot impose order on ‘‘the

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boundless chaos of living speech.’’19 Even as Johnson recognizes the impossibility of the task of fully regulating the language, he nevertheless still succumbs to the influence of a paradigm where language is either orderly or disorderly—the third option of pseudorandomness is not presently available to him, despite his awareness of it in his moral and political writings. The role of lexicographer blinds him to this possibility even as he realizes that he has failed in his prescriptive role as a writer of dictionaries. He finds the spoken language ‘‘copious without order, and energetick without rules’’ for the language ‘‘has . . . been hitherto neglected; suffered to spread, under the direction of chance, into wild exuberance’’ (23–24). He sees ‘‘confusion to be regulated’’ (24) only to realize that often ‘‘the pen must . . . comply with the tongue’’ (48) as he surrenders to the seemingly purely random aspects of language. This is true not only because of the complex nature of spoken language but also because of the influence of civilization as manifested through mediated culture and the economic structures it supports in the confluence of cultures among the nation states. As Johnson says, ‘‘Commerce, however necessary, however lucrative, as it depraves the manners, corrupts the language; they that have frequent intercourse with strangers, to whom they endeavor to accommodate themselves, must in time learn a mingled dialect’’ (46). These corrupting linguistic habits will ‘‘be communicated by degrees to other ranks of people, and be at last incorporated with the current speech.’’ Similarly, people in cultures ‘‘busied and unlearned’’ will see little change or corruption, but civilized countries inhabited by ‘‘people polished by arts, and classed by subordination’’ will see ‘‘no such constancy’’ in their language (47). For ‘‘Those who have much leisure to think’’ will inevitably ‘‘produce new words and combinations of words.’’ And ‘‘As by the cultivation of the sciences, a language is amplified, it will be more furnished with words deflected from their original sense.’’ The production of literature in print culture also has a corrupting effect: ‘‘The tropes of poetry will make hourly encroachments, and the metaphorical will become the current sense’’ (47). Ironically, those men and women of letters in the eighteenth century who pose as the arbiter elegantarium actually have a dissipative effect in the linguistic realm, for literary language can also ‘‘confound distinction and forget propriety’’ in language (48). And especially in the culture of print, ‘‘The great pest of speech is frequency of translation.’’ This species of printed literature that

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established Pope’s career as a best-selling author, and as Lund says, troubled many a Scriblerian,20 has a ruinous effect: No book was ever turned from one language to another, without imparting something of its native idiom; this is the most mischievous and comprehensive innovation: single words may enter by thousands, and the fabric of the tongue continue the same, but new phraseology changes much at once; it alters not the single stones of the building, but the order of the columns. If an academy should be established for the cultivation of our style, which I, who can never wish to see dependence multiplied, hope the spirit of English liberty will hinder or destroy, let them, instead of compiling grammars and dictionaries, endeavor with all of their influence to stop the license of translators, whose idleness and ignorance, if it be suffered to proceed, will reduce us to babble a dialect of France. (48)

Eisenstein argues that linguistic uniformity is a direct result of print in the nationalist state,21 but for Johnson’s money in this illuminating passage, that’s not the full story. Translation is inevitable in mediated cultures, and this modern variety will have an inevitably corrupting influence. Just as he says in his political prose, mediation makes nationalistic boundaries indistinct and permeable, and this leads inevitably to linguistic corruption. Textual instability abounds everywhere and adds to the corrupting tendencies of languages in speech and print. Indeed, mediation helps make speech and all aspects of language unstable and uncontrollable. And unlike the Johnson we meet in the political prose of this time and in the ensuing decade, the one writing this preface in the context of linguistic decay seems unable to suggest any means of stabilizing nationalistic boundaries and identities in the face of this new mediated culture. When the unstable sign occupies the foreground, and Johnson must play the role of lexicographer as regulator (even as he recognizes that his failure to achieve complete reform of the language in this role was inevitable), Johnson’s view of the mediated culture clearly emphasizes its negative aspects over its more positive potential. In such a context even literary language is defiled; indeed it contributes to the corruption of English in mediated culture. But if Johnson is forced to confess in his ‘‘Preface’’ that ‘‘I have not always executed my own scheme, or satisfied my own expectations’’ (41), he nevertheless gains much from his experience because he recognizes from his empirical study that complex systems like languages in mediated cultures cannot always be compre-

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hended by linear thinking. In tracing etymological and semantic evolution, he encounters phenomena so complex that they can be comprehended only locally; globally, the language’s complex nonlinear dynamic is beyond human ratiocination: kindred senses may be so interwoven, that the perplexity cannot be disentangled, nor any reason be assigned why one should be ranged before the other. . . . The shades of meaning sometimes pass imperceptibly into each other; so that though on one side they apparently differ, yet it is impossible to mark the point of contact. . . . Ideas of the same race, though not exactly alike, are sometimes so little different, that no words can express the dissimilitude, though the mind easily perceives it, when they are exhibited together; and sometimes . . . perseverance . . . hurries to an end, by crouding together what she cannot separate. (36)

Small wonder that later Johnson will show such skepticism (in the context of Pope’s and Jenyns’s views on the cosmos) about understanding complexity in global or cosmological contexts. He sees the difficulty in comprehending local phenomena; and from this develops a stronger commitment to careful analysis of the relationship between the local and global in the context of mediation. Like Goethe repeating Newton’s optical experiments, Johnson experiences the shock of struggling to comprehend fuzzy boundaries that do not conform to the linear logic informing most classical thought or early modern empiricism in the context of then-current linguistics. The experience highlights Johnson’s intellectual honesty and ability to learn from the unexpected. He seems to realize that he has a capacity to perceive the complexity without being able to directly comprehend it. He begins to display in this linguistic context what he shows elsewhere in his culture criticism in the periodicals and his political tracts, something chaoticians call an intuitive grasp of complex dynamics22 —and, by liberating this intuition, Johnson takes an important step toward recognizing the limits of linear rationality and the need for a dynamic, nonlinear semiotic to comprehend the complex and dependent interaction between order and randomness in dynamic systems. His encounter with the instability and lack of fixity in the English language, accentuated by the perceptions in his essays of textual instability in the print culture as described by Adrian Johns and David McKitterick in earlier chapters, leads him to consider new models for understanding and representing complexity in the often unstable texts of culture and nature.

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Indeed, his frustration with the sign at the atomic level of linguistic study helps him, in his new role in the later 1750s and 1760s as an editor and critic of Shakespeare, to refine his conceptualizations of the fixed yet mobile sign at all levels of discursive study in such a way as to allow him to deal with issues of representation more inductively and pragmatically than Pope. If his periodical prose and political writings allowed Johnson to experiment with broad conceptions of chaos and complexity in culture, society, and politics, his work as an editor and critic helped him to further explore, amplify, and apply such notions at the microcosmic and macrocosmic levels of his mediated culture and sign system. The result, after these periods of experimentation, frustration, and triumph in the 1750s and 1760s, is the fully refined system of inquiry into chaos, complexity, and representation that emerges in his ‘‘Preface to Shakespeare’’ and Lives of the English Poets from 1765 to the 1780s. This allows Johnson to fully articulate a theory of representation grounded in the complexity of mediated culture with an inductive thrust that could only acquire greater persuasive power in a century that grew more confident in the power of that mode of inquiry in the wake of the New Science. Pope’s approach could only seem more arcane with time, until today when its reliance on Leibnizian modes of proceeding makes it seem very sophisticated indeed. Johnson’s earlier interest in complexity informs the continuing evolution of his attempts to conceptualize it in his work as an editor of Shakespeare where he encounters the complex interplay between stability and instability of the word in printed texts under more manageable circumstances than what he encountered in composing the Dictionary. In the 1740s and ’50s, confronting every aspect of the instability of the language, both in print and in speech, and in such disparate areas as orthography, etymology, and semantics, Johnson the lexicographer is overwhelmed intellectually by the sheer complexity of language. He leaves the project humbled and dismisses it with frigid tranquillity. But the experience of editing the printed texts of Shakespeare is different. His 1756 proposal announces his plan for editing the plays with a confidence that is matched in tone by his description of what he has accomplished in his 1765 ‘‘Preface to Shakespeare.’’ And the Johnson that emerges in 1765 shows already a comprehension of the complex nature of printed texts that leaves him triumphant without embracing what he seemed to characterize as a misplaced pride and overvaluation of human capabilities in the face of complexity in his 1755 ‘‘Preface to the Dictionary.’’

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The Johnson that emerges in the 1765 ‘‘Preface’’ to the plays bears only superficial resemblance to the individual that Alvin Kernan describes in his discussion of Johnson as an editor of Shakespeare.23 Kernan once again declares Johnson to be the champion of fixity and ‘‘Print logic’’ that ‘‘encourages in many different ways the concept of a single accurate text, offers the means to assemble such a text, and realizes its idealizing potential in an actual printed text, solidly fixed in permanent form on the printed page, always exactly the same in copy after copy,’’ and thus typifying the ‘‘platonizing power of print . . . in the Gutenberg age’’ (165). Johnson, says Kernan, ‘‘found not a single ideal text representing the ‘true’ intentions of the author but a complex historical tangle of human accidents’’ (167). Nevertheless, ‘‘Johnson’s Shakespeare can fairly be called the first modern edition of the plays, printed and edited with a firm Gutenberg belief that, despite contrary evidence, there is behind all the historical accidents a true uncorrupted text, which represents the authoritative intention of the author and which can be most clearly approached in the early printed versions of the plays, no matter how complex their relationship’’ (171). Hence, Johnson ‘‘established as fact the sources of literary aura in print society in an idealized and perfect Platonic text, in the pure meaning of style and as the source of an authentic language’’ (203). If true, this Johnson would to some degree confirm the side of the double tradition that Bronson and others have questioned; he sounds much like the stern classicist defender of tradition and thus a textual fixity that must be imposed on the chaos of printed texts. But that is not the Johnson that emerges in the 1765 ‘‘Preface.’’24 He is deeply aware of the ‘‘negligence and unskilfulness’’ of Shakespeare’s previous editors, and he perceives the problems created by the writer’s ‘‘ungrammatical’’ style and the unauthorized emendations made on the texts by ‘‘players’’ and ‘‘transmitted by copiers’’ (93). Nevertheless, after collating various copies and editions, he nowhere posits the idea of achieving Platonic perfection in an edition of the plays. Quite the contrary; his approach is pragmatic and realistic, for he realizes that ‘‘conjectural criticism demands more than humanity possesses, and he that exercises it with most praise has very frequent need of indulgence’’ (95). Indeed, careful collation has led Johnson to a surprisingly simple conclusion: the textual authority of the First Folio ‘‘is equivalent to all others’’ (96). Immersion into the world of textual criticism, as has so often been the case for Johnson in his past encounters with complex mediated

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texts, has been an exercise in searching for the stability of truth and virtue, and this time it has led him specifically to a new estimation of the value of patience and humility in the face of deepening complexity. For the most part in the history of textual criticism, much ‘‘paper is wasted in confutation’’ and this should lead us to ‘‘lament . . . the slow advances of truth’’ (99). Indeed human advances in knowledge are not linear; they represent a complex rhythm of creation and destruction, less regular perhaps even than Foucault’s pendulum of today and more like the vast energetic sweep of the ocean wherein Lucy Hutchinson (as we saw in the first chapter) sensed order in the pounding surf of the deluge. Johnson’s prose is sublime here as it captures the turbulent flow of informatics in print culture, and is worth quoting in full: The opinions prevalent in one age, as truths above the reach of controversy, are confuted and rejected in another, and rise again in remoter times. . . . The tide of seeming knowledge which is powered over one generation, retires and leaves another naked and barren; the sudden meteors of intelligence which for a while appear to shoot their beams into the regions of obscurity, on a sudden withdraw their luster, and leave mortals again to grope their way. These elevations and depressions of renown, and the contradictions to which all improvers of knowledge must for ever be exposed, . . . may surely be endured with patience by criticks and annotators, who can rank themselves but as the satellites of their authors. How canst thou beg for life, says Homer’s hero to his captive, when thou knowest that thou art now to suffer only what must another day be suffered by Achilles? (99)

Out of the turbulent flow of print, life, and experience emerges, unexpectedly, the stability of truth—but it is a truth that is not fixed, nor Platonic, but rather reflective of the rich erudition to be found only in the realm of textual instability. Johnson reiterates a lesson learned many times in his life as a writer, but given special significance in this context. He shows that we are limited in our human capabilities and hence only by virtue of patience (a cardinal virtue in Johnson’s ethical system, as it is in many Christian ethical systems) can we endure and comprehend the demands placed on us in this complex mediated world of ours. Thus the complex boundaries wherein truth and error penetrate in mediation processes allow us to see via our human limitations the unexpected stability of truth and virtue as emergent features of a

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finite humanity in a world of infinite complexity. The final Augustan trope of the above passage captures, frames, and animates the deepening paradox of Johnson, his civilization and society, and the mediated culture that at once troubled them and made their insights into humanity and human expression endure. Johnson has no illusions about the nature of the effort he and other editors have made in the face of the Bard’s textual instability—there is no Platonic unity to be captured here, there is only a tireless quest for truth and virtue that is enriched by turbulence and instability rather than debilitated or deferred by it. To immerse oneself as a reflexive editor and critic into this potentially destructive element is to experience in full the reality of the dynamics of human life and the chaogenic power of our sign systems as they interact with our minds and the material world we live in. This brings into full relief the experience of all readers who dive into the world of human textuality, risking much, including the stability of the mind and society, but still enduring patiently as the flood of information breaks over humanity with equal potential for destruction and creation. We learn the value of patience, something at once true and virtuous in this world of instability shared by editors and readers alike. This is not the Samuel Johnson of either the Plan or the ‘‘Preface to the Dictionary.’’ He is neither overly optimistic nor deeply chagrined by his encounter at close range with the word that exhibits instability even as it promises fixity. This is an author and a presence whose quest in the areas of lexicography, ethics, politics, and now textual criticism has brought him to a new shore where he surveys the literary heritage, the traditions and transformations of Britannia’s issue, with a renewed confidence in the value of complexity and chaos. He evinces here a refined conception of the relationship between chaos and order in printed texts, and this transfers to his own brilliant representation of that process in the passage above. He does not strive to control what cannot be controlled; he finds equilibrium in doing the opposite when context demands it. Hence he says, ‘‘Some plays have more, and some fewer judicial observations, not in proportion to their difference of merit, but because I gave this part of my design to chance and caprice.’’ He does this as part of a program to involve his readers dialogically (as in his periodical essays and political tracts) in the text: ‘‘I have therefore shewn so much as may enable the candidate to criticism to discover the rest’’ (104). He has ‘‘adopted the Roman sentiment, that it is more honorable to save a citizen, than to kill an enemy, and have been

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more careful to protect than to attack’’ (106). In the task of dealing with the Bard’s textual instability, Johnson has discovered a deep sense of what it means to be human and to be part of the collective human enterprise to find stability amid flux: ‘‘It is to be lamented that such a writer [as Shakespeare] should want a commentary. . . . But it is vain to carry wishes beyond the condition of human things; that which must happen to all, has happened to Shakespeare, by accident and time’’ (112). In short, we are all Achilles. Even more extensive views emerge when we observe not only Shakespeare’s satellite critics and editors, but also the complex dynamic of the Bard’s art. Like Pope, Johnson turns to aesthetics for still more complex conceptualizations of chaos—but unlike his predecessor, Johnson is more methodical in his attempt to show how aesthetic systems of order can help human subjects achieve tone with environmental perturbation. Pope’s Essay on Man uses the complex dynamic of poetry itself to represent nonlinear literary dynamics—but Johnson, like modern chaoticians, takes the inquiry one step further. He translates intuitive perceptions of such dynamics into a self-reflexive empirical discourse, one that eventually posits a theory of reader response, demonstrating how the complex dual networking system of the mind (represented by reason and fancy) allows readers and writers to weave a text that achieves tone with perturbation through the aesthetic of concordia discors.25 The resulting description outstrips his best attempts to understand and describe complexity in his earlier periodical prose and his works as a political writer while setting the stage for a complete explanation in Lives of how mind, sign and materiality interact to represent the complexity of human experience in the age of the fixed yet mobile sign. In the 1765 ‘‘Preface to Shakespeare,’’ Johnson feels the attraction of classical tradition but recognizes in Shakespeare’s mimetics the stronger force of an aesthetic that challenges and reshapes that tradition. Johnson here constructs a probabilistic discourse that recognizes the uncertain nature of art and criticism. Johnson explains that whereas one can see that the ‘‘Pythagorean scale of numbers’’ is perfect ‘‘at once,’’ one sees that a work of architecture is ‘‘lofty’’ only in comparison with others; likewise, human aesthetic judgment is ‘‘gaining upon certainty’’ but ‘‘never becomes infallible’’ (60–61). A case in point: the ancients looked upon the flux of reality and ‘‘Out of the chaos of mingled purposes and casualties the ancient poets, according to the laws which custom had prescribed, selected

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some the crimes of men, and some the absurdities. . . . Thus rose the two modes of imitation, known by the names of tragedy and comedy’’ (66). However, Shakespeare’s aesthetic, informed as much by observation of nature as by custom, offers a different form of representation, ‘‘exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another . . . ; and many mischiefs and benefits are done and hindered without design’’ (66). Shakespeare’s aesthetic approaches ‘‘nearer than either [ancient genre] to the appearance of life, by showing how great machinations and slender designs may promote or obviate one another, and the high and the low co-operate in the general system by unavoidable concatenation’’ (67). In short, like his predecessor Dryden (as we saw Dryden discussing complexity in a preface addressed to Sir Robert Howard), Johnson describes the dynamic dialogical interplay of language and action in the drama, the capacity of language to testify to and embody the complex orderly disorder of nature. But Johnson does so in much greater detail and with clearer analogies and illustrations than Dryden. The legacy of over fifty years of post-Restoration print culture, and Johnson’s own careful meditations on the nature of language at the atomic level and beyond, have given Johnson a sense of confidence and a precision in naming the elements of complexity that his illustrious predecessor could yearn for but could not yet instantiate. Indeed, as a critic, Johnson discerns and describes in Shakespeare what he could not yet elucidate as a lexicographer and what he could only represent in broad strokes in his essays and political prose, the precise fashion in which order is implicated in the pseudorandomness of a complex system dynamic. The phase space of the comic and tragic modes can be represented dramatistically to reveal a ‘‘general system of unavoidable concatenation’’ (67). Shakespeare exploits the fuzzy boundaries between the various modes of human existence to create a dynamic aesthetic unity wherein Johnson describes a system of nonlinear scales of causation where elements that obstruct can also construct, fostering a design in the chaotic milieu. The verisimilitude of this dissonant harmonics promotes pleasure in the audience: ‘‘the interchange of mingled scenes seldom fails to produce the intended vicissitudes of passion’’ for, as the classical tradition had already shown, ‘‘all pleasure con-

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sists in variety’’ (67). Thus, like Pope in his Essay on Criticism, and in Pope’s criticism of Shakespeare and Homer, Johnson sees value in Shakespeare’s irregularity: ‘‘The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and regularly planted . . . ; the composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and roses; filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind with endless diversity’’ (84). For Johnson, Shakespeare’s genius shows that human aesthetic designs can trace emergent structures in dynamic systems from which eventually emerges the ‘‘stability of truth’’ (62). Johnson says, ‘‘The accidental compositions of heterogeneous modes are dissolved by the chance which combined them. . . . The sand heaped by one flood is scattered by another, but the rock always continues in place. The stream of time, which is continually washing the dissoluable fabricks of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare’’ (70). Literature and the search for truth both benefit from accident; the chaotic dynamics informing language, literature, and life thus make possible discovering order in the sublunary realm, even if induction cannot demonstrate a direct analogical relationship between the earthly chaogenic order and that of the far reaches of the cosmos. Johnson comes to recognize that human systems can reveal the stability of truth, at the human level, can move from particular, local aberration to general, global norms, as order appears within the chaotic flux of the earthly realm. This is clearly the case with Shakespeare’s representations of characters: Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature. [T]he pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth. Shakespeare is above all modern writers the poet of nature. . . . His characters are the genuine progeny of common humanity such as . . . observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species. (61–62)

Johnson had, of course, considered similar ideas of representation in chapter 10 of Rasselas, but not with this degree of philosophical rigor, precision, and sophistication. Both passions and life, for

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Johnson, are in a state of turbulence, as suggested symbolically by the waters in Rasselas, but only in the ‘‘Preface’’ does Johnson suggest how general truths arise from the inductive froth of experience. The post-Linnaean milieu (described in chapter 1) features much flow and stability. In the turbulent mediation of experience Johnson sees arising islands of calm that are shaped by the rush of data but that nevertheless represent stability upon which the mind can rest. The islands are themselves the results of violent upheavals without which they could not exist, without which there would be nothing for the mind to repose on. Minds agitated by passion nevertheless reveal and observe the stable emergent form among the flux of reality and mediated human experience. Hence, to return to the theme of the double tradition, Johnson clearly is a proponent of order—but of a very special kind, one that is discernible in nature and art, but one that is part of a dynamic schema implicated in the space where mind, language, and reality interact. Johnson respects the attempts of the ancients to achieve tone with the flux of life, but admires Shakespeare more for incorporating a truly dynamic conception of nature’s complex ordering principle into art. Shakespeare demonstrates the capacity of the mind to use language to trace emergent order that is not opposed to disorder but dependent on it. The dynamic interplay between comedy and tragedy, between many heterogeneous elements, launches the vessel of Shakespeare’s dramatic trajectory that wanders unpredictably between attractors but in a space limited in dimension and volume that embodies a nonlinear aesthetic where the global aspects of the mimesis are generated by successive iterations of local variation sustaining the greater system dynamic. Johnson’s fascination with dynamic order in literature is reiterated and amplified later in his biography of Pope in Lives of the English Poets. His comparison between Dryden and Pope clearly indicates that Pope is the greater technician, but Johnson maintains that Dryden possesses greater genius, ‘‘that power which constitutes a poet; that quality without which judgement is cold and knowledge is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies and animates’’ (470). Like Shakespeare, Dryden ‘‘knew more of man in his general nature,’’ unlike Pope who knows man ‘‘in his local manners’’ (479). Like Shakespeare, Dryden’s notions are formed ‘‘by comprehensive speculation,’’ while Pope’s are wrought ‘‘by minute attention’’ (479). Whatever challenges Dryden might have faced in his critical prose with describing complexity, in his wit written, in his

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command of English style, he nevertheless can represent the connection between order and disorder, between the local and the global. Thus, Dryden’s prose shows the same irregular yet orderly grandeur evident in Shakespeare’s drama, again in contradistinction to Pope’s method. Despite Pope’s testimony to the value of irregularity in his Essay on Criticism, his style seems to embody a different aesthetic when compared to Dryden’s: ‘‘The style of Dryden is capricious and varied, that of Pope is cautious and uniform; Dryden obeys the motions of his own mind, Pope constrains his mind to his own rules of composition. Dryden is sometimes vehement and rapid; Pope is always smooth, uniform and gentle. Dryden’s page is a natural field, rising into irregularities, and diversified by varied exuberance of abundant vegetation; Pope’s is a velvet lawn, shorn by the scythe, and leveled by the roller’’ (479). Even the prose style of the two writers, for Johnson, points to their relative differences as avatars of poetic genius; not surprisingly Johnson says that if Pope gives ‘‘perpetual delight,’’ Dryden ‘‘is read with frequent astonishment’’ (480). Johnson’s ‘‘partial fondness for the memory of Dryden’’ (480) is justified since Dryden illustrates the potential of the poet’s mind to find and represent order in chaotic flux—and hence to embody the complex connection between local and global, where it can be discerned, empirically, in human life. Like the modern chaotician Ben Goertzel, Johnson sees the mind pursuing a cognitive equation via which consciousness achieves tone with environmental perturbation. Goertzel conceives of the mind as a dual networking system—where one component makes analogical links between perceptions and ideas, a fractal ‘‘heterarchy,’’ while the other component makes distinctions between ideas to establish a complex hierarchical organization of information, an operative hierarchy.26 Thus, Goertzel implies that the mind is structured like a complex whole, an orderly yet disorderly fractal that in its structure is analogous to the complex structures of reality that feature similarly heterarchic and hierarchic features. Both types of structure are needed to process information and to discern meaningful patterns in reality and to put information to use (33–34). Thus, for Goertzel, the self-organizing, dual networking mind can interact dialogically with environment, to achieve tone with environmental flux—in which case the result is productive or rational thinking (187). Or, conversely, the mind can monologically resist interactions with other systems and fail to create new perceptions to ensure adapta-

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tion to environs—in which case the result is ‘‘conservative,’’ nonproductive, irrational thinking (189). The mind, in short, works like a kind of immune system, screening information from the environment, allowing enough bits of information inside the system to form complex cognitive structures that constantly adjust and reorganize themselves to deal with new information coming from the environment, as the mind attempts to discern implicit order in the complexity of experience (154–58). Productive minds use both sides of the dual network to find balance among the flux; unproductive (irrational) minds fail to do so and are incapable of processing the data effectively—in which case the subject cannot deal with environmental pressures and is at risk of being overwhelmed by the chaos of information and perturbation. Such failure to interact with environs and produce successful cognitive immune systems can lead to paranoia and delusional behavior (205–7). Thus, implicitly, the successful operation of the mind, by contrast, allows discernment of order in flux, of seeing local variation as an iterative reflection of the global self-similar whole. Similarly, Johnson sees imaginative faculties—which make analogical heterarchical links between ideas—cooperating with judgment, which makes distinctions between ideas and organizes them according to hierarchical differentiation. As Johnson says in Rambler 151, in the early stages of life, Fancy or Imagination reigns and seeks to ‘‘combine’’ images ‘‘into pleasing pictures . . . of life’’ (5:39). With time and experience, however, there ‘‘commences the reign of judgment or reason,’’ which fosters both comparison and contrast and leads us to be ‘‘disgusted with copies in which there appears no resemblance’’ to reality (5:40). Thus ‘‘our intellectual activity is exercised in winding through the labyrinths of fallacy and toiling . . . up the narrow tracks of demonstration’’ (5.40). However, in poetic discourse, these two networking systems cooperate closely and achieve a special degree of harmony in the poetic genius, which is expressed in true wit that is ‘‘at once natural and new,’’ to borrow Johnson’s phraseology from Cowley.27 As Johnson says in Pope, genius consists of both Imagination, which conveys ‘‘the various forms of nature, incidents of life and energies of passion’’ and Judgment, which separates ‘‘the essence of things from . . . concomitants’’ (496–97). True literary genius not only represents general nature in its complexity by ‘‘calling imagination to the help of reason,’’ as Johnson says in Milton,28 but fosters productive, rational involvement with the real world. As Johnson says of Shakespeare in

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his preface to the plays, ‘‘he who has mazed his imagination, in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him may be cured of his delirious extasies, by reading human sentiments in human language; by scenes from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world and a confessor may predict the progress of the passions.’’ The plays can do this because they are ‘‘the mirror of life’’ (65)—or, more pointedly, mirrors of how the complex structures of the mind, guided by an aesthetic sensibility, can be used to find order coexisting with and dependent on disorder. Hence Johnson shows awareness of the culture’s fears that textual instability may lead to psychological and thereby social instability (the phenomenon that Adrian Johns describes as a significant preoccupation of print culture in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century)—and through chaotic textual dynamics prescribes a cure. (All those years Johnson spent reading and meditating on Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy apparently paid off, at least on the theoretical level.) Works of true genius and true wit are thus the opposite of those that Johnson critiques in Cowley—the metaphysical poems that constitute a failed form of mimesis because these authors’ ‘‘wish was only to say what they hoped had never been said before’’ (20). Their excessive interest in novelty, their overreliance on the analogical imagination to produce new combinations of ideas, produces a kind of chaotic dissipation wherein no implicit order can be discerned. ‘‘Their attempts were always analytick: they broke every image into fragments, and could no more represent by their slender conceits and labored particularities the prospects of nature or the scenes of life, than he who dissects a sun-beam with a prism can exhibit the wide effulgence of a summer noon’’ (21). The metaphysicals concentrate only on the ‘‘combination of dissimilar images’’ (20). Without the interaction of the distinguishing power of Reason with the analogical capability of Imagination, the result is a monological discourse, which leads the metaphysicals to become ‘‘rather beholders than partakers of human nature’’ who ‘‘were not successful in representing or moving the affections’’ (20). Thus they fail to grasp the natural principles that facilitate perceiving an implicit order arising in the chaotic matrix: ‘‘they left not only reason but fancy behind them, and produced combinations of confused magnificence that not only could not be credited, but could not be imagined’’ (21). Hence, Lives of the English Poets draws together many disparate lines of thinking on human psychology, complexity, and chaos from

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the time of the Rambler, through the ‘‘Preface to Shakespeare,’’ to Johnson’s criticism in the 1770s and 1780s wherein a complex psychology of reader response is fully articulated to explain how the mind deals with complexity in the context of the mediated culture from which had emerged many legitimate concerns and issues regarding the impact of the fixed yet mobile sign on human society, psychology, and ethics. The mind, especially in the context of the complex dynamics of aesthetic and poetic representation, can indeed find stability of truth and with it psychological and social stability as well through the ethical influence of responsible art. Johnson therefore dispels the anxieties of his age about mediation in ways that other commentators like Thomas Baker and Vicesmus Knox, discussed in chapter 1, could not hope to match for depth and complexity. Johnson’s stand on issues shows more philosophical rigor than Baker’s or Knox’s, and his views are vastly more practical and approachable than Pope’s. Thus, Johnson effectively underscores the special capacity of poetic genius to discern and construct complex matrices that allow us to find order in the flux of life at the sublunary level. In the process, he also helps explain his own elusive genius, his own resistance to static ideological and critical categories that resulted in the double tradition that has alternately either obscured or only partly illuminated the complex dynamics of his philosophical aesthetic. It is an aesthetic that respects both tradition and transformation as two attractors catalyzing the dynamic dialogue between ancients and moderns, and thus producing successive forms of stability that arise in disorder, as represented in literature. When Johnson applies this aesthetic to the works of Pope and others, he also points to ways in which the continuing dialogue on chaotics has profound implications, not only for Johnson studies, but also for aesthetic studies drawing on complex systems’ analysis in the twentyfirst century. Johnson’s ideas on chaos are thought provoking and may lead us to deepen our own contemporary inquiries into the role of chaos in theories about mimesis and representation. Most studies on chaos in literature tend to focus on metafiction and postmodern concerns with chaos—and they often overlook the implications for chaos and theories of representation in narrative and poetic literatures, areas Johnson, as we have seen, covers in detail. Stoicheff has pointed to the fact that metafiction rather curiously, despite its nonmimetic tendencies, seems to contain ‘‘many strategies for metamorphizing

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the apparent chaos . . . of phenomenal reality into an order comprehensible to its reader.’’29 Hayles points out that this raises the question, ‘‘If real dynamic systems also act like this [literature of metafiction], does it mean that in a sense metafiction is mimetic after all?’’30 The answer, she says, is no—because, as Stoicheff implies, the convergence can be attributed to ‘‘the convergence between postmodern literature and science,’’ occurring as a result of a shared master ‘‘ ‘narrative of chaos’ that is characteristic of the present moment’’ (22). Perhaps so—assuming such master narratives exist—but this still leaves open the theoretical possibility that some kind of chaotic mimesis is feasible and worth exploring. As Charles Hinnant has shown, Johnson’s theories of mimesis are not naively arguing for some simple theory of idealized presence.31 Instead, as I have argued, Johnson seems to conceive of mimesis as an attempt to make immanent in the organizational principles of the text the complex interface between order and disorder in nature, as experienced by the dual networking of the mind. As such, mimetic texts do more than Stoicheff suggests; they do not ‘‘maintain the reader’s happy ignorance of the illusion’’ in order to create the impression of a ‘‘linear transmission of reality to’’ the reader (88). Quite the contrary. For Johnson, mimesis permits the reader or spectator to be aware of the constructed nature of narrative, as Johnson shows in his defense of Shakespeare’s violation of the unities of time and place. In his ‘‘Preface to Shakespeare,’’ Johnson pointedly rejects ‘‘the triumphant language with which a critic exults over the misery of an irregular poet,’’ maintaining that ‘‘It is false that any representation is mistaken for reality; that any dramatic fable in its materiality was ever credible, or, for a single moment, was ever credited’’ (76). The language here is sufficiently broad to imply that what Johnson says applies to all literary representation, not just the theater. Johnson’s analysis of theatrical representation indicates that one who reads such representations is always suspended somewhere between belief and disbelief: ‘‘The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses and know from the first act to the last that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players’’ (77). Indeed, says Johnson, ‘‘Imitations produce pain or pleasure not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind’’ (78). All representational art works in this fashion: ‘‘When the imagination is recreated by a painted landscape, the trees are not supposed capable to give us shade, or the fountains coolness; but we consider how

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we should be pleased with such fountains playing beside us and such woods waving over us’’ (78). The audience, in short, is aware that a medium of representation is present, not the thing that is imitated. The audience is aware of the mediation of the process through signs. And yet, because this medium approximates the artist’s perceptions of the orderly disorder of reality and experience, a writer like Shakespeare will appeal to audiences regardless of their levels of sophistication: ‘‘Shakespeare, whether life or nature be his subject, shows plainly that he has seen with his own eyes; he gives the image which he receives, not weakened or distorted by the intervention of another mind; the ignorant feel his representations to be just, and the learned see that they are complete’’ (89–90). Johnson shows the effect of his experience as a periodical essayist; he sees that reader response can vary across an implicit hierarchy in the mediated culture while he still appreciates the capacity for the mediating sign to appeal with equal power across the levels of that hierarchy. Shakespeare seems to excel all others in this capacity, but it is this quality that Dryden and others, in Johnson’s eyes, strive to achieve. Thus, Johnson’s criticism after 1765 shows awareness of the complex interface between language and reality, something that involves transmissions of ideas in language constructed to reflect the nonlinear nature of experience and the world writers respond to. Johnson, in short, seems to offer a challenge to some postmodern conceptions of the naive nature of mimesis and points to ways in which the representational crises of the early eighteenth century were later engaged in a sophisticated fashion. Certainly, Johnson’s theories raise questions about mimesis and representation that are worthy of continued study and consideration. And they indicate that ultimately Johnson has much more in common with chaologists than with deconstructionists. As Hayles shows in Chaos Bound, deconstructionists, like most postmodern thinkers except chaologists, tend to emphasize the local over the global in their epistemologies, although they are inevitably drawn back to the globalizing tendencies of discourse, despite their tendency to identify the global with political oppression.32 By contrast, Johnson, like Hayles and other chaologists, describes chaos and order as mutually dependent on each other and sees the local variation as part of the reiterative trace of strange attraction in global self-similar matrices. Hence, so long as the evidence is empirically verifiable, Johnson sees no problem in equally emphasizing the global and the local in either epistemological or

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aesthetic contexts—because for him they are linked in the orderly disorder of human cognition. Recognizing this quality in Johnson’s thinking will help us, I hope, to continue to reclaim and value not only Johnson’s aesthetics, but also the critical insights of earlier supporters of Bronson’s stand in the wake of postmodernism. In The Achievement of Samuel Johnson, Bate argues that ‘‘Johnson’s [literary] procedure manages to by-pass the false dialectic with which the criticism of literature and art forces us to think in terms of polar opposites—of classicism and romanticism, realism and formalism, subjective and objective’’ (182). He further notes that ‘‘Johnson’s practical use of tradition thus refuses to allow special or fixed concepts of tradition to serve as ends in themselves’’ (217). This depiction of Johnson’s aesthetics and mindset maintains its persuasive power today, and the continuing mission of further explicating the intricacies of Johnson’s writing can only be enhanced by the precise terminology and conceptualizations of such dynamism afforded by postmodern conceptions of complex dynamics. For, as Edinger shows in Samuel Johnson and Poetic Style, Johnson is clearly ‘‘a major synthesizer of ancient and modern thinking on critical issues of a radical and comprehensive kind’’ (xiii). Indeed, we must not underestimate the radical nature of Johnson’s aesthetics, anymore than we should underestimate the special nature of his politics, which was the focus of the previous chapter. Bate’s summary of Bronson’s and Greene’s take on Johnson’s politics still maintains its power: it underscores and illuminates Johnson’s support, globally, for an ordered monarchical state that is based on the need to protect the masses who, while seeming only local deviations from the whole of society (and its higher ranks), in truth help constitute its fabric and foundation. Subordination, as Bate says in Samuel Johnson, is needed to protect ‘‘safeguards for the vulnerable –who comprise the mass of humanity’;’ and only a strong monarchic tradition can provide shelter from the selfish acquisitive tendencies of the worst exemplars of Whig politics.33 As Bronson shows, Johnson must be in revolt as he supports order in a gesture that, as Bate says in Samuel Johnson is simply yet sublimely ‘‘reasonable’’ (197). Johnson’s meditations on mass culture and mediation in his periodical essays help lay the basis for this reasonable conceptualization of society, as does his work in political writing. Johnson thus creates an ideologically charged aesthetic that entitles him to something more than Stendhal’s description of Johnson as ‘‘Le pere du romanticisme.’’34 Indeed, Johnson’s contributions to

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the history of aesthetics invite more study; and continued examination of his aesthetic principles in eighteenth-century contexts will doubtless provide fruitful speculation concerning the significance of chance, chaos and complex dynamics for literature in a century that has just begun.

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6 Conclusion ‘‘Lies, lies, all lies!’’ —What Samuel Holt Monk reportedly said at the end of many of his lectures on the eighteenth century

THERE ARE MANY REASONS FOR THE RICHNESS, DEPTH, AND COMPLEXITY of much eighteenth-century criticism in the twentieth- and twentyfirst centuries, not the least of which is the influence of the period’s interest in and rigorous requirements for accuracy and reliability in communication and representation. Certainly the lives of Pope and Johnson inspire and support a double focus on the need to search for the truth while tempering any tendency to make easy leaps of faith with the skepticism necessary for establishing the criteria of success. That is much in evidence in the works of Johnson that we have reviewed here. Preceding chapters have shown how initial crises over complexity and signification cause Johnson to review the milieu that Pope called to his aid in An Essay on Man and draw his own conclusions on complexity and aesthetics in accordance with what Johnson seems to have perceived as a more rigorous, more practical, and more reliable theoretical methodology. Johnson’s own quest comes in part as a result of his attempts to deal with the new mediated culture of his time that increasingly put pressure on writers like Pope, Addison, and Johnson to consider the value of the ancients in the world of the moderns whose new commercialized culture of print had raised significant questions on the value of media and mediating signs in a world that they perceived to be increasingly complex. For Johnson this quest intensifies and begins to yield useful results in his periodical writings, which allow him to consider the benefits and dangers of mediated culture in an information age. Here he shows growing confidence that human beings can exert positive influence over this medium; that they can resist 163

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the isolating effects of print culture and at least begin to maximize print’s potential for sustaining a political and social order that values the contribution of the individual to the necessary system of hierarchic subordination. In his political prose Johnson further pursues this theme and courageously considers its implications for Britain as a nation-state competing for survival and power with other states like absolutist France. He concludes that mediated culture can pose a threat to the nation-state unless it is careful to secure its borders informationally as well as territorially; he shows the necessity for developing critical distancing from and dialogical interaction within one’s own information culture in order to prevent unwitting adoption of one’s opponent’s tendency to use information for manipulative ends that undermine the British Constitution’s guarantees of liberty and hierarchic stability. He does this as he explores the relative benefits and dangers of fixed yet mobile signs in his mediated culture and finally concludes in his aesthetics that textual instability can be a good thing since order and disorder, stability and instability need not be mutually exclusive categories in the texts of nature and literature. In short, he finds faith, rationally and inductively, in the flux and fixity of texts that reflect the capacity for signs in mediated culture to constitute a reliable mode of mimesis. This final aspect of his thinking on chaos, on the capacity of the fixed yet mobile sign to represent a complex world, at least within the context of immediate practical human needs, finds its fullest expression in his aesthetics from 1765 onward. In the previous chapter I have suggested that Johnson’s theories on mimesis are sufficiently sophisticated to provide food for thought as we enter a new millennium, though that is far from saying that his theory is not in any way problematic; nor do I mean to suggest that we have completely ignored its implications in previous scholarship. Quite the contrary; previous scholarship has shown admirable depth and comprehensiveness in underscoring the broader implications and difficulties of Johnson’s approach, and the approach of his age, to mimesis and the search for truth (as well as virtue). I am only asking that we reconsider those implications in new or reconsidered contexts, theoretically and historically. Let me illustrate. Studies of the novel and its links to epistemological issues in the eighteenth century often point to the difficulties involved with mimetic theories in the period. This is the case even before McKeon’s Origins of the Novel suggests that the novel’s attempts to stabilize categories of truth and virtue very likely aggravate the problem even as

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the novel endeavors to solve it.1 For example, in his 1970 Narrative Form in History and Fiction: Hume, Fielding, and Gibbon,2 Leo Braudy indicates that one implication of modes of mimesis in the period is that any ‘‘knowledge of a complete aesthetic world emphasizes the impossibility of ever completely knowing or judging the real world’’ (152). In his 1975 Systems of Order and Inquiry in Later EighteenthCentury Fiction,3 Eric Rothstein responds and argues that in the novel ‘‘Aesthetic problems are systematically resolved, but the real world admits of no resolutions except simple acceptance, if that’’ (259). Rothstein indicates that there is an inherent disjuncture between the novelistic world of representation and the complexity of reality: ‘‘the world that can be held in systems of order, in which we can have repose, is smaller than the implied world of the books.’’ Many of the novels’ inconclusive conclusions alone ‘‘show the failure of literary form to give full coherence to the panorama of life.’’ Hence, the novels ‘‘put us in the odd situation of feeling at once superior and bewildered,’’ superior because we are open to a richer, denser ‘‘nature’’ than the novels’ characters are, ‘‘and bewildered by our recognizing our failure to see that nature coherently.’’ So, ‘‘We come at last to a final analogy and modification, in which Christian Humility and empirical skepticism agree on the measure of man’’ (260). One should not overlook the importance of this paradigm of analogy and modification that Rothstein sees structuring the novel. As he implicitly shows, the individual novel does indeed seem to be a second order sign system paralleling the first order system whereby the culture has structured its schema for conceptualizing the capacity of words to figure forth and structure reality in epistemological and aesthetic contexts. ‘‘The mingling of formal and philosophical arguments, mediated by notions of psychology’’ enables the eighteenth century to ‘‘transpose old aesthetic and rhetorical ideals into the affective structures’’ of new types of literature (247). The double nature of novelistic form reflected in the analogy and modification of the novel is seen in many other eighteenth-century aesthetic contexts: ‘‘The formula implied by Addison, that of unity (or uniformity) and variety, became the most tirelessly repeated in the eighteenth century,’’ and, as Rothstein asserts, is evident in such seemingly disparate contexts as ‘‘John Dryden’s dramatic criticism, Frances Hutchinson’s aesthetics, Joseph Priestly’s lectures on public eloquence, and Sir Joshua Reynold’s Discourses on Art’’ (249). And as we have seen in the preceding chapters, the fascination

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with unity and variety also appears in such seemingly unrelated contexts as the political theory informing the writing of the British Constitution of 1765, not to mention the cosmology, physics, and theology of Newton. These sign systems are all configured in the context of a mediated culture (one often conceived as a contexture featuring unity and variety) whose increasing reflexivity led many thinkers to contemplate new means to configure order in the context of what appeared to be prefabricated texts from culture and nature featuring equal potential for fixity and instability. The concerns for mimetic representation, then, were at least as intense as Rothstein avers, if not more so; and the solutions were problematic. The Samuel Johnson we meet in the Dictionary’s preface seems utterly overwhelmed by the complexity of not only the world but the word as well. Still, While Rothstein is no doubt right to underscore that the ‘‘illusion of reality’’ in the novel ‘‘was helped by . . . particulate representation . . . rather than by continuous flow’’ (251), it is nevertheless equally important to emphasize the awareness of thinkers like Johnson that a kind of turbulent flow of information, in both human and natural texts, made any approach to mimesis even more challenging than perhaps we have fully appreciated previously. That being the case, it may seem to many readers today that Johnson’s solutions to the problem of representation in his poetics are naive or based on a naive perception of the mediated culture he lived in—but I think the evidence suggests otherwise. Even Johnson’s cautious optimism may seem extreme by modern standards. Modern media theoreticians like Jean Baudrillard and Friedrich Kittler certainly evince no such optimism. If they concur on anything at all, it is in something Kittler says; namely, that mediation has ‘‘liquidated the real event.’’4 Postmodern approaches to mediation and its concomitant complexity often take this kind of dark pose. Baudrillard argues that we live in a simulacrum where the technologized media culture destroys the difference between reality and dissimulation, between truth and fiction to create a consumer culture where signs point only to themselves and the masses can resist only through hyperconformism, which makes them and the media moguls who seek to control them dupes of the power structures they maintain. Indeed, for Baudrillard, even fractals and complexity are potentially oppressive modes of information manipulation; they make possible the metastasis of the oppressive code that replicates itself endlessly like CEOs of corporations who are endlessly replaceable.5

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Are these theoreticians more pessimistic than Johnson simply because of the times they live in—when the constant bombardment from so many types of media creates the impression that we are losing our humanity and our freedom in the face of such overwhelming odds? That is not likely since theoreticians today do not all share in this pessimism. Certainly the criticism of N. Katherine Hayles shows that optimism and pessimism can be balanced in our current mediated culture. As Hayles says in Chaos Bound, In more than one sense, the Cold War brought totalitarianism home to Americans. As information networks expanded and data banks interlocked with one another, the new technology promised a level of control never before possible. In this paranoiac atmosphere, chaotic fluctuations take on an ambiguous value. From one point of view they threaten the stability of the system. From another, they offer the liberating possibility that one may escape the information net by slipping along its interstices.6

Thus, Hayles argues perceptions of chaos and information technologies work together in this double nature. She then goes on to argue that one need not completely abandon the idea that language can represent a complex reality, so long as one recognizes the limits of how we may represent that reality. She calls her theory of representation tropism, and her summation of what it means is worth quoting in detail: [W]ithin the range of representations available at a given time, we can ask, ‘‘Is this representation consistent with the aspects of reality under interrogation?’’ If the answer is affirmative, we still know only our representations, not reality itself. But if it is negative we know that representation does not mesh with reality in a way that is meaningful to us in that context. . . . The position I am describing abandons all attempts to arrive at foundationist certainty. On the contrary, . . . It emphasizes that reality cannot be known in its positivity, only partially sensed through the failure of some representations to mesh with some aspects of reality. Because its thrust is toward explanations that are consistent with reality rather than reality itself, it could aptly be called tropism. Unlike positivism, it invites cultural readings of science, for the representations presented for disconfirmation have everything to do with prevailing cultural and disciplinary assumptions. (223–24)

It seems to me that Hayles’s tropism has much in common with the literary/epistemological enterprise of Samuel Johnson and the

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eighteenth century. There is a genuine humility here before the sheer complexity of reality—but there is also a powerful commitment to achieving tone with the complex challenges of this daunting mediated milieu. (Surely the scholarship of Markley, Cope, and especially Kroll, discussed in the introduction of this study, attest to this.) Johnson’s theories do indeed point to a kind of tropism not unlike Hayles’s. He is abundantly aware of the complex mediation implied by signification in his time. Nevertheless, like Hayles, he is deeply aware of the interplay between chaos and order in his milieu. He has a kind of moral commitment to himself and his society to discern how to proceed with caution and confidence in that milieu toward a system of representation that reflexively situates humanity on that isthmus between angels and beasts that his Scriblerian predecessors so well described.7 This is the means to unite virtue and truth, if only temporarily, when one eschews the narcissism and selfindulgence of anachronistic writers like Savage and instead embraces the cultural milieu with all of its challenges. It may even be argued fairly that Johnson is, like Hayles, and like his predecessor Pope, reading the various disciplines of his times within their cultural context but keenly studying their relative strengths and weaknesses in such a fashion as to avoid the controversy Pope unwittingly induced while also steering a path clear of the embarrassing earlier attempts to return to Babel. Johnson may not address those issues as directly as Hayles would—though it seems to me that the review of Soame Jenyns and Pope’s Life do represent examples of his capacity as a reader of the culture of science and philosophy. Johnson was thus living up to the best standards of inquiry in his own time and anticipating those that have come to prevail, at least in some circles, in our own. He benefits from the controversies of Pope’s Essay on Man by teaching himself to read his culture broadly and skeptically in such a way as to fully anticipate the difficulties of combining different outlooks from different disciplines. The result is a philosophy on chaos and mediation that perhaps follows Pope’s advice in his Essay better in some ways than Pope did—for Johnson’s thinking always proves mindful of human limits in the face of complexity by focusing only on those aspects of complexity that are directly observable and have been observed for a long time by the ancients and moderns such as Shakespeare. Johnson’s theories of mimesis should, therefore, challenge us. His comprehension of complexity and his representations of it suggest that linguistic representation of the world need not be a static or

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extremely limited thing. The conception of complex (fractal) form that he clearly grasps and asserts in different contexts is worthy of serious consideration. Such structures indicate that the formal structures of literature bear within them the seeds of effective investigation and inquiry. Unity and variety, or, if you prefer, analogy and modification, may represent finite strategies in poems or novels, but the discipline of chaos suggests that things of finite nature can be infinitely expanded. Simple iterative structures in the chromosome can yield the complexity of the fingerprint as the code unwinds and displays levels of complexity that would be difficult to infer from the original starting point. Deterministic codes in genes can also be complexified under the pressures of environmental perturbation to induce evolution of complex organisms adapted to deal with the deepening complexity of a changing reality. There is no reason why mediating structures in literature, produced by unity and variety of structures in mediated culture, cannot promote similar evolution in sign systems and human consciousness. The resulting evolution of sign systems would achieve for homo significans what similar evolution in physical structure does for the bodies of humans and other organisms: isomorphic adaptation of the individual and the species via sign systems (modes of representation) to enable achieving tone with environmental perturbation. Johnson suggests that literary texts are at once fixed and mobile; they contain within them strategies that need not be limited in application to the decoding of the particular text. They can be elaborated upon in the real world; the tropism of the poem embodies complex principles that emerge in the formal interactions of atomistic word and complex cognition. Literature does not figure forth like a road map; it stimulates interactions between sign and mind in an unfolding chaogenic milieu that insists that the mind’s capacity to create complex structures will at least in principle have the capacity to compete and keep pace with a complex and changing world even if absolute certainty must exceed our grasp. For Johnson and the eighteenth century, the implications of this were great. They touched on the realms of science, literature, economics, and politics. All of this happened in the aftermath of a civil war that represented the kinds of perturbation that today’s chaoticians indicate are typically the factors that inspire complexification and creation of new moral and epistemological strategies to enable the mind to achieve tone with this distress. The beginning of the eighteenth century did not, of course, initially show signs of this.

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The return to Babel and pre-Adamic discourse masked anxieties— but only temporarily. The result was a civilization that eventually rose to the challenge and embraced new possibilities instead of turning to the past and running the risk of the culture succumbing to unmitigated political oppression and complete explanatory collapse. This threat of collapse, this motion toward the edge of chaos, has happened in our culture many times before; and the dawn of the twenty-first century seems to show signs of the pattern repeating itself again. If that is the case, then the lessons we may be able to learn from the Restoration and the eighteenth century therefore must command our fullest attention. We too live in an age where the turbulent sweep of new forms of mediation has been augmented by the impact of trauma and the instability of a symbolic cultural fabric. No one, of course, can say what kind of pattern will finally emerge in the future. But the accomplishments of Johnson and predecessors like Hutchinson, Dryden, Locke, Baker, and Pope, as well as contemporaries like Blackstone, Hume, and Knox, should be cause for considering the usefulness of tropism and of eighteenth-century approaches to comprehending and creating a productive mediated culture. Developing an appropriate postdisciplinary approach to the problem would seem to be the mission with which Samuel Johnson and his age have charged us as we turn to face an uncertain future in a world of increasingly complex mediation.

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Notes Introduction 1. David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 217; hereafter cited in the text. 2. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); hereafter cited in the text. 3. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); hereafter cited in the text; Alvin Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). 4. Some particularly influential works by these writers would include Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Paul Virilio and Patrick Camiller, ‘‘Indirect Light: Extracted from Polar Inertia,’’ Theory, Culture and Society 16.5 (1990): 57–70. 5. Daniel R. Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 218–19. 6. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 6; hereafter cited in the text. Also useful for understanding changing attitudes regarding media and information in the electronic age is Lynn Spigel’s Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 7. Bertrand H. Bronson, ‘‘The Double Tradition of Dr. Johnson,’’ English Literary History 18 (1951): 90–106.

Chapter 1. Textual Instability 1. See page 343 of James Berger, ‘‘Falling Towers and Postmodern Wild Children: Oliver Sacks, Don De Lillo, and Turns Against Language,’’ PMLA 120.2 (2005): 341–55; cited hereafter in the text. Also of interest is James Berger’s booklength study of apocalyptic and postapocalyptic culture in literature and cinema, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 2. Robert Markley, Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). See pages 69–70; 78, 82; and 93–94; hereafter cited in the text; Richard W. F. Kroll, The Material Word: Literate

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Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). See pages 60 and 286; hereafter cited in the text. 3. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 47; hereafter cited in the text. 4. Daniel R. Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 8; hereafter cited in the text. 5. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel: 1660–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 6. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); hereafter cited in the text. 7. See, for example, Donna Haraway, ‘‘A Manifesto for the Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,’’ Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65– 107. 8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991); hereafter cited in the text. 9. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State; 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 10. See Richard Foster Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study in the Rise of the Scientific Movement in England (Saint Louis: Washington University Studies, 1936) plus R. F. Jones et al., The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1951). For a good summary of how that scholarship became discredited, see the first chapter of Kroll cited above. 11. Kevin L. Cope, The Criteria of Certainty: Truth and Judgment in the English Enlightenment (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990); hereafter cited in the text. 12. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Alvin Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); hereafter cited in the text. 13. Janine Barchas, Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Of special interest in this study is Barchas’s discussion of McKeon and her conclusion that the taxonomic systems and lists of print culture are linked to the ‘‘categorical instability’’ of conceptualizations of truth and virtue wherein the novel reflects the ‘‘epistemological crisis’’ of the eighteenth century. See pages 186–88. Evidence for this is abundant in the period. See also Stephen Karian, ‘‘Problems and Paratexts in Eighteenth-Century Collections of Swift,’’ Studies in the Literary Imagination 32.1 (1999): 59–80; and ‘‘Reading the Material Text of Swift’s Verses on the Death,’’ Studies in English Literature, 1500– 1900 41.3 (2001): 515–44; Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); hereafter cited in the text; and David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); hereafter cited in the text. 14. John Dryden, ‘‘An Account of the Ensuing Poem in a Letter to the Honorable, Sir Robert Howard,’’ in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and

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H. T. Swedenberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 1:54; hereafter cited in the text. 15. Samuel Johnson, Denham, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 1:78–79. 16. Phillip Harth, in Contexts of Dryden’s Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), in his first chapter especially emphasizes the role of the new science in Dryden’s critical thought—and he discusses religion throughout the study. Cope’s take on Dryden (93–94), touched on above, perhaps contradicts this view in some ways—and this may show that the task of stabilizing Dryden’s texts will continue to renew the debates that led Harth to write his study of Dryden in the first place. This is surely also testimony to the complexity of Restoration texts that evinced artful and still challenging ways to deal with a world where textual instability created many opportunities for expression as well as real dangers for writers dealing with hegemony and hierarchies to the best of their extraordinary abilities. 17. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); hereafter cited in the text by part, section, and page number. 18. All quotes from Hutchinson and her modern editor David Norbrook are taken from Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, ed. David Norbrook (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001); hereafter cited in the text. 19. For background on the connection between poetics and Protestant doctrine on grace and salvation, see Barabara Lewalski’s Protestant Poetics and the SeventeenthCentury Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) and Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). See also Andrew D. Weiner, ‘‘Moving and Teaching: Sidney’s Defense of Poesie as a Protestant Poetic,’’ Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2 (1972): 259–78. 20. Anne Finch, ‘‘The Introduction,’’ in Selected Poems of Anne Finch, ed. Katherine M. Rogers (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979), 5–7. 21. Edward N. Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), 7; hereafter cited in the text. 22. See Robert Shaw, The Dripping Faucet as a Model Chaotic System (Santa Cruz: Aerial Press, 1984), 91–95. For a treatment of the broader significance of intuition for chaos theory, see N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 163–64. 23. See pages 168–79 in Lorenz cited above. 24. Samuel Johnson, Savage, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 2:354; hereafter cited in the text. 25. Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Donald J. Greene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 449. Johnson uses Baker in this passage to reiterate what he had learned in writing the Dictionary: ‘‘no man could give law to language.’’ Yet Johnson seems to wish that he could legislate language and prevent the colonials from misusing the word ‘‘slavery.’’ As I note in chapter 4, in many ways, Johnson in Taxation No Tyranny backslides to a mind-set reminiscent of his stance in the Plan of the Dictionary rather than its preface; also see Thomas Baker, Reflections Upon Learning, Wherein is Shown the Insufficiency Thereof in its Several Particulars, In Order to Evince the Usefulness and Necessity of Revelation (London: A. Bosvile, 1700); hereafter cited in the text. 26. Vicesimus Knox, Essays, Moral and Literary, 1779 (London: Printed for Ed-

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ward and Charles Dilly, in the Poultry, 1778), in two volumes; hereafter cited by volume and page number in the text. 27. Thomas Reinert, in his book Regulating Confusion: Samuel Johnson and the Crowd (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), brings a somewhat similar focus to Johnson as he describes the ‘‘many traces of the crowd’s effect on Johnson’’ (7), as Johnson considers the impact of the masses on his life as a writer and thinker. But Reinert deals with the crowd and the masses as unmediated phenomena, as if they mainly existed for Johnson conceptually outside the realm of print. My own focus on mediation leads me to see Johnson as someone who, instead of seeing the crowd as an ‘‘epistemological block’’ (7) as Reinert categorizes it, focuses on appealing through print to individual readers of many backgrounds in such a way as to move a mass readership without being overwhelmed by the concept of them as a great unknowable force who only seem that way if they are configured outside the realm of mediation. This distinction may not seem significant in this early section of my study, but in chapter 5 I believe the reader will see that it prompts me to draw different conclusions about Johnson from those shared by Reinert and other critics today who, by overlooking the importance of print mediated culture for Johnson, wrongly characterize him as someone showing affinity with strains of postmodern thinking to which his system of mimesis and inquiry bears only superficial resemblance.

Chapter 2. Pope as Precursor to Johnson 1. Alvin Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); hereafter cited in the text. 2. James McLaverty, Pope, Print and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); hereafter cited in the text. 3. Roger D. Lund, ‘‘The Eel of Science: Index Learning, Scriblerian Satire, and the Rise of Information Culture,’’ Eighteenth-Century Life 22.2 (1998): 18–42; hereafter cited in the text. 4. Harry M. Solomon, ‘‘Johnson’s Silencing of Pope: Trivializing An Essay on Man,’’ Age of Johnson 5 (1992): 247–80; hereafter cited in the text. 5. Harry M. Solomon, The Rape of the Text: Reading and Misreading Pope’s ‘‘Essay on Man’’ (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 2–3; hereafter cited in the text. 6. As Solomon notes in The Rape of the Text (103–6), it is at least possible that Pope could mix Horatian and Lucretian styles, in light of Howard Weinbrot’s discussion of Pope’s prediliction to combine different kinds of voices in Pope and the Tradition of Verse Satire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 364. 7. In her studies Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) and Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), N. Katherine Hayles broadens the study of chaos to include all sites in the culture (including those outside of the sciences) that conceptualize chaos as an organizing principle. In this chapter, I use the term chaologist to refer to those who study the cultural significance of chaos, while I apply the term chaotician to scientists and mathematicians who use nonlinear mathematical models to describe self-organizing or dissipa-

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tive systems. The term chaology can be traced back to the eighteenth century where, according to the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), it referred mainly to the history of geological upheavals and catastrophes. The OED indicates that Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopedia (1727) cites Thomas Burnet’s The Theory of the Earth (1684–90) as a chaological study. One further note: in this chapter I am focusing on what Pope has to say about chaos as a potentially beneficial organizing principle. In Chaos Bound Hayles quite rightly asserts that in other contexts, most notably The Dunciad, Pope focuses on the negative connotations of chaos (20–21). My purpose here, however, is to reassess Pope’s interest in chaos as an ordering principle in light of new approaches to understanding chaos in complex systems. Chaos Bound is hereafter cited in the text. 8. Robert Markley, Fallen Languages: Crises of Representaion in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 10; hereafter cited in the text. I hasten to point out that the topic of chaos has been associated not only with the eighteenth century but with Pope himself—something that I document fully in the section below on Pope and the Dynamics of Chaos. 9. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, ‘‘Postface: Dynamics from Leibniz to Lucretius,’’ in Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josue Harari and David F. Bell, 140 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); hereafter cited in the text. 10. Bernard Fabian describes Pope’s Essay as an epic rejoinder to Lucretius in ‘‘Pope and Lucretius: Observations on ‘An Essay on Man,’ ’’ Modern Language Review 74 (1979): 524–37. As my discussion of Solomon indicates, the Lucretian connection has sometimes been questioned. Brean S. Hammond questions Fabian’s argument in Pope and Bolingbroke: A Study of Friendship and Influence (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), 81–82. However, I am inclined to agree with A. D. Nuttall who, in Pope’s ‘‘Essay on Man’’ (Boston: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), 185, argues that Pope’s correspondence indicates that the poem is very probably drawing on both Horace and Lucretius. See Pope’s letter to Swift, September 15, 1734, in The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 3:433. Note that Maynard Mack also describes the Essay as a rejoinder to Lucretius in Alexander Pope: A Life (New York: Norton in association with Yale University Press, 1985), 530–32. Certainly Pope’s Essay is Lucretian in scope and raises similar metaphysical issues in a poetic mode. See also Michel Serres, ‘‘Lucretius: Science and Religion,’’ in Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josue Harari and David F. Bell, 98–124 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). 11. G. Nicolis and I. Prigogine, Self-Organization in Non-Equilibrium Systems: From Dissipative Structures to Order Through Fluctuations (New York: Wiley InterScience Publications, 1977). The feedback loop model is applied to biology, morphology, and evolution (441–45); hereafter cited in the text. 12. See Daniel R. Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 218–19. 13. On the connections between probabilism, empiricism, and the eighteenthcentury novel, see Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965); Eric Rothstein, Systems of Order and Inquiry in Later Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Douglas Lane Patey, Probabil-

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ity and Literary Form: Philosophic Theory and Practice in the Augustan Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel: 1660–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Eve Tavor, Scepticism, Society and the Novel (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987); and Thomas M. Kavanaugh, Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 14. See David Castillejo, The Expanding Force in Newton’s Cosmos, as Shown in His Unpublished Papers (Madrid: Editiones de Arte y Bibliofilia, 1981), 15; Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Janus Face of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 6–12; and Robert Markley’s 1993 work, Fallen Languages, 125–26 cited above; hereafter cited in the text. 15. According to definition 5 of chaos in the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.), chaos in the alchemical sense refers to ‘‘Element; environment; space.’’ This definition seems to resonate with the original Greek definition of chaos as the ‘‘nether abyss, empty space, the first state of the universe.’’ Dobbs draws very much the same conclusion in The Janus Face of Genius, 54–57. 16. Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy or the Hunting of the Greene Lyon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 158; hereafter cited in the text. 17. For the importance of thermodynamics for chaos theory, see Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam, 1984), 12 and 106–18; and N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound, 39–56. 18. As in the case of Lucretius, twentieth-century scholars have long debated whether Pope actually read and was influenced by Leibniz. C. A. More’s essay ‘‘Did Leibniz Influence Pope?’’ (Journal of English and Germanic Philology 16 [1917]: 84– 102) argues that Pope most likely did not read Leibniz but was influenced by British thinkers who influenced Leibniz. Douglas H. White’s Pope and the Context of Contorversy (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1970), 39, points to similarities between Pope and Leibniz. A. D. Nuttall’s 1984 Pope’s ‘‘Essay on Man’’ (cited above) notes parallels (51) but denies direct Leibnizian influence (208). Joanne Cutting Gray’s and James E. Swearingen’s ‘‘System, the Divided Mind, and the Essay on Man’’ (Studies in English Literature 32 [1992]: 479–94) implies a direct influence (480)—as does Michael Srigley’s The Mighty Maze: A Study of Pope’s ‘‘Essay on Man’’ (Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University Press, 1994), 19. Pope, of course, denied any direct influence in a letter to his defender Warburton (Correspondence, 3:164)—at a time when admitting influence would have confirmed his enemies’ accusations. While it cannot be proven whether Pope actually read Leibniz’s Theodicy or Monadology, no scholars have ever denied the parallelism between Pope’s and Leibniz’s thinking. This again attests to the usefulness of the feedback loop model. Ideas on the organization of matter were circulating between England and the Continent. Pope’s artistic and ethical arguments required a monadological matrix to support Pope’s intuitions regarding the organization of matter and the circulation of information globally. If Newton and Leibniz could discover calculus independently, there is no reason that Pope could not discover the usefulness of monads for aesthetics and philosophy with or without the direct help of Leibniz’s writings. To call Pope’s thinking Leibnizian does not necessarily imply indebtedness—it merely points to the complex and useful ways in which information could be circulated and appropriated in eighteenth-century print culture. However, I strongly suspect that Pope read Leibniz and was directly influenced.

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19. See Leroy Loemker, Philosophical Papers and Letters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 1:61. 20. Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1983), 18 and 405–19; hereafter cited in the text. 21. Gottfried von Leibniz, Leibniz Selections, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1979), 98–99. 22. Gottfried von Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, Trans. and ed. Leroy Loemker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 1:345. 23. See Martin Kallich, Heav’n’s First Law: Rhetoric and Order in Pope’s ‘‘Essay on Man’’ (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1967), 44; Marjorie Nicolson and G. S. Rousseau, ‘‘This Long Disease My Life’’: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 215–19; A. L. Altenbrand, ‘‘On Pope’s Horticultural Romanticism,’’ in Essential Articles for the Study of Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1968), 127; Samuel Holt Monk, ‘‘A Grace Beyond the Reach of Art,’’ in Essential Articles for the Study of Alexander Pope, 53–54; Earl R. Wasserman, ‘‘Pope’s ‘Ode for Musick,’’’ in Essential Articles for the Study of Alexander Pope, 30–31; S. L. Goldberg, ‘‘Integrity and Life in Pope’s Poetry,’’ in Studies in the Eighteenth Century, ed. R. F Brissenden and J. C. Eade (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 3:188–89; Martin Price, ‘‘Character and False Art,’’ in Alexander Pope, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 53; and Harry Solomon’s 1993 The Rape of the Text, 93 and 178. 24. See page 105 of David B. Morris, ‘‘Bootstrap Theory: Pope, Physics and Interpretation,’’ Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 29 (1988): 101–21; hereafter cited in the text. 25. Michael Srigley, The Mighty Maze: A Study of Pope’s ‘‘An Essay on Man’’ (Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University Press, 1994), 27; hereafter cited in the text. 26. I focus mainly on Pope’s prose here—but the same fascination with how what is disorderly can contribute to the overall aesthetic harmony and impact of a poem is clearly discernible also in these lines from An Essay on Criticism: Great Wits sometimes may gloriously offend, And rise to Faults true Criticks dare not mend; From vulgar Bounds with brave Disorder part, And snatch a Grace beyond the reach of Art, Which, without passing thro’ the Judgement, gains The Heart, and all its End at once attains. (152–57)

Pope recognizes the parallel between these irregularities and the fractal shapes of nature, like ‘‘The shapeless Rock, or hanging Precipice’’ (160), which ‘‘out of Nature’s common Order rise’’ (159). This connection between the irregular in nature and in art is made in Pope’s prose, also. I will elaborate on this in chapter 5. Both quotes from Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack, vol. 3 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950). 27. Alexander Pope, Spectator 404, in The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Norman Ault (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), 1:39. Spectator essays are hereafter cited in the text. 28. Alexander Pope, Guardian 173, in The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Norman Ault (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), 1:149.

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29. Alexander Pope, ‘‘Preface to The Iliad,’’ in The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Norman Ault (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), 1:224. 30. Alexander Pope, ‘‘Preface to Shakespeare,’’ in The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Rosemary Cowler (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1986), 2:25–26. 31. In addition to Harry Solomon’s 1993 The Rape of the Text, 10–12, some earlier studies on the poem’s reception are very valuable. See Robert Rogers, ‘‘Critiques on the Essay on Man in France and Germany, 1736–55,’’ English Literary History 15 (1947): 176–93; White’s 1970 Pope and the Context of Controversy, 2–49; Elise Knapp, ‘‘Community Property: The Case for Warburton’s 1751 Edition of Pope’’ Studies in English Literature: 1500–1900 26 (1986): 455–68; and Mack’s 1985 Alexander Pope: A Life, 737–41. 32. Samuel Johnson, Pope, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 3:243. 33. For a full description of how reason and imagination function in Johnson’s critical theory, plus discussion of wit that is both natural and new, see Jean Hagstrum’s Samuel Johnson’s Literary Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). 34. Many critics discuss the seeming contradiction in the logic of the Essay, which points to the limits of induction and observation and then seems to argue in a deductive fashion concerning that which is not observable. See Reuben A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 209–12; J. M. Cameron, ‘‘Doctrinal to an Age: Notes Towards a Revaluation of Pope’s Essay on Man,’’ in Essential Articles for the Study of Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack, 353–58 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1968); Nuttall, Pope’s ‘‘Essay on Man,’’ 54–59; Thomas R. Edwards, ‘‘The Mighty Maze: An Essay on Man,’’ in Alexander Pope, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1968), 39; Gray and Swearingen, ‘‘System, the Divided Mind,’’ 487 and 490; Solomon, Rape of the Text, 59–65. 35. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, in Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack, vol. 3 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 1:25–28; hereafter cited in the text by epistle and line number. 36. For an analysis of the question and answer device in Vanity, see Howard Weinbrot, ‘‘No ‘Mock Debate’: Questions and Answers in The Vanity of Human Wishes,’’ Modern Language Quarterly 41 (1980): 248–67. 37. See A. Rupert Hall, Philosophers at War: The Quarrel Between Newton and Leibniz (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 185. For more on Pope’s interest in and knowledge of alchemy, see Douglas Brooks-Davies, Pope’s Dunciad and the Queen of the Night: A Study in Emotional Jacobitism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 140–67. 38. See Prigogine and Stengers in Hermes, 142. See also Yasuda Elkana, The Discovery of the Conservation of Energy (London: Hutchison, 1974). 39. Lorenz offers the following useful definition of a self-similar form or set: ‘‘A set of which a portion, if magnified, becomes identical to the original set.’’ In other words, in self-similar forms, the part and the whole are very similar in shape, and this can be described mathematically and visually in fractals that have such self-similar forms. In this way fractals can have a monadological form. See Edward N. Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), 212. Again, I will expand on this discussion in chapter 5. 40. See Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, 293–300.

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41. For a chaological assessment of intuition that is at once scientific and poetic, see Robert Shaw, The Dripping Faucet as a Model Chaotic System (Santa Cruz: Aerial Press, 1984), 91–95. For a treatment of the importance of intuition for chaos theory, see Hayles, Chaos Bound, 163–64. 42. In Alexander Pope: A Life, Mack describes how the poem reflects the anxieties of the age but also tries to set them to rest by reaffirming the justness of the society’s order. Pope’s vision ‘‘springs partly from his own deepest intuitions of the atomistic individual working in the age . . . as it moved compulsively toward definitions of success’’ (543). Thus, ‘‘human beings may legitimately aspire’’ (541) to becoming part of the larger cosmological order. In Origins of the Novel, McKeon also notes that ‘‘the social order . . . approximated the providential design when it enjoyed an absolute freedom and self-sufficiency’’ that virtually renders God ‘‘superfluous’’ (199– 200). Markley describes the tendency of physicotheologians to seek ‘‘a sociopolitical order which they perceive as both divinely sanctioned and beset by a variety of internal and external threats’’ (8). Ironically, as Markley’s Fallen Languages shows, their attempts to redeem a fallen world also represented a threat to the order they sought to stabilize in the face of chaos. The culture simultaneously fed and sought to allay the very anxieties that Pope’s Essay attempted to assuage through a new chaological poetics. 43. J. Douglas Cantfield and J. Paul Hunter discuss trends in criticism reflecting the eighteenth-century tropes of order and chaos in their introduction to the collection of essays they edited, Rhetorics of Order/Ordering Rhetorics in English Neoclassical Literature (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), 13–14. 44. Alexander Pope, letter to James Cragg, July 15, 1715, in The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 1:306; hereafter cited in the text. 45. Alexander Pope, letter to Bolingbroke, April 19, 1721, in The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 2:227.

Chapter 3. Complexity and Mediated Culture 1. Addison famously discusses the notion in Spectator 10. Interestingly, his attitude toward other forms of mass media such as newspapers in this essay is somewhat negative, despite his playful tone. Johnson, as we will see, has been much more serious and self-conscious in his reflexive analysis of the mass information distribution industry. This parallels his serious analysis of the need for freedom of information in his political prose, as we will see in the next chapter. For Addison, see The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1:44–47. 2. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 373; hereafter cited in the text. 3. Samuel Johnson, Rambler 4, in TheYale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Walter Jackson Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 5:23; hereafter all Rambler essays are taken from the Yale edition and cited in the text by page and volume number. 4. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: David McKay, 1957); hereafter cited in the text. 5. Samuel Johnson, Idler 40, in TheYale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed.

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Walter Jackson Bate, John M. Bullitt, and L. F. Powell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 2:127; hereafter all Idler essays are quoted from the Yale edition and cited in the text by volume and page number. 6. See Walter Jackson Bate, The Achievement of Samuel Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 145; Robert Voitle, Samuel Johnson the Moralist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 23–46; and Carey McIntosh, The Choice of Life: Samuel Johnson and the World of Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 30–61. 7. The term is not as anachronistic as it may seem. As Johns notes, ‘‘virtual witnessing’’ (45, 447, 507–8, 532) was an important aspect of the scientific revolution. When experiments could not be reproduced in a lab, print made possible their reproduction and imagined witnessing from the time of Boyle onward. 8. Lund notes similar tendencies with Pope in the face of mediated culture. See Roger D. Lund, ‘‘The Eel of Science: Index Learning, Scriblerian Satire, and the Rise of Information Culture,’’ Eighteenth-Century Life 22.2 (1998): 18–42. 9. The seminal texts here are Walter Jackson Bate, The Achievement of Samuel Johnson and William Edinger, Samuel Johnson and Poetic Style (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1977). 10. See Samuel Johnson, Milton, in Lives of the English Poets (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 1:171. 11. Johnson may be one of the first media critics to employ the metaphor of a web or net- like structure to describe how media can connect large numbers of people via communication without their having any direct contact with one another. The most famous implementation of such a metaphor occurs after radio supersedes the wireless in 1922. Jeffrey Sconce says, ‘‘As the fleeting transmissions of wireless—stray messages traversing the depths of the etheric ocean—were driven out by the routine and virtually omnipresent signals of broadcasting, the ether became less a free-flowing ocean and more like a net or blanket’’ with the rise of the radio networks. See Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 93–94. 12. Baudrillard’s primitivism, which contrasts the more genuine style of symbolic ritual exchange in ancient tribal societies with the surplus exchange values of hollow modern societies is nicely explicated in Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 54–57. 13. David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3; hereafter cited in the text. 14. See Connor, 60–61. 15. Alvin Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 18. 16. The task of describing eighteenth-century audiences for the type of periodicals that Johnson is writing is as daunting today as it would have been for people in Johnson’s time. Boundaries between classes, at least conceptually, were certainly fluid, as is evident in the analysis of class and status given in Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the Novel, 1600–1700 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 131–75. But it is unlikely that a demographic model informs Johnson’s rhetoric, as he seems to avoid explicit references to potentially divisive social and political categories in his essays, much like his predecessors Addison and Steele. For a useful and well-informed testimony to this tendency in the essays of Addison and Steele,

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with respect to gender boundaries, see Tedra Odell, ‘‘Tatling Women in the Public Sphere: Rhetorical Femininity and the English Essay Periodical,’’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 38.2 (2005): 283–300. 17. Indeed, the image and its use to explain the interaction of reason and imagination calls to mind 2.105–16 in Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man, in Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack, vol. 3 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950). Johnson does benefit from the groundbreaking work of his illustrious predecessor. 18. Murray Cohen, Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England, 1640–1785 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 9. 19. Robert DeMaria, The Life of Samuel Johnson (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993), 167; hereafter cited in the text. 20. Years later, in Lives of the English Poets, Johnson displays the breadth of his tastes in prose style in his praise of Addison’s elegant middle style and Swift’s similar use of style. See Addison, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905), 2:149–50, and Swift, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905), 3:151–53. For a full discussion of Johnson’s flexibility in using and appreciating style, see my article, ‘‘Johnson’s Prose Style: Blending Energy and Elegance in The Rambler,’’ Age of Johnson 6 (1994): 205–35.

Chapter 4. Johnson’s Politics 1. Donald J. Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1973), 242; hereafter cited in the text. 2. Clement Hawes, ‘‘Johnson’s Cosmopolitan Nationalism,’’ in Johnson ReVisioned: Looking Before and After, ed. Philip Smallwood (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 37–63; hereafter cited in the text. 3. Alvin Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 41. 4. Walter Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 191. 5. Lynn Spigel, ‘‘Entertainment Wars: Television Culture After 9/11,’’ American Quarterly 56.2 (2004): 235–70. See especially her discussion on page 239 regarding how ‘‘the fate of nationalism in contemporary media systems is a huge question,’’ despite the post-9/11 revival of ‘‘nationalist myths of the American past and the enemy/Orient.’’ 6. William Blackstone, ‘‘The Theory of the Constitution,’’ in English Historical Documents, ed. P. S. Horn and Mary Ransome (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1957), 89; hereafter cited in the text. 7. David L. Keir, The Constitutional History of Modern Britain, 1485–1951 (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1953), 295; hereafter cited in the text. 8. David Hume, ‘‘Of the Origin of Justice and Property,’’ in David Hume’s Political Essays, ed. Charles Handel (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), 29; hereafter cited in the text. 9. Samuel Johnson, Adventurer 67, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. W. J. Bate and L. F. Powell (New Haven: Yale University Press,1963), 2:389. 10. Samuel Johnson, Sermon 24, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson,

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ed. James Gray and Jean Hagstrum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 14:259. 11. All quotes from Johnson’s political tracts are taken from vol. 10 of Samuel Johnson, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Donald J. Greene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); hereafter cited in the text. 12. The French were in general believed to have achieved more linguistic conformity as a part of their nationalistic enterprise under the rubric of absolutism. See David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 198. 13. See Greene’s discussion of these events on pages 283–87 in volume 10 of the Yale edition of Johnson’s Works. 14. See Robert DeMaria, The Life of Samuel Johnson (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993), 243; hereafter cited in the text. Green’s thesis on the consistency of Johnson’s politics nevertheless seems viable. Johnson, in his A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Mary Lascelles, vol. 9 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), written only about a year before Taxation No Tyranny was published, voices sentiments regarding the English rule over Scotland that seem very much to question the status quo, even going so far as to characterize England as ‘‘a vindictive conqueror, whose severities have been followed by laws, which, though they cannot be called cruel, have produced much discontent’’ (89). He also laments English laws requiring disarming the Scots that ‘‘place the subjects in such a state [of defenselessness that they] contravene the first principles of the compact of an authority: they exact obedience, and yield no protection’’ (91). Hence, in all likelihood, what we see in Taxation No Tyranny is less a change of philosophy than one of tone, reflecting the odd rhetorical situation that had excluded the possibility of dialogical exchange. 15. See Robert Voitle, Samuel Johnson the Moralist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press, 1961), 110 and 111, and see DeMaria pages 252 and 253. 16. Samuel Johnson, ‘‘Review of a Free inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil,’’ in The Works of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D. (Oxford, 1825), 6:56–57.

Chapter 5. Complex Dynamics 1. Bertrand H. Bronson, ‘‘The Double Tradition of Dr. Johnson,’’ English Literary History 18 (1951): 90–106. 2. Steven Lynn, Samuel Johnson After Deconstruction: Rhetoric and the Rambler (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 69–70; hereafter cited in the text. 3. Helen Deutsch, ‘‘ ‘The Name of the Author’: Moral Economics in Johnson’s Life of Savage,’’ Modern Philology 92 (1995): 328–45; Alex Segal, ‘‘Conversation, Writing, and the Subversion of Economy: Samuel Johnson’s Life of Savage,’’ Critical Review 37 (1997): 81–95; Raman Selden, ‘‘Deconstructing the Ramblers,’’ in Fresh Reflections on Samuel Johnson, Ed. Nathan Prem (Troy, NY: Whitston, 1987), 281; hereafter cited in the text. 4. Thomas Reinert, Regulating Confusion: Samuel Johnson and the Crowd (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 141; hereafter cited in the text. 5. The seminal texts here are Walter Jackson Bate, The Achievement of Samuel

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Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955) and William Edinger, Samuel Johnson and Poetic Style (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); hereafter cited in the text. 6. See N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 3; hereafter cited in the text. 7. Robert Markley, Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 10; hereafter cited in the text. 8. Edward N. Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 170; hereafter cited in the text. 9. Terry Bossomaier, David Green, and Paul Davies, Patterns in the Sand: Computers, Complexity, and Everyday Life (New York: Helix Books, 1998), 135; hereafter cited in the text. 10. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, in Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 3:289–92. 11. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, in Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 3:152–60; hereafter cited in the text. 12. For an overview of the debate—in an article underscoring that the preponderance of the evidence indicates that the universe is not fractal—see Vincent J. Martinez, ‘‘Is the Universe Fractal?’’ Science 284.5413 (1999): 445–46. 13. For a fuller discussion of these two branches of chaotics, see Hayles’s Chaos and Order, 12–16. 14. Other critics have pointed to or implied that there is an empirical basis for Johnson’s criticism of Pope and Jenyns. See Fred Parker, ‘‘The Skepticism of Johnson’s Rasselas,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, ed. Greg Clingham, 130 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Arieh Sachs, ‘‘Samuel Johnson and the Cosmic Hierarchy,’’ in Studies in English Language and Literature, ed. Alice Shalvi and A. A. Mendilov, 138 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1966); and Wayne Schmalz, ‘‘Samuel Johnson’s ‘Soame Jenyns Review’: The World Experienced,’’ Wascana Review 18.2 (1983): 40–47. 15. Samuel Johnson, ‘‘Review of a Free inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil,’’ in The Works of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D. (Oxford, 1825), 6:59; hereafter cited in the text. 16. Samuel Johnson, Pope, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905), 3:493; hereafter cited in the text. 17. Samuel Johnson, Rambler 184, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Walter Jackson Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 5:205; hereafter all Rambler essays are taken from the Yale edition and cited in the text by page and volume number. 18. Howard D. Weinbrot’s essay, ‘‘Samuel Johnson’s Plan and Preface to the Dictionary: The Growth of a Lexicographer’s Mind,’’ in New Aspects of Lexicography: Literary Criticism, Intellectual and Social Change, ed. Howard D. Weinbrot (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), 73–94, points to the most probable explanation, biographically speaking, for Johnson’s backsliding as he approached the writing of his Plan. Johnson succumbed to the influence of his seeming patron, the aristocrat Lord Chesterfield. As Weinbrot shows, ‘‘Chesterfield exerted a great influence on Johnson’s conception of the Plan’’ (80). ‘‘Moreover, Johnson is not

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speaking with his own voice or authority, but merely as a mouthpiece for Chesterfield,’’ and this leads Johnson to share ‘‘some of Chesterfield’s values regarding language,’’ including his concerns for ‘‘fixing the language’’ right down to what Johnson calls ‘‘the ‘atoms of our speech’ ’’ (82). Thus Johnson’s desire to impress Chesterfield and secure economic support leads to a kind of ventriloquism all too easily instantiated in the mediated age—something that we have also seen happening in Taxation No Tyranny where Johnson speaks for the Crown and loses some of the better qualities of his print persona. 19. Samuel Johnson, ‘‘Preface to A Dictionary of the English Language,’’ in The Works of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D. (Oxford, 1825), 5:31; hereafter cited in the text by page number. 20. Roger D. Lund, ‘‘The Eel of Science: Index Learning, Scriblerian Satire, and the Rise of Information Culture,’’ Eighteenth-Century Life 22.2 (1998): 35–36. 21. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 91–93. 22. For discussion on intuitive perception and chaos, see Robert Shaw, The Dripping Faucet as a Model Chaotic System (Santa Cruz, CA: Aerial Press, 1984), and Hayles, Chaos Bound, 163–64. 23. Alvin Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); hereafter cited in the text. 24. Samuel Johnson, ‘‘Preface to Shakespeare (1765) in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Arthur Sherbo, vol. 7 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969); hereafter cited in the text. 25. Although Johnson criticizes the metaphysical poets in Cowley for abusing this principle (for reasons I outline in the rest of this chapter), he nevertheless endorses it when it is applied properly and makes use of it in other contexts. See Jean H. Hagstrum, ‘‘Johnson and the Concordia Discors of Human Relationships,’’ in The Unknown Samuel Johnson, ed. John J. Burke Jr. and Donald Kay (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); Steven Lynn, ‘‘Sexual Difference and Johnson’s Brain,’’ in Fresh Reflections on Samuel Johnson, ed. Prem Nath (Troy, NY: Whitston, 1987), 134; and Howard D. Weinbrot, ‘‘Johnson’s Poetry,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, ed. Greg Clingham, 42 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 26. Ben Goertzel, Chaotic Logic: Language, Thought and Reality from the Perspective of Complex Systems Science (New York: Plenum Press, 1994), 8–34; hereafter cited in the text. 27. Samuel Johnson, Cowley, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905), 1:20; hereafter cited in the text. 28. Samuel Johnson, Milton, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905), 1:170. 29. Peter Stoicheff, ‘‘The Chaos of Metafiction,’’ in Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, ed. N. Katherine Hayles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 85; hereafter cited in the text. 30. See Hayles, Chaos and Order, 22. 31. Charles Hinnant, ‘‘Steel for the Mind’’: Samuel Johnson and Critical Discourse (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 83–85. 32. See chapters 7 and 8 in Chaos Bound. 33. Walter Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 191; hereafter cited in the text.

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34. Quoted in Philip Smallwood, ‘‘Shakespeare: Johnson’s Poet of Nature,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, ed. Greg Clingham, 160 (New York: Bucknell University Press, 1997).

Conclusion 1. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel: 1660–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 2. Leo Braudy, Narrative Form in History and Fiction: Hume, Fielding, and Gibbon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); hereafter cited in the text. 3. Eric Rothstein, Systems of Order and Inquiry in Later Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); hereafter cited in the text. 4. Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA; Stanford University Press, 1999), 133. 5. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 79–86 and 96–99. 6. N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 5–6. 7. Arieh Sachs attests to Johnson’s vision of humanity on an isthmus in Passionate Intelligence: Imagination and Reason in the Work of Samuel Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 21.

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Index 9/11, 25, 110 n. 5 Addison, Joseph, 86, 90, 163, 166 n. 1, 179 n. 16, 180 n. 20 After the Great Divide, 27, 171 n. 3 alchemy, 71,72, 74, 82, 85, 176 n. 15 ‘‘Altar, The,’’ 46 Anderson, Benedict, 30, 172 n. 8 Annus Mirabilis, 38

concordia discors, 40, 43, 48, 64, 65, 141, 151, 184 n. 25 Connor, Steven, 48, 180 nn. 12 and 14 Constitution (British), 110–12, 164, 166, 181 nn. 6 and 7 ‘‘Cooper’s Hill,’’ 40 Cope, Kevin, 8, 32, 34, 35, 36, 56, 168, 172 n. 11, 173 n. 16

Babel, Tower of, 25, 26, 41, 58, 143, 168, 170 Baker, Thomas, 19, 21, 54, 57–61, 69, 86, 128, 158, 170, 173 n. 25 Barchas, Janine, 36, 172 n. 13 Bate, Walter Jackson, 91, 93, 106, 110, 136, 138, 161, 179 n. 3, 180 nn. 5, 6. and 9, 181 nn. 4 and 9, 182 n. 5, 183 n. 7, 184 n. 33 Baudrillard, Jean, 16, 60, 97, 98, 166, 170 n. 4, 180 n. 12, 185 n. 5 Berger, James, 25, 26, 58, 171 n. 1 Blackstone, William, 111, 112, 122, 170, 181 n. 6 Bootstrap Theory, 70, 75 Braudy, Leo, 165, 185 n. 2 Brewer, John, 30, 172 n. 9 Bronson, Bertrand H., 21, 107, 136, 143, 148, 161, 171 n. 7, 182 n. 1 Burke, Edmund, 130, 133, 184 n. 25 Butterfly Effect, 49

Darwin, Charles, 42 Deconstruction, 160, 182 n. 2 determinism, 14, 49, 50, 52, 125 Deutsch, Helen, 136, 182 n. 3 dialogism, 93, 115 discordia concors, 80 Dobbs, Betty Jo Teeter, 70–72, 82, 176 nn. 15 and 16 Donne, John, 52 Dryden, John, 19, 27, 34, 35, 38, 39, 4043, 45, 47, 48, 52, 129, 152, 154, 155, 160, 165, 170, 172 n. 14, 173 n. 16 Dunciad, The, 62, 64, 65, 84, 175 n. 7, 178 n. 37 Dynamic Systems, 50, 51, 85, 99, 111, 137, 141, 146, 153, 159

Castillejo, David, 71 Chaos Theory, 48–50, 66, 68, 85, 99, 138, 139, 173 n. 22, 176 n. 17, 179 n. 41 Cohen, Murray, 106, 181 n. 18 Complex Dynamics, 20, 23, 25, 44, 53, 65, 90, 105, 107, 134–38, 143, 146, 158, 161, 162, 174 n. 7

‘‘Easter Wings,’’ 46 Edinger, William, 93, 138, 161, 180 n. 9, 183 n. 5 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 13, 14, 36, 145, 170 n. 3, 172 n. 12, 184 n. 21 emergent order, 31, 42, 46, 50, 107, 108, 128, 137, 139, 149, 154 Evelyn, John, 36 feedback loop, 69, 70, 86, 139, 175 n. 11, 176 n. 18 Finch, Anne, 49, 173 n. 20 fixity, textual, 13–16, 36, 45, 47, 53, 58,

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INDEX

59, 60, 62, 101, 130, 141, 146, 148, 150, 164, 166 fractals, 51, 67, 68, 73, 79, 80, 122, 124, 139–155, 166, 169, 177 nn. 20 and 26, 178 n. 39, 183 n. 12 Fractal Geometry of Nature, The, 76, 177 n. 20 Goertzel, Ben, 155, 184 n. 26 Greene, Donald J., 109, 110, 114, 115, 119, 127, 128, 131, 137, 161, 181 n. 1, 182 n. 13 Hagstrum, Jean H., 135, 136, 178 n. 33, 184 n. 25 Hall, Rupert, 79, 178 n. 37 Haraway, Donna, 29, 172 n. 7 Harth, Phillip, 173 n. 16 Hawes, Clement, 109, 110, 181 n. 2 Hayles, Katherine N., 29, 50, 68–70, 138, 141, 159, 160, 167, 168, 172 n. 6, 173 n. 22, 174 n. 7, 176 n. 17, 179 n. 41, 183 nn. 5 and 13, 184 nn. 22, 29, 30, 185 n. 6 Headrick, Daniel R., 17, 28, 29, 31, 42, 43, 70, 94, 171 n. 5, 172 n. 4, 175 n. 12 Herbert, George, 46, 52 Hesiod, 69, 71, 74 Hinnant, Charles, 135, 159 Hobbes, Thomas, 44 Hume, David, 112, 113, 170, 181 n. 8 Hutchinson, Lucy, 19, 43–49, 52, 67, 84, 101, 140, 165, 170, 173 n. 18 Huyssen, Andreas, 27, 28, 29, 53, 53, 172 n. 3 Imagined Communities, 30 informatics, 21, 29, 30, 70, 86, 87, 110, 116, 120, 124, 127, 129, 149 information culture, 17, 21–23, 25, 28, 29, 31, 38, 42, 43, 53, 54, 59, 63, 98, 99, 100, 104, 110, 113, 116, 128, 131, 135, 164 Jenyns, Soame, 133, 142, 146, 168, 183 n. 14 Johns, Adrian, 13, 14, 36, 55, 57, 90, 94, 146, 171 n. 3, 172 n. 13, 179 n. 2 Johnson, Samuel, 15–23, 27, 28, 31, 36,

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37, 40, 42, 43, 47–49, 52–54, 62–65, 76–78, 83, 84, 86–88; and aesthetics 135–39, 141–50, 161, 163, 164, 166– 70, 171 n. 7, 173 nn. 15, 24 and 25, 174 nn. 27 and 4 (ch. 2), 175 n. 32, 178 n. 33, 179 nn. 1, 3, and 5, 180 nn. 9, 10, 11, and 16, 181 nn. 17, 19, 20, 2 (ch.4) and 9, 182 nn. 11, 13–16, (ch.5) 1, 3, 4, and 5, 183 n. 14–18, 184 nn. 19, 24, 25, 27, and 28, 185 n. 7 —Pope’s aesthetic vs. Dryden’s 155–60 —Shakespeare’s aesthetics 151–54 —and periodical essays, Idler 40, 96–99, Idler 85, 105, Rambler 4, 90–92, 94, 95, Rambler 145, 104 Rambler 158 & 184, 100–103, Rambler 208, 106–8; and information —revolutions 58, 59, 60, 61; and political tracts, 109–11, 113 ——‘‘Considerations on Corn,’’ 114, 115 ——‘‘The Bravery of the Common British Soldier,’’ 123–25 ——‘‘Introduction to the Proceedings of the Committee of French Prisoners,’’ 126, 127 ——‘‘Observations on the Present State of Affairs,’’ 115–22 ——‘‘Taxation No Tyranny,’’ 128–34 ——‘‘Thoughts on a Coronation,’’ 114, 115 —and Richard Savage, 55–57 Jones, Richard Foster, 32, 172 n. 10 Karian, Stephen, 36, 172 n. 13 Keir, David, 112, 181 n. 7 Kernan, Alvin, 13, 15, 36, 53, 56, 62–64, 101, 110, 142, 147, 148, 170 n. 3, 172 n. 12, 174 n. 1, 180 n. 15, 181 n. 3, 184 n. 23 Kittler, Friedrich A., 16, 60, 166, 171 n. 4, 185 n. 4 Knox, Vicesimus, 19, 21, 37, 59, 60, 152, 170, 173 n. 26 Kroll, Richard W. F., 26, 28, 32–36, 52, 56, 168, 171 n. 2, 172 n. 10 Leibniz, Gottfried von, 19, 51, 66–69, 72–74, 78, 79, 81, 85, 138, 139, 141,

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142, 146, 175 n. 9, 176 n. 18, 177 n. 22, 178 n. 37 Lewalski, Barbara, 173 n. 19 Locke, John, 19, 27, 34, 35, 38, 41–43, 48, 52, 53, 56, 92, 95, 100, 109–11, 116, 129, 170, 173 n. 17 Lorenz, Edward N., 49, 50, 51, 99, 139, 140 Lucretius, 44, 47, 69, 73, 74, 138, 175 nn. 9 and 10, 176 n. 18 Lund, Roger D., 63–65, 145, 174 n. 3, 180 n. 8, 184 n. 20 Lynn, Steven, 110, 136, 137, 171 n. 6, 181 n. 5, 182 n. 2, 184 n. 25 Mack, Maynard, 84, 175 n. 10, 177 nn. 3 and 26, 178 nn. 31, 34, and 35, 179 n. 42 Mandelbrot, Benoit, 51, 73, 76, 139, 177 n. 20 Markley, Robert, 26, 32–36, 38, 57, 67, 70–2, 75, 84, 138, 168, 171 n. 2, 175 nn. 8 and 14, 179 n. 42, 183 n. 7 McIntosh, Carey, 51, 180 n. 6 McKeon, Michael, 29, 84, 164, 172 nn. 5 and 13, 176 n. 13, 179 n. 42, 180 n. 16, 185 n. 1 McKitterick, David, 13–17, 19, 36, 37, 52, 59, 98, 106, 146, 171 n. 13, 180 n. 13, 182 n. 12 McLaverty, James, 63, 64, 84, 174 n. 2 Mcluhan, Marshall, 62 mediated culture, 22, 25, 27–32, 34, 37, 39, 42–44, 46, 49, 51–57, 60, 64, 67– 70, 84, 86–99, 102–7, 110, 113, 115, 122, 128, 131–34, 136, 137, 139, 143– 45, 147, 150, 152, 160, 163, 164, 166, 169, 170, 174 n. 27, 180 n. 8 Newton, Sir Isaac, 19, 33, 38, 51, 67–73, 75, 78, 79, 81, 82, 85, 88, 100, 110, 111, 122, 138, 139, 141, 142, 146, 166, 176 n. 18 Order and Disorder, 43, 44, 47–52, 173 n. 18 orderly disorder, 16, 22, 39, 40, 41, 43, 48–52, 64, 65, 77, 107, 138, 152, 160, 161

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Origins of the Novel, 29, 164, 179 n. 42, 180 n. 16 Packard, Vance, 91, 179 n. 4 Patey, Douglas Lane, 176 n. 13 phase space, 140, 152 Pope, Alexander, 19, 20–22, 27, 35, 43, 48, 51–53, 56, 60–70, 72–80, 82–91, 94, 103, 104, 115, 121, 122, 133, 137– 42, 145–47, 151, 153–56, 158, 163, 168, 170, 174 nn. 2, 4, 5, and 6, 176 n. 18, 177 nn. 23, 24, 26, 27, and 28, 178 nn. 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, and 37, 179 nn. 42, 44, and 45, 180 n. 8, 181 n. 17, 183 nn. 10, 11, 14, and 16 Prigogine, Ilya, 68, 69, 73, 79, 80, 176 nn. 11 and 17, 178 nn. 38 and 40 print culture, 13–16, 18, 20, 21, 31, 33, 35–37, 40, 42, 43, 52, 54, 56, 57, 60, 62, 64, 67, 69, 70, 84, 90, 92, 93, 103–5, 110, 129, 144, 146, 149, 152, 157, 164, 172 n. 13, 176 n. 18 print logic, 15, 18, 53, 62, 148 pseudo-randomness, 49, 50, 51, 60, 85, 138, 140, 143, 144, 152 Puritan Revolution, the, 18, 19, 22, 25 Reflections Upon Learning, 57, 173 n. 25 Reinert, Thomas, 136, 137, 174 n. 27, 183 n. 4 Restoration period, the, 17, 19, 20, 22, 26, 27, 31–36, 38, 40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49, 51, 53, 57, 72, 75, 138, 143, 152, 170, 173 n. 16 Rothstein, Eric, 165, 175 n. 13, 185 n. 5 Sapir Whorf hypothesis, 52 Savage, Richard, 54–57, 60, 82, 94, 102, 113, 168 Sconce, Jeffrey, 18, 171 n. 6, 180 n. 11 Scriblerians, 63, 64 self-organizing systems, 72, 83, 86, 117 self-similar form, 73, 74, 76, 79, 139, 141, 156, 160, 170 Serres, Michel, 69, 73, 110, 175 n. 10 Solomon, Harry, 65, 66, 77, 84, 174 nn. 4, 5, and 6, 175 n. 10, 177 n. 23, 178 nn. 31, and 34 Spectator, The, 75, 102, 114, 179 n. 1

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Spigel, Lynn, 110, 171 n. 6, 181 n. 5 Stengers, Isabelle, 68, 79, 176 n. 17, 178 nn. 38 and 40 Strange Attractors, 174, 139, 141 Swift, Jonathan, 27, 35, 63, 109, 172 n. 13, 175 n. 10, 181 n. 20 Tories, 86, 109, 136 textual instability, 14–16, 20, 22, 23, 36, 40, 58, 118, 127, 135, 137, 143, 145, 146, 149, 150, 151, 157, 164 tropism, 167, 168, 170

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Vanity of Human Wishes, The, 64 Virilio, Paul, 16, 171 n. 4 Voitle, Robert, 132, 180 nn. 6 and 15 Watt, Ian, 175 n. 13 Weinbrot, Howard D., 175 n. 6, 178 n. 36, 183 n. 18, 184 n. 25 Weiner, Andrew D., 173 n. 19 Whigs, 161 Wildermuth, Mark E., 181 n. 20 Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester, 43

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