Annual Conference of the German Society for 18th-Century Studies; 9-11 September 2013 (Herzog August Library, Wolfenbüttel)

The annual conference is organised by the German Society for 18th-Century Studies (DGEJ) and Prof. Dr. Birgit Neumann (University of Passau). Abstracts of approxi-mately 200 words should be sent to Birgit.Neumann@uni-passau.de by 1 October 2012.

Presence and Evidence of Unfamiliar Things in 18th-Century Europe

The modernisation processes of the 18th century coincide with the birth of the consumer society (McKendrick et al. 1982; cf. Schrage 2009), whose most important effect is the increased presence of new, unfamiliar, and exotic things in nearly all fields of society – from politics and economics to religion, and art, media and popular culture. Whether from a geographically or temporally distant culture, unfamiliar things are detached from their original context and embedded into new cultural spheres of value and meaning (cf. Frank et al. 2007: 12). Hence, the presence of unfamiliar things dynamically interacts with the formation of new, oftentimes implicit, epistemic constellations. The transfer of unfamiliar, foreign things relies on acts of creative ap-propriation, display, and symbolic presentation, that is, practices of presentification that directly refer to the epistemic excess of the object. The creation of presence must thus be understood as a process of concretisation, often including discursive presentification, which aims at the seemingly immediate creation of evidence and the legitimisation of claims of dominance. Accordingly, the production of presence not only denotes a temporal, but also a spatial relation to the foreign world. Being pre-sent means being tangible, to fascinate through concrete palpability, and these fea-tures enable things to affect human desire and (implicit) knowledge (cf. Gumbrecht 2004: 11). However, according to the prevailing empiricist paradigm the production of presence must not interfere with objective, rational, and unbiased observation.
The conference will examine the strategies and paradoxes of making unfamiliar things present within central cultural fields of the 18th century, exploring the role of unfamiliar things in the production of evidence and in the presence of otherness. How did the presence of unfamiliar things shape dominant orders of knowledge, concepts of identity, and alterity in the 18th century, an age of enlightenment, travel, consumerism, and imperial expansion? Hence, the following specific topics warrant attention and discussion.

(1) The Knowledge of Unfamiliar Things
In the 18th century, things such as books, pictures, scientific instruments, exotica, clothing, chinaware, coins, and medals were privileged media of transfer between cultures, countries, and regions. Intercultural transfer processes are never purely cumulative, but always entail creative acts of signification. The creative appropriation of unfamiliar things yields creative transformations that can be exploited for cultural acts of self-fashioning. Linked to cultural practices and knowledge systems, unfamiliar things are charged with new meaning and turned into visual elements of cultural communication. The presence of unfamiliar things brought about numerous epistemic transformations in the political, economic, epistemological, and aesthetic fields (cf. Scholz 2004: 26). Under what historical, cultural, and medial conditions are unfamiliar things turned into ‘epistemic things’ (Rheinberger 2001) that can convey a sense of evidence? Epistemic things initiate transformations in knowledge systems and sug-gest evidence by way of presence. Evidence, in this respect, is to be understood not merely as a means of epistemological justification, but as a fundamental experience of truth, characterised by a match between the given or concrete and the intended (cf. Husserl 1980: 122). The logic inherent to objects can funnel epistemic associations (cf. Latour 1991) and suggest boundaries between the human and non-human. This functionality should be taken into account when reconstructing the various medial, social, and discursive contexts in which unfamiliar things are employed for the pro-duction of evidence. In this context, forms of the mystic, mysticism, and magic also deserve attention because they ultimately aim at making absent things present or estrange present things.

(2) Media of Presence: Collecting and Exhibiting Unfamiliar Things
The abundance of new material artefacts, in particular objects and souvenirs brought home from trips and imperial travels, required the creation of new orders of things. In this context, practices of collecting and exhibiting played a pivotal role (cf. Clifford 1988; Scholz 2004: 124). Collections by natural scientists, art collections, chambers of marvels, and cabinets of curiosities constituted spaces in which the foreign world was put on display through things considered representative (cf. Laube 2011). While the rationale and motivation for exhibiting things differed between these various spaces of visual display, their groundswell testifies to the desire for evidence, namely the immanent and sensual presence of a foreign world (cf. Fohrmann 2001: 8). Through classification and exhibition, unfamiliar, foreign, and exotic things were inte-grated into new contexts of meaning. Bringing the steady flow of goods to a halt, the ordering and exhibiting of things allow for the determining, confirming, revising, and renewing their meaning in the context of familiar webs of concepts, beliefs, and norms. Which things were displayed in these museums, collections, and cabinets and which orders of knowledge organised their contextualisation and presentation? How did the materiality of unfamiliar things, which clearly exceeds discursive signification, shape the production of evidence? How did the exhibition of unfamiliar, other things bear on concepts of cultural identity and identification? Generally, one can as-sume that the invisible and the immaterial are prerequisites of presence. Thus, what do the ‘visual settings’ (cf. Findlen 1994: 193) make us see? What remains hidden and how does this contraction between the visible and the invisible concur in the pro-duction of presence and evidence? Whether and to what extent do the presence and evidence of things rely on the productivity of the invisible within collections, museums, and cabinets of curiosities?

(3) Subject Constitution, Social Practices, and Unfamiliar Things
Subjectivity and social status in the emerging consumer society were closely tied to the possession and appropriation of things, preferably exotic things of foreign origin. Social positionings, class and gender relations were acted out in and through the world of objects, thus fashioning the subject as a proprietor of things (cf. Scholz 2004). In its tangible presence the thing symbolised wealth, social authority, and taste: By including unfamiliar objects in practices of self-stylisation, forms of social inclusion and exclusion were negotiated (cf. Bosch 2010: 9). The creative display of exotic, unfamiliar or foreign things allowed consuming subjects to demonstrate cul-tural superiority and hierarchical distinction from a metonymically present, yet objectified, foreign world. In what kind of social processes are unfamiliar and exotic things integrated? What meaning do they take on in these performative contexts? How do they support individual and collective acts of self-presentation? The role of things in acts of self-fashioning is complicated by the prevailing empiricist epistemology, which demands a clear-cut distinction of subjectivity from materiality: In the process of adapting unfamiliar things to familiar cultural concepts, the would-be subjects dis-tance themselves from the things and reconstruct them as tokens of their intellectual mastery (cf. Scholz 2004: 35). The self-enchantment of the modern, enlightened subject is challenged by the destabilising effects of the appropriation of things, especially reification, superficiality, and self-marketing. For objects need to be understood less as inanimate things, from which the subject can simply dissociate him-/herself. Rather, things and subjects take shape by virtue of their mutual relations, which are established in and through social practices (cf. Böhme 2006; Bosch 2010). These considerations raise the following questions: What is the formative and functional power of unfamiliar things in acts of cultural self-fashioning? How do concepts of enlightenment bear on the cultural usage of things? An analysis of these issues should take into account gender-specific differences and behavioural codes regard-ing the appropriation of things as well as changing ideals of politeness and sensibility. Again, it is also important to address the inner logic of things itself: How do things model social relations and how do they participate in the production of networks of human and non-human actants (cf. Latour 1991)?

(4) Representations of Unfamiliar Things: Discursivity of Presence and Evidence
Processes of representation and discursivity are essential to transforming unfamiliar things into epistemic things. Representations of unfamiliar, foreign and exotic things necessarily rely on symbolic transformations that can be mobilised for acts of individual and/or collective self-fashioning. Representations of unfamiliar things are there-fore never merely descriptive, but always performative: They are self-affirmative and/or self-reflexive constructions of the seeing, possessing, and interpreting subject. By way of symbolic evaluation, the subject demonstrates cultural authority and de-fines the boundaries between subject and object, human and non-human, self and other (cf. Stewart 1993; Bal 1994). The presence of unfamiliar things is thus intricately related to discursive processes – be it literature, art, or theatre –, which nego-tiate the interrelations between unfamiliar things and familiar orders of knowledge. Yet, as highlighted by Roland Barthes’ (1988) early remarks on the ‘semantics of the object,’ things can never be reduced to their instrumental function because no thing is free from the ‘functional surplus’ of a ‘weak emphasis’. The materiality, “thingness” or “obdurate objecthood” (Daston 2004) of (unfamiliar) things clearly exceeds discursive signification processes. The thingness manifests itself in the ‘realistic insignificance’ (cf. Rancière 2006) of redundant details and in the creation of ever new, iri-descent terms that resist narrative economy – especially the rules of word usage established by the Royal Society. The proliferating invention of inventories reflects the period’s fascination with unfamiliar things and underlines that these things always exceed familiar epistemic constellations. What strategies are used in texts, plays, music, and the visual arts to make unfamiliar things present in a society that was deeply fascinated by visuality and evidence? And how did the fascination with unfa-miliar things organise the relation between otherness and sameness?

(5) Market Orders: The Value of Unfamiliar Things
In the emergent consumer society of the 18th century the value of unfamiliar things depended less on their use value but rather on their exchange value, that is their in-tegration into the dynamics of circulation and their eventual consumption (cf. Bosch 2010: 32). Thus, things served as powerful markers for social orientation and expres-sions of identification. Market-economic procedures of presentification and visualisa-tion, such as the newly developed advertising techniques, as well as creative con-sumer behaviour turned specific goods into desired things of extraordinary value. Hence, analyses of markets and economic systems in the 18th century did not merely factor in the relation between prices, goods, and payments, but also the interests, motives, and consumer behaviour of the economic individual. How did economic mechanisms as well as consumer needs and consumer behaviour determine and make visible the (im)material value of unfamiliar things?
To the extent that trade, commerce, and exchange rationally organise relations be-tween individuals and between various cultures, the market, in the 18th century, be-came a place of social order (cf. Vogl 2010: 45). The market was a site that ideally disciplined self-interest, acquisitive instincts, and greed, integrating these into a so-cial context. Debates about the import of foreign and exotic things thus saw a clash between two diametrically opposed positions: On the one hand, the trade between nations was seen as an instrument to overcome conflicts between trading peoples and as an engine for ‘civilising’ other cultures. On the other hand, the growing de-pendence on foreign things evoked pervasive fears about the corrupting influence of luxuries. Therefore, the following crucial questions deserve attention: How did the exchange of foreign things during the 18th century become a model of a social order between different nations? And how were the various forms of economic exploitation that characterised the 18th century legitimised and made invisible?

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