THE Re:ENLIGHTENMENT PROJECT at New York University and the New York Public Library

“What forms might Enlightenment take now?  The basic premise of The Re:Enlightenment Project is straightforward. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century—the revolution in tools, methods, and institutions that recast inquiry and enterprise in the West—still shapes the ways in which knowledge is produced and disseminated today.  It was from the Enlightenment that we have inherited our modern universities and schools, libraries and galleries, learned societies, journals, academic structures, and procedures. Over two centuries later, however, gradual and sudden changes in technology, finance, and society have put that inheritance and its heirs under pressure—pressure not only to understand those changes but to participate actively in shaping them. The institutions and individuals of The Re:Enlightenment Project have joined together to pursue a historic opportunity: the transformation of our Enlightenment inheritance.

We use the prefix “Re:” to convey our basic strategy for pursuing that goal.  On the one hand, the Project is “about” Enlightenment in that new electronic databases and other archival and research tools are transforming our understanding of what Enlightenment was and how it worked.  On the other hand, that new knowledge of the past speaks back to the present, informing our efforts to ascertain what aspects of Enlightenment we should work to recharge, reconstitute, reform, or reject.

The Re:Enlightenment Project is such an effort, one that assembles something new by reassessing and learning from the old.  Enlightenment emerged in the eighteenth century from then innovative ways of mediating relationships among individuals, groups, and technologies.  These entailed changes in infrastructure, such as the post office and the roads that enabled it, in genres and formats, such as newspapers and magazines, in protocols, such as copyright, and in associational practices, such as the societies and clubs that transformed public and private life.  Our own effort at transformation in the twenty-first century engages current forms and practices with three touchstones in mind.

• Connectivities—In a new “association,” New York University and the New York Public Library have formed the nexus of an alliance of institutions that share a compelling interest in current transformations of knowledge. The Re:Enlightenment Project facilitates that activity by pursuing initiatives that connect investigators in New York City with each other and with colleagues at linked institutions—including Cambridge University and the University of California, Santa Barbara—across the globe

• Past and Present—The feedback loop between Enlightenment and Re:Enlightenment, our new knowledge of the past and how it speaks back to the formation of new knowledge in the present, is a foundational gesture of the Project.  Issues of change are central to the entire undertaking, and that entails strategies for identifying continuities and discontinuities.

• Mediation—Although our individual investments in this concept vary, mediation has repeatedly surfaced as a conceptual touchstone that has helped us to link our research agendas.  In its broadest sense, “mediation” can be understood as shorthand for “media” of every kind—everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in-between.  Different forms and genres, for example, are types of mediation, as is translation, which can also serve as a touchstone.  And, since mediation of some kind is always at work but the forms of mediation differ over time, there is a “history of mediation.”  That history can engage “media history” and “media theory,” but its wide range of objects, forms, technologies, agency, and interactions—and thus its chronological scope—differentiates it from both of those established enterprises. Within such a history, there is space to link the technological and the literary (print-to-digital) to the social and economic (how systems of wealth and knowledge mediate each other).  The point here is not that we all need to use this particular term, but that all of us are actively looking to identify and underline concepts capacious enough to embrace our various undertakings.

Just as the maturing technologies of print enabled new kinds of networks in the past, such as the Republic of Letters, so we seek to take advantage of newly pervasive electronic and communications technologies to connect across not only these geographic boundaries, but institutional and professional ones as well.  Many of us are academics and teachers, but we are also independent scholars and administrators, librarians and foundation officers, business people and artists, publishers and public figures.  Collaborations strengthened by this hybridity will, we hope, put pressure on existing organizations of knowledge and work.

Crucially, however, the primary purpose of the Project is not critique; the dangers of specialization and legitimation crises require alternatives and solutions, not amplification.  The pressure we hope to exert is positive: we seek to take advantage of what could not be done before now.  Thus our initiatives are constructive and opportunistic.  We seek to maximize, that is, the historical good fortune of working together at a moment of new and powerful technological and intellectual mediations—a moment of change unprecedented since the Enlightenment.

New tools, for example, now offer the chance to construct an innovative strategic infrastructure for conferencing and communication—and we have sought to augment our own effort by joining the intellectual and technological resources of NYU and the NYPL.  In similar fashion, our efforts to produce and circulate new knowledge have been enhanced by our UK connections; our membership includes the founders of an innovative startup based at Cambridge, Open Book Publishers, that offers a new model for scholarly publishing at the digital turn.  Our partnering has proceeded on the local, NYU level as well.  A research seminar on “Postcolonialism and Enlightenment” undertaken with the University’s new branch of France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and a working research group on “Technologies of Mediation” in conjunction with NYU’s Humanities Initiative, are already underway.  So, too, is the Financial Literacy Group 2010 whose agenda is to foreground and “read” the genres of economics and finance—the “forms of writing that mediate these topics for various audiences.” 

The Re:Enlightenment Project functions as an umbrella for all of these undertakings.  They are useful both in their own terms and, under the umbrella, as a means for both enhancing our knowledge of the historical Enlightenment and fueling our metacritical inquiry into the possibilities for reconstituting knowledge now. Any change in that sense of possibility, however, will alter, in turn, the initiatives we take.  In that sense, the rubric of “Re:Enlightenment”—in its conceptualization and in action—functions less like an umbrella and more like an organism.  We anticipate that it will grow and adapt, subject to feedback and the constraints of its practice.

DIRECTOR: Clifford Siskin, Henry W. and Alfred A. Berg Professor of English and American Literature, New York University

FOUNDERS: Clifford Siskin and Kevin R. Brine

GRADUATE PROJECT ASSISTANTS: Yohei Igarashi and Seth Rudy