Eighteenth-Century Figures in Twenty-First Century Media Theory

• In Event: Theatres of Truth: Against Interpretive Hegemonies

Abstract

Some argue that “today, [the eighteenth-century world of] theatrical representation is yielding to [a social media world of] pornographic exhibition,” in which information and attention circulate unmoored from any aspiration to “public, critical consciousness.” Through a focus on the character of Mrs. Candor in Sheridan’s School for Scandal (1777), I demonstrate how the eighteenth-century theatrum mundi in fact sought to dramatize and contain something quite like this perceived threat of “pornographic exhibition.” Eighteenth-century political and moral thought often celebrated the virtue of candor, here meaning not so much the forthright self-presentation today associated with the term but rather a generous reluctance to find fault when forming a judgment. Perhaps just as often, however, the same period also often satirized the follies and dangers of excessive candor. As distinct from Voltaire’s Candide and other instances of this trope, Mrs. Candor personifies a particular critical image of such candid generosity. Rather than a mere dupe, or even a straightforward hypocrite, characters like Mrs. Candor are closer to eighteenth-century parallels of the twenty-first century figure of the mindless social media user: compulsively driven to recirculate and remediate without ever stopping to think and judge for themselves. Appreciating the role such figures played in the eighteenth century calls for a revised analysis of where we are today. On this account, the key political theoretical problem posed by social media is less a waning of the capacity for judgment, and more the limited frames through which we apprehend the interrelations of human thought and attention with media recirculation. Rather than representing an ideal we have lost, Sheridan’s Mrs. Candor represents a dangerously limited mode of analysis not yet overcome.

Author

• Nathan Gies, Towson University