Metaphors of Spatial Storage in Enlightenment Historiography and the Eighteenth-Century ‘Magazine’
In: The Radical Enlightenment in GermanySearch for other papers by Sean Franzel in
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Abstract
This essay compares ideas of spatial storage at work in eighteenth-century periodicals with various spatial metaphors deployed by intellectual historians of the Enlightenment, including by Jonathan Israel with his notion of the ‘package logic’ of radical thinking. As a model of gathering and storing various entities in a single location, the metaphor of the magazine guided important print periodicals and served as a point of orientation for eighteenth-century reflections about the larger print landscape and public sphere. The metaphor of the magazine engages the tension between theoretical design and the practice of knowledge production for it implies the drive toward both order and coherence and heterogeneity and asystematicity.