Constructions of Knowledge and Truth

Adrian Johns describes Pope’s century as “a realm in which printed records were not necessarily authorized or faithful. What could one know in such a realm, and how could one know it?” Other posts have touched on the issue that most struck me: Pope’s elaborate manufacture and stabilization of truth and knowledge, which differs greatly from what I think of as 21C practices of constructing and validating knowledge. One mode of knowledge construction that Johns cites is “contentious argument” versus “straightforward observation,” and in the Dunciad this libelous argumentation becomes “satyrical.”

Argumentation exposes an 18C understanding of knowledge’s inherently contentious nature: it can be made up, it can be revised, it can be insulted out of favor, it can be created through a profusion of footnoted “facts” that ultimately threaten to overwhelm and overwrite the text they footnote. Hacks can hide behind anonymity, and so the “authentic” author must tease out his singular voice for readers to immediately recognize, as well as marshal a considerable amount of historical and literary knowledge whereby, in the act of referencing, his identity can be further validated and fixed. Authors negotiate their own authenticity through public defenses, protections, and debates that, for Pope’s satire, appear mostly as insults. This week I found myself most interested in the construction and status of knowledge and the processes of its stabilization, both in Pope’s text and his time.