They now demand obedience, the return to an authority that has been weakened but never surpassed.The intellectual, for whom the process of reflexivity of selfhood are tools of their trade as much as a typewriter or a pencil, become weary of personal examination and sigh at the self-indulgence that seems to be a byproduct of our therapeutic culture. But for others, for whom obtaining a voice is linked to the possibility for emancipation, for whom the language of emancipation would be an acquisition of incomparable value, desire is no literary convention, but a powerful discovery. It may be excessive to claim that the old order contains nothing that is worth having; certainly I am not a self-hating intellectual who would jettison my recordings of the Well Tempered Clavichord or bum my Proust. But just as it is possible to revel in the introspection, the unabashed self-involvement of the modernists for whom finding their beautiful soul was the protest against an external world in which they could no longer find themselves, so may those who can only see themselves in the glamour of an actress or an athlete finally turn towards their own fantasy of sexuality and power as a prelude to taking it.
ParableIn 18S5, an event, fateful within the history of modern consciousness, occurred. In late August of that year, The New York Sun, one of the first mass, commercial media, published a series of articles on the astronomical discoveries of Sir John Herschel, made at his observatory at the Cape of Good Hope, Southern Africa.The articles were concerned with Herschel's telescopic surveillance of the moon. The first in the series described the telescope in some technological detail. The machine was a hybrid of science and magic: its lense was "24 feet in diameter, and weighed nearly 15,000 pounds after it was polished; its estimated magnifying power was 42,000 times." Herschel, the Sun reported, believed that his instrument would make him a seer amid the unfolding of technical discovery. It would allow him "to study even the entomology of the moon, in case she contained insects upon her surface."'The installments that followed were a temptation in the religion we call "progress." The next in the series provided readers with a look at the lunar surface, and soon.. .at the shady vegetation that reportedly flourished there. Then, encircled by woods, nestled by a valley, the scientist "beheld continuous herds of brown quadrupeds, having all the external characteristics of the bison." 2The articles were the handiwork of Richard Adams Locke, a relation of John Locke, and a star reporter for the Sun. Needless to say, the articles were a hoax. The alleged source for the articles, the Journal of Science from Edinburgh, was -at the 1. Frank M. O'Brien, The Story of The SUN: New York, 18331928 (New York, 1928), p. 43. 2. Ibid., pp. 43-44. SYMPOSIUM ON NARCISSISM / 75time -defunct. Herschel himself continued his works at the Cape of Good Hope, totally ignorant of the stories' appearance. He was a victim of one new development in modern commu...
