In his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin defends the dialectical imperatives of the written text. He cites several instances in which contractual relationships are centered around a written document. He credits his commercial advancement to the "articles," which set forth "every thing to be done by or expected from each partner, so that there was nothing to dispute" (104). In this declaration, Benjamin Franklin glorifies the imperialism of Western print, a process that culminates in the United States Constitution and American Nationalism. The ideological underpinnings of Franklin's perspective derive from the Puritan tradition in New England and the re-Anglicization of the colonies in the mid-18th century.
New England was a print culture from its inception. Alongside disease and Westernized creeds, the Puritans carried with them to "New Israel" an overwhelming conviction in the written word. Puritans objected to the non-scholarly preaching style of the Anglican Church. In their insistence upon an educated clergy, Puritans established the ideological framework for a wealth-based power structure (only the educated could afford schooling) from which marginalized groups would be excluded. Puritans were thus able to defend their imperialistic "errand into the wilderness" in part due to their proficiency at the written, and printed, word. Even as Puritans commodified the goods of the "New World," they commodified language; language became a tool for cultural, economic and religious conquest. White, Western reality was superimposed textually onto a lexically unpolluted landscape.
This Puritanical confidence in the written, printed, text can be detected in such documents as Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682) Jonathan Edwards' Personal Narrative and Anne Bradstreet's Letter to Her Children. Mary Rowlandson's account of captivity is preceded by a male-written forward which frames the narrative and inculcates it with purpose: "It will doubtless be a very acceptable thing to see the way of God with this Gentlewoman . . . thus laid out and portrayed before [the readers'] eyes" (A3). The narrative has instructional and moral value: "Read therefore, Peruse, Ponder, and from hence lay up something from the experience of another" (A4). The narrative is meant to be read, either privately or aloud, with the catechizing effect of religious conformity.
Edwards likewise supports the improving qualities of a written text when he cites Timothy 1:17 as "the first instance that I remember of that sort of inward, sweet delight in God and divine things that I have lived much in since" (59). Only books that "treat" of God are "delightful" to him (60); his reliance on "delightful" texts is only matched by his teleological reaction to nature's beauties. Moreover, Edwards' famous, or perhaps infamous, sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" was printed immediately upon its presentation in Enfield, Connecticut. Of greater significance, Edwards delivered his sermon from a hand-held text. The written word transcended its medium to become the voice of God: it embodied the imperialistic religious justification of Puritan colonization.
Lastly, Anne Bradstreet, more privately, utilized the textual form to persuade her children of their Christian responsibilities. Speaking out of a liminal Chthonian experience—she is nearing death—she exhorts her children "in this you read . . . pick benefits out of it" (240, 245). She has chosen to "compose" since she doubts whether on her death bed she "shall have opportunity to speak" (240). By writing, rather than speaking (although both functions may have been performed), she binds language to a cultural tradition that promotes an aggressive, concrete dialectic as opposed to an aural, fluid one.
This tradition influenced Franklin whose choice of occupation—printer—emulates the societal value placed on written texts in the early Republic, a value that traversed regions, indicating a non-Puritan authority at work. Anglicization impacted the growth of print culture in the colonies. Benjamin Franklin was encouraged, while in his youth, to travel to England to collect "press and types, paper" (46) in order to establish his own printing business. Although the venture fell through, Franklin found work at a "famous printing-house," where he printed the occasional document and involved himself in office politics. He profited by his experience when he later manufactured English forms of type in Philadelphia. As Benjamin Franklin's development as a printer indicates, the colonies looked to England for their aesthetic education, whether in the arts or sciences; thereby they aligned themselves with British imperialistic culture; specifically, the imperialism of British "textualization," that is, the dogma that written communication can adequately reproduce reality
British textualization derives from a tradition that extends back to the Magna Carta. In the continued mythification of Western history, the Magna Carta occupies a central role. In 1215, self-interested barons forced King John to sign a document guaranteeing them certain rights; the term "magna carta" subsequently gained denotation as any document which confers civil liberties. An analogous mythification occurred in America over the Mayflower Compact, its promoters emphasizing its contractual nature while de-emphasizing its English one. What matters is that the thing was written down. While the British judicial system came to be built also upon common law--the development of legal responses through casuistry--the "American Experiment" was to institutionalize a nation under a single written text: the Constitution of the United States.
The paradigmic processes that resulted in the composition of the U.S. Constitution can be traced through the colonial years preceding 1787. Both the Puritan experience and Anglo culture impacted this codification of new and of prevailing laws. Underlying both these traditions is the ontological assumption that a written text signifies reality. Texts are perceived as exact mirrors of human relationships; the interchange of philosophical debates extends to the contractual character of "articles." Texts become covalent participants in an ongoing construction of reality.
Franklin involved himself in such transfers early in his life when he engaged in a written debate with a friend over the education of women: "three or four letters of a side had passed" (25). In this same passage, Franklin relates his father's reproof that Franklin "fell short in elegance of expression" (25) which Franklin then, Alger-like, labored to rectify. Communication through "method" and "perspicacity" are as necessary to the rhetorician as "correct spelling" (25). Concerning his commercial ventures, Franklin credits the explicitness of the "articles" with his success. According to Franklin, forthright and veracious language produces a corresponding reality: amicableness between partners and the avoidance, unwelcome to an incipient capitalist, of "lawsuits and other disagreeable consequences" (105).
This aggrandizement of textual reality culminates in the United States Constitution. American Nationalism is infected from its commencement with the belief in textualization. Transcribed definitions are promoted in opposition to the unwritten experience. As competition between vocalized realities propagates, texts abandon their positivism. Rather than suffer the indignities of a relativistic approach, textual authors take refuge in theory, whereby philosophical and sociological labels are superimposed onto textualized facts. Experienced reality is subrogated to the tautological reality of the written word. As such labeling gains credence, the texts themselves become more and more emblematic until even the symbolic becomes symbolized, resulting in textual "white noise." Texts enter a state of Pauli Repulsion in which meaning can no longer share space with language.
Benjamin Franklin may have anticipated this crisis of lingual recidivism and prototyped a solution that appeared later in the progressive doctrine of reflexivity. Reflexivity demands the continual adaptation of text against experienced reality. The innate formalism of words is undercut by dialoging, a process in which participants are engaged, through questions, in identifying their experiential reactions as insiders. In his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin advances the experiential testimonials of Mr. Abel James and Mr. Benjamin Vaughan as justification for further textual renderings. Throughout his self-exploration, Franklin recommends certain interpersonal skills dependent upon a give-and-take modality. He praises eloquent speechifying, even at the expense of authorial recognition. Lastly, he emphasizes writing as a contract, not only between parties but between the author and consumer, whether the latter is a newspaper reader or a family member.
Imperialistic, Western, patriarchal, Puritan, Anglicized, Christian print culture becomes, for Franklin, a Lorentz transformation, where language, like light, is no longer a barrier between disparate theories of reality. In Franklin's hands, definitive print undergoes syncretism with abstract thought. Franklin argues, "So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything thing one has a mind to do" (43). Whether taken as wit or as serious reflection, Franklin's postulation is clear: in his hands, language is a tool to be wielded at his discretion.
Likewise, under the aegis of reflexivity, the U.S. Constitution, whilst ostensibly classist, racist, Anglo and wedded to the constrictions of written language, can be viewed through the lens of political dialoging. "In the 200 and more years since the US Constitution was drawn up, the text itself has been studied (often superficially)," states historian Paul Johnson in History of the American People, "but the all-important manner in which the thing was done has been neglected" (189). The merit of the text lies in the reflexivity of its creation.
Reflexivity was not absent from the early American experience. The print culture of Antebellum New England, for example, reflects a three-way dialog between a desire for civic improvement, authorial imagination and the printed page—a search for reality, rather than reality itself. Jedidiah Morse and Timothy Dwight, as demonstrated by Joseph Conforti, were searching for one national identity (Imagining New England). Lydia Maria Child, of The American Frugal Housewife, was searching for retrenchment and thrift; she recommends that women "preserve the backs of old letters to write upon" (15). In a literal act of alchemy, the material world and the world of print synergistically merge.
Benjamin Franklin foresaw the use of dialoging and brought it to bear on productions of print, as when he encouraged the growth of clubs to scrutinize and comment on written texts. In the latter-day constructs of deconstructionalism and Post-Modernism, with their banshee-like pillaging of all lingual meaning inter alios, Franklin's mild call for dialoging can be traced. Unlike his ideological progeny, however, Franklin emerges as a man able to handle both the troubled world of semantical relationships and, evidenced by his unfinished Autobiography, resist his own textualization of self. He is a true model for the 21st century, a time when our understanding of the physical realm is rapidly expanding. As we leap-frog from the absolutism of Newtonian laws and the clever disorder of quantum mechanics into the multi-dimensionality of string theory, textualization becomes but one factor in a complex universe of continually enlarging truth. Worlds without end.
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