Siskin and Warner 2010
Adrian Johns, "The Piratical Enlightenment" (301-320)
in c18, "printing was a local craft, addressing local and regional markets. Its legal, conventional, and moral institutions were local, too. Printed ideas attained ubiquity not only by distribution from major centers, but also by tension and competition between them and a more numerous set of reprinters. The reprinters were relays, if you will, en route between publisher and reader. The more the competition, the greater the ubiquity." (302)
not necessarily pure ideas radiating from Paris, Edinburgh; but mediated texts -- material texts (302)
- "every conceivable kind of knowledge spread across the continent and beyond in this way, through multiple reappropriations, generally unauthorized and often denounced" (303)
- "Cultural dispersion acted as a kind of chain reaction" (303)
- "Cascades of reprints carried ideas across Europe" (303)
- "In consequence, it was perfectly possible -- indeed, probable -- for a given volume to be either legitimate or piratical depending on where a reader happened to encounter it. Piracy was an attribute of the politics of space. So, therefore, was Enlightenment." (303-4)
"most fertile sites of reprinting were places with indistinct borders -- places whose political autonomy was ambiguous" (304) -- e.g. Scotland, Ireland
3 kings of polities with controversial relationship to reprinting:
- centralized monarchies (France)
- colonies (America)
- composite states (Scotland, Ireland, German lands)
printer-publishers worried that reprinting threatened the fidelity of the text; reprinters argued they were spreading its message of public reason further (305)
Naturphilosophie, Romantic merger of nature and self, high idealism
piracy in German states -- some states actively encouraged it
- "Practitioners of Buchernachdruck were not shy about defending their practice. They discomfited their opponents by forthrightly laying claim to the ideals of Enlightenment. Reprinting undercut monopolies; it made knowledge available at lower prices, across wider regions, to more readers. Enlightenment required it. a book was not an 'ideal' thing, but an object of manufacture like any other, so it should be treated the same way." (309) -- ideas like literary property were useless in such ap olitical system