Technology and Culture

Readers seeking information in this book about American manufactories in the early years of the republic will be disappointed to find none beyond a few succinct paragraphs in its introduction. The book is much more about culture than technology.

They will find instead six intriguing literary and art-historical analyses of varied “productions” of art and labor in and around Philadelphia: 1) the city’s Grand Federal Procession of 1788; 2) the autobiography and steamboat history that “poor Johnny Fitch” sealed and deposited in the Library Company in 1792; 3) Charles Willson Peale’s mastodon exhumation and exhibition, 1801–22; 4) the “miscellaneous” magazine Port Folio, 1801–9; 5) Alexander Wilson’s nine volumes of American birds, 1807–14; and 6) the portrait of locksmith-engineer Pat Lyon at the Forge, 1798–1829.

Rigal’s thesis is perhaps startling: she says not merely that these works reflect the culture of that federalist and republican period, but that they, and other such artifacts, when viewed and read, actually constituted—more than did the Constitution itself—the nation: “the extended republic was not merely a species of government; it was a spatial architecture, an extended sphere of visibility, a complex of representational sites outside of (but including) the institutions of government that constituted collectivity through the division, balance, and elevation of power” (pp. 9–10). Or: “Under federalism, no single act alone—not even the craft of authorship—could dominate the innumerable acts of collective self-making that constituted the federal republic by linking individuals, through countless intermediate sites of incorporation, to a phantasmic whole” (p. 23).

Eschewing such more familiar concepts for nation-building as allegiance, patriotism, polity, economy, or common goals, Rigal instead uses terms like “performance of commodity production,” “representation,” “reproduction,” “self-production,” “the arts of spectatorship and self-regard.” She challenges historians to see that “The new republic was not located in the consensus of a ruling elite,” which was anyway ruptured by Federalist and Republican party politics, but that “The federal state was located, instead, in the multiple media, arts, professions and occupations that raised themselves into view by constituting and dividing themselves as the artifacts of representative self-production” (p. 120).

Unfortunately, this vocabulary renders much of her meaning opaque. For instance, by “the expansion and proliferation of an early-industrial commodity market that produced, individuated, organized, and classified persons as things” (p. 122) she is not referring to the slave trade, nor even to the spread of wage labor, but, somehow, to everybody. [End Page 140]

Fortunately, Rigal’s six thought-provoking interpretations of particular “productions” can be profitably read on their own, and are buttressed with notes proving thoroughgoing scholarship. Of the six, the first, with its imagery of the artisanal “exhibitions” in the Grand Federal Procession, best demonstrates her subthesis that “spectatorship”—simply the act of viewing things—was at the heart of nation-building. The metaphor of carpenters framing the “Grand Federal Edifice or The New Roof” and the “Federal Ship Union” became explicit in the parade and in its surrounding ephemeral printed works.

When Rigal uses “frame” and “framework” throughout the book in multiple connotations—in analyzing an artist’s partitioning of his picture plane or the framing of a poem, framed pages of writing on a wall, or the framing of Linnaean classifications of birds for a museum—she means the words to resonate with this metaphor of framing the federal nation. In fact, she relies on this and play with other words like “elevation,” “museum,” “interior,” “mammoth,” “pyramidal,” and “raise” to carry her argument that the early republic functioned as a self-creating “manufactory.”

Such wordplay, though frequently exasperating, has its effect even on the linear-minded reader in inducing simultaneous thought in two or three dimensions. This is an exhilarating, if dizzying, exercise. One may forget to ask whether tools of cultural criticism are in...