4 - The Subject of Beachy Head

Summary

The following essay on Charlotte Smith's Beachy Head – her long poem published posthumously in 1807 – forms part of a larger research project on discursive constructions of identity in British Romanticism. To give a frame of reference for my reading of Beachy Head and to put this reading into a context, I should like to delineate briefly and somewhat sketchily what the overall project is all about, what its basic premises and assumptions are and which results my investigations have yielded so far.

The prime objective of the larger project is to trace as accurately and minutely as possible the various ways and processes by which identities are discursively constructed in the Romantic era and to identify their respective inner logic. In this inquiry I work from the assumption that in this concrete phase of Europe an modernization the construction of identities by way of binary oppositions (e.g., I and not-I, Own and Other, man and woman (as biologically defined opposites), ‘nation’ as the result of the exclusion of alterity, occident vs orient etc.) is increasingly transformed into and supplanted by differential discursive practices of identity construction which, similar to differential equations in mathematics, relate differences and changes in such a way that identity is, at best, realized in a series of preliminary and unstable instantiations, as the necessarily variable result of a highly dynamic discursive negotiation.

I have further assumed that it is not by accident that these new differential discursive practices coincide with a decisive phase in the formation of a fully-fledged functionally differentiated modern society, as defined in Niklas Luhmann's System s Theory, because it is exactly the flexibility and open-endedness of these practices that allows the different social sub-system s to operate with variable and fluid identity designs and thereby to avoid the counterproductive and dysfunctional rigidity of identity concepts that are prematurely fixed by ‘substantialist’ parameters or content-defined entities. Differential practices, by contrast, deal not with values but with rates of change; they are quintessentially temporal and operate with Δ – Δ being the shorthand for changes that occur over a span of time.