Indexical Grids and the Construction of Identity in Wilde’s The Importa

The Victorian Google Indexical Grids and the Construction of Identity in Wildes The impressiveness of seriousThis paper considers the indexical grid, those texts such as the railway snip table, the army list, or the postal directory upon which the Victorians depended to manage the proliferation of information in the nineteenth century even as we use internet search engines such as Google today. Then as now the indexical grid surpassed its utile function as simply a means of locating a persons address or confirming a fact. It basically altered the subjects relative to the organization of knowledge, and, in so doing, provided possibilities for new modes of identity formation. This paper takes Wildes The Importance of Being Earnest as its case in point in order to betoken for the productive function of the indexical grid, its capacity to disinter the subject from its entire rootedness in history, even while invoking history as the condition of this ersatz model of subjectivity. In the ultramodern world of information, it concludes, hotshot discovers the truth of ones being not in the experiential process far-famed by the bildungsroman, but in the depthless alphabetical arrangements of the archive.Foucaults The Order of Things describes the modern episteme as resulting from the breakdown of the taxonomic imperatives of Classicism. The exemplary form of such imperatives was the scientific table, the mathematical function of which was to link things together through external resemblances and differences that effaced their relation to history in such an order, the sequence of chronologies merely scanned the prior and more than fundamental lieu of a table which presented all possibilities in build (218). By the nineteent... ...d in the equal way, as Derrida notes, is no longer lived the same way. Archivable meaning is also and in advance codeteremined by the structure that memorial (18). The effect of this structure is not to arrest Jack within the sp ace of order, but to affirm his identity an effect of its productive potential. In a world in which subjectivity seems more often to reside on the surfaces of an index card than in the deep recesses of the self, the truth, as Algy says, is rarely virgin and simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature, a complete impossibilityWorks CitedDerrida, Jacques. Archive Fever A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago U ofChicago P, 1996Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. crude YorkVintage, 1973.Wilde, Oscar. The Importance f Being Earnest.