Joseph Bizup
One hallmark of much recent literary and cultural criticism is its rigorous attention to historical "discourses" and their intersections. Such work typically attributes tremendous creative agency to abstractions such as "culture" and pays little attention to the ways in which discourses are shaped by human cognitive processes. Current developments in cognitive rhetoric, such as the theory of conceptual blending being elaborated by Mark Turner and others, have the potential to remedy this situation. In blending, structures from two or more existing mental spaces are selectively projected into a blended space, which develops its own emergent structure and logic. This theory has been developed largely through the study of literary texts, which Turner treats as a "laboratory" for the investigation of universal human cognitive capacities. My interest in cognitive rhetoric lies in a different yet complementary direction: in its usefulness as a framework for reading specific historical discourses. I illustrate the efficacy of this approach by using it to explain the prohibition against the display of prices at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Several recent critics have treated this prohibition as one facet of the mystification of production in a nascent commodity culture. I argue that it may be understood more specifically as a consequence of an extensive early-nineteenth-century discourse on industrial design centered on the conceptual blend "Art Manufactures" (a term in wide circulation in the years immediately preceding the Exhibition). By tracing the evolution and material effects of this blend, I bring to light influential and heretofore overlooked conceptual patterns in the theoretical underpinnings of the Great Exhibition and thus model one way in which cognitive rhetoric can contribute to historicist study.