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ОглавлениеIntroduction: Giving Power to the Medium
Flat Reflections
In 1766, Evan Lloyd published at his own cost “The Powers of the Pen,” a poem satirizing the mid-century market in literature. Lloyd presents readers mindlessly clamouring after sentimental tales, life histories, novels, and religious writing, and authors egged on by poverty and mercenary booksellers to produce these forms as efficiently as possible. In this energetic world of superfluous literary production, Lloyd describes pens rather than minds generating different kinds of text, imagining as the ultimate piece of hack writer’s equipment a pen so indifferent to content that it can write everything:
Can by the Foot sob, whine and sigh,
Tho’ too polite to make you cry.
Sometimes, so various is this Pen,
’Twill deign to write of common Men;
Will tell the Feats of Tommy Thumb,
As well as those of Fee-fa-fum—
Histories, Novels, Odes, or Tales,
As the fantastic whim prevails.1
Parodying literature as quantitative output, Lloyd damns the mechanical production of writing. Yet what his catalogue of popular forms leaves out is the most typical kind of mid-century writing of all: writing that, like his own poem, reflects critically on the economic and material production of literature. As a participant in the flood of reading matter it describes, Lloyd’s poem belongs to a moment where such reflexivity was so deeply embedded in popular culture that it can be described as a fashionable and technological impulse rather than one of real human outrage.2
There is, of course, nothing particularly new about the claim that eighteenth-century literature commented wryly on the overproduction and mindless consumption of literature. It is well known that Cervantes was enthusiastically read and imitated in England throughout the 1700s, that Swift specialized in ridiculing the efforts of the writers aspiring to popularity and economic success, and that Fielding rose to popularity as a novelist by challenging the new thirst for credible narratives. The success of these writers underscores the now widely accepted view that the eighteenth century’s best-known literary invention, the realist novel, evolved as writers sought ways to trump and belittle older genres and habits of belief and not, as critics once supposed, as an ideal of its own. Michael McKeon describes seventeenth- and eighteenth-century readers exposed to successive versions of truth-telling, each of which dialectically overturns the one that had come before it.3 And J. Paul Hunter documents a market early in the century for ever more innovative examples of sermons, didacticism, and travel literature, arguing that the genesis of the novel at this time can best be understood as a response to the demand for works capturing readers’ imagination through visible kinds of experimentation.4
These studies have laid the basis for understanding the eighteenth century as a period in which fiction was produced through, and productive of, participant awareness—of genre, of epistemology, and even of print. Most literary historians now agree that the period’s newest kinds of novels, magazines, and anthologies announced themselves as novelties through their reflexivity about older kinds of reading and writing.5 Far from being swept up only in ever more convincing imaginative alternative realities, eighteenth-century readers were entertained by the feeling of knowing more than the generations before them about the production of language and the representation of truth. There is, however, a certain slant to this narrative that assumes, if not a teleological development of literature, then at least a process of innovation required to satisfy the demands of savvy readers. Studies emphasizing the constitution of literary genres tend to document the production of new forms through the usurping of older ones.
This perspective applies well to the first four decades of the century, when self-consciousness and formal innovation run closely together. It even works to describe why a certain kind of generic, literary innovation dries up in the middle years of the century. With the exception of Tristram Shandy (1759–67), which can itself be understood as a reflective reiteration of the process of which it announces the end, relatively few mid-century works advance the history of the novel—or of literary novelty. As an engine of change, literary self-consciousness seems to run more slowly once the institution of the modern novel is in place. The market in ephemeral literature, well-established by the 1750s, produced instead a range of predictable products that were greeted for the large part as old hat by their public. All this is true. And yet, this version of literary history does not describe how and why certain kinds of self-consciousness should have exploded in this otherwise imitative literary climate. What has a writer like Lloyd to gain by critiquing the commercial incentives and mechanisms his own poems follow? It is difficult to explain why a writer like Edward Long should caricature the vanity of minor authors like himself in this way: “Having concluded this History to the destined period, I threw down my Pen; and looking steadyfastly at the manuscript before me, began to entertain myself with those self-Applauses, and flattering conceits, which most Authors are sensible of, whilst they survey their new fangled performances.”6 Equally perplexing are the ways that minor novelists in this period represent their frustrated readers, and that pious texts written for profit encourage their readers to scrutinize the practice of penmanship. A special account is needed of why these kinds of writing, produced largely for profit, reflect so closely on their status as paper products, on the marketplace for which they written, and on the misbehaviour and appetites of their authors and readers.
In this respect, mid-eighteenth-century British literature complicates the ways literary critics have previously understood the relation between self-consciousness and literary innovation. While literature did become less exciting on many fronts once the novel was established as a genre, the self-consciousness of texts did not decline as commercially driven and sub-canonical texts took over the mid-century market. On the contrary, if there is one thing characterizing the writing of this period, it is the vivid interest that writers like Lloyd show in representing the phenomena of bad writing, mindless reading, and ruthlessly profit-driven publishing. Clifford Siskin describes eighteenth-century authors “making writing as much an object of inquiry as a means: writing about writing produced more writing in a self-reflexive proliferation.”7 In the mid-century such self-reflexivity is striking and widespread. It is not, however, proof of an author’s originality, literary merit, or class aspiration. The mid-century culture of self-consciousness about literary production and consumption cannot be explained as a laboratory in which norms were challenged or new forms made. Rather, it must be understood as culture in which critical awareness becomes compatible with the production and consumption of fairly predictable and widely berated literature.
Thus Columella, or, the Distressed Anchoret (1779) begins:
The Public is overwhelmed already with books of every kind, but especially with tales and novels; and I begin to think that in time the world, in a literal sense, will not be able to contain the books that shall be written. Nay, a droll friend of mine imagines, that one reason why this terrestrial globe will be destroyed by fire, is, that a general conflagration will more effectively consume the infinite heaps of learned lumber (with which it was foreseen our libraries would be stored after the invention of printing) than any inundation, earthquake or partial volcano whatsoever, could possibly do.8
At first glance, Richard Graves’s humor seems Swiftian in its emphasis on the disturbing, material proliferation of texts. It is tempting to imagine the author of Columella trying to distinguish his own work from the mass of novels on the market, and to produce in Columella’s reader a feeling of conscious distinction. Yet Graves’s satire occurs in a text that seeks no exemption for itself from the conditions of print popularity it describes. Written by a second-rate novelist, this description of literary superfluity illustrates the way that the professional writers, publishers, and booksellers who had been the target of ridicule in Augustan satire became involved in managing the prejudices of the public against the their own profession. In making the posture of critical knowledge collective and compatible with ordinary forms of reading, their style differs from the wit that drives those seeking distinction for their own work. Unlike the Augustan satirists, the authors of most novels, poems, magazine columns, and philosophy tracts of the 1750s, ’60s, and ’70s can’t ridicule earlier literary forms, nor distinguish themselves from current, fashionable ones, because they have not actually surpassed them. Instead, they cultivate a reiterative brand of self-consciousness for their work that points with remarkable candor to the actual conditions and materials of their writing.
This flat style of reflexivity has specific qualities and effects. Most importantly, self-conscious writers at this time are more likely to direct readers to the physical and economic life of pages and print than to the constructions of genre or rhetoric. While mid-century writers tend to treat with a jaded sense of familiarity the novel or the newspaper article as conventions to which they conform, they flaunt with great energy the way these texts are produced and circulated as paper, print, and commodity. In doing so, they call attention not just to the rhetorical nature of language or discourse or genre, but to the material and social reality that supports these conventions: to pages, ink, fonts, imprints, editions, sales figures, booksellers, readers, reviewers, libraries, and to authors’ working conditions, contracts, wages, physical exertion, and exploitation.
Thomas Keymer identifies the most innovative feature shared by novelists in the 1750s as
their tendency to push a literary self-consciousness inherited from Fielding into a more directly practical self-consciousness about the mechanisms and institutions of print-culture; specifically, about the relationship between authorial production and its materialization as a printed object, and about the over-determination of both by the forces of literary commodification, consumer fashion, and regulatory reviewing.9
What Keymer calls these writers’ “practical self-consciousness” can also be termed their consciousness of mediation. Mediation describes, first of all, the material aspects of writing that “form” and “discourse” leave out of literary analysis. While discussions of a text’s self-consciousness have traditionally referred to the way Pope, for instance, deploys the beauty and symmetry of his own couplets in making a case for social order, talking about these couplets’ consciousness of mediation would involve taking account of Pope’s signposting at the level of discourse his poem’s neat physicality as print and paper. When Hume and Beattie direct readers to think about the pages in their hands, or Mackenzie presents his poems as property that may get carried, lost, and reclaimed on a deserted beach, these authors are displaying consciousness of their work’s mediation. Although many texts invoke ink on paper as the primary scene of composition, most references to mediation in the eighteenth century point, as “Powers of the Pen” and Columella illustrate, to the technology of print and the reception of its product. They invite readers to think about the long journey that brings a published text to hand, imagining impressions made by the printer on the page; the way pages are bound, or unbound; and the way books and papers are advertised, consumed, and, in possible futures, surfeited and recycled.
This field of reference makes mediation distinct from materiality, which shows up as soon as a poem references its own constitution in glass or ink or stone, because it extends to the complicated and multifaceted present and future of the text as object. As Lisa Gitelman defines them, media are “socially realized structures of communication.”10 A text that refers to its own mediation therefore represents a process that exceeds the moments in which a text is written and published. Accordingly, a text’s profession to know of its mediation exceeds in scope and outlook the perspective of its author. When played out well, this impossibility can cause the page to quicken with the impression of sentience. Authors, for instance, normally have no sense of how, or even whether, their manuscripts will appear in print, or whether they will be reviewed or bound. They certainly don’t know for certain whether a reader will stop to drink coffee at the eighteenth page of a novel or skip certain passages in search of others, or whether reviewers will hate their work. If I write now asking you to mark this, the sixth page of your book, I must do so before I know myself the page on which these words will appear. For the direction to make sense, it must be inserted once pages are set and paginated in a process over which I have no direct command. Eighteenth-century authors frequently experiment in this way with the fusion of authorial and material control over a text. In doing so, I will argue, they offer a representation of writing as something aware of itself in the present.
The books in this study also tend to explicate the social and economic aspects of their production, circulation, and reception. This, too, is an instance of their referencing mediation. Richard Griffith’s The Triumvirate (1764) includes half a page of dashes, “a hiatus,” the narrator explains, to be “supplied in the second, or third edition, for there is a peculiar nicety in this article, which requires some time to be able to accommodate for public view.”11 A few chapters into the first volume of Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne offers, with a similar view to the future of his text, a dedication to a Lord, declaring that “the above dedication was made for no one Prince, Prelate, Pope, or Potentate … nor has it been hawk’d about, or offered publickly or privately, directly or indirectly, to any one person or personage, great or small; but is honestly a true Virgin-Dedication untried on, upon any soul living.” In the next passages, Tristram declares that his dedication is up for sale to anyone it suits, ranks its merit in terms of “composition,” “coloring,” and “design,” and commands any interested customer to pay to Mr. Dodsley, Sterne’s actual bookseller, the price of the dedication. Once the money is received, Tristram promises, “in the next edition care shall be taken that this chapter be expunged and your Lordship’s titles, distinctions, arms and good actions, be placed at the front of the preceding chapter.”12 Like invocations of the here-and-now of the page, descriptions of the economic process of publication and circulation shore up the effect of a book being conscious of the material form it takes in the present and will take in multiple editions in the future.
In exposing their material and economic basis, books make themselves visible as what Latour might describe as “quasi-objects,” things “much more social, much more fabricated, much more collective than the “hard” parts of nature.”13 Yet books that reference this social aspect of their objective being do so from a newly “hardened” perspective because they stake a claim to register experiences that no author or publisher could have anticipated for them. In many cases, this involves eighteenth-century authors using nonhuman perspectives from which to describe writing as a human technology, a field of economic concern, and a social practice. The Adventures of a Quire of Paper (1779), published as a series of newspaper columns, capaciously documents from the perspective of printed pages the production of cloth and paper, as well as the temper of hack writers willing to compose almost anything that will fill this paper for profit, and the way ephemeral publications are read. The question raised by my title, of what books know, is answered generally by the claim that texts written to the future in this way appear to know their own mediation. By definition, they expose their social and economic life and their material basis. Yet, because the representation of such processes involves electrifying loops of self-reference, the knowledge of mediation also becomes a strangely anti-human cause, entertaining because of the way in which it seems to make paper cleverer than people.
Thinking About Mediation
There are several ways to explain historically why people began to think about mediation (as opposed, for instance, to communication or materiality) in the eighteenth century. One factor is that it was at this time that books emerged as objects of entertainment, distinct from the didactic and religious messages they carried.14 In this form they began to travel through post offices, circulating libraries, and bookshops, and to show a propensity to get lost or rearranged, as well as to overcome distances. Deidre Shauna Lynch, recording what can be described as the way writers dwelt on mediation, describes “how enthusiastic eighteenth-century novelists were about the portability enabling written words to be conveyanced from book to book and about the materiality rendering those words collectibles that novelist-collectors might arrange as they pleased.”15 By the mid-eighteenth century, the commercial properties of literature were also evident to readers, writers, and professionals in general. Booksellers become conspicuously rich, bringing print sharply into focus as a technology producing objects of economic value and opportunity.16 Under these conditions, readers were more likely to see print as able to intervene in and contribute to the message it was carrying. John Guillory’s work on the concept of mediation describes eighteenth-century readers and writers thinking in these terms. Earlier, he argues, tools of communication such as ink and voice and paint were viewed primarily in terms of the thoughts or images they conveyed. In contrast, mediation “directs our attention first to the material and formal qualities of different kinds of cultural expression and only second to the object of representation.”17 By this account, mediation, though not limited to print, became visible at the time when print and its dissemination was on the rise.18
Guillory is relatively unusual in his emphasis on mediation as something that eighteenth-century writers thought about actively. Most critics working with the concept in recent years have claimed it as part of their method of looking at the past, assuming media to be visible in retrospect rather than to the original users of a medium. This is in keeping with the tradition of late twentieth-century literary critics’ practice of foregrounding inscription as a tool used unknowingly by earlier writers. Derrida achieved his prominence as a theorist in connection with the claims that writing is always inaugural of new meaning; that meaning can never precede writing; and that a slippage of will at the point of inscription is inevitable.19 These claims were never meant to furnish historical observations about the way literary producers handled language in the past, or to describe concepts that writers themselves manipulated. Rather, they were to inaugurate a new way of looking at history from beyond the perspective of its human actors and intentions.
More recently, post-structuralism has given way to an emphasis on material culture that puts technologies and their objects, rather than people and ideas, at the forefront of literary investigations. Book history has introduced print production as a determinant of subjectivity and ideology, reversing the idea of books being at the service of the ideas they contain.20 Paula McDowell’s The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678–1730 (1998) and Janine Barchas’s Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (2003) both exemplify the rewards of recovering the material aspects of eighteenth-century print communication as distinct from the ideological ones. This involves focusing on print, circulation, and the oral culture of the street in McDowell’s case, and on the frontispieces, title pages, and indexes of mid-century novels in Barchas’s. Their studies show that even texts and particular editions that seem of little interest from a narrative or generic perspective can be used to reconstruct the ways print and its associated activities of production and marketing shaped the lives of those involved in them.21
In a related vein, many recent studies of the eighteenth century have drawn on the rubric of thing theory to refashion the claim that human history might best be told from the perspective of nonhuman actors. Critics including Bill Brown, Alfred Gell, and Arjun Appadurai have built a theoretical matrix in which to think creatively about the way meaning accrues to “things.”22 Webb Keane, offering a compelling anthropological justification for making things the object of social inquiry, argues that they constitute an alternative to linguistic systems of meaning making. In the case of chairs or coats, he argues, “it is not simply that their meanings are undetermined, but also that their semiotic orientation is, in part, toward unrealized futures.”23 Things open up new versions of history that are by definition impossible to narrate as cognitive operations or intentions. For Gell, this claim comes to rest on the work of art, whose visual properties facilitate connections and meanings that language and cognition preclude.24 Such approaches shed new light on a set of correspondences, affinities, and accidents that animate material objects through forces distinct from the market.25
These theories approach mediation, broadly conceived, as something critics highlight in texts and their contexts. Post-structuralism, book history, and material cultural studies as they are currently practiced by literary critics all offer ways to read texts against the grain of their semiotic intentions. Book historians focus on the recovery of paper, print, and paste, making it possible to include as objects of study texts that are of little interest from a literary perspective. For instance, the cases that attract the attention of McDowell and Barchas are only coincidentally texts where authors are themselves concerned with the topic of printing or book presentation: although intersections become clear at some places in their studies, neither McDowell nor Barchas uses discursive analysis to focus explicitly on the affinity of a given narrative with its graphic or physical incarnation.26 While their studies encourage us to see more accurately the way eighteenth-century readers, authors, and printers were shaped by the words they printed, bought, and sold, they relax the literary critic’s traditional hold on the knack of certain kinds of language to index its own operation. Literary critics focusing on material culture frequently do the same. When books are used to illustrate the growth of material things and processes, the engagement of texts with the development of material culture is understood as an auxiliary reflection of the way technical progress, globalization, and print capitalism gave rise to new kinds of objects and materials.
As a result, the history of mediation as it is currently being told often comes across as being the result of our theoretical orientation. The history we recover appears only coincidentally recorded in texts themselves, and not as a phenomenon that was apparent to the writers and readers caught up in its development. In some cases, mediation has been used to explain the thematic preoccupations of writers and readers from a more sociological perspective. Siskin’s and William Warner’s collaboration This Is Enlightenment (2010) makes the bold move of describing the Enlightenment as a “media event”—a point in history at which the transmission of ideas overwhelms and reshapes the essential nature of those ideas. Their productive rubric opens up innovative ways to think about the historical ebb and flow of content in terms of media, capaciously defined here as a set of institutions, genres, and their associated protocols that help pinpoint better than any ideological tendency the specific character of Enlightenment knowledge and communication.27
But while Siskin and Warner are keenly attuned to the importance of public engagement with these institutions, they show no particular investment in privileging the texts that were thematically occupied with their own situation within this mediated setting. As well as discouraging any approach that consults closely the meaning of texts, this approach leaves unasked the phenomenological question of what happens when mediation registers in discourse. Are the texts that have something to say about print and its proliferation different kinds of objects from those that simply employ print to get their message across? Do texts that talk about mediation move along more quickly in or absent themselves from its history? In order to answer these kinds of questions as literary critics, we need to continue to read closely and describe texts that cultivate discursively the impression of understanding their own mediation.
Dialectical Approaches to Consciousness
By focusing my discussion of mediation on such texts, I take what may seem to be an older orientation, away from the new history of technologies and objects, and toward models of consciousness expressed in and worked up through writing. At the most basic level, the subject of this book is the human, rather than the technological, force behind texts displaying consciousness of their own production and circulation. Like Latour and Gitelman, I believe that the ascription of independence and objectivity to technology must be described as a social process. In the realm of literary criticism, I agree with Catherine Gallagher, who describes the eighteenth-century effect of books belonging to nobody as a “rhetoric of dispossession,” and with Sandra MacPherson, who documents an uncoupling of responsibility from agency and voluntarism that occurs in the imaginative realm of the eighteenth-century novel.28 In keeping with these projects, this book contributes indirectly to the argument that people do in fact control the technologies they use. More directly, it focuses on the way texts can disavow this fact by making print media appear beyond human control. Although Knowing Books has at its horizon the ideal of human agency, its subject is a form of literary self-consciousness that has helped to conceal this horizon. Mid-eighteenth-century texts perform through their consciousness of mediation a version of reflexivity that refutes its origins in the human imagination. From the perspective of book or cultural history, these texts testify to a technology-centered history of print capitalism (think, for instance, of the evidence Lloyd’s poem might provide of a culture overwhelmed with new forms of literature). With close reading, however, their apparent concern with the ability of print to overtake thought can be reclaimed as belonging to the realm of wilful human construction and imagination.
If the consciousness of mediation does not simply describe technological occurrences or promote literary distinction or human control, what does it do? The chapters to follow maintain the complexity of this question by showing the very different effects of mid-century experiments in working up a book’s literal self-consciousness. Chapter 1 documents the way narrative journeys teach readers to think of themselves as powerless to shape the novels they consume, and Chapter 2 carries through by showing how it-narratives perform the trick of usurping their authors as the producers of stories. Chapter 3 suggests that philosophy texts pointing to the paper on which they were printed have the double effect of making the world appear more malleable and more objectively given. In Chapter 4, sermons referencing their own production as handwriting fashion an authenticity for their writtenness in spite of their appearance in print; and in Chapter 5, texts modeling themselves on graffiti encourage readers to imagine writing left to find its own way in the world, cut off from its author’s intentions. These different reasons for making a book appear conscious of its mediation share, however, one effect, which is to support the idea of print having autonomy from and power over its message.
This observation goes against the grain of the most successful critical precedents for thinking about self-consciousness, both at the level of a society, and as something modeled in and encouraged by literature. Histories of the novel, as I have already suggested, tend to present generic self-consciousness as generative of change. In the realms of philosophy and social science there is also a long tradition of philosophers answering the question of what self-consciousness does by suggesting that it alters the conditions of which it makes people either individually or collectively aware. For Hegel, philosophers transform a historical situation by bringing consciousness to it. In this process, the spirit of self-knowledge becomes its own end and reality, confirming the self as the source of all objective conditions.29 Marx turns this argument around to claim that consciousness has it origins in everyday life and in practical transformation, situating the self as the product of these objective conditions. But both descriptions of history insist on consciousness being central to a process of radical development. The whole tradition of dialectical materialism can be understood as a description of understanding entering into the dynamics of capitalism, overcoming commodification and alienation as forms of false consciousness that conceal the realities of labor. “Value,” argues Marx, “transforms every product of labour into a hieroglyphic.” But in the reality of class society and in relation to its modes of production “men try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of their own social product.”30 That process of revealing the way things are made signals the reorganization of a system dependent on the obfuscation of these truths.
The most direct analysis of the transformative role of consciousness in history comes from Georg Lukács, who describes the consciousness of the proletariat of their own class situation as the aim of socialist revolution. In order to achieve class consciousness, he argues, the proletariat must overcome through collective action the forms of false consciousness that class society puts in their way. Namely, they must overcome the illusion of individual psychological reality, as well as a “class conditioned unconsciousness of their own socio-historical and economic condition,” in order to comprehend their place in history.31 This positive emphasis on class consciousness helps define the spirit of Marxist literary criticism in the twentieth century. Brecht and his followers argue that an audience conscious of the theater as a medium will realize their power to shape the world beyond the theater. The compatibility of early twentieth-century literary formalism with Marxist poetics also rests on the idea of it being progressive to grasp literature’s function as a specific mediation of reality.32 John Frow describes a politics of reading that would “account for the culturally determined vraisemblance by which the conventions determining the reception of the work are naturalized” and concludes that “the full social dimensions of the literary sign can only be restored through a deliberate reconstruction of these conventions.”33
These practical claims for the role of consciousness-raising are rarely cited by critics of eighteenth-century literature today, yet they continue to provide the frameworks within which scholars approach self-conscious literature from the past. The most detailed account of the way in which authors participate in the communication networks of eighteenth-century print, Christopher Flint’s The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (2011) illustrates this orientation. Flint provides evidence for why language remains in the eighteenth-century the most fascinating medium of all, able to reflect in profound and detailed ways on its own existence. Focusing on a wide range of canonical and sub-canonical eighteenth-century fiction, Flint offers a history of novelists preoccupied with the possibility of controlling and directing print through references to authorship and experiments in controlling how it appears on the page. His basic tenet is that authors want to own their creations: “in eighteenth-century fiction, the author’s deliberate reference to the reading matter in the consumer’s hand could seem a self-promoting form of de-authorization that, however paradoxically, asserted the writer’s proprietary interest in the material.”34 Thus, although Flint acknowledges the paradox involved in this effect of de-authorization, he remains loyal in his study to the logic that by raising the profile of their own professional and material undertakings, authors try to control them. Underlying his work is the assumption that by making economic conditions visible, writers attempt, to use Marx’s terms, to unscramble the “hieroglyphic” that commodification has made of their words.
Flint’s work exemplifies the prevailing idea that an author who makes visible the marketing of literature works against its commercial operation. But he is not the only one to seize on authors who represent the production of literature as feisty protagonists in the story of its commercialization.35 Laurence Sterne has been consistently celebrated as an outlier in the competition for popularity, an eccentric whose reflexivity defines his resistance to the demands of his own society on authors. However well grounded this assumption is in social theory, it does not work easily in relation to the bulk of eighteenth-century writing, where the paradox Flint describes, of de-authorization being a central conceit in the battle for literary ownership, still needs to be explained. Marxian models of self-consciousness create this paradox by ignoring the possibility that writers elucidating the way literature is made might also conform to a market in entertainment. Before Marx and Brecht and Hegel, it was this proposition that many eighteenth-century writers explored as they made words referencing the operation of print media the most fashionable commodities of all.
I have introduced this as a phenomenon to be explained in human rather than technological terms. But the fact is that the imaginative efforts of mid-eighteenth-century writers did have material effects: books whose primary mode is to expose the way the media work as human constructions do, in some sense, achieve a life of their own that makes them attractive as objects. By performing consciousness as the property of the text itself, they use the knowledge of mediation to create the reality of media having agency and autonomy. This is evident in some of the examples already mentioned. It-narratives, for instance, typically satirize the way writing is made and handled for economic gain—one of the stories they tell most often is that of the writer forced to write faddish fiction for a living.36 In this capacity, it-narratives disarm themselves of the power to appear as mere windows on the world, mysteriously cut off in their perspective from human needs and efforts. Instead, their authors cultivate the power to entertain readers with the trite consciousness of the paper objects in their hand. As The Adventures of a Quire of Paper concludes by announcing to its fictional reader, “I was found just as some of My kind was required to print the very sermon you hold in your hand,” the magazine in which it was published appears to light up with self-knowledge (3:452). A text referencing its origins in human labor and design ends up appearing possessed of an artificial intelligence that puts it one cognitive step ahead of the processes it represents. This makes the characters who try to imprint and profit from paper into objects of ridicule in a form of entertainment that exceeds human management: the story’s reflexive turn to the reader transforms consumers of paper into spectators of their own behavior.
Put critically, the attitude these self-conscious texts support is one of an early technodeterminism. The willingness of self-conscious novelists to liken reading to the experience of being held captive in a coach, or Hume and Beattie to imagine their books moving unseen around their rooms, or Mackenzie to represent his own publications haunted by their longevity as paper relics, are literary manifestations of what Lukács will describe as the “structure of consciousness” common to the factory worker who obeys his machine and the technologist who treats the profitable application of science to technology as inevitable.37 Eighteenth-century texts that appear programmed to register their own existence conspire with an attitude Frankfurt School critics have associated with later stages of modernity. Knowing books anticipate for their readers feelings of resignation that Adorno and Horkheimer attribute to twentieth-century audiences as the
mythical scientific respect of peoples for the given reality, which they themselves constantly create, (which) finally becomes itself a positive fact, a fortress before which even the revolutionary imagination feels shamed as utopianism, and degenerates to a compliant trust in the objective tendency of history.38
This analysis can be applied to the poems of Henry Mackenzie, the subject of Chapter 5. These sentimental poems are almost empty of content; they consist, rather, of elaborate frame narratives describing the aleatory conditions of their own circulation and reception. Although there are readers in the world Mackenzie imagines for his poems, they are lone figures connected by texts whose writers are long dead. In their authors’ wake, these texts inherit a post-apocalyptic landscape where they are driven as objects through a world void of human volition, passed from the hands of one sentimental survivor to the next. Mackenzie’s poems are remarkably detailed about the kinds of contingency haunting creative attempts to achieve posterity. They document the lives of papers lost at sea, used for gun wadding and to lift hot kettles from the stove, and handed forlornly between editors. At their best, they anticipate what Susan Stewart describes as the ability of the book to appear as its own object, turning the makers of both the electric toaster and Finnegans Wake equally into “absent and invisible fictions.”39
In reality, however, the printed magazines and collections Mackenzie edited and in which he published his work did not circulate as misguided attempts at posterity: they were highly managed productions, successfully contrived to meet and shape the demands of a newly constituted Scottish reading public. Their pages could only qualify as part of a narrative about the material autonomy of print by obscuring the degree to which Mackenzie found journalism a sphere of personal control and empowerment. It is nevertheless possible, in line with Horkheimer and Adorno’s observation that the “mythical scientific respect of peoples for the given reality … finally becomes itself a positive fact,” to claim that Mackenzie’s poems are animated by the circuits of self-reference that imagine writing’s conquest over its author’s life and intentions. This is not because a poem that tells us it is floating, rudderless, on the currents of the material world automatically becomes such an object. It is because books that refer to themselves as books become circuits open to what Hegel defines as the “recognition” by one self-conscious being of another. A book that announces it is a book involves an author recognizing a reader who is conscious of reading a book.
Many of the self-conscious novels published in the 1750s use this strategy to develop the category of the self-conscious novel reader. They belong to a strand of eighteenth-century quixotic fiction, popularized in England by Fielding, with a characterized narrator and direct line of address to the reader, which seems to encourage the reader’s participation in an openly created world. As we will see, however, these novels establish a complicated relationship with their reader, not unlike the one Hegel imagines in his master-slave narrative, where self-consciousness becomes a struggle for power. The upshot of the dialectic Hegel describes in the case of two self-conscious minds is that
Each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself; and each is for itself, and for the other, an immediate being on its own account, which at the same time is only through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.40
Applied to books and their readers, this description helps explain how it is that self-conscious books contribute to the perceived autonomy of print mediation. The recognition of the reader, which shows up in the consciousness modeled by the book of its own mediation, and of the reader’s categories of understanding, qualifies the book to perform as a partner in what is by rights a human process.
In these terms, Mackenzie’s poems claim a life of their own because their performance as documents conscious of mediation qualifies them to recognize the self-conscious, sentimental reader, and to recognize this reader through their frame narratives. It is because of this recognition, and not simply because they describe themselves as having a life independent of this reader, that they promote the existence of their autonomous status as print and paper. In other words, the scenarios Mackenzie imagines for print-mediation in his texts, which represent the culpability of poems as material objects that stray from their authors, can be understood as self-fulfilling—but the fiction of papers visible beyond the orbit of human intention equates roughly, not smoothly, with the objective reality in which papers can be described as having a material life of their own.
Similarly, although the first really self-conscious novels after Fielding confirm their readers as knowing participants in convention, they typically reclaim these conditions of knowledge as ones that belong, incredibly, to the book itself. The ability of the reader to recognize herself as the book’s interlocutor casts her as a known entity, part of a process to which she is subject. Texts achieve this effect by acknowledging the medium with which they work as porous to human interaction while also making this recognition something that elevates print to a position of control over the moment of its reception. Under these conditions, the ability to register interaction becomes the ironic hallmark of the medium that can pretend command of its own existence. Like Mackenzie’s poetry, texts illustrate the imaginative effort involved in creating the effect of the medium having an autonomous existence. Put differently, while the literature of the eighteenth century is clearly an effect of print capitalism and technology, its function is much more than one of recording their occurrence. Through its field of reference, this literature profits from a human willingness to perceive objects, and to perceive media in particular, as being beyond human control.
From Marx to Media Theory
I have drawn in the spirit of this argument on the strong tradition of Marxian critics, from Lukács and Horkheimer and Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Axel Honneth, critiquing the tendency to ascribe objectivity to history and technology; to assume a passive relationship to its unfolding. Jameson, for instance, has always distanced himself as a Marxian critic from a particular brand of technological determinism. Critiquing historians of media, he argues:
nothing is further from Marxism than the stress on invention and technique as the primary cause of historical change. Indeed, it seems to me that such theories (of the kind which regard the steam engine to have been the cause of the industrial revolution …) function as a substitute for Marxist historiography in the way they offer a feeling of completeness comparable to economic subject matter, at the same time that they dispense with any consideration of the human factors of classes and of the social organization of production.41
The efforts of eighteenth-century writers to imagine print as more powerful than they are reinforce Jameson’s point about this way of thinking as a teleological error. Texts referencing the proliferation and power of print cannot simply be read as evidence of these facts. In Jameson’s terms, to do so is to overlook the social and class-based conditions of a book’s existence. This means, however, that a book that turns reflexively to these conditions qualifies as part of the human struggle to claim ownership of them. While I am entirely sympathetic to this possibility, I have discovered in the course of writing this book that theories placing literature on the side of Marxist historiography, and against technodeterminism, do not quite capture the phenomenon that makes mid-eighteenth-century texts operative as knowing objects.
Some frameworks I have found more helpful in understanding eighteenth-century cases are those developed by media theorists to explain the imaginative appeal of media in renouncing control over the things we have made. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, for instance, describe the simultaneous awareness and forgetting that modern audiences experience through what they term “remediation,” a process that calls one medium to mind as a human construction while insinuating another as the purely technological venue for this reminder.42 This framework offers one way to describe how books representing aspects of writing, such as manuscript production or the economic struggles of authors, accomplish a certain invisibility for themselves as human productions. Gitelman’s description of the development of a twentieth-century “tendency to naturalize or essentialize media—in short, to cede to them a history that is more powerfully theirs than ours” also turns out to be relevant to an earlier period.43 Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (2006), focuses on the phonograph and the worldwide web at their inaugural moments because, Gitelman argues, it is when a medium is new that it is negotiated and contested, thereby providing a site for the “the ongoing and vernacular experience of representation as such.”44 Once people are won over to a new medium, they accept its authority as an instrument for the collection and storage of data, and this initial moment of consciousness about representation dies down into discussions of content that, regardless of tone, grant authority to the medium. This analysis is helpful in pinpointing what is happening in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, where the culture of self-consciousness worked-up through literary production targets the means, rather than the content, of print representation, but quickly helps characterize these means as unavoidable.
In a different vein, I have found inspiration in Bruno Latour’s insistence on the false distinction between nature and society, subject and object. For Latour, the human tendency to attribute objectivity to certain phenomena while defining others as purely social characterizes all modern, social scientific enterprise. With forms of critique and indignation premised on the idea of nature and society falsely encroaching on each other, he argues that we are impeded in recognizing the quasi-objects that are in fact constitutive of our existence, entities that have a life of their own although they originate in the social, or that rely on collective human practice even though they originate in objective reality. Latour includes as such objects IBM, the laws of gravity, global warming, and the computer. These things are our own doing and yet they feed, though our own desire to separate the natural from the social, either into our experience of a world that is beyond our control, or into our belief in there being a purely social dimension. In this separation, their quasi-objectivity is lost to us.
The books in this study can be seen as earlier versions of such quasi-objects. Discursive constructions that loom over their readers and authors as evidence of print and its circulation being outside their control, material objects compromised in their autonomy by the discourses to which they refer and on which they rely for their existence, their being makes it inappropriate to describe them either as social constructions or as autonomous objects. As paper and print, they do have a physical constitution, but this life is not nearly so distinct from their intentionality as their authors would have us believe. Lloyd’s “Powers of the Pen,” which bemoans the way inscription technology drives modern literary production, is typical of the literary climate we must describe. Rather than taking Lloyd’s description of literary production at face value, the challenge is to consider the way the poem projects forward a wry understanding of itself as printed product, thereby helping to create the sovereignty for writing, and the disenfranchisement of the writer, of which it appears most critical.
