Lupton 2012
Lupton, Knowing Books (2012)
Prologue
Almost immediately, I was struck by the ways much of this literature was self-reflexive in its own terms, not just about representation, but about the material, economic, and colonial contexts of textual production.
Could imperialist and elitist l ture that announced its ideological operations be held responsible for them in the same way as literature that conducted them more by stealth? Were commercially produced texts that announced their racist or capitalist origins in candid terms also challenging them? Or, most to the point for this study, were texts signposting their reliance on the material world transcending its laws and limitations?
When was an acute understanding of r resentation compatible with its consumption as entertainment? What theory did I have that would help me understand these phenomena?
…an early chapter in the history of the com- patibility of discourse that announces its own operation (socially, materially, economically) with an audience that “gets” and enjoys this candor while also granting power and mystery to the technologies supporting the production of discou…
When I describe this book to people outside English d ments, I say I am interested in the long history of the attitude we have to our laptops and kindles and mobile phones as devices through which we receive
information of which we can be bitingly critical, but in relation to which we routinely entertain the idea that machines have their own opinion, and may even know more about ourselves than we do.
…ule made by a program I hadn’t chosen.” 1These phenomena illustrate some of the moments in which ceding consciousness, and even agency, to an electronic object becomes the modern equivalent of the eighteenth-century attitude to books I set out to describe.
The chapters of Knowing Books refer to the way eighteenth-century texts are written so as to suggest that they have an artificial intelligence of their own: a sentience that emanates from their material form in print and announces itself as a knowledge of the relation between an author, narrator, and audience that belongs to none of these parties.
While these texts are made to seem more like subjects than we might expect, their readers and authors are invited to know themselves as products of a mechanical process, and thus to seem more like the sentient objects they consume.
…it is about the preparedness of people to imagine consciousness in things, and about the literary uptake of this attitude by readers and writers in- vested, at least for the sake of entertainment, in the fictional consciousness of their tools and their powerlessness over th…
“Knowing” underscores my claim that the modern history of being entertained by books and screens is compatible with much higher levels of awareness about repre- sentation than critics of mimetic and realist immersion generally imagine.
Although this is a historical study, focused quite tightly on three decades of the eighteenth century, it also aims to do the conjunctural work of making clear the relevance of these decades to our own.
When authors invent a life for their productions, artificially severing them from the sphere of creative con- trol, they do so, I suggest, under conditions we can recognize, of candid reflec- tion rather than false consciousness.
…the decades on which I focus are ones in which ways of looking at the page emerge as particularly close equivalents to the ways we have of looking at the screen and thinking about digital technology. From a historical perspective, one can show that this is because in the mid-eighteenth century printed books and papers went, in the way screens have in the twenty- first, from being fairly limited educational and institutional devices, to being a prolific form of entertainment, portable, private, and increasingly available, even threatening, in their number and popularity.
The questions that Knowing Books raises, about the literary forms that support the combination of consciousness of, and complicity with, the media, and about the role of literature in encouraging and overcoming our feelings of power- lessness toward technologies of inscription and representation, are ones that I attempt to answer in the eighteenth-century domain. But they are questions that I think of as our own.
Introduction: Giving Power to the Medium
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.
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As an engine of change, literary
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self-consciousness seems to run more slowly once the institution of the mod- ern novel is in place.
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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.
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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, mind- less reading, and ruthlessly profit-driven publishing.
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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 con- sumption of fairly predictable and widely berated literature.
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Pen
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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 liter- ary 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.
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What Keymer calls these writers’ “practical self-consciousness” can also be termed their consciousness of mediation.
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Pen
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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, imagin- ing 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.
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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 some- thing aware of itself in the present.
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Pen
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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.
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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 crit- ics all offer ways to read texts against the grain of their semiotic intenti…
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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.
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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 dis- course.
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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.
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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 ob- jects, and toward models of consciousness expressed in and worked up through writing.
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Like Latour and Gitelman, I believe that the ascription of independence and objectivity to technology must be described as a social process.
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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 tes- tify 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.
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Pen
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The whole tradition of dialectical m ism 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.
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By performing consciousness as the property of the text itself, they use the knowl- edge of mediation to create the reality of media having agency and autonomy.
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Pen
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Put critically, the attitude these self-conscious texts support is one of an early technodeterminism.
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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.
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Applied to books and their readers, this description helps explain how it is that self-conscious books contribute to the perceived autonomy of print me- diation. 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 proces…
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The ability of the reader to recognize herself as the book’s i locutor 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.
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Put differently, while the literature of the eighteenth century is clearly an effect of print cap- italism and technology, its function is much more than one of recording their occurrence.
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Texts referencing the proliferation and power of print c not 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.
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…e 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.
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Some frameworks I have found more helpful in understanding eighteenth- century cases are those developed by media theorists to explain the imagina- tive appeal of media in renouncing control over the things we have made.
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Pen
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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.
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The books in this study can be seen as earlier versions of such quasi- objects.