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…