Knowing Books. Christina Lupton
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