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
