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
