the backdrop of the questions I asked as I arrived in New Jersey. And even as the project has grown much narrower in its depth, I have continued to think of it in its broadest conception as an early chapter in the history of the compatibility 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 discourse. When I describe this book to people outside English departments, 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. I give the example of “Freedom,” the Internet blocking program that sets a computer to deny its user online access for a certain amount of time, and of the Wikileaks website celebrated for making the process of government more transparent while simultaneously baffling audiences with the technological wonder of making classified diplomatic cables visible to the world. I cite Derrida describing the word processing function that tells him his paragraphs are too long, and using this reminder to bring his thoughts to a close. There is something liberating, he claims, about “submitting…to an arbitrary rule made by a program I hadn’t chosen.”1 These 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.
Talking about the eighteenth century’s fashionably “self-conscious” texts raises the question of where the consciousness named in this book’s title really resides. 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. My examples demonstrate a wide variety of discursive tricks used in the 1750s, ’60s, and ’70s to create texts that appear cognizant of how they are made. They include writers using language to project their texts’ physical form as print, paper, and commodity, and to make texts appear able to register their physical origins, movement, and arrival in a reader’s hand. Novels are managed by metafictional narrators who suggest their residence inside books by ordering readers not to fold down or fall asleep over their pages, or insisting that they turn over a page in order to see the color of the book’s binding or a musical score glued inside chapters.2 Magazine columns ventriloquize the voice of paper and pens, deploying narrators like the sermon that speaks to its reader of the material on which it is printed, or the published graffiti that anticipates its own discovery as tragic artifact.3 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.
In none of these cases do words or the objects allowing them to be written actually come to life. As I understand it, inanimate objects cannot be self-conscious. This should perhaps go without saying. Yet, because we now live in a world where objects so convincingly model intelligence, and in which so many approaches to cultural and literary history explore the ways things, systems, and environments serve as a nexuses of nonhuman consciousness, it is worth stating at the outset that this project is not about artificial life or intelligence, nor about any simple belief on the part of eighteenth-century readers in these phenomena. It is not even about the life of the nascent commodities that appear in the thriving international marketplace of the eighteenth century. Rather, it is about the preparedness of people to imagine consciousness in things, and about the literary uptake of this attitude by readers and writers invested, at least for the sake of entertainment, in the fictional consciousness of their tools and their powerlessness over them. In this context, the “knowing” of my title refers as much to the knowledge eighteenth-century readers had of the making of books (and sermons and newspapers) as it does to the knowledge these books professed of their own constitution and their readers. “Knowing” underscores my claim that the modern history of being entertained by books and screens is compatible with much higher levels of awareness about representation than critics of mimetic and realist immersion generally imagine. In this sense I challenge the idea that entertainment has historically been focused on making alternative worlds seem as believable as possible. But the term “knowing” also points to the suggestion developed throughout this study, that knowing how representation works can support the entertaining illusion of books and games and films knowing more than we do.
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. Current terms for thinking about objects, and about media, qualify us to understand the possibility that eighteenth-century audiences simultaneously parodied and dissected the print medium and granted it new kinds of power. Their attitude toward technologies is akin to the one Bruno Latour appeals to in his twentieth-century readers when he claims that we, more than earlier generations, have “digested, integrated, and perhaps socialized” technologies and are therefore capable of looking squarely at their causes without either absolute optimism or despair.4 Latour may be wrong to assume that we are the first to look at technologies in these sanguine terms, but he is quite right to foreground a view of technology that is both knowing and accepting, and to see this legacy of modernity as more important than the attitudes that either decry technology as the antithesis of the humanism, or celebrate it as our salvation.
The following chapters suggest that the attitude Latour describes as our own also characterizes the 1750s, ’60s, and ’70s. When authors invent a life for their productions, artificially severing them from the sphere of creative control, they do so, I suggest, under conditions we can recognize, of candid reflection rather than false consciousness. In making this claim, is not my intention to exclude other ways of thinking about the eighteenth century’s foreignness, nor to suggest that studies of later periods might not be used to demonstrate similar kinds of affinity. Yet 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. I am less concerned, however, with describing these changes causally than with exploring the reflexive, literary forms that emerge once a new way of reproducing and disseminating language is widely recognized and accepted.
This study marks its own origins in the twenty-first century by beginning fairly quickly with the assumption that acceptance of a new medium can coexist with a high level of critical consciousness about its presence. 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 powerlessness 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.
I have felt this very clearly while finishing this book, during a snowy winter in London that has brought human movement of all kinds to a halt, but has only emphasized the apparent ability of words to move of their own accord. In the city where sermons and graffiti and papers and windows were once constructed as sentient things by the people who wrote for and about them, digital text and images now appear to traverse spaces we cannot; to speak about their own and our constitution; to say the things authors would not dare; to appear in ways individual writers could never have anticipated. The British Library is abuzz with excitement about technologies for representing and retrieving words that dwarf in potential the content of what has been written. My hope for this project is that it will help to give this buzz a history; not a history of writing as a technology, but a history more human and more disquieting than that, of our imaging ourselves in the thrall of the things we have written.
Knowing Books