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 Approaches 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