Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Prologue

P r o l o g u e I began thinking about this book in England in the mid-1990s. In those days my interest in self-conscious literature led me to fairly well defined places. The reflexive play that made writing self-conscious revealed how language worked as a set of constructed meanings and conventions, and self-conscious fiction exposed the operation of narrative: Miguel de Cervantes, Laurence Sterne, and Italo Calvino wrote, for instance, more self-consciously than Samuel Richardson , Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad. But more important, literary theory seemed able to open up almost any text in these reflexive terms. Postcolonial and poststructuralist theory placed self-consciousness on the side of the critic who exposed the true operation of discourse, typically in spite of an author’s attempt to use words as transparently as possible. We were conditioned not to see the conventions of writing, I thought, and any critical method that brought these conventions to light was working against the mainstream habits and history of reading. In the British and European contexts where I first studied theory and philosophy, there was a political aspect to this too; one that combined Marxian strands of social critique, which identified the raising of consciousness with the transformation of imperialist and class society, the theories of Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno, which celebrated antimimetic forms of representation as the aesthetic branch of this undertaking, and post-structuralism as a way to contextualize the whole Enlightenment project of critical transcendence. None of these theoretical frameworks made the journey across the Atlantic with me in quite one piece. When I arrived in the United States in the late 1990s, I began reading eighteenth-century literature more closely than I had done before. Almost immediately, I was struck by the ways much of this literature was self-reflexive in its own terms, not just about representation, but about the material, economic, and colonial contexts of textual production. Reading a little outside the canon of British and American eighteenth-century works, I was quickly convinced that Sterne was much more typical in his habits than courses that began with Daniel Defoe and ended with Jane Austen viii Prologue made him seem. But, if this was the case, and eighteenth-century literature was less invested in transparency and vraisemblance than Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault and Edward Said supposed, was this literature also spared of the charges these theorists laid against it? Could imperialist and elitist literature that announced its ideological operations be held responsible for them in the same way as literature that conducted them more by stealth? Were commercially produced texts that announced their racist or capitalist origins in candid terms also challenging them? Or, most to the point for this study, were texts signposting their reliance on the material world transcending its laws and limitations? As I was asking these questions, I was experiencing late twentieth-century America as a setting more self-conscious than any I’d lived in before. The students I was teaching spoke more knowingly than students in England about the way news stories and movies were produced, about social and political corruption, and about the mechanisms of truth-making generally. Every teenager seemed to understand the way the sports and entertainment industries worked together. And yet most loved spectator sports. They were more comfortable with capitalist society, more engaged with the entertainment industry, and more tolerant of authority than any of the communities of humanities students I’d known elsewhere. Ideology critique as I understood it did not apply easily here, where such high levels of critical knowledge could be woven together with an acceptance of and pleasure in the way things were. Critical understanding of society, such as the kind fostered so effectively in North American humanities departments, did not seem obviously related to changing it. But what configuration, I wanted to ask, made such consciousness compatible with the status quo? When was an acute understanding of representation compatible with its consumption as entertainment? What theory did I have that would help me understand these phenomena? During a decade in which I have lived with one foot planted in Europe and the other in North America, this study has taken shape against 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...