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

Reviewed by Jordan Wingate

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Published: September 12, 2013

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In the mid-18th century, prose began to replace poetry as the most popular form of literary expression in the Western world. Drawing on the metaphysical claims of Newtonian science and the King James Bible’s faith in the translatability of Truth, the Enlightenment witnessed the development of a theory of literary realism which asserted that language and writing could objectively capture and transmit information about the observable world – the assertion, in other words, that “art” could copy life without distorting it. Accordingly, and as scholarship has generally suggested, we should then expect that Enlightenment realists assumed that books and words faithfully transferred knowledge between individuals. Christina Lupton’s Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain, is, among other things, a refutation of that traditional story. In it, Lupton argues that “knowing books” – books that display “awareness” of their own materiality and historical situation – evince an awareness on their authors’ and printers’ part of the inherent subjectivity of all expression.

In Knowing Books – part of the University of Pennsylvania’s “Material Texts” series – Lupton persuasively makes the case that British writers, printers, and readers of the 1750s-1780s were indeed aware of the crucial role of print technology in shaping knowledge, a point which, she suggests, 19th- and 20th-century scholarship has mostly failed to notice. In her analysis, many examples from all types of publications – novels, sermons, philosophical treatises, magazines – during the period display a sharp “consciousness of [their] mediation” as material objects; that is, writers built into the books (consciously or unconsciously) an “awareness” that they could be torn, unbound, rebound, or used for entirely non-literary purposes. By displaying their panoramic knowledge of “the relation between an author, narrator, and audience” and of the general constructedness of printed materials, “knowing books” kept their paper and ink in their readers’ view, like the glare on the painted canvas reminding us, lest we forget, that art is something other than life. As Lupton notes on her website, “awareness of the artifices of language and the materiality of representation are in fact central to the politics of reason [of the period] time” – and, we might add, central to what has been so often termed our own “postmodern reflexivity.”

Lupton’s attention to writing’s “consciousness of [its own] mediation” (as opposed to a consciousness of its “materiality”) takes cues from William Warner’s and Clifford Siskin’s recent thesis that the Enlightenment was a “media event,” or “an event in the history of mediation” of knowledge (This is Enlightenment, 2010). “Knowledge” here is used broadly, rendered not only in physical media, but inflected by “everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in between” one knower and another (the “everything” that happens to and changes knowledge in this intervening process is called “mediation”).

Indeed, the cover of Knowing Books presents an image, not of a book, but of 18th-century windowpane with still-legible graffiti etched upon it (extant to this day at the Museum of London Archaeology). In Lupton’s analysis, wall murals and stained glass windows, perhaps England’s most prevalent forms of writing through the end 16th century, were profoundly influential in the developing 18th-century attitudes toward the printed page. As with windows used as the “page” on which to scribble writings to be read by passers-by, Lupton argues that authors and readers saw the printed page as a necessarily public medium – that is, a medium that could not be delivered exclusively toward a particular readership or viewership. (Lupton points out that the “found text” is a trope of early sentimental fiction, demonstrating authors’ awareness of the “accidental” ways that readers found writing).

The question naturally arises: did print media revolutionize writers’ understandings of what writing could do, or change the way readers read and viewed the world? The “suspension of disbelief,” Coleridge’s famous coinage in the 1817 Biographia Literaria, is perhaps the exemplary formulation of our willingness to forget the glare on the canvas, to forget the thing-ness of art, to forget that art is not simply life put otherwise or elsewhere. But what happens when the canvas lurches back into view? One line of argument offered by Karl Marx (1818-83), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), and more recently Bruno Latour (b. 1947) stresses the “revolutionary” implications for a society that becomes aware of the historical and material contingencies of its own artistic or economic productions. For example, when Labor is alerted to the “alienating” conditions under which it serves Capital, Marx claims, political revolution will follow.

Knowing Books, to the contrary, ultimately returns a negative answer to the question posed at the top of the previous paragraph. Aware that their works were indeed mediated by the “demands” of the printed, material object, 18th-century authors were revolutionized in neither their politics nor their epistemology (the study and theorization of knowledge and knowing). In Lupton’s words,

The mid-century culture of self-consciousness about literary consumption and production cannot be explained as a laboratory in which norms were challenged or new forms made. Rather, it must be understood as a culture in which critical awareness becomes compatible with the production and consumption of fairly predictable and widely berated literature.

And yet this is not to say that this18th-century “consciousness of mediation” did not bleed into Enlightenment philosophical discourse. At least since John Locke’s tabula rasa – the “blank slate” of the infant mind – Western metaphysicians had turned to writing for metaphors of knowledge. As Lupton shows in her discussion of David Hume and his “commonsense” opponent James Beattie, there was an increasing sense of contradictory philosophical claims. Crucial of both Hume’s and Beattie’s arguments, Lupton points out, is that both perceive publication as “an uncontrollable process,” mediated in multiple, often unseen ways. Indeed, Lupton argues that 18th century authors viewed their various publications not as “direct act[s] of communication” but rather “material evidence of the way…[material texts] could not be controlled.”

While Bruno Latour has argued that the advent of a meta-awareness of technologies such as print marks the birth of “modernity,” Knowing Books argues persuasively otherwise. Lupton’s Enlightenment, like Siskin’s and Warner’s, is one in which writers knew of the inextricability of message and mediation, and wrote accordingly. For those who read the windowpanes, the sun’s glare emphasized 18th-century writing’s consciousness of its own materially “situated and vulnerable” presentation to readers. If this awareness was not enough to set its conservative age off on a new trajectory, neither would England have long to wait for Coleridge. Lupton’s powerful monograph will provide book historians and literary scholars with new ways and motivations to read the page without losing sight of the paper in front of them.

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