Knowing Books by Lupton Christina;

Author:Lupton, Christina;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Sermons Written on the Screen of Print

Remediation and the Trial of Dr. Dodd

As the last chapter suggested, one of the things that has made paper visible in the twenty-first century is what Derrida calls its “withdrawal” from the scenes of writing and reading.1 In place of the reality of paper, we are left, Derrida argues, with its figurative legacy. His point coincides with the case made more empirically by media theorists for the way the book and the letter “withdraw” from our lives but remain visible through remediation as newly conspicuous signs of writing, fundamental to our understanding the digital interface in terms of “mail,” “pages,” “fonts,” etc. This chapter and the next take up these insights as they explore the way remediation made people more conscious of how writing was made in the eighteenth century. Specifically, I describe two inscription technologies, manuscript and graffiti, participating in making printed texts both more and less visible in their manufacture and circulation. These next two chapters come back along different routes to the question raised in the introduction, of how a text that announces its own human and material constitution can also stimulate the idea of media autonomy. Why should a text that makes the origins of writing in human labor its subject also help suggest that media are irreducible to human agency and intention? Theorists of remediation can be usefully concrete in their answer to this question, for the phenomenon they describe involves by definition both clarification and obfuscation of technology as a historical and social process. Remediated technologies appear on pages and screens in ways that make them appear newly available as content, but they also contribute to the ongoing mystification of the medium that is being used to represent them in this way.

As a description of the way representation works, remediation can also suggest a misleadingly impersonal process; one in which the development of media provides its users with inevitable, objectively determined glimpses of the technological process. This approach sidelines the possibility that such glimpses can be staged to provide certain effects, and motivated by local concerns, rather than the overarching desirability that each new medium appear natural. The eighteenth-century campaigns in this chapter and the next draw attention to the handmade-ness of texts for specific reasons, and with conservative effects. In this chapter, for instance, the point of making readers aware of writing is that it helps suggest the integrity of a cleric and distract attention from the real conditions of print publication. The consciousness of mediation in this setting is not just an effect of technology, but part of an ideological project in which the visibility of writing is enlisted to suggest that even texts without authors can have writers, and then to graph this suggestion wilfully onto the surface of the printed page.

With this process in mind, I turn to a cluster of publications from 1777 that appeared as coverage of the trial of William Dodd, a clergyman famously hanged that year for forgery. Dodd was a well-known figure in London before his crime and execution.

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