Techno-Magism: Media, Mediation, and the Cut of Romanticism

By Orrin N. C. Wang

Shortlisted, Marilyn Gaull Book Award

Techno-Magism explores how British Romantic literature abuts and is organized around both print and non-print media. The book explores not only the print, pictorial art, and theater of early nineteenth-century England and Europe but also communicative technologies invented after the British Romantic period, such as photography, film, video, and digital screens. This proleptic abutting points to one way we can understand the implicit exceptionality wagered by reading Romanticism through media studies and media theory.

Techno-Magism argues that both media studies and the concept of mediation in general can benefit from a more robust confrontation with, or recovery of, the arguments of deconstruction, an unavoidable consequence of thinking about the relationship between Romanticism and media. The book thinks that relationship through the catachrestic practice of a techno-magism, a technics of inscription always outside the causalities of a dialectical economy. The book further pursues two interrelated ideas: the structural incommensurability of the cut and the unapologetic presentism of the constellation. Marked by its late capitalist moment of composition, the book explores the continuity between the social character of Romantic and post-Romantic media, in terms of commodity culture, revolution, and the ecological devastation of the anthropocene.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Jan 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9780823298495

Orrin N. C. Wang

Orrin N. C. Wang is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) and Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), which won the 2011 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize, and editor of “Frankenstein” in Theory: A Critical Anatomy (Bloomsbury, 2021). He is the General Editor of Romantic Circles and recipient of the 2020 Keats-Shelley Association of America Distinguished Scholar Award.

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Introduction

Techno-Magism: Media, Mediation, and the Cut of Romanticism explores how British Romantic literature abuts against and is organized around a topos of both print and nonprint media. These themes and motifs involve not only the print, pictorial art, and theater of early nineteenth-century England and Europe but also communicative technologies invented after the British Romantic period, either during the Victorian age or sometime during the twentieth century, such as photography, film, video, and digital screens. The awareness in Techno-Magism of this proleptic abutting points to one way we can understand the implicit exceptionality wagered by reading Romanticism through media studies and media theory.

What follows elaborates the implications of this historical positioning of Romanticism in media studies, one that then goes beyond, as Romanticism always does, whatever historical ground is assumed by that role. I then expand on the proposition of Romanticism’s exceptionality for media studies by foregrounding the aporetic qualities of any Romantic understanding of a term also necessary for an approach to media, mediation. In a word, both that concept and the idea of media studies in general can benefit from a more robust confrontation with, or recovery of, the arguments of deconstruction, a consequence I found unavoidable when thinking about the relationship between Romanticism and media in the essays collected here. Expanding on this premise, the Introduction considers how much of this book coalesces around the idea of techno-magism as well as another principle further organizing its essays, the cut. This involves first engaging with John Guillory’s account of the media concept and then considering a key scene from James Whale’s 1931 film adaption of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. I conclude with some final observations about the shape and character of this collection, coalescing around the ideas of techno-magism and the cut, as well as a third also organizing these essays, the constellation.

Pre-, Proto-, and Avant la Lettre

In Clifford Siskin and William Warner’s influential argument, the Enlightenment is itself synonymous with a new understanding of what media means, with Romanticism then simply a more compressed and intense bandwidth of forces starting earlier in the eighteenth century.¹ As compelling as that claim might be, Techno-Magism actively wonders whether the convergence of Romantic and media studies constitutes a distinct event. We can start this inquiry by lingering over Romanticism’s position as that social and cultural portion of the nineteenth century that immediately exists before such mediums as film, photography, and the typewriter. And we can elaborate this moment in terms of a story about disciplinary fields, one whose purchase is precisely what the work of Siskin and Warner and others studying the media culture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and before disrupt. I refer to how, for quite some time, and perhaps still even now, one can recount and expect others to understand the following: that before the end of the nineteenth century, which means until Romanticism, there was the book and thus book history; and then starting with the late nineteenth century, after Romanticism, advanced forms of media technology explode and media studies begins.²

This is a crude formulation, certainly, but any qualification one might like to make about it—and there are many—depends nevertheless on the basic intelligibility of its claim. Romanticism is the site of a pivot where something changes with regard to the history and theory of media. That dyad is important because how that pivot occurs is itself an opening for further thought. Most immediately, the explanation might be historical in the way that Friedrich Kittler once argued that the emergence of the phonograph, typewriter, and film signaled a change in modernity’s episteme in some fundamental way. Kittler’s place in current media studies is of course a complicated one, but this early argument is still pertinent for our concerns about Romanticism and media, insofar as the historical question following this paradigm would then be, how much did the earlier nineteenth century—the Romantic period—in print or beyond print anticipate the mediatized episteme of the end of that century, as well as the twentieth century’s and ours?

Andrew Burkett gets at something like this when he perspicaciously notes how the Romantics were the last generation of English writers and artists not to be photographed.³ This material fact lends a particularly intense, historical force to the question of the Romantic culture abutting against a later century informed by new technologies such as the photograph and gramophone. If Kittler’s 1800/1900 insists on stressing the epistemological break between the beginning and end of that century, we might wonder if other material and intellectual genealogies of the Romantic period exist, ones in which the pivot is not as clearly defined as Kittler might like, where one can see that break already happening in Romanticism or the long eighteenth century.⁴

The situation, however, is more complicated than that, as my initial observation about the Romantic pivot was also explicitly disciplinary. It was also about how, if media studies attaches itself to the end of the nineteenth century and beyond, and book studies begins before that, we are not simply talking about the past but our present modes of knowing and being that then view the past. To even note the difference between media studies and book history is to accede in some way to how the study of one is different from the other—to how, then, approaching books as media will inflect their examination in a changed way. For one thing, studying media inevitably means theorizing media. One can theorize the book, but, whether by degree or kind, that is not quite the same as theorizing media. How media studies involves media theory while the study of the book goes by book history speaks to the disciplinary distinction I’m signaling here. Understanding further how that distinction until recently enables a linear intellectual history—we study the history of the book until the end of Romanticism and then we study media and media theory—gets at both the pertinent status of Romanticism in this history as well as the larger conceptual issues behind that history. It makes the pivot of Romanticism toward media studies, like media studies itself, not simply a historical but also a theoretical question.

When Celeste Langan and Maureen McLane cannily argue for the convergence of Romantic and media studies by noting how late eighteenth-century English print culture reflexively emerges by narrativizing the transformation of nonurban oral culture into print literature, they’re accomplishing something aside from making a historical argument—though it is certainly that, one that resonates in its own way with the claims for the historical exceptionality of a Romanticism bookended by this transformation and by the explosion of media forms that follows during the Victorian era.⁵ They are also theorizing media as an event, practice, or encounter that either exists with or subsumes the history of the book during the Romantic period. They are reconceptualizing Romanticism through media theory, which is to say that the explanation for Romanticism as a pivot between book history and media studies is not only historical but also theoretical.

Even more radical is the possibility that the cause of this pivot might not be primarily historical but instead theoretical, in that evidence for this pivot, for the place of Romanticism as this change, might not be found simply in Romantic history but in a Romantic topos of theory exceeding the historical, anticipating and perhaps even grounding the concerns of contemporary media theory. Unmoored from any reified anchoring in their period history, Romanticism’s texts—like Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel, say—might explain contemporary media theory because of their prior existence, avant la lettre, as that theory, or theoretical practice.⁶ From a number of different angles the essays in Techno Magism are guided by the provocation of this claim.

The assertion sounds excessively ambitious, though perhaps not so much to those familiar with a Romanticism defined by an exorbitance synonymous with theory’s disciplinary study in the humanities (as Theory with a capital T) that some argue reaches its apotheosis at the end of the last century. I would also note that this claim never quite leaves the historical behind. For if one can historicize theory, one also theorizes history—its possibility and what kind of history one is arguing for in the first place. And whether one is arguing for history or theory or both, one is also contending over the nature of that argument—how much it should be historical or theoretical.

Foucault called this evidentiary bifurcation the predicament of the empirico-transcendental doublet, a condition he believed the end of man as well as his own categories of historicist thought would resolve.⁷ Yet any Romanticist worth their salt will recognize this doublet, the volatile relation between history and theory, as one stubbornly, perhaps obsessively, organizing their field of study since the Cold War in a manner unlike any other literary period’s, including the eighteenth century’s and the Victorian era’s.⁸ To say then explicitly what I’ve implied so far: A similarly intense, reflexive sense of this relation of the historical-empirical and theoretical-transcendental also structures media studies. This is not to say that both fields do not have their own attempts to resolve this dichotomy—in media studies, the Foucauldian inspired notion of media archaeology immediately comes to mind. Yet it is to suggest how much the tension between history and theory still underwrites—and, for some, might energize—both fields. This metadisciplinary correspondence by itself speaks to another way that Romantic and media studies could be drawn productively together. The essays in Techno-Magism explore in a number of different ways, some perhaps contradictory, the consequences and possibilities of this mutual envelopment.

We can elaborate this shared attraction even more pointedly, in a way that once again realizes Romanticism as both a historical identity and a theoretical event. To theorize media means theorizing what media does. It means encountering the question of media as that which carries out the act of mediation, a nonlocal condition beyond the historical parameters of any one technical medium or object, a term that is unintelligible without either Romanticism’s history or topos.

Media, Mediation, Figure

Inaugurating the first issue of Media Theory, W. J. T. Mitchell suggested that there are two basic ways of positioning—or, more precisely, of pre-positioning—media: ‘in’ and ‘through.’⁹ Succinctly, Mitchell demonstrates why media must be theorized—why, as the prepositional enactment of media, mediation invites an approach that goes beyond the historical particularity of each media artifact. Mediation mediates the betweenness that inevitably arises out of the positional occurrence of either in or through, a dynamic that is not simply historical insofar as the choice between the historical and the transhistorical rests on investigating the regulatory meanings of being in or going through history in the first place. In the same manner that Althusser argues that ideology has no history, one might say the same of these terms.¹⁰ Media theory, then, theorizes in a noticeably disjunctive manner not only the particular operations of the media object, but also mediation as an overarching term for what occurs always, in, through, and beyond.

Siskin and Warner claim that mediating sense of betweenness for their own reading of media-as-Enlightenment (6). The essays in Techno-Magism, however, examine how a number of Romantic texts tackle this issue through a metaconceptual vocabulary long associated with the Romantic topos. I specifically refer to how Romanticism has long been studied (in an almost hoary manner) as the dilemma of what resides separately in the mind and then in nature, and how Romanticism as a less than fifty-year historical identity also models the equally vehement problem of historical periodization, of what lies between one era, period, age, or century, and another.¹¹ Romanticism thus defines its own reflexive nature as inevitably about mediation-as-an-event: the historical predicament of Romanticism as historical mediation, where it is stalked equally by its belated nature to the early modern period and antiquity and by its role as the harbinger of modernity, and the philosophical dilemma it tries to resolve or mediate, the relation between mind and nature. If Romantic literature is littered with figures that enact various forms of media and mediation, especially those that come after it, that is because of its own awareness of the two problems—mediating the past and future and mediating the mind and world—that comes to occupy its writings and other cultural creations.

Schematically, we might say that Romanticism has extensively been read, studied, and taught as the question of what exists in the mind as opposed to in nature, and as the question of what exactly history goes through (revolution, empire, or industrialization, for example) for historical change to occur. Romanticism mediates the difference between mind and world; it also mediates historical difference.¹² Other literary fields contain authors and texts equally invested in these questions, of course. But few seem so compulsively shaped by these scholarly-critical fixations as Romanticism. Indeed, getting a fix on Romanticism often means obsessing over one or both of these two predicaments. If, as I have suggested elsewhere, Romanticism is distinguished by the metacritical question of its own legitimation (Romantic, 17), the archive of its study is equally notable for the number of works that respond to that question through these two concerns.

The essays in Techno-Magism are no exceptions, though each hopefully does so with alertness to the conceptual implications of these two inquiries, now envisioned through the language of specific media and the question of mediation. Indeed, noting the historical and theoretical particularity of Romanticism as the pivot between the book and media studies is itself the latest iteration of Romanticism as a necessary index of historical difference—as the philosophical, artistic, or political (self-) representation of a rupture that ushers in modernity. That this sense of a historical break—of history as this break—can be traced back to reflexively periodizing works like Hazlitt’s 1825 The Spirit of the Age simply reinforces the braiding of Romanticism and media studies as the mediation of historical difference that supports many of the studies in this present book.

With regard to the old chestnut of Romanticism as the mediation of mind (or imagination) and nature, Techno-Magism reflects on this dynamic in ways that most explicitly speak to current preoccupations in the humanities. I refer to the contemporary topos for which previous critical and literary language about Nature can be considered a placeholder: thinking through the ecological and social devastation of the anthropocene as well as arguing for what has been dubbed the New Materialism in all its permutations, including Object Oriented Ontology. Insofar as proponents of the New Materialism want to rid us of the distinction between mind and nature, of toppling the existential sovereignty of the subject over the object, or internal, human mental ideation over an outer nonhuman realm, they are engaging with Romanticism, which through the writings of Kant and others has been routinely perceived (and criticized) for installing the subject-object divide as the primal scene of our philosophic modernity.

Techno-Magism complicates this scenario in two ways. First, it questions the viability of any object qua object that willfully ignores its existence within the commodity form and its heteronomous relation to exchange value. Second, it resists calls to erase the subject-object divide not to rescue the subject but to insist on the primordial notion of a divide, break, or split—différance, if you will—that inflects the radical notion of figure bequeathed to us by deconstructive thought.

With regard to the first formulation, if the critique of the commodity form necessarily refers us to Marx, Techno-Magism assumes its Marx to be in continuity with the Romantic works it studies, which in many cases convey how intensely the problem of commodity reification characterized late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century life. Much of my previous work has dwelt on juxtaposing how Romanticism and Marxism each negotiate the question of commodification’s relation to other notions of historical narrativization, first and foremost the possibility of radical historical change, or revolution. Techno-Magism continues this trajectory, using its own critiques of New Materialism and its language of commodification and revolution to formulate the uneven imbrication of Romantic and Marxist attempts to mediate both mind and nature and historical difference.

Several of the essays in this present collection also conceptually deploy another coordinate, one that grimly reworks the question of scale already informing our parallax view, as Žižek put its, of commodification and revolution.¹³ I mean the world-ending question of the effects of the anthropocene that increasingly informs everything we think and do, and don’t do. Certainly that is the implicit truth of the academic labor in the humanities, and Techno-Magism is no different, with several of its essays engaging with this new forbidding horizon in an explicit manner.

To question, however, the newness of this horizon, as well understanding exactly what world-ending might mean—to understand our contemporary task not as world-making, for example—involves a critical attention consciously underwritten by the braiding of Romanticism with Marxism but also, as vigorously, with deconstructive thought.¹⁴ This is another premise of Techno-Magism, one that finds its works quite comfortably operating within the zone of aporias and radical indeterminacies that is the legacy of theory as Theory from the last century, one prominently caught up in deconstruction’s own allegories of Romanticism. It also speaks to the second way that Techno-Magism demurs from New Materialist desires to do away with the subject and object divide and to realize in some radically pure, immanent form only the latter side of that dyad.

This does not mean investing in something like Badiou’s project to understand how a new political subject might materialize during our times, though the catachrestic undertones of that emergence does resonate with the critical impulses of this book.¹⁵ I refer instead to how over forty years ago Derridean écriture and de Manian allegory (very much enabled, as any Romanticist might assert, through readings of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century texts) reworked the subject/object split into a radical problem of language emphatically delinked from (subjective) consciousness as the origin of linguistic meaning. Far from either accessing the object or recovering the subject, then, Techno-Magism more pointedly stresses the impossibility of erasing the divide between subject and object, or the divide between anything else, as the staging of a structural incommensurability that repudiates the seamlessly transparent ontology of any identity, immanent or transcendent. Moreover, in the wake of deconstruction’s understanding of this predicament as a fundamentally linguistic one, Techno-Magism understands that staging as the far-reaching operation of figure.¹⁶ Both these interlocking moves—attending to this radical division or cut, and to its consequences as figural ones—inform Techno-Magism.

As an overarching theoretical disposition, a deconstructive awareness of figure means understanding the in and between pre-positioning of media as not simply phenomenal quandaries, but more exactingly as tropes—not hopelessly beholden to such categories as time and space but aboriginally inciting them. The aporias and complexities of such categories speak then to the intransigent nature of figure rather than to any facile notion of sweeping figure away once we become aware of its existence. Troping in as what Derrida terms the prosthetic of the inside both enables us to understand media as a storage system even as it also aggressively resists the promise of some media to externalize all knowledge, to make the real transparently visible and identifiable in some nonspeculative, absolute manner.¹⁷ Conversely, exteriorization as the ubiquity of the prosthetic—the supplementary tool, the script, the screen—is equally something that a deconstructive approach figures, or insists upon—the troping of trope, as it were.

This is a through line of Techno-Magism, where from a number of angles its essays test the axiom that mediation is not about overcoming or sublating the tropic pre-positioning of in, through, or between, but rather about exploring the implications of their catachrestic asymmetries in Romanticism’s works.¹⁸ The tropic drift of such asymmetries also characterizes one way that Techno-Magism understands how the works it studies might constitute a prehistory abutting technologies not invented until later in the century, and centuries after that. If such pre- or protohistories have any viability, they must necessarily reflect how much their figures slide imprecisely from one to another, where, for instance, the creature’s spying on the De Laceys in Shelley’s Frankenstein can be allegorized as both theatrical and screen viewing at the same time.

The status of the Romantic topos as exactly that, rather than as a reified set of straightforward, stadial genealogies leading to the invention of this or that technical device, enhances how and when this tropic drift occurs, and the essays in Techno-Magism are characterized by seizing such occasions opportunistically to empower its own conceptualizing heft. Conversely, such drift does have its own profile, as conflicted and doubled as it may be, with the works in this book concentrating on how various intellectual histories and an ever rapidly emerging capitalist modernity articulate that shape. That this concatenation of social and philosophical nodal points—from the Coleridge-like transformation in Eisenstein’s editing philosophy to the always, ever on character of capital saturating the televisual, gothic Lebenswelt of Wordsworth—might emit a logic at once surprising, uncanny, and compelling is one wager spurring on all the essays in this book.

This dynamic intermixing of social shaping and tropic drift explains why none of the essays turns to one methodological concept prominent in media studies at the start of the century, Jay David Bolter’s and Richard Grusin’s notion of remediation.¹⁹ Insofar as that idea assumes one historically stable medium whose readily identifiable practices and procedures then reappear (changed and constant) in another, the figural volatility inherent in the way that Romanticism addresses its pre-positioning techné of in and through makes remediation a limited notion, if not a conceptual redundancy. At the same time the instinct in Techno-Magism, proleptic and otherwise, has been to recognize traits of certain media not simply or even in any technical ideal notion of a medium but in the accelerating social relations of capitalist modernity, captured in all their unevenness in the period writings of Romanticism itself.

One might assume from such a description that the twin vocabularies of Marxist and deconstructive thought mobilized here—of commodification, revolution, figure, and the cut—converge consistently in a mutually clarifying manner. To the contrary, following my previous work, Techno-Magism is energized as much by the volatile nature of their relationship as the echoes and family resemblances between them. If this book insists on the continuing relevance of these two great modes of critique, much of that adamancy is based on a commitment to search out the generative nature of that theoretical precariousness, cathected here in the entangled relations among media, mediation, and Romanticism.

That said, the theoretical probings in Techno-Magism do bear the historical moment of their writing, the second decade of this millennium, where it seems self-evident to me how much thought and planetary existence labors under the horizon of the latest phase of late capitalism, oligarchic or plutocratic capital. My analyses of commodification, revolution, and the anthropocene all explicitly allude to this fact. The deconstructive character of many of these essays, its delineation of the incommensurate, incalculable, and the inevitable force of figuration, often confronts as directly its inscription within this horizon. If there is a way that this present collection does not dissolve into the occasionalism that Carl Schmitt criticizes Romanticism for embodying, the awareness of this horizon as one constant referent in Techno-Magism, whatever its ultimate ontological status, would be one notable brake against this happening.²⁰

However, insofar as Schmitt’s charge of occasionalism targets the very exaltation of the subject proponents of the New Materialism also chafe at, the deconstructive disposition of this book accepts the risk of this charge, if only to clarify the unsteady way subject and objective world (as Nature or history) naively face off one another, without any closer inspection of what precisely this confrontation entails. Since Romanticism especially, the most enduring systematic accounts of this encounter in fact narrate the transformation of that face-off as, ultimately, mediation. Hence the centrality of mediation for this book’s tackling of the question of Romanticism and media, not only as the object of study but as the very way critique is deployed throughout this collection.

I am not the first to argue the necessity of including a theoretical and philosophical account of mediation in media studies; a 2010 essay by John Guillory was especially important for my own thoughts on this matter.²¹ A reading of the piece’s treatment of a famous exchange between Adorno and Benjamin appears in the last essay of this collection. For now, I want simply to stress what I found most helpful in this essay, the way it forcefully clarified for me how Guillory and I diverge. In Guillory, the philosophical understanding of mediation formulated by Hegel is transmuted into the Marxist study of dialectical materialism, a distinct mode of engagement with the social that is taken up by the likes of Raymond Williams and Theodor Adorno in the twentieth century. Guillory thus gives us a template by which a distinct relationship between Romanticism and media can be known as following through the implications of a dialectical mediation, originating in Hegel and then Marx, that enables the media object—and media studies, consequently—to participate necessarily in the most ambitious form of social critique.

Aside from his discussion of John Stuart Mill, however, Guillory does not mention Romanticism by name, even with his focus on Hegel. This is telling, insofar as it ignores how much Hegel and other writers of that period have been a notable resource for the likes of Derrida and de Man, who read in these late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers not the simple triumph of dialectical thought but its radical blockage.²² Guillory’s recovery of that century’s philosophical history of mediation is thus incomplete, insofar as that remembrance does not reflect on how much it rests on the idea of a Romantic commitment to the dialectic that was far from assured—whose power comes in fact from the degree to which that avowal was radically problematized even as it was insisted upon. From this perspective, Guillory’s rehabilitation of mediation for media studies is not Romantic enough.

To assert the exceptional character of Romanticism’s encounter with media and media theory means noting how the dialectical idea of mediation itself necessarily calls forth its own relation to Romanticism, one that arguably reaches its philosophical apotheosis in the writings of Hegel, but that is also explicitly staged in the works of a host of other thinkers and artists in the first part of the Anglo-European nineteenth century. And to do that means not only proleptically referring to the particular philosophical force of mediation in Marxism but also acknowledging, and deploying, the critique of that intensity in deconstruction (though Marxism contains its own critiques as well). It means risking Schmitt’s charge of occasionalism, though now not in the service of any reified subject, but in recognition of the more difficult a priori status of the divide, break, or gap that both enables and disables the separate autarchy of mind and world. The fact that any mediation remains a face-off defined not by the dialectical realization of subsuming identity but by the off of that phrase, an impenetrability or resistance that necessarily exists in asymmetric fashion with the in and through of Mitchell’s thoughts on media—that is as much the theoretical instance of this collection on Romanticism and media, as much the arc between the Romantic era and the late capitalist planet we inhabit.

Techno-Magism, Figure, and the Media Concept

The key term in the title of this book and of its first essay points to this more complicated—Romantic—understanding of mediation, with techno-magism alluding to the effects of media, technology, and techné beholden to an epistemé built around the inexplicability of catachreses rather than the certitude of any economic distribution and regulation of forces associated with a more properly dialectical approach. Techno-magism refers to how both the imposition of meaning and identity and their dissolution do not