Medium: Essays from the English Institute

Abstract

Medium:Essays from the English Institute Bill Brown and Bradin Cormack For the last few years the English Institute has focused on fundamental topics that have a long history within literary criticism—genre, text, and form, for instance, each an indisputably key word and concept, however disputed or complex. Medium, the focus of the Institute’s attention in 2014, hardly seems like such an inevitable topic (word, or concept). It feels like a more recent addition to the literary-critical lexicon. The impulse to deploy the term (or what you might call the pressure to deploy the concept) would seem to come not from within literary studies but from without—or, rather, from the recognition, prompted by a proliferation of media in our time as by the thriving field of media studies, that literature (in all its forms) inhabits a media ecology which it also helps to shape. Attending to medium is a matter of becoming self-conscious about the fact that, as W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark Hansen have quipped: “We are, it seems, all practitioners of media studies, whether we recognize it or not.”1 Then again, the most iconic practitioner of media studies in the twentieth century, Marshall McLuhan, studied at Cambridge with I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis, completing a dissertation on Thomas Nashe. And not only does McLuhan offer The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) as complementary work to Milman Parry’s and Albert Lord’s study of the oral character of Homer’s epics, he also makes steady use of literary touchstones: Rabelais and Shakespeare; Pope, Goldsmith, and Blake; Rimbaud, Joyce, and Faulkner; etcetera. It’s clear in his case how media studies emerges from the study of literature, however extensive his account of the “disturbances” provoked by literacy and print.2 The shared text for the Institute’s conference was not from McLuhan and not focused on specifically technological media. It was Niklas Luhmann’s “Medium and Form,” a systems-theoretical account of the interplay between the two, form designating the realization of medium, which Luhmann casts as form’s tight coupling of elements loosely coupled by a medium (for example, a footprint in the sand). Generating medium/form relations, art itself appears as a medium that is given form by artworks.3 More simply, apprehending just what a medium is (or when it is) depends on your particular perspective: [End Page 293] sculpture is an artistic medium, and marble is a sculptural medium. Recognizing yourself as a practitioner of media studies entails thinking afresh about what a medium may be said to be: about medium specificity and its impact on aesthetic experience; and about mediation, remediation, and demediation. Of course, attention to manuscript culture and print culture has been a part of literary studies, old and new, as has the history of the book, the page, and the word, whether or not the term medium ever surfaced. And just as certain literary texts (old and new) have made an effort to bring their medium into visibility (such as Tristram Shandy), so too many media have appropriated or refunctioned particular literary techniques and effects (for example, stream of consciousness). By foregrounding the singular medium as opposed to the collective-singular media, the Institute meant to prompt a kind of inquiry that does not restrict itself to technology (new or old), and that does not refrain from asking about mediation as such. Just as different mediums—the voice, the printed page, the nook, the CD—provide access to literature, so too literature functions as a medium that provides access to religion, politics, history, memory, etcetera. However valid McLuhan’s claim that the “medium is the message,” it should not obscure how perspective can determine just what we take the medium to be. The speakers at the 2014 conference on “Medium,” held at Harvard, provided the Institute with a robust and far-ranging engagement with this topic, as the five essays printed here amply testify. They prompted considerable discussion as talks. Three of them use medium (and media, and mediation) to formulate strikingly new accounts of familiar topics: the book, Shakespeare, theater. And two of the essays provide important assessments of how media shape who...