The Knowing Book: Authors, It-Narratives, and Objectification in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

IThe technology of recent decades has produced a multitude of objects that quite literally respond to touch: fabrics, walls, and everyday devices with embedded sensors now contain what have been called formulaic versions of human thought. In contact with these surfaces, we are becoming familiar with questions such as those posed by anthropologist Susanne Kiichler: We have to ask how a thing can be 'thoughtlike,' or 'how thought can conduct itself in things' (209). Answering these questions, accounting for literally capable of taking thought beyond the realm of any individual, transforms any purely Marxian account of the life of objects as a social phenomenon, imagined under conditions of commodity exchange. Describing this new kind of cognition also takes us beyond the existing frameworks for understanding consciousness as a transformative process. The thought of which objects are now capable is not the consciousness that Hegel famously describes as the engine of history. N. Katherine Hayles makes this distinction when she points out that in our highly computational world, artifacts carry part of the load, operating in flexible configurations in which are embedded human thoughts, actions, and memories, and yet goes on to argue that cognition must be differentiated in this new realm from self-consciousness: machines may think - indeed may even think about themselves - but this does not generate a human standard of selfawareness (139). In this essay, I would like to use the distinction that recent discourse about materiality and mediation has generated - between self-consciousness and the kinds of lives and process that things can now be imagined as having to discuss a group of mid-eighteenth-century texts. These texts operate, I will argue, as cognitive systems: fictions that are capable of speaking formulaically about their own constitution, appearance in print, handling as objects, and the movements of their readers through their pages, but they are not, for all this, selfconscious in the way this term normally applies either to the tradition of selfconscious literature or to the transformation of human society. When the