The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century by Susan Zieger

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century by Susan Zieger Leah Grisham (bio) Susan Zieger, The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), pp. 273, $30 paperback, $105 hardcover. At first glance, our culture's consumption of mass media—with our twenty-four-hour news cycle, social media, and love of iPhones—may not seem to have much in common with the nineteenth century. Susan Zieger's The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century, however, argues otherwise. By examining the close relationship between consumers and goods in nineteenth-century Britain, Zieger presents ephemeral items and the conversations they sparked as prefigurations of twenty-first century forms of mass media. At the center of this book are ephemera that have received little critical attention: objects like temperance pledge cards, inkblot games, cheap reprints of fine art, sheet music, and cigarette cards. Reading print as a media technology, she works to counter Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer's "image of the mindless mass cultural consumer" by exposing the affective, intellectual engagement between mass-produced print goods and consumers (12). "Affect," Zieger explains, "demarcates the friction—whether irritating, pleasurable, or compulsive—that results when a new mass medium repositions individuals in relation to the social" (208). In other words, ephemera produced discussion, debate, and unique types of knowledge that Zieger elucidates throughout the monograph. The first two chapters, which focus the most explicitly on mass-produced print objects, may be of special interest to Victorian Periodicals Review's readers. The innovative first chapter compellingly presents the temperance movement as a mass-media event by examining the effusion of print matter it produced, such as elaborate certificates for those who took sobriety pledges and cheap ballads promoting the cause. As she does in later chapters, Zieger links these ephemeral objects to community events, underscoring the active role ephemeral objects held in communal discourse; here she considers crowd-drawing spectacles like temperance speakers Father Mathew and John B. Gough. Though most of the book focuses on England, chapter one is more transatlantic in its approach (Gough was English-born but did most of his work in America, and Father Mathew was Irish). The wider lens of this chapter is both a strength and a weakness. While it offers interesting insights about ephemera and affect within Anglo-Irish and transatlantic contexts, it may leave readers wondering about the fissures or divergences among Irish, English, and American temperance ephemera. Chapter two (a version of which was published in Journal of Victorian Culture) considers how smoking became analogous with consuming print material, as shown in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's [End Page 210] short story "The Man with the Twisted Lip" (1891) and Robert H. Buss's watercolor Dickens's Dream (1875). The literary, artistic, and ephemeral manifestations of smoking emphasize cognition, and the reader's absorption in written material becomes synonymous with the smoker's absorption in his tobacco. Additionally, smoking came with its own ephemera, such as collectable cards found inside cigarette boxes and publications created especially for smokers. This ephemera aided the proliferation of print media as an exchange of information, with many of the cards imparting encyclopedia-style facts that created a "cultural fantasy" aligning smoking with knowledge (75). Chapter three extends the discussion of print culture and knowledge by reading Harriet Martineau's Eastern Life Present and Past (1848) and Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868) with a special emphasis on the materiality of ink. Broadening what is typically considered print culture, Zieger presents ink—and the phenomenon of ink gazing—as a notable media phenomenon itself. Often written about in Victorian culture, ink gazing consisted of a brown or black Orientalized other making predictions based on images that appeared in the surface of a pool of ink. In public consciousness, ink became associated with knowledge, information, and in some cases genius. Notably, Collins's novel adjusts this association, instead creating an analogy between ink pools and "the unconscious as information storage," a connection Zieger argues is reflected in the period's popular inkblot games and later Rorschach tests (118). These activities, which are...