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Print Culture studies and technological determinism.

Article Excerpt
According to an anonymous poem printed in Philadelphia in 1758, "On the Invention of Letters and the Art of Printing," the printing press was the key mechanical invention in the advance of human knowledge and liberty:



Her bold Machine redeems the patriot's fame From royal malice, and the bigot's flame; To bounded thrones displays the legal plan, And vindicates the dignity of man. Tyrants and time, in her, lose half their pow'r; And Reason shall subsist ... ("On the Invention of Letters" 1758, 281)

Far from an extraordinary statement, the poet merely versifies what was a common understanding of the relation of print to the progress of the natural and human sciences during the Enlightenment. As Michael Warner noted in the opening pages of his groundbreaking work, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America:

The West treasures few moments in its history the way it treasures the story of the democratization of print. in the century preceding the American and French Revolutions, men of letters commonly linked the spread of letters to the growth of knowledge. From an early date they linked it to the democratization of power as well (Warner 1990, ix).

The story, however, is flawed, as Warner and others have shown. The problem is that print as a technology does not necessarily determine a set of ideological uses to which it must be put. To posit a causal relation between print and democracy, then, is what Warner and others have called "technological determinism." It is a historiographic fallacy, in that "[w]hat have historically become the characteristics of printing have been projected backward as its natural, essential logic" (1990, 9). Furthermore, the historiographic fallacy is one that leads to fallacies of political and social reasoning as well, because so much of our thinking about democracy in the U.S. is informed by its eighteenth-century origins. Instead, Warner insists that we attend to "the reciprocal determination ... between a medium and its politics" (xii; emphasis added), so that we recognize that "certain assumptions about print and certain assumptions about politics were coarticulated; neither is a fixed reference point against which to tell the story of the other" (xii).

Critiques of technological determinism suggest the need to ask a number of questions about the dominant stories about print culture. Are there alternative visions of print and history that don't match the determinist assumptions? Have cultures outside of the modern West used print technologies in ways that parallel or differ from those in Europe and the U.S.? Has the story that we have told ourselves about print culture been grounded in the study of the material conditions of texts and their contexts? Are there cultures within the U.S. and Europe who have imagined uses of print for projects that were resistant to or countered popular and political goals, or that were oriented toward goals not normally associated with democracy? The three books under consideration offer answers to these questions, and thus will be of great interest to scholars seeking to study print culture--and indeed emergent digital cultures--without the fallacy of technological determinism.

The foundations of the field of inquiry that has come to be called "print culture studies" were just being laid in the decade before Warner published his work. Indeed, he takes as one of his primary examples of technological determinism the work of a pivotal scholar in the field, Elizabeth Eisenstein. Eisenstein's 1979 work The Printing Press as an Agent of Change has been central...

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