Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism

Mechanical reproduction has other effects as well. By indiscriminately preserving and distributing even the most disposable cultural productions (think how television revives everything), it stimulates an aesthetic whose appropriative basis is ecological. Andy Warhol made this connection explicit:

I always like to work on leftovers, doing the leftover things. Things that were discarded, that everyone knew were no good…. if you can take it and make it good or at least interesting, then you’re not wasting as much as you would otherwise. You’re recycling work and you’re recycling people, and you’re running your business as a byproduct of other businesses. Of other directly competitive businesses, as a matter of fact. So that’s a very economical operating procedure.

(1975, p. 93)

For just as modern transportation exposes passengers to the threat of unscheduled detours, mechanical reproduction, by disseminating signs, leaves them open to unpredictable re-routings of their own. Artists since Duchamp have recognized this condition. In the 1960s, the Situationists exploited it for political polemics, practising what they called détournement, a ‘reterritorialization’ of objects through appropriations like recaptioned comic strips. Jacques Derrida has described this historical situation in a famous passage whose urgency could only have occurred in a media age:

And this is the possibility on which I want to insist…. Every sign, linguistic or non-linguistic, spoken or written…in a small or large unit, can be cited, put between quotation marks: in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. This does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchoring.

(1977, pp. 185-6)

Why has remotivation become so common in the late twentieth century? To what specific circumstances does it correspond? Over fifty years ago, in what could be called the founding essay of postmodernism, Walter Benjamin ([1935] 1969) identified the crucial fact as mechanical reproduction and the historical juncture as mid-nineteenth-century Paris, when new forms (photography, cheap books, lithography) and their attendant mass culture first challenged the supremacy of traditional aesthetic practice. By now, the effects of mechanical reproduction have become far more evident: an immense increase in the number of signs, an uncontrollable multiplication of their possible contextualizations.

Literature may be ‘nothing less than this constantly doomed, ironically self-undoing attempt to make it new, this ceaseless incapacity ever quite to awaken from the nightmare of history’ (Eagleton, 1986, p. 136).

Many of the central works of modernism—The Waste Land, the Cantos, Ulysses—bear this out strongly. Although each may in some way endeavour to awaken from a nightmare of history, the past, and particularly the literary past, has a high and complex profile within them. Far from ignoring or defying tradition, they attempt to redefine it, to see beyond the formal imperatives of the immediate past and to re-select from the vast body, domestic and otherwise, of the literature which preceded them.

But when one tries to survey the field of recent criticism of Romanticism as a whole, the image which comes irresistibly to mind is Arnoldian; it is of mighty armies clashing by night, albeit armies well-equipped with sophistication and formidable in their terminologies. For while a great deal of quiet and traditional textual work and work in the history of ideas proceeds—mostly focused on individual writers—Romanticism has simultaneously become a site on which battle has been joined between the most important tendencies in literary theory.