Techno-Magism

Techno-Magism reads British Romantic literature through media studies and media theory. Its argument is that Romantic writing sits next to, and is shaped by, both print and non-print media. The book looks at the print culture, pictorial art and theater of early nineteenth-century England and Europe. It also looks ahead to communicative technologies that arrived only after the Romantic period: photography, film, video and digital screens. Orrin N. C. Wang treats this anticipatory contact as a way to understand the unusual claim implied in pairing Romanticism with media theory.

The book argues that media studies, and the idea of mediation more broadly, would gain from a fuller engagement with deconstruction, or from recovering its arguments. Wang sees this as an unavoidable result of thinking about Romanticism and media together. He works through the relationship using the term techno-magism, a catachrestic practice and a technics of inscription that always lies outside the causal logic of a dialectical economy.

Two related ideas run through the study: the structural incommensurability of the cut and the unapologetic presentism of the constellation. The book also bears the mark of the late capitalist moment in which it was written. It traces the continuity between the social character of Romantic and post-Romantic media, with attention to commodity culture, revolution and the ecological devastation of the Anthropocene.