Technologies of Power in the Victorian Period Print Culture, Huma ...

systems have been transforming the ways in which knowledge is communicated and valued. Innovations such as the printing press modified how the written word was to be authenticated and disseminated. Technologies of print production disrupted the unity of subject by disconnecting the body from the writing process, much in the same way the manual laborer has been disconnected from capitalist modes of production.

Despite their varying availability to classes and genders, technologies of production became the constant reality of meaning against differentiated social subsystems and became ingrained in the Victorian cultural subconscious through the spread of the printed word. Technologies of production began to determine progress at their own rate and have since been assuring the fulfillment of internal functions. Technical progress has been measured as “the substitution of machinery, not merely for the skill of human hand, but for the relief of human intellect”³ as well. For this reason, those who have employed normative and purposive categories for considering technologies of production and those who have argued that technologies of sign systems are a privileged medium that both prioritizes and reflects human interests have been failing to realize how technologies have rendered all of society accountable to their self-sustaining purposes.

During the early nineteenth century, industrialization facilitated new technologies of production that altered labor and communication by reconstituting sign systems to accommodate the demands of new technical processes. Sign systems inform concepts of reason and meaning. How we learn to recognize signs determines our conceptions of reality and our relation to the present culture. This process of signification has been complicated by intertextuality as well as the relation between reader and text and the culture they both signify and place under erasure.