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

been appropriated for technologies of production. These embodiments require a human presence in order to be perceived and expressed. However, technical intervention into sensory modalities has altered the process of human perception and the language used for social commentary.

Texts are not pure representations of reality, but they are constituent parts from which multiple layers of empirical and fictional reality are continuously formed at a constant rate within the mind of the reader. Regardless of their psychological demands upon the reader, the antagonisms between empirical and fictional reality rely on linguistic and nonlinguistic representations for their reconstitution. Much in the same way as we come to know ourselves in relation to what we are not, binary oppositions rely upon linguistic representation to reaffirm, to announce, and to critique the self. The transition from oral culture to literate culture caused slippage between how linguistic and nonlinguistic representations were created, experienced, and used to inform the relation of self and other.⁴ The cultural alteration also anticipated the incompatibility of new technologies of production and radical critique within Victorian society. As a consequence of the transition to nonverbal modes of discourse, technologies of production instrumentalized Victorian conceptions of the relation of the self and the other in specialized and functional terms that predicted behaviors and established new boundaries for signifying meaning and identity in nonlinguistic forms.

When readers open a book, textual meanings undergo a perpetual process of revision and reconstitution. Through novels, for example, readers are able to trace the absence of reality from the fictional presence that informs it. Thus, texts are opened to the limitless possibilities of contextualization. Texts are not systems of enclosure limited to historical or literary periodization,