As I compose this paragraph on an Apple laptop projected through a 27-inch LED monitor, on my desk next to these objects sits a cardboard virtual reality viewer with a smartphone tucked inside it. On a shelf behind me lie boxes containing several antiquated gaming consoles, a smattering of game cartridges, and a bottle of rubbing alcohol required to clean decades of disuse off the connector pins and thereby coax the games back to life. Surely we mean items like these when we us the term “multi-media.” Why, then, am I arguing for a multi-media Romanticism through the case of Lord Byron’s Don Juan (1819-1824)? Don Juan certainly enables engagement with the broader nineteenth-century media ecology, as others have demonstrated.

In this essay, however, I develop a vocabulary for describing the multiplicity of a singular medium: print (even though to call it singular belies its assemblage-like nature and its capacity to remediate other objects into its regime). My broader aim is to demonstrate the complexity of thought around notions of media and mediation displayed by Romantic-era writers. It would be naïve to assert that nineteenth-century print matches our modern communications technologies when it comes to relative degrees of multiplicity and complexity of mediation. Even so, I adopt a speculative attitude in order to leave room for the possibility that we might not yet fully know a medium’s capacities; by attending to earlier interventions in media practice and theory, we might encounter new ones.

So why Don Juan? Even though the Romantic era did not produce a fully developed notion of media theory, nor a clearly articulated definition of “medium” as a technological communicative apparatus, that does not preclude the possibility that those using, creating, and speculating on instantiations of different media were engaged in complex ways.

The discourse around Don Juan, in particular, shows a wide range of that complexity. The poem’s forms of mediation accounted for as much of its reception as did its scandalous content. John Gibson Lockhart, in John Bull’s Letter to Lord Byron (1821), draws attention to this fact when describing the poem’s appearance and impact: “Every body poring over the wicked smiling face of Don Juan,—pirated duo-decimo competing it all over the island with furtive quarto” (83-4). Because John Murray would not acknowledge himself as the poem’s publisher, piracies flooded the market.

What the piracies and the responses to those piracies reveal is an insight familiar to those conversant with bibliography: that the physical object conveys meaning in concert with the text it delivers. The significance of what Jerome McGann calls linguistic and bibliographic codes

are clearly understood by the Quarterly reviewer (believed to be Robert Southey) who writes, “‘Don Juan’ in quarto and on hot-pressed paper would have been almost innocent—in a whity-brown duodecimo it was one of the worst of the mischievous publications that have made the press a snare” (“Cases” 128). Engagement with the complexity of nineteenth-century media is also one of Byron’s frequent moves in the poem. Its founding impulse emerges from Byron’s attention to the contingencies of paper. Don Juan begins with the poet seeking out a new hero in the pages of contemporary newsprint, and Byron frequently performs other self-reflexive tropes, as when he ends Canto I with the famous borrowing—and mockery—of Southey’s lines bidding the “‘little book’” (1.222.1769) to go out into the world in search of “gentle reader[s]! and / Still gentler purchaser[s]!” (1.221.1761-2).

Indeed, that self-reflexivity is arguably the poem’s most consistent feature, particularly as it relates to the materiality of the media ecology from which it emerges and into which Byron serially casts it. Byron’s sense of mediation insists on the poem’s contingency, its uncertainty, and its correspondence with speculation. Paper—one readily identifiable medial substrate of the poem—exudes a lively variability, which contributes to the multiplicity of the poem’s mediation. As Byron repeatedly jokes about the fate of “uncertain paper” (1.218.1738), his poem, thanks in part to its wide availability in pirated form, could have easily found a second life lining a trunk (“the next time their servants tie on / Behind their carriages their new portmanteau, / Perhaps it may be lined with this my canto” [2.16.126-8]), as culinary wrapping paper (“What, must I go to the oblivious cooks? / Those Cornish plunderers of Parnassian wrecks?” [4.108.861-2]), or perhaps worse, as a “rare deposit” discovered “In digging the foundation of a closet” (3.89.807-8), a metonymic association which, we might say, in the paronomastic spirit of Don Juan, links literary posterity with the paper needs of the posterior.

But I digress. In pointing toward the poem’s self-reflexivity about its material manifestations, I raise a familiar, fundamental issue for literary studies: the relation between text and physical object. In particular for literary critics engaging with book and media history, this question remains central. In nineteenth-century literary studies, we see such efforts in recent books by Andrew Piper and Leah Price, both of whom argue that to understand books as objects, we need to attend to how writers from the period imaginatively represent books and the interactions they afford. Byron in general, and Don Juan in particular, offer bountiful material for querying what it means for a poem and a book to exist in 1819. In what follows, I suggest that object-oriented ontology (OOO) provides a conceptual stance well-suited to reveal some of the early media-ontological speculations performed in, around, and through Don Juan. Following an overview of OOO and my reading of it in relation to media studies, I offer analyses of how Don Juan interrogates two media objects essential to its existence: paper and ink. In so doing, I suggest that despite its complicated relationship with materialism, OOO nonetheless equips us with tools for rethinking the materiality of media—a necessarily multiple materiality—in the Romantic era and beyond.

But first, what is OOO? And how might it enhance our understanding of media in general and Romantic-period media in particular?

OOO was christened by Graham Harman, who, along with Levi Bryant and Timothy Morton, forms the core group of OOO practitioners. OOO is a subset of the broader Speculative Realist movement, first dubbed as such at a workshop held in 2007 (titled simply, “Speculative Realism: A One-Day Workshop”), which featured talks by Harman, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Quentin Meillassoux. The loose grouping of Speculative Realists is held together by their shared rejection of what Meillassoux terms “correlationism,” the tendency in post-Kantian philosophy to investigate only the correlation between being and thought, never being itself.

The OOO answer to correlationism is to affirm the existence of objects apart from relations and to insist on objects’ “withdrawal” (the term that Harman, in Tool-Being [2002], adapts from Heidegger’s tool analysis from Being and Time [1927]). OOO is speculative in that it affirms the being of objects but not their presence to us, to other objects, or to themselves. In a formulation similar to Meillassoux’s, Harman claims that “contrary to the dominant assumption of philosophy since Kant, the true chasm in ontology lies not between humans and the world, but between objects and relations” (Tool-Being 2). What emerges from this recognition, as Harman puts it in Guerilla Metaphysics (2005), is the centrality of withdrawal: “Object-oriented philosophy has a single basic tenet: the withdrawal of objects from all perceptual and causal relations” (20). Objects only ever enter into relations through some form of translation, which means that relation never exposes the essence of the object. And this truth applies to relations with humans (as when a human reads a poem by translating “a small drop of ink” into a “lasting link / Of ages” [3.88.793, 797-8]), and also to relations between non-human objects (as when an aeolian harp translates the wind into song).

As suggested by the focus on causality in Morton’s Realist Magic (2013), OOO offers great insight on how objects come to interact with one another despite their mutual conditions of withdrawal. If objects ontologically withdraw from full presence, then the work of speculative philosophy means exploring how these “vacuum-sealed” entities (Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics 2) communicate, correspond, or otherwise enter into relation. That focus on relation ports smoothly into media studies, particularly to help think through the relation between the fraught terms, book and text—or, put another way, the relation between the mediating object and the object mediated. This has been and continues to be a pressing question for book and media history. For instance, in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004), William St Clair notes that “when we have reconstructed the production, access, sales, and readerships of the materiality of books [. . .] our best resource for understanding the impact of the reading of the literature of the romantic period may be the literature itself” (412). Or to pose the issue more succinctly via Andrew Piper, “Literature makes books as much as books make literature” (11). This claim applies especially to the Romantic era since books were still relatively fluid cultural objects. As Ina Ferris and Paul Keen note in their introduction to Bookish Histories (2009), “[print] remained visible as a medium, palpable [. . .]. Books were not the taken-for-granted objects they would soon become” (5). St Clair, Piper, and Ferris and Keen all demonstrate that how Romantic readers (and how we) understand a given book, or the book, connects intimately with how we understand the literary (or non-literary) objects that come into being through books. From an OOO perspective, a poem is an object, and it exists independently of its particular material instantiations. Of course, this notion is nothing new to literary scholars—one thinks of F. W. Bateson’s famous question, as paraphrased by James McLaverty: “If the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, where are Hamlet and Lycidas?” (82). But OOO would also add that the gap between poem and its appearance to us in different mediated forms is not some trick of textuality but the condition of being itself. All objects withdraw, not just poems whose existence cannot be reduced to their bibliographic histories. An object-oriented media studies can therefore investigate object relations that extend into realms we might not typically see with a solely textual focus.

To employ that claim in Byronic terms, such an approach enables our critical Muses to “treat[] all things, and ne’er retreat[] / From any thing” (16.3.17-8).

As such, an object-oriented ontology of media enables us to see media from their side as well as from ours. In the case of books, it helps us to imagine, as Price does in her reading of it-narratives, “how accounts of print culture would look different if narrated from the point of view not of human readers and users, but of the book” (“From The History” 120). Book history’s fundamental premise, as D. F. McKenzie claims, is that “[i]t can, in short, show the human presence in any recorded text” (29). But in order to understand what it means to come into contact with a book, or with a human presence through a book, we need first to understand the object and the nature of its object relations. Though it may seem counterintuitive, I contend that we can better conceive of the human presence in books if we first attend to how they exist in their strange bookishness, how they enlist many non-human agents in order to exist.

The human presence we encounter is never fully itself—it remains fundamentally withdrawn, only made present in the form of a translation through a medium and through each object’s mode of appearing in that medium. An object-oriented media studies thus affirms the existence of media objects and their irreducibility to their qualities or relations. The result is a greater capacity to account for qualities or relations of which we may be unaware but which may emerge through unforeseen contingencies. Typically in book history and media studies, analysis of book/media objects focuses on subject-object relations (e.g., between human subject and book/media object, as in H. J. Jackson’s study of Romantic-era marginalia), or on object-object relations (e.g., the relations between books and the other objects which make up the systems of print circulation, as in McKenzie’s “sociology of texts,” or Robert Darnton’s similar “communications circuit”). Eugene Thacker, in theorizing what he calls “dark media,” suggests that we shift away from those models and instead attend to object-thing relations.

Such a method would interrogate media as paradoxical mixtures of intentional objects-for-us and things-in-themselves that resist full access from any other beings—human or otherwise. Dark media demonstrate more clearly what is true of all media: that they withdraw from full access even when hinting at their existence through particular qualities and appearances. When we theorize mediation, we must contend with the deeply inhuman core of those media objects to which we ascribe so much human presence. Media objects benefit from an object-oriented position precisely because it’s all too easy to locate their essences as mediums in the emergent properties of their uses for us. It may seem odd to imagine a book apart from the human actions that brought it into being, or the intentions humans had for it, or the uses to which humans put it. Yet, an object-oriented media studies calls for just that, and we can do so by entertaining Byron’s speculations on the non-human elements of mediation in Don Juan.

While we tend to think of paper as an inert substance awaiting the variable accidents of new and true poetic attempts, Byron’s poem repeatedly poses paper as itself an agential object. He writes to Murray a month after the publication of Don Juan: “I have no plan—I had no plan—but I have or had materials” (Letters 207). Of course, Byron here means source materials or ideas, but this comment should nonetheless suggest to us that Byron’s poetics embraces the contingency of matter. Paper functions as an insistently material presence, though one with a vitality we tend not to associate with material objects like fused bits of cloth.

From early in the poem, and throughout its development, Byron’s paper moves. Or in OOO terms, it withdraws, escaping full apprehension and only showing itself and its powers in partial, translated manners. Toward the end of Canto I, in one of Byron’s many digressions about the nature of fame, paper’s materiality first surfaces with “the end of fame” amounting to nothing more than a spatial concern: “’tis but to fill / A certain portion of uncertain paper” (1.218.1737-8). As he is “born for opposition” (15.22.176), it comes as no surprise that Byron employs “certain” in its two oppositional senses: the “certain portion” refers to an undetermined or unspecified amount (and thus, a not very certain portion after all), and then the “uncertain paper” calls to mind the opposite meaning (fixed, determined, stable), though here negated by the prefix.

Fame, then, requires a certain—that is to say, an unknown—amount of material production, which resides in an object whose stability is likewise suspect. Paper must be acted upon by willful agents, but that control over paper is compromised by the material’s own particularities. In this case paper’s instability primarily results from change over time, but it possesses synchronic as well as diachronic uncertainty. Although the latter sense is more apparent, Byron at least gestures toward paper’s lively materiality with the rhyming words, “vapour” and “taper,” a trio employed three more times across the poem. The vapour appears in another metaphor for fame (that of walking up a hill “lost in vapour” [1.218.1740]), but the echoing of paper with a seemingly immaterial substance rhetorically heightens the changeability of the former. And the “taper,” which metonymically stands in for literary production (“bards burn[ing] what they call their ‘midnight taper’” [1.218.1742]), also reminds us that the paper medium requires additional material supports (such as light, ink, quill, etc.). Paper and taper are etymologically as well as sonically linked, both coming from “papyrus,”

an earlier writing surface which, as it ceased to function materially, continued its legacy discursively by lending its name to other composite materials (such as cotton fibers) assembled for the purposes of writing and printing. Through the ottava rima form’s particular affordances, the linking of paper/vapour/taper encourages us to consider paper’s multiplicity and variability even as it exists in a single moment.

What, then, are we to make of a renewed meeting of media studies and literary criticism as a path to a multi-media Romanticism? Thanks to many scholars working in nineteenth-century studies,

as well as others more firmly rooted in media studies,

the binary qualifiers “new” and “old” have been productively rethought over the last fifteen years. At this point, a foundational question is being revisited: what are media? We see this question probed in several recent media studies projects which, in different ways, tend to emphasize media as processes or activities rather than as things or objects.

For instance, as Craig Dworkin argues, “No single medium can be apprehended in isolation [. . .][;] media (always necessarily multiple) only become legible in social contexts because they are not things, but rather activities” (28). While process ontologies, such as Dworkin’s, productively illuminate the variability of media, they also risk eliminating distinctions between things. If all is process, then any media object can be processed into any other, like discrete bits of cow flesh rendered into pink slime. In borrowing from OOO, media studies can make room for both the simultaneous plenitude of distinct objects and their strange, processual variability by reversing Dworkin’s claim: media are things, not activities. Media of course involve activities, but activities are not the same as, and should not take priority over, the media objects themselves. A book is not the poem printed within it, nor is it the means and mechanisms of its circulation, use, and storage that welcome it into the twenty-first century in a variety of forms (in a Rare Books room, in the stacks, in digital databases, in a trash heap, etc.). As I’ve discussed, Don Juan is particularly receptive to an object-oriented ontology of media since it exploits the extent to which the existence of a media object is always multiple—not because its existence is predicated upon a variety of activities, but because objects (such as poems and paper and ink) withdraw from access.

The stakes undergirding my argument are the political effects that emerge from our media ontologies. I share with Alexander Galloway the urgency of asking, “What should we do so that thinking does not purely and simply coincide with the spirit of capitalism?” (“Poverty” 364). But I disagree with his contention that “recent realist philosophy mimics the infrastructure of contemporary capitalism” (“Poverty” 348). In its resistance to reductionism, OOO counters the logic of neoliberal techno-utopianism, the dominant ideology of the information economy against which Galloway writes.

Contemporary capitalism translates all into code. It thereby seeks to control social and economic flows with greater efficiency, to monetize any and all forms of interaction, and to eliminate any variations that would upset the algorithmic machinery. As William Blake wrestled with the machines of church and state, we now face media as the gardens of love in which our joys and desires are bound in the briars of algorithmic reduction. The rhetoric of process—which implies that activities (like data manipulation) are all that matter—risks capitulating to such restriction. If we abandon the notion of the irreducible existence of media and of other objects, if we focus instead on pure flows and endless process as the things to which objects are reduced, and if we accept that all objects and all media exist merely as different data configurations of the same inert substance, then we embrace twenty-first-century global capitalism and its fantasies of immaterial production. Even though a philosophy centered on objects may seem to imply a dull, static materialism, OOO actually reveals the plenitude at the core of all objects. In applying this logic to media, I do not claim that older media are somehow more real or more physical than electronic media. The latter too have equal claims on reality and materiality.

But I resist the notion that we can ignore or transcend materiality (an attitude often expressed with respect to computational media), and the reductionism of process-based ontologies risks leading us down that path. If we go that route we’ll find nothing more than the endless procession of the same dull round, to which we can only reply as one. An object-oriented ontology of media shows us that, as in Don Juan—whose narrator claims, “my tale is / ‘De rebus cunctis et quibûsdam aliis’” (“Of everything that is and a few other things besides” [16.3.23-4])—we benefit from speculating beyond the everything that is.