But so Matters fell out, and so I must relate them; and if any Reader is shocked at their appearing unnatural, I cannot help it. I must remind such Persons, that I am not writing a System, but a History, and I am not obliged to reconcile every Matter to the received Notions concerning Truth and Nature.
—Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, 1749
System and History I
If this book engaged system as an idea, it could be labeled a history of system. I welcome that tag as a pointer for readers, but also as an opportunity to make two points crucial to the shape my argument will actually take:
Although the history of ideas has been such a capacious and robust genre that we often simply think of it as “history” itself, it is but one kind of history. By that, I don’t mean just the usual suspects now, such as social history or political history or the history of science, but of plurality in the past. Work on historiography, particularly in earlier periods, and especially Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi’s Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe (2005), has forcefully reminded us of the importance of understanding “history” as consisting historically of different kinds with different functions—history is, that is, a genre that, like all genres, is always subject to regrouping. And as we have seen with system, the resulting mixtures of features and functions change over time. Especially in moments of substantial change of resources, when reasons and opportunities for regrouping multiply—as in our current shift into the digital—writing a history requires more than choosing an object; we need to select with equal care the kinds of history into which that object will be written.
When we think of kinds—of history as a genre as well as system as a genre—we need to keep Henry Fielding’s remonstrance in mind. History and system have baggage—a past of changing interrelations that the preposition in “history of system” cannot overwrite.
Taken together, these issues are not impediments, but opportunities to use our historical ambitions to bring system closer. Using more than one kind of history can magnify the object by bringing those changing interrelations into focus. We can fashion a better spyglass.
In addition to improving an old tool, this chapter also offers a version of a new one. Its purpose is to help us explore and understand an extraordinary twist in the interrelations between system and history. As we use different kinds of histories to zoom in on system, what comes into focus is not just system but everything that comes into proximity with it—including other genres, such as history itself. The twist, that is, is a twist in the trajectories of how and how often those two genres were used during the eighteenth century. As indexed by the growing number of eighteenth-century title pages they share, system and history were on a collision course. My argument is that their intersection at the end of the century helps to explain a major event in the shaping of modern knowledge: the division of knowledge we call disciplinarity.
If we retrace the upward trajectory of system back to its Galilean launch, this twist becomes a bit less surprising. What we discover is that history became a genre of special interest at exactly the same time and for the same reason: to get knowledge going again. When, within a few years of Galileo’s message, Francis Bacon described his plan for advancing knowledge, he did not claim, as we have seen, to be smarter or better than his predecessors. As with Galileo excusing Aristotle, ancients versus moderns, as I noted earlier, was not a contest for Bacon but history—a history that told of what he called his “good fortune” in living in a moment of different “resources” than they did. The resources that he cited were “mechanical things”: printing, gunpowder, and the nautical compass. But Bacon recognized how easy it would be to squander those resources, so he warned against the idols of the mind and argued for the importance of method.
Most important, however, Bacon argued that no single mind—contra Descartes1—could advance knowledge on its own. The Great Instauration was collaborative to its core. Knowledge was stuck, Bacon argued, and we can only move it forward together. His major publications were more than monuments to himself and his own ideas; they were grant proposals: requests for funding for large-scale projects complete with appendixes detailing tasks and time lines. That’s why the Royal Society considered him its founding father in a much more literal sense than we usually acknowledge: the members were not just honoring him as a great thinker but as the architect of the scientific institution as the social institution they now formed; their society was the embodiment of his vision of new knowledge as necessarily a joint undertaking.
Appealing to the powerful and the wealthy for support is not, of course, unusual—not back then or now. Bacon’s particular request to King James, however, takes the form of a very specific and unusual proposal: it asks him to take “steps to ensure that a Natural and Experimental History be built up and completed” (Bacon [1620] 2000, 4–5). What is strange here is that Bacon does not want help building a building but building a genre—and that is what he asks for from the first page of his proposal to the last. In fact, the 1620 Organum ends with an extraordinary list of all the historical work that needs to be done—a list that bears the now telltale signs of a PI facing an imminent deadline:
Now therefore we should move on to an outline account of Particular Histories.
But as we are now distracted by business, we have only the time to append a Catalogue of titles of Particular Histories. As soon as we have the leisure for the task, we plan to give detailed instructions by putting the questions that most need to be investigated and written up in each history.
That catalogue begins with the “History of the Heavens; or Astronomy,” veers earthward seven histories later to the “History of Clouds, as they are seen above,” and continues to descend to number 12, the “History of all other things that fall or come down from above, and are generated above.” By number 124 we reach the “History of Jugglers and Clowns” and, four places later, the “Miscellaneous History of Common Experiments which do not form a single Art” (Bacon [1620] 2000, 232–238).
Why history, and why so many of them? As we saw in my turn to Galileo, “system” became, to use Walter Ong’s word, “interesting” only when it became plural—initially when Copernicus pitted his new system against the established one. It became, to use Galileo’s own word, “really” interesting when systems started showing up inside each other. The same is true of history, as forcefully illustrated in Pomata and Siraisi’s (2005) volume as they show history to be a genre that, like all genres, is a mixture of features and functions that change over time.
We can start plotting its interrelations with system by focusing on history’s different relationship to the pedagogical and methodological priorities of Ramism and the new knowledge forwarded by Galileo and Bacon. Whereas system’s “setting up” of parts and wholes could, as we have seen, structurally serve those priorities, history had what Donald R. Kelley calls a “detachment from form and structure” that did not lend itself to the new organon (Pomata and Siraisi 2005, 224). Galileo highlighted that issue by pointedly contrasting philosophers like himself to “historians” who relied on textual authority (225). That distance from form and structure did, however, afford history the flexibility to take on a variety of different tasks. In 1613—just three years after system’s debut in English and one year after technology’s—Rodolphus Goclenius’s Lexicon Philosophicum, presented a fourfold definition of history. It could at that time be, to quote Kelley, a “simple description without demonstration,” knowledge of particulars, a “syntagma” or specified “unit” of history, such as “the commemoration of antiquity,” or observation from experience or the senses (212).
At the root of this multiplicity is a polarity of purpose with deep roots in the classical enterprise of historia. In Kelley’s succinct telling,
historia meant inquiry into specific but unspecified things and actions (res, res gestai), and soon the distinction between such things and the memories and reports thereof (narratio rerum gestarum) became confused, especially in English and the Romance languages. (213)
Pomata and Siraisi’s collection is extraordinarily helpful in tracking how this distinction plays out in the genre’s shifting mix of the empirical and the chronological. The volume as a whole demonstrates in detail that it was not until the late eighteenth century that temporality “moved” to the “core” of history. Many kinds of histories were simply not concerned with the passage of time. Here, for example, is Encyclopaedia Britannica’s definition of “history” in 1771:
a description or recital of things as they are, or have been, in a continued orderly narration of the principal facts and circumstances thereof. (emphasis mine)
Notice that “have been”—the past tense—is only an option. The overall focus is on what we would now call the empirical: “things as they are.”
To get a sense of how thoroughly this “or” shaped not only history but many other genres through the entire eighteenth century, compare William Godwin’s title for his 1794 system-in-a-novel mentioned earlier to Delarivier Manley’s title of 1714 in figure 2.1. “Adventures” or “History,” Manley’s binary, is flipped and recoded—per Britannica’s definition—into Godwin’s “Things as They Are” or “Adventures.” In both cases, adventures points to the retelling of the character’s past, while history is the empirical “recital of things as they are.” In using that phrase, Godwin, like Britannica, was echoing Francis Bacon who, as we have seen, foregrounded that phrase as a key to his plan to advance knowledge. For Bacon as well as for Godwin, “things as they are” invoked the empirical as the historical. That’s why Bacon claimed that his “advancement” into a future of new knowledge “must only be made by a natural history, and that of a new kind.”
Figure 2.1 Title pages from 1714 and 1794.
Although his mode of scaling up to that kind was the forbiddingly long list of histories that, from our perspective, strategically fell short, it’s Bacon’s motive that still speaks to us now: his insistence that history came in many kinds and that choosing mattered. For a history of system, this means that system is not the only variable. History, too, is a genre—a grouping that changes over time—and choosing how to engage it is as important to the outcome as choosing how to engage system. Choosing both is all the more important when we have two genres that have not only played important roles in shaping knowledge but have often done so in a competitive manner. It matters because—to put this as simply as possible—the competition hasn’t ended. What we write about system now is shaped by how history and system have interrelated in the past and how they continue to do so in the present.
In most books, what others write about the same topic is either cordoned off in introductory comments or engaged at length, usually in the form of elaboration or argument. But since my focus on system is on how it shaped knowledge, the shapes that other work on system have taken are part of my inquiry. I bring this issue of other work up here—rather than in a preliminary meta-statement or as argument—because what illuminates the shapes of that work and the shape of my own is the subject of this chapter: the interrelations of history and system. In those interrelations, system has shaped knowledge about itself.
I have raised already, in comparing my findings to David Simpson’s in chapter 1, the relationship of my enterprise to the study of system within the history of ideas. I will turn shortly to the story of how that type of history emerged at the turn into the nineteenth century to assume such a prominent place in the discipline of history. The rise of ideas as a primary currency of history went hand in hand, I shall argue, with history’s changing relationship to system—specifically a transfer in agency from system to the modern subject. Three of the most prominent forms of system scholarship today also bear telling connections to the changing interrelations of that period. Immanuel Wallerstein’s “modern world system” has been an effort to describe the rise of capitalism as the dividing of the world into geographical parts, with each part defined by the function it performs in a unified global economic system. Niklas Luhmann’s work in systems theory has been an effort to remake Max Weber’s rationalization narrative of modernity into a tale of functional differentiation through autopoetic systems. Cybernetics, most closely identified with Norbert Wiener, has also used system’s feedback loops to explore issues of control arising out of the changing relationship between man and machine.
These have been valuable undertakings, all three of which abstract system from its status as a genre to put it to work as a conceptual tool explaining the conditions of modernity: the economic and political, in particular, for Wallerstein, the social and psychic, for Luhmann, and the technological for Wiener. Since these scholars do not do what I do—they use system to produce knowledge, while I study it—my business with them in this book is not critique but explaining how and why system ended up in their hands. To that end, I return system to its status as a genre so that we can study it through its interrelations with other genres, particularly—for our present purposes—its changing relationship to history.
The Tectonic Maps
How do we identify and grasp that relationship? System and history, as we have just seen, were genres launched at the same time to address the same problem: how to pull out of a stall and scale up to the good fortune of new resources. But recovering what happened next—and the consequences—is no easy task, so it’s time to use our new computational resources and locate system and history on our Tectonic maps. I call them “Tectonic” because the different shapes in each map resemble the plates that float on the surface of the earth.2 These shapes, although irregular, fit together into what geologists would call a Pangea or supercontinent. The analogy is, of course, only a starting point for grasping what the maps represent and what they can do for us. Take a look at the first one (>figure 2.2).
Figure 2.2 System in relationship to other terms with which it shares title pages, 1700–1739.
This map is the product of my collaboration with my research colleague Mark Algee-Hewitt, who in building it has drawn on work in information visualization at Bell Laboratories (see appendix A). Tectonics is in ongoing development—not only in the conventional sense of the technology getting better and the maps much prettier, but also in the sense of how we develop in response. Like all new technologies, it will take time for it to take hold—for you and me and it to find its primary forms and functions. In a sense, it will tell us what to do next.3
Based on all of the title pages in Eighteenth Century Collections Online that contain variations of the word system, it tells us which other words also appear on those title pages. Each word receives a “distance” score from every other word, based on the likelihood or probability that both would appear within the same title in which system appears. These are stem searches, meaning that they catch all variants of the word—with one exception. Since our focus is on the relationship of history to system, we have given history special attention. Its variants occupy two plates: one, as with system, is the noun, both singular and plural; the other is for the modifiers, historical and historically.
Every plate is bounded by the words with which it most often shares title pages with system. The diagrams thus map both adjacencies and clusters—and the map itself has what we might call cardinality. Words in the northeast, as explained more fully in appendix A, are much more likely to appear with each other on system title pages than to any word in the southwest corner. Having system—as the common denominator—at the center of the map translates the frequency with which words share title pages with system into distance from the center. Every word’s location is thus a function of that frequency and its clustering cardinality. As the date ranges change from map to map—moving sequentially through the eighteenth century—we can track which words and clusters in the descriptive title pages of that time4 fall in and out of proximity with system.
In the first four decades of the eighteenth century, as mapped in figure 2.2, we find history at the periphery.5System is surrounded more closely by terms associated with Newtonian natural philosophy, including nature, account, method, universe, observation, and matter, table, and body. At a farther distance, even Newton’s nameplates make it onto the map: “Sir” “Isaac” “Newton.”
In the next third of the century, however, they fall off the edge (into the mouth not of a monster but of statistical insignificance), and a number of the Newtonian terms give way to a new set of systems that package “knowledge” into a “variety” of “introductory” “accounts” and “descriptions” that include “illustrations” and “copperplate” “engravings” (figure 2.3). This surge in “systems” that “illustrate” “knowledge” arises at the midcentury moment when the visual legacy of Ramism intersected with the scaling up both of system’s encyclopedic ambitions and of the market for and technologies of print. As that confluence contributed to what John Bender and Michael Marrinan (2010) describe as the “culture of diagram,” “history” was also on the move. In this slice of the eighteenth century, it halved its earlier distance from the center, approaching system in the company of a new set of terms: history, when sharing title pages with system, increasingly took on the task of “shew[ing]” things, particularly things that were “curious” or more “accurate.”
Figure 2.3 System in relationship to other terms with which it shares title pages, 1740–1779.
Figure 2.4 System in relationship to other terms with which it shares title pages, 1779–1800.
What happened next, in the final two decades of the eighteenth century, is what I am calling the collision (figure 2.4).6 Could this have been predicted—predicted in the manner that geologists are working hard to predict earthquakes today? What we can say is that system and history shared an initial push and direction from Galileo’s and Bacon’s contemporaneous efforts to advance knowledge—and that after the advancement we call Enlightenment, their trajectories intersected. What Tectonics does is materialize that intersection on a broad evidentiary base that—in its specificity and physicality (2,679 shared title pages)—can help us to understand better what happened and why. It offers, for example, an index to the force of that collision in the form of historical* appearing on the map for the first time—an indication that the adjectival and adverbial constructions also now share more title pages with system, in what we might call the “generic modifier” format—as in “historical systems.”7
By mapping adjacencies and clusters, Tectonics also identifies and visualizes the conditions of possibility for new forms of knowledge and understanding. In this case, the meeting, or collision, of system and history formed what I would term a platform—a generic platform—on which knowledge could and did divide into the modern disciplines. In terms of our understanding how the shape of knowledge changes, the stakes here are high. Citing evidence from William Clark (2006), Geoffrey Lloyd (2009), and Donald Kelley (1997), Simon Schaffer argues that “sorting out the geographical and chronological schemes of disciplinary power remains the analyst’s task, since one cannot be sure exactly when there were disciplines to connect nor when they looked as they do now” (Barry and Born 2013, 2–3). As Schaffer points out, for example, “Robert Boyle systematically used the term discipline.” But the use that Schaffer highlights illustrates the need to historicize rather than to assume the presence of our understanding of the term “discipline” back then.
When Boyle describes himself as “having invaded Anatomy, a Discipline which they [‘Physitians’] challenge to themselves” (Boyle 1660, 382–383), his use of the term was more a matter of occupational gatekeeping among the professions than a statement about the nature of that knowledge. This was not an invoking of an overall organization of knowledge divided into narrow-but-deep kinds. What Tectonics offers is a way to historicize that reorganization by identifying the condition of possibility of those kinds. Their incarnation was enabled, I am arguing, by the historical formation of the platform visualized by Tectonics: the coming together of system and history.
Tectonics is, then, per Galileo, a new spyglass for zooming in—for charting spatially over time the shifting adjacencies that enable larger-scale change, including not only the reorganization of knowledge but also, per Peter de Bolla’s work on the “division of labor” and “human rights,” the formation of new concepts (Siskin and Warner 2010, 87–101; de Bolla 2013). Calling this method of materializing change “Tectonics” points as well to these shifting configurations as an act of building, the term’s etymological root. A tectonic form is—as in an OED cite from 1903—“A form produced ... by the exigencies of construction.”8 Thus another payoff for Tectonics is that it can help us understand what is being built and under what conditions.
What were the exigencies that drove history into system and onto shared title pages? We focused the third map on just the last two decades of the eighteenth century because of two quantitative phenomena of that period of time: the overall takeoff in print and the increase in stand-alone, self-proclaimed systems as vehicles for specialization and professionalization (e.g., a system of the income tax, a system of education). In this growing, and thus more and more crowded, market for print, all kinds were under increasing pressure to lay claim to their part of it. Even the most comprehensive categories assumed more specialized forms.
Specialization, however, was not a simple matter of isolation but of renegotiating boundaries and functions with other forms. History’s intersection with system was just such a negotiation, the terms of which we can find inscribed on the title pages identified by our maps. By scaling up to thousands of title pages, those maps also allow us to scale down—to zoom into specific examples of this new adjacency. We can see that under the pressure of those final decades, system and history, to use a word from one of the title pages in figure 2.5, entered into a “gratifying” relationship.
Figure 2.5 Title pages containing system and history.
For Mrs. Dards’s catalogue, on the one hand, the gratification comes from a “new system” interrelating with “history” by appealing to history’s empirical mode of valuing “objects” “minutely described.” On the other hand, Thomas Bankes’s “NEW AND AUTHENTIC SYSTEM” of 1788 is enhanced by “Complete HISTORY” in its chronological mode of accounting for events that “have taken place.” That temporal dimension provides system with the opportunity to exercise its scalability across time as well as space, for, with the past mixed in, Bankes’s “SYSTEM” becomes a new “WHOLE” comprehending “EVERY THING WORTHY OF NOTICE THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE FACE OF NATURE, BOTH BY LAND AND WATER.”
As history met system under the exigencies of those last two decades, the two genres rebuilt each other—and in the process, they reshaped other subject areas from branches of philosophy into stand-alone specialties. Both of these shared title pages announced such specialized systems—of biology and of geography—both of them becoming part of that genre’s end-of-century surge and of knowledge’s new shape. In Galilean terms, there were more systems within systems. In turn, system’s scalability—its capacity to scale up to the “UNIVERSAL” for Bankes (1788) and to a “Variety” that was “EQUAL TO NATURE” for Mrs. Dards (1800)—opened new realms to the professing of history. Under the competitive exigencies that helped to specialize and professionalize system, more systematic histories took on more, with more becoming the mark of its changing status.
In Bankes’s geography, history scaled up to the “whole” world, mounting new efforts at world and universal history that extended and rationalized earlier biblical and monarchical chronologies. A century after Newton had used a universal law of rising and falling to give a new coherence to the “system of the world” (1687), Edward Gibbon wrote a History of the Decline and Fall (1776–1788) and Alexander Tytler published a Plan for a Universal History, Ancient and Modern (1782).
With system now mediating the empirical connection to things—absolving history of that function—this was the moment in which temporality completed its move to history’s core. New knowledge groupings now had empirical content arranged systematically and their own chronological narratives to define them and to differentiate them from each other. And they also now had professionals specializing in the writing and recitation of those narratives. Both Gibbon and Tytler were professors, and Tytler’s Plan was for a “course of lectures.”
To corroborate the phenomenon I have just described—the tectonic formation of the narrow-but-deep disciplines of modernity at the late eighteenth-century intersection of system and history—we need to be able to observe it from a different generic standpoint. The perspective that offers the greatest clarity is, not surprisingly, from one of the most prominent and proliferating genres of those final decades of the eighteenth century: the encyclopedia. When the first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica appeared between 1768 and 1771, its editor explicitly denounced both organizing knowledge in alphabetical order and comprehensive diagrams as “repugnant” “folly.” Materials from all of the sciences and arts were instead “digested” into substantial “Treatises or Systems” that proved to be Britannica’s most striking and consequential formal innovation: the consolidation of alphabetically organized material into an array of subject-specific “arrangements” that anticipated the modern curriculum. In effect, the encyclopedia became the home of protodisciplinary systems (Encyclopaedia Britannica 1771, v; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1797, x).
As Britannica grew during the decades of the takeoff in print—almost quadrupling from 2,391 pages in the 1771 first edition to 8,595 in the 1784 second edition and then almost doubling again into the 14,579 pages of the third—“more” produced difference. Not only did the number of protodisciplines increase with the number of pages, but their boundaries thickened. What had been only digested was now defined and deepened. By the third edition, each of these “distinct” new systems was now packaged, proclaimed the title page, with its own “History, Theory, and Practice.” This move sounds innocuous until Tectonics helps us to visualize what was at stake.
When finally packed together at the end of the century, system and history formed a new generic platform—a platform on which the encyclopedia’s new knowledge groupings could institute their differences by telling their own tales. Britannica could now claim that it contained “Full EXPLANATIONS” of the “VARIOUS DETACHED PARTS OF KNOWLEDGE” (emphasis mine). What Galileo observed in the stars—that the system of the physical world was a world full of systems—the reader of Britannica could observe on the page: the system of the intellectual world was becoming, edition by edition, a world full of new systems that are now our disciplinary and departmental homes.
We may think or hope those homes are on solid ground, but the condition of possibility I have just described was a collision—and collisions in tectonics are always the first steps toward other collisions. Think of the late twentieth-century calls for interdisciplinarity as preliminary tremors—tremors that remind us that the core message of Tectonics (indeed, tectonics of any kind) is always instability. To say, as Bacon did when system was first entering English, that knowledge was “stuck” may have suggested that things were static—that nothing was happening. But in the context of tectonics, stuck signals change—it is the enabling condition of change—the state in which pressures build and forces multiply. Looking back from the late eighteenth-century collision I’ve just described, we can see Galileo’s systems and Bacon’s histories multiply until their collisions formed a new ground for knowledge. Standing on that ground, Tectonics gives us a new perspective on how we got there—and, in doing so, it asks us to anticipate a near future in which that ground will shift from under our feet.
History among the Disciplines—The Narrowing
After the collision, what Donald Kelley calls “the career of world or universal history” (Pomata and Siraisi 2005, 229) was set; its later twists and turns have all been efforts to build on the tectonic proximity of system and history. For Wallerstein (2004), for example, the world system was a product of history configured by capitalism. For Luhmann (1997), however, system was not a product but itself the active agent. “Under modern conditions,” he argued,
the global system is a society, in which all internal boundaries can be contested and all solidarities shift. All internal boundaries depend upon the self-organization of subsystems and no longer on an `origin’ in history or on the nature or logic of the encompassing system. (72)
Here yet again is yet another version of what Galileo sighted through his spyglass: systems within systems. Luhmann’s twist on the scalability of system was to insist that systems made themselves by using “their own output as input.” History could not, of course, be the origin of autopoietic systems—for they are their own origin—but by no means did history drift off from system. In Luhmann, history (in its modern sense with time at its core) became the condition of possibility for autopoiesis itself as a recursive and thus necessarily temporal process.
Neither Wallerstein nor Luhmann represents the norm for writing history or for writing about system. For that we need to turn in the direction of the history of ideas. As I suggested earlier, the rise of ideas as a primary currency of history went hand-in-hand with the tale I have just told of history’s changing relationship to system. The two are linked by transfers in agency between system and the modern subject. Luhmann’s work can be our station for that transfer, since readers reaching for a way into his arguments have repeatedly grasped what looks like a straightforward substitution. In Linda C. Brigham’s words echoing those of William Rasch and Cary Wolfe, “systems” in Luhmann “stands in the place of the old subject, and ‘environments’ replaces the old object” (Brigham 1996; Rasch and Wolfe 1995).
What enables this switch is that Luhmann is granting system autopoietic agency, and thus qualifying it to take over causation from the subject. System became a place to “send the mail,” Brigham (1996) writes, once we recognized that “the address of the Enlightenment Subject has been vacant for a long time.” But system and subject have actually been in a very long-term relationship, as I detail in chapter 7. Our focus here is on their interaction during the moment of history’s modernization; the subject, as well as system, I will argue, played a role in that transformation.
To bring the subject into the picture, we need to pick up that process where we left off in the 1780s and then take it forward into the following decades. In 1784, while, Gibbon and Tytler were busy with their systematic scaling up of world history, William Jones wrote a “Discourse on the Institution” of the Asiatic Society that was later published in its Transactions. In discussing the kinds of knowledge he hoped the society would produce, Jones echoed Francis Bacon’s classification of man’s knowledge from 1605: “history to his memory, poesy to his imagination, and philosophy to his reason” (Bacon [1605] 2008, 175). This scaffolding for the new organon had persisted as a framework for new knowledge ventures thanks not only to the success of the Royal Society (the explicit model for this Asiatic one), but also Peter Shaw’s new edition and translation of Bacon in 1733. Linking “memory, reason, and imagination” to “history, science and art,” Jones, like Bankes in his Geography, set a new worldly agenda for history: it “comprehends either an account of natural productions, or the genuine records of empires and states” (Asiatic Society 1799, x, xiii).
For historians seeking to comprehend, Asia was the subject of daydreams. “So pleasing in itself, and to me so new,” wrote Jones, it “could not fail to awaken a train of reflections” and “inexpressible pleasure,” for it was
fertile in the production of human genius, abounding in natural wonders, and infinitely diversified in the forms of religion and government, in the laws, manners, customs, and languages, as well as in the features and complexions, of men. I could not help remarking, how important and extensive a field was yet unexplored. (ix–x)
Field does fascinating double duty here, referring both to Jones’s physical field of vision as his voyage neared its end—“India lay before us, and Persia on our left, whilst a breeze from Arabia blew nearly on our stern”—and to the fields of knowledge he imagined himself harvesting. In this dual signification, the word enacts Bacon’s handshake—the meeting of the visible and intellectual worlds. Part of the changing “career” of world history, then, was to mediate worlds.
Since system, as we saw earlier, was well suited for that job, history’s drive toward it played, and continues to play, a key role in readying historians for that same task. But this tectonic collision was not history’s only career-altering encounter. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, history experienced at least three others:
Differentiation from the novel
The formation of the disciplines
The personification of agency
Each of these events sharpened history’s professional profile, making it increasingly distinct from other genres and thus a more effective disciplinary tool. However, sharpening also entailed a narrowing that altered its relationship with system in a manner that bears importantly on choosing the best way for us to connect history to system now.
Differentiation from the novel. Like system, Jones’s genre and his society’s—the genre of “transactions”—proved to be a popular vehicle for history during the nineteenth century. But by the end of the second decade of that century, another genre—the one Fielding contrasted with system—became a particularly visible vehicle thanks to Walter Scott’s lucrative turn from poetry to the novel. Note how this early review of Scott’s first historical novel, Waverley, sets the scene of writing and reading in ways that clearly echo Jones’s encounter with Asia:
We are unwilling to consider this publication in the light of a common novel, whose fate it is to be devoured with rapidity for the day, and to be afterwards forgotten for ever; but as a vehicle of curious accurate information upon a subject which must at all times demand our attention—the history and manners of a very large and renowned portion of the inhabitants of these islands. … We would recommend this tale, as faithfully embodying the lives, the manners, and the opinions of this departed race. (British Critic 1814, 204)
We have become used to thinking of Scott as a matchmaker, as one of the first novelists to bring history into the novel. But history, as Cheryl Nixon’s Novel Definitions illustrates in detail, was already there—there from the start when the genre of the novel first emerged from the categorical stew that featured romance as its other primary ingredient (2008, 44). Far from bringing the genres of history and the novel together, Scott’s industry and popularity played a key role in writing them apart.
To use Samuel Coleridge’s term, Scott’s efforts and reception desynonymized history and the novel. Their relationship became adjectival, authorizing two different kinds of difference. First, dwelling on some novels as “historical” allowed for a category of those that were not. That left the novel—after more than century of being closely linked with history (a sharing enshrined on hundreds of title pages and in the quotation heading this chapter)—to stand on its own. Second, by the time the Romantic period, as we conventionally label the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, drew to a close, reviews of Scott and his novels regularly, and often ferociously, focused on how history was different from what Scott wrote. In 1847, for example, Fraser’s Magazine took a review of Scott as an occasion for asking whether “History gained by his writings”:
That a great and romantic effect was thus produced [in Waverley] is evident. There is all the semblance of a genuine historical tableau; the elementary characters are living, breathing men, and they offend us by no discrepancies of manner or costume. But is historical truth preserved? We confidently answer that it is not, and there is no surer way of contravening the realities of History.
This, then, was the consensus that emerged by midcentury: Scott, thanks to his strengths and weaknesses, became the poster boy for doing what the eighteenth century could not: differentiate history from forms of fiction such as the novel and the romance.
The formation of the disciplines. That differentiation, in turn, was part of the more comprehensive reclassification of kinds and knowledges that we have just tectonically identified as disciplinarity: the reorganization of knowledge into the narrow but deep fields we inhabit today. History was not alone in hiving itself off as its own form of specialized knowledge; every newly forming discipline instituted itself as a “detached” form of knowledge, to use Britannica’s word, by telling its own history (Siskin 1998). In literary studies, for example, Romanticism is the label for the historical tales literary study tells itself about the period in which it became a discipline. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the first courses in English Literature were taught, the first departments of English were formed, the essay and the review—as well as the periodicals that contained them—assumed their modern forms, and our current disciplinary distinction between the humanistic and the scientific was first instituted.9 History thus experienced a doubling of its status: its incarnation as a stand-alone discipline was coupled with its instrumental role in the formation of its freestanding neighbors.
The personification and hegemony of agency. The infrastructure to support history’s specialization and professionalization was assembled during the last three decades of the eighteenth century. Once in the proximity of system, history—scaled up and with temporality at its core—was newly energized by the notion that history might itself have a story (Pomata and Siraisi 2005, 234). This disciplinary reflexivity bracketed the Romantic period, from the stadial histories of civil society—with their built-in stories of progressive stages—that surfaced in late eighteenth-century Scotland, to Gibbon and Tytler, to the very large-scale teleological and dialectical epics of Hegel and Marx in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.
As history’s own stories of historical change stretched temporally and geographically from local reports on things as they are to universalizing tales of things as they were, are, and must become, gaps in the narratives were filled in two primary ways. “Ideas,” which had been, in Donald Kelley’s words, “rational and universally valid concepts independent of time,” became, in the context of these new kinds of history, things that “lived in time”—and thus capable of explaining how times changed (Pomata and Siraisi 2005, 231). In retrospect, all that was necessary to give us that most familiar form of modern history—the “history of ideas”—was a companion for this new form of life: a subject capable of generating and carrying ideas forward in time. If, per the reading of Luhmann I cited earlier, system is now receiving the subject’s mail, this was the earlier moment when letters first interpellated that subject. They hailed it into history as an agent personifying some of system’s causal functions—functions that Luhmann’s work has tried to reclaim for system.
That developmental subject—a subject now defined and made deep by the capacity to change over time—advertised its newly intimate relationship with ideas in a wide range of genres, from the philosophical—as in Kant’s motto for Enlightenment, “dare to know”—to the lyric forms that scholars of the Romantic period know so well. But as William Warner and I have argued in This Is Enlightenment (2010), Kant’s daring subject was not in need of Enlightenment; it was the product of Enlightenment, including, as we detail, Europe’s first postal systems. By 1784, the year of Kant’s famous essay on Enlightenment, man had already become, in Bacon’s terms, a new kind of tool—a tool whose power now lay in its insistence on using its own understanding to change itself (Siskin and Warner 2010, 1–21).
Empowered in this autopoietic manner, this embodiment of agency amplified agency itself. It scaled up its own tales of personal development into a form of history as development, appropriating, simplifying, and thus amplifying the existing causal narratives—from the stadial to the gravitational to the universal. It thus played a key role in establishing the hegemony of agency over history, securing the assumption that history’s primary task was to tell tales of causal relationships between past and present. The history of ideas became the dominant form of this causal history as its narratives were increasingly driven by two kinds of persons: personifications of ideas themselves, such as “capitalism,” and individual persons whose own daring ideas changed history.
What the subject did to history, then, was give us both Marx and Carlyle. As ways of mediating history’s relationship to system, they and their histories have become useful disciplinary tools, extending historical inquiry in innovative ways. However, those uses came with a price: history’s encounters with differentiation, disciplinarity, and agency all generated the same vector. Even as they helped history to scale up in content, they narrowed it as a form, delimiting its interrelations with fiction and other fields as they sutured temporality and causality into a single prime directive. Narrowing, let me emphasize, is a relative term—my example in the next section is On the Origin of Species—and it is not in itself a problem, but it can become a problem when conditions of possibility change.
System and History II
To dramatize why this matters for finding the right histories for system now, at the moment of its new proliferation in new technologies, I will go out on a disciplinary limb. Actually, let’s call it a branch, for my model here is the man who won a Nobel Prize for establishing that there are three basic branches to the tree of life. Instead of resting on his personal laurels and the recent prominence of biology among the sciences, however, Carl Woese has spent his seventh decade mounting a campaign in scholarly articles and magazine interviews to recast his field. Declaring the obsolescence of reductionist biology in the very moment of its apparent success, he has been arguing, in the physicist’s Freeman Dyson’s words, for “the need for a new synthetic biology based on emergent patterns of organisation rather than on genes and molecules” (Dyson 2006, 38).
Woese’s enabling strategy is to return to the usual suspect in arguing about biology, Darwin, but not just to take sides in the debate that still concerns all of us, inside and outside the field: the debate between evolution and creationism. Instead, he zooms out, propelled by the simple but surprising observation that Darwinian evolution is only a chapter in the book of life. We forget that Darwin wrote about the origin of species, not the origin of life. Though the age of Darwinian speciation, roughly 2 to 3 billion years, may seem long to us, it was but an interlude within the larger history of living things. What preceded it was a period without species that Dyson has summarized in often hilarious terms:
Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information. … Evolution … could be rapid, as new chemical devices could be evolved simultaneously [through] horizontal gene transfer. But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbours in efficiency. That cell separated itself from the community and refused to share. Its offspring became the first species of bacteria, reserving their intellectual property for their own private use. (Dyson 2006, 39, emphasis mine)
Once VGT (vertical gene transfer)—how species do it—replaced HGT (horizontal gene transfer), evolution slowed down, for “individual species once established evolve very little.” In Darwinian evolution, established species have “to become extinct so that new species can replace them.”
Strangely enough, that imperative sealed the fate of Darwin’s epoch; it began to end
when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganise the biosphere. Now, as Homo sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are reviving the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. … The evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented. (39)
So while almost everyone else thinks they are in on the big argument—the “truth” of Darwinian evolution—Woese has put that concept, and thus the controversy, in its historical place by proposing a different history and hierarchizing them: the history of life includes the history of species. And, not surprisingly, a crucial piece of technology for this scaling up is system. At the moment of Woese’s call for a history of life, “systems problems,” according to the Systems Biology website of Harvard University, “are emerging as central to all areas of biology and medicine.” Although systems biology is a label for many different kinds of endeavors, it most often shares two key features with Woese’s prescription for a biology newly adequate to a history of life: it is synthetic, requiring institutional and intellectual “synergisms” across the sciences, and it attends in particular to the modeling and discovery of emergent properties.10
Turning to Woese thus provides a current example of how the interrelations of system and history continue to change, particularly as our world (as in my title for this part of the book) becomes a world full of systems. There are as yet no new departments on the “systems biology” model outside of the hard sciences, though there has been a proposal for “systems sociology” at MIT, and much work, as we’ve seen, in systems theory and in particular kinds of systems across the humanities and social sciences. Woese’s venture speaks to those disciplines as well, for although his immediate goal was to improve his own field, his method echoes and enacts Bacon’s plan for advancing all knowledge through a careful choice of histories. What kind of history can do for the study of system what Woese’s history of life offers to biology? Bacon’s list of histories was long, but he did hierarchize it, and in doing so he singled out one history in particular as strategically capacious.
Reclaiming Literary History
History is Natural, Civil, Ecclesiastical and Literary; whereof the three first I allow as extant, the fourth I note as deficient. For no man hath propounded to himself the general state of learning … without which the history of the world seemeth to me, to be as the Statue of Polyphemus with his eye out; that part being wanting, which doth most shew the spirit and life of the person.
—Francis Bacon, 1605 (2008, 175–176)
For anyone outside an English Department, the notion that “literary history” is the living eye of the “history of the world,” would certainly raise eyebrows. Bacon identified one reason: this kind of history was, in his time, “deficient.” That is not surprising given its remit as Bacon defined it: this “story of learning” would track “the antiquities and originals of knowledges … and all other events concerning learning, throughout the ages of the world” in order to “make learned men wise in the use and administration of learning.” It was, in other words, “HISTORIA LITERARUM” in the formerly comprehensive sense of letters as all written records. Through the late eighteenth century, letters, learning, and literature remained interchangeably inclusive.
“Literary history” continued to be deficient—there in “divers” parts, as Bacon put it, but not in a whole from “age to age”—until the meaning of the word literary changed. As “Literature” became a subset of its formerly inclusive self, literary history became less about knowledge in general and more about the narrowing of knowledge into disciplines. It then followed exactly the vector I described for “history” as a genre at that time. Its interrelations with system precipitated various classificatory schemes, from genres to periods, but what came to occupy the center was the subject. That self made itself at home as the primary causal agent of literary history: the Authors who still populate anthologies and remain principal objects for articles and books.
After two centuries of equilibrium—a balance between the scale of its content and its authorial patterns of organization—literary history in the late twentieth century began again to be experienced as deficient. Its field began to change shape—both deepening, into searchable but growing databases of historical and current materials, and extending, across the globe and into and through new technologies. What had been intimidating to specialists in training—from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf—had quickly become a sliver of what was easily accessible.
Resistance to scaling up soon gave way to the need to choose how. One alternative has attempted to conserve the discipline—and its relationship to its authorial subjects—by growing the existing schemes (e.g., expanding the canon, consolidating and adding periods).11 The obvious problem has been determining how much is too much for schemes designed to handle less. And especially troubling in that regard has been the effectiveness of the tools that do the handling. The tools of literary history have primarily been tools of scarcity; they were designed, that is, to make more out of their objects.
Consider one of the most popular tools: close reading. From the moment at the end of the eighteenth century when the poet William Wordsworth told the readers of Lyrical Ballads to read his poems in the same “style” that he wrote them—“look[ing] steadily”—writers and readers of literary history have moved in closer to the text in order to make more out of it (Wordsworth [1800] 1974, 1:132). The further they have burrowed in—isolating each word, each image—the more they have had to say. Canonization, the vector of less, and close reading, the vector of more, have been the paradoxical countermovements of the modern literary system. But that system’s tools, like all analytic tools, are data sensitive; they work differently at different scales.12 Thus, as the canon has grown, canonization has ceased to be the vector of less, calling into question the value of close reading’s extractions of more.
This is how a narrowing that was once enabling has become a problem. If literary history can’t scale up while conserving the literary system it helped to form, then it’s Woese time: time to find a new history that can contain the old one. For biology, this meant a history with a different name—“life” as embracing “species.” But Woese time also points back in time—to Bacon as the strategist who first linked advancement to a hierarchy of histories and put literary history in the top tier. To reclaim his earlier, broader sense of literary is to acknowledge our own historicity—the aging of our deep but narrow disciplines and the issues of scale they now face. But reforming literary studies is not my agenda here. Though I would welcome that as an effect, my goal in connecting past to present is to focus on system.
To that end, this book as I ventured in the Prologue is best described as a literary history in the Baconian sense that I am reclaiming here. As a story of “knowledges,” it is compatible with both the book’s ambition—of describing how system has shaped knowledge—and its strategy of including histories of other kinds. That strategy can best be understood as applying the lessons of historia’s past—that history has consisted historically of different kinds with different functions—in a contemporary way. The histories I am about to describe, and then use, “run” in this book like programs multitasking on a computer. Each one can perform particular tasks, some tasks enable others, and they all relate hierarchically to each other. While systems within systems, as we have encountered them so far, have highlighted that genre’s architecture as scalable, histories within histories, as they will be deployed here, illustrate the ways they can be interoperable. Some histories, for example, can be ways of doing other histories.
The History of Mediation
Bacon did not leave a model for how to do his version of literary history, and it’s not my purpose to offer a prescriptive one. The value of flagging this book’s genre as literary history derives from the act of grouping itself. Sorting out Wallerstein and Luhmann, historicizing ideas and subjects, and connecting Woese to Bacon are all classificatory acts that yield a distinctive mix of features. Those features highlight scope, interrelations, and change, and they are formal (“literary” as all written records, including multiple histories), thematic (knowledge of all kinds), and temporal (changes in knowledge over time). Together, they constitute a genre adequate to the ways I engage system: a literary history of system studies system as both a genre that interrelates with other genres and as a technology that shapes and reshapes knowledge.
But how? What kinds of history can do the work of this form of literary history? Conventional literary history has largely depended on its interoperability with the history of ideas: authors have ideas that they represent and then critics interpret them. What would an alternative currency be, and where can we find it? The opening words of Bacon’s Great Renewal provide some explicit directions: “The human intellect is the source of its own problems, and makes no sensible and appropriate use of the very real aids which are within man’s power” (Bacon[1620] 2000, 2).
Outside the mind and its ideas are what Bacon called “aids”—one of a cluster of terms and translations that includes “machines,” “instruments,” and “tools.” Whether moving a “heavy obelisk” or “advancing” knowledge, relying on the mind’s own ideas was, Bacon concluded, an “act of utter lunacy” (28–29). Sanity, for Bacon, was accepting the necessity of tools—tools that work. His “renewal” of knowledge was thus fundamentally a problem of what William Warner and I (2010) have termed mediation. We use that word as shorthand for the work done by tools, by what we would now call media of every kind—everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in between—emphasizing the Baconian stipulation that media of some kind are always at work.
If they are, then that work can be a framework for identifying and articulating change: mediation never ceases, but the forms of mediation differ over time. A history of this kind could be a useful alternative to the history of ideas. In This Is Enlightenment, Warner and I posit mediation as the inclusive term for this history; mediation can refer to what we now call media, but (as the breadth of reference of that book demonstrates) it is not restricted to them. The history of mediation can thus engage “media history” and “media theory,” but its wide range of objects, forms, technologies, agency, and interactions—and thus its chronological scope—differentiates it from both of those established enterprises.
Our test case for this history was to present Enlightenment as “an event in the history of mediation,” and we found that it provided new, and newly useful, ways of contesting the distortions of the history of ideas. Once ideas are animated with the requisite agency to change history on their own or through designated subjects, good historiographic intentions fall victim to the Frankenstein syndrome: once you start them, you can’t stop them. Thus, the Frankfurt School chased their marker for Enlightenment—“instrumental reason”—from Homer to Hollywood. And for those uncomfortable with such chronological excess, the history of ideas has also conveniently stretched in the other direction. Instead of using one idea to extend a single Enlightenment across thousands of years, for example, it has turned different ideas, within more conventional time frames, into multiple Enlightenments, from the Counter to the Radical to the Postcolonial.
Viewed as an event in the history of mediation, however, Enlightenment doesn’t dissolve into too many years, too many things, or too many versions of itself. Because mediations can be more easily pinned down than “ideas” to specific times and places, we can track more of them more accurately—including genres such as periodicals, infrastructure such as schools, associational practices such as clubs, and protocols such as copyright—and thus more readily identify patterns in those interactions. And since mediation doesn’t force us to distinguish between living things and inanimate things—it does not discriminate, that is, against any particular form of agency—it points us past the increasingly unproductive binary of technodeterminism. A history of mediation thus provides new, and newly useful, ways of thinking about change. And by reversing the narrowing of Romantic historiography, it gives us the capacity to zoom out Woese style—and thus write a literary history of the scope and scalability that system needs.
Such a history must also be able to take into account system’s capacity to adapt to different conditions and substrates, from writing and print to the algorithmic and the electronic. As an alternative to the focus on representation and interpretation in the history of ideas, mediation can ask the question “in what?”—and thus “capture,” as John Guillory has argued, the “hidden complexity of the process” that representation has for so long purported to describe, particularly the issue of “‘in what’ form a representation is transmitted.” Mediation thus offers an alternative to what Guillory calls “the dominance of representation in Western thought” (Siskin and Warner 2010, 7).
Using a history that addresses mediums is crucial to engaging system as a genre, for genres are themselves forms of mediation. Ideas never float free of form but are always in genre; they are never unmediated. Classifying into genres, as I have been doing with history in this chapter, is also an act of mediation—both between things (by generating and identifying hierarchical relationships of sameness and difference) and between us and things. In the Fraser’s Magazine discussion of Scott, the novel is described as a “medium” for history.
With its focus on substrates and conditions, of the physical embeddedness of ideas—they are always already physical—mediation also provides a way past some of the pitfalls not only of the binary of technodeterminism but also of the binary that the history of ideas always invites: idealist versus materialist and the causal arguments it generates. I am not suggesting here that mediation resolves all of those arguments given the longstanding and important investments that we have in them. But I do hope this book gives a sense of what might be gained by turning to mediation. I see those gains as taking the form both of specific insights—as with the arguments about Enlightenment sketched out above—and of a more general and much-needed push toward compatibility between historical work and a growing consensus in other disciplines on the relationship of information and knowledge to physical reality.13
Having made these claims for mediation, I should also reiterate here that choosing the history of mediation as a way to operate literary history at Bacon’s scale of stretching from “age to age” cannot be the task of one book. Since this one turns back to Galileo and forward to the fate of system today, I recognize that I am risking criticism for what will inevitably be left out in stretching as far as I do. Far is, of course, a relative term. The book that shares most clearly with mine the task of Baconian literary history stretches even further. In A Social History of Knowledge (two volumes published separately in 2000 and 2012), Peter Burke scales up both chronologically and geographically—a strategy he explains in terms of both disciplines and genres. “Relatively few historians,” he points out, “have taken the sociology of knowledge seriously.” His notion of seriousness echoes, as I just have, the choice that Samuel Johnson posed for eighteenth-century writers. This particular history, Burke proclaims, is
an essay, or series of essays, on a subject so large that any survey which did not take a consciously provisional form would be not only immodest to attempt but impossible to carry out. I must confess to a predilection for short studies of large subject, which attempt to make connections between different places, topics, periods or individuals, to assemble small fragments into a big picture. (Burke 2000, 9–10)
In terms of Johnson’s opposition, Burke’s essay is his “consciously provisional” alternative to a complete system.
It is in the trade-offs of scale—“short” and “large,” “small” and “big”—that his effort complements mine. I use complement in the strongest sense; for the reader this means engaging our endeavors not as rivals to be judged against each other but as contributions to the joint enterprise of a newly capacious literary history. We share, to offer one example, the same primary answer to the question, “Whose knowledge is the subject of this study?” The emphasis, in Burke’s words, “following the sources, [falls] on dominant or even ‘academic’ forms of knowledge, on ‘learning’ as it was often called” in the past. But Burke also essays a “wider” framework to which I have not aspired in this book: “The competition, conflict and exchange between the intellectual systems of academic elites and what might be called ‘alternative knowledges’ will be a recurrent theme in this study” (14). The price of accommodating that theme, however, is the narrowing of other parts of the story of knowledge—such as the treatment of “system” itself. Burke provides a paragraph on the “coming into use” of system in the seventeenth century in the first volume (Burke 2000, 86–87) and two paragraphs on its appearance as a “keyword” in the eighteenth century in the second (Burke 2012, 255–256).
I hope our readers will in the end conclude that the gaps opened by our particular negotiations of the essay/system binary are justified by the connections our studies do make. But those negotiations should be as transparent as possible, so let me clarify a few of the key temporal and geographical compromises—in the most productive sense of the term—that I have knowingly made. System’s role in the Enlightenment is a central focus of this book. After the early seventeenth-century sightings we have just made, I turn to the long eighteenth century and its equally long linear rise of references to system. It is then, particularly in the century’s middle and late decades, that the mediation of knowledge in general reached an unprecedented pitch. System, I will argue, played a key role in this extraordinary moment—a moment in which the very medium of mediation—its architecture of forms and tools, people and practices—became load bearing. At that point, each individual act of mediation worked not only on its own terms but also as part of a cumulative, collaborative, ongoing enterprise.14
My argument, as I sketched it out in the Prologue, then makes a number of stops in the nineteenth century to engage such topics as the emergence of the disciplines, Romanticism, and liberalism. It then returns to Darwin, not—as with Woese—to scale his work down, but to identify the major role his algorithmic use of system is now playing in current (nonmetaphorical) efforts to explain the universe as a computational system. I regret the many moments, topics, and uses of system missing from this agenda, but I take some comfort in the company of the collected volume whose title places it so close to mine in the enterprise of Baconian literary history. In his introduction to The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, coeditor Donald Kelley acknowledges that the “patterns and transformations” that should be part of his book
cannot be well understood from the heights of the general history of ideas. … The map must be filled in by particular explorations and soundings, and our project called for a conference that would combine some encyclopedic (as well as interdisciplinary and international) breadth with scholarly and technical depth. (Kelley and Popkin, 1991, 1)
My book shares not only this concern about the history of ideas but also the sense of risk in attempting to construct an alternative.
Though writing on my own,15 I too have tried to reach across and into other disciplines, and, at select moments, I have crossed national boundaries However, the focus of this book is Britain. Being more geographically capacious does, of course, have advantages, and an increased catchment area can alter some conclusions. For that I apologize, especially where my ignorance is the major factor. But sacrificing the advantages of following through in Britain would be cause for equal regret. It is too easy to lose arguments that do matter to the weight of limitless detail and qualifications, and to untempered admiration of the “trans-” and the “comparative.”
The history of mediation is a particularly useful tool for navigating these hazards. In This Is Enlightenment, it spared us
intellect-wasting custody battles over Enlightenment: “It’s French, of course.” “No, it’s actually British.” Grounded in specific mediations and yet yielding regularities, the history of mediation can clarify both the singularity of each local event and what those events have in common. (Siskin and Warner 2010, 11)
My more local focus on system has served up a number of compelling singularities: nation-specific arguments that are valuable in themselves but have the potential as well to be generative points of comparison:
System and the new science in England. Bacon and Newton helped to enable Enlightenment by engaging (and not engaging) system in specific and influential ways. Bacon’s plans for a new kind of knowledge used system to highlight difficulties in advancing knowledge. Newtonians were indebted not only to Newton’s ideas but to the form of guesswork he choose to employ—a form that came to stand for the entire work. The Principia became known as the “Newtonian System.”
System and the project of Enlightenment in Scotland. By project, I mean that for Adam Smith and his Scottish cohort, Enlightenment was a carefully planned foray into the newly expanding world of print. Their systems, as we will see in TheTheory of Moral Sentiments (Smith [1759] 1976), shaped knowledge in a specifically cumulative way that I describe as “Master Systems.”
System and print in Britain. The fate of Enlightenment in Britain was tied to the fate of system. To study system as a genre is to connect it and knowledge to the specific quantitative contours of the output of print in Britain.
System and politics in the United Kingdom. The politics of a kingdom in the process of uniting offers, as we shall see, an exceptional opportunity for studying the history of system as something to blame, starting with the fact that the social and political body that emerged from the Glorious Revolution (1689) became known as “the English system.”
Focusing through this national lens makes these particular uses of system visible. Sighting them in this way then sets the stage for future efforts to discover how system may have worked in similar and dissimilar ways elsewhere. To that end, I have engaged in some strategic boundary crossings, starting with the opening pairing of what Galileo saw and said with the simultaneous surfacing of the word system in English. I also integrate a number of the touchstones of system in France into my histories and arguments, from placing the distinction between esprit de système and esprit systèmatique into a history of blame to bringing Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique et Critique and Diderot’s Encyclopédie into my narrative of system’s role in forming the modern disciplines. Additional turns to such matters as Condillac’s emphasis on system’s ratio of principles to things and Rousseau’s plotting his Confessions as a journey from system to system will also, I hope, help to map out avenues that comparative studies might take.
“Particular Histories”—The History of Blame and the History of the Real
If I ask him to out to dinner, a race, rout, or ball, he replies, “You may go, if you please, but it is not in my system.”
—The Systematic, or Imaginary, Philosopher: A Comedy in Five Acts (1800)
Histories can work like camera lenses, capturing an object from different angles. The key to taking the most telling snapshots lies in selecting the histories into which the object is written. At the end of the Novum Organum, after describing his “Mother History”—the “Natural and Experimental History” that he envisioned as the primary vehicle for advancement—Bacon added the long list of what he called “Particular Histories.” He saw those histories as legal briefs that would prepare the “human race” to “cross-examine nature herself” (Bacon [1620] 2000, 223, 232). For my examination of system, two histories in particular work in and across the arguments to follow: the history of blame and the history of the real. The quotation at the start of this section is a punch line for both.
The philosopher is the butt of this comedy because of system. Two hundred years after Bacon worried that system could distract people from things as they are, this philosopher is distracted from almost everything. His experience of the world is thoroughly mediated by system; in fact, he is in system. To mock his behavior is to put system itself in the history of blame—and to write that history is to prepare a brief on one of the major ways that system has worked in the world.
Early in my research for this book, I discovered that it continues to work that way. In an effort to enlist my students in the task of identifying when and how system first became an object that could be blamed, I constructed an entire undergraduate course called “Blaming the System.” A day after the English Department submitted its schedule to the university, I received an e-mail from the registrar asking if she could take the class. Any sympathy that note evoked in me, however, completely evaporated a few weeks later when the next semester’s bulletin emerged from her office: my course title had been mysteriously transmuted into “Blaming the Victim.” I still can’t imagine what the students who signed up for the class were thinking when they first entered the room, but within a few weeks, they had done some rewriting of their own. EGL 347 became “Blaming the Siskin.”
What the class helped to uncover was a startlingly wide range of contexts in which system has been blamed. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, these range from politics to economics, from religion to epistemology. Blaming was so pervasive, in fact, that it doubled in on itself, with some people blaming others for habitually blaming the system: “If the Great Mind had form’d a diff’rent Frame,” wrote Sir Richard Blackmore in 1712, “Might not your wanton Wit the System blame?”
Although often mocked, as it is here, for excess, blaming the system played a crucial role in shaping knowledge. Blame so often accompanied system because systems were seen as something made—made to approximate the real and thus always falling short of it. But opening a gap invited more knowledge to fill it, and thus system configured the space in which Enlightenment could take place. Blaming the system set the scene of Enlightenment.
That scene was also a scene in a different “particular history”—the history I call the “history of the real.” The “systematic” philosopher was also, per the play’s title, the “imaginary” philosopher in at least two ways. Being “in” system detaches him from the world that is real to those who mock him—the world of diners, races, routs, and balls. But he is also an imaginary philosopher in the sense that he is not really a real philosopher but a fake one trapped by system. System is in some way an index to both what is experienced as the real and what can be ontologically claimed as real.
We have already seen this connection in Galileo’s account of Copernicus as “taking off the clothes of a pure astronomer” in order “to investigate what the system of the world could really be in nature.” The history of the real provides a frame for considering continuities and discontinuities in what the real could really be. Getting its bearings from objects such as systems, this history is an effort to identify how and when the experience of the real—not just opinions about the real—changed. For the eighteenth century, for example, consider all of the discussion of tabulae rasae, primary ideas, probability, fiction, fact, novel versus romance, imitation, falling trees, kicking rocks, skepticism. These phenomena all point to the same historical fact: the real was up for grabs during this time period, and what people were grabbing at was the physical.
When did the physical become real? When, to put this in more philosophical terms, did the physical secure its ontological hold on the real? For Newton, the world was still metaphysical. Soon after, however, the physical started kicking, becoming the virtual reality of the late eighteenth century; that is, the physical at that point was very present but still experienced as an approximation—something that was not quite real. Briefed by the history of the real, we can query system about these changes. At different times, system has been the metaphysical form of the divine will, the physical form of knowledge in print, the virtual form of our electronic simulations, and, now, the informational form of the universe itself. As we move in Part II forward into the Enlightenment—and, in the Coda, into the future—we will see how system has shaped and reshaped our knowledge of the real—and thus our experience of it.
