Yearlong
Core Program for the Year 2003–04
The
Age of Projects:
Changing
and Improving the Arts, Literature, and Life during the Long Eighteenth
Century, 1660-1820
by
Maximillian E. Novak, UCLA
In his Essay upon Projects, published in
1697, Daniel Defoe, who liked to find appropriate names for the times
in which he lived, pronounced his period, "the Projecting Age." The words
project and projector had distinctly negative contexts when
Defoe was writing. During the early seventeenth century in England projectors
were associated with those obtaining patents and monopolies, and during
the 1690s proposals for projects were often the province of the desperate
and the disreputable. It was no accident that John Law, the projector
who introduced new economic ideas to France during the Regency, lived
his last years as an expert at playing cards. Defoe tried to give projects
and projectors a new spin. While acknowledging the nefarious impulses
behind many schemes, he also saw that projecting could lead to improvements
in human life through new inventions or new methods of organizing society.
His way of viewing the world was typical of the European Enlightenment,
which in itself may be conceived as a massive project for changing and
improving the world through the search for new approaches in the arts,
sciences, education, and politics. In this sense, Locke, Swift, Rousseau,
Diderot, and Godwin all had elements of the projector in their makeup.
Although the potential evil inherent in illusory projects emerged with
the collapse of the Mississippi Company in France and the South Sea Bubble
in England, the quest for improvements continued.
For the sake of this program I want to conceive of projects in this very
broad way. In his Essay, Defoe discussed everything from a system
of pensions for the aged to courts of bankruptcy, from schools for educating
women to schools for training young soldiers, from academies for the improvement
of language and literature to methods of organizing naval personnel. Some
of these projects, such as that on recreating the Roman highways throughout
Britain, involved rediscovering the achievements of the past. The principles
that had produced the great poetry of Greece, Rome, and the Old Testament;
the systems of government that had enabled Rome to maintain its empire;
and the painting, sculpture, and architecture that many critics felt should
serve as models for an enlightened world all seemed available to a period
eager to be considered a new classical age. It is hardly an accident that
Gibbon's Decline and Fall should have represented the great historical
project of the time. Thus I will begin this series of programs with views
of attempts at retrieving the past. The great projects of the Enlightenment,
however, involved attempts at improving the world in which men and women
passed their daily existence, and the second series will focus upon contemporary
experience. Whatever its religious impulse, the Society for Reformation
of Manners, that was so powerful in England during the beginning of the
eighteenth century, had as its goal the immediate betterment of the appearance
of things. The social code of a Beau Nash at Bath was a secular version
of such a scheme. The need for repairing the present was obvious to all.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, utopia was in the air, along
with the first hot air balloons and revolution in America and France.
But even during the earlier part of our period, for projectors such as
Daniel Defoe (who was often attacked for imitating his namesake, the Old
Testament prophet who had visions of future kingdoms), attempting to peer
into the future was hard to resist. The last section of this series, called
"envisioning the future," will concentrate on those who speculated on
what an enlightened world might be like-not necessarily a world of reason
but perhaps a world expressive of feeling and sensibility. If, as Michel
Foucault has shown, Bentham's remarkable project, the Panopticon, may
have led to the excessive surveillance present in modern life, it was
also a remarkable combination of rational planning based on a relatively
recent conception of the benefits of isolation, a concept associated with
new attitudes toward inner states of feeling.
I expect to make the series interdisciplinary, conceiving of "projects"
both literally and as a metaphor for a certain type of inventive and creative
thinking during the long eighteenth century.
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