Title Page Enlightenment Assemblages: Mapping Material Relationships in 18Th-Century France
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Title Page Enlightenment Assemblages: Mapping Material Relationships in 18th-Century France by Paul Dawson Wallace Bachelor of Arts, West Virginia University, 2009 Master of Arts, West Virginia University, 2011 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2020 Committee Page UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Paul Dawson Wallace It was defended on February 28, 2020 and approved by Dr. Giuseppina Mecchia, Associate Professor, Department of French and Italian Dr. Todd W. Reeser, Professor, Department of French and Italian Dr. Pernille Røge, Assistant Professor, Department of History Dissertation Director: Dr. Chloé Hogg, Assistant Professor, Department of French and Italian ii Copyright © by Paul Dawson Wallace 2020 iii Abstract Enlightenment Assemblages: Mapping Material Relationships in 18th-Century France Paul Dawson Wallace, Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh, 2020 This dissertation explores manifestations of assemblic connectivity in literary, philosophical, and epistolary texts of 18th-century France. In scientific treatises, encyclopedias, novels and personal correspondence, early modern writers imagined increasingly complex interconnections between phenomena, both material and otherwise. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of assemblage, I demonstrate the illustrative and exploratory power of “assemblic imagination” as a conceptual framework for envisioning proto-network connectivity across a range of cultural and intellectual contexts. I study how four different types of assemblage--corporeal, epistemological, epistolary, and sexual--work to organize, imagine and connect material phenomena within their respective texts. My analysis of corporeal assemblages focuses on Julien- Offray de La Mettrie’s 1747 medical/philosophical treatise L’homme machine, which problematizes the Cartesian idea of mind-body separation by drawing connections between multiple human and nonhuman factors that influence human subjectivity. My investigation of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751-1772) reveals the epistemological assemblage, a web of intertextual references and novel organizational schemes connecting articles on a wide range of subject matter. The epistolary assemblage is contained within a series of letters between the Chevalier de Boufflers and his longtime lover, the Countess of Sabran. It encompasses written letters, material objects, enslaved humans and other elements, creating links across great distances. My fourth and final assemblage, the sexual assemblage, manifests in the anonymously published iv 1748 libertine/pornographic novel Thérèse philosophe. The sexual assemblage considers the impact of external and internal factors upon human sexual desire, mapping pathways of stimulation between individuals, objects, and ideas. These assemblages illustrate the evolving nature of 18th- century materialist thought towards an ever-increasing awareness of the interconnected nature of humans, objects, ideas, and other phenomena and prefigure the curated and controlled networks of the 21st century. v Table of Contents 1.0 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 1 1.1 Assemblage Theories ...................................................................................................... 3 1.2 Assemblic Imagination ................................................................................................. 12 1.3 Genre and Material Embodiment ............................................................................... 17 1.4 Chapter Overview ........................................................................................................ 21 2.0 Chapter 1: Corporeal Assemblages: Mapping the Biological Imagination ..................... 25 2.1 Undoing the Machine in L’Homme machine .............................................................. 28 2.2 An Epistemology of Uncertainty ................................................................................. 33 2.3 La Mettrie’s Imagination and the Rhizome Assemblage .......................................... 38 2.4 The Organic Interior .................................................................................................... 43 2.5 A Fascination with Food .............................................................................................. 52 2.6 The Imagined Soul ........................................................................................................ 58 2.7 Modular Man ................................................................................................................ 61 2.8 Conclusion: Flowering Humanity ............................................................................... 70 3.0 Chapter 2: The Encyclopédie: Diderot and d’Alembert’s Epistemological Assemblage .................................................................................................................................. 76 3.1 The Assemblic Roots of the Encyclopédie ................................................................... 80 3.2 The Clandestine Assemblage ....................................................................................... 90 3.3 Mapping the Mundane ................................................................................................. 94 3.4 Assemblic Subject Clusters .......................................................................................... 99 3.5 The Power of the Page: The Physicality of Assemblic Relationships .................... 107 vi 3.6 The Reader’s Assemblage .......................................................................................... 113 3.7 Editorial and Temporal Epistemological Oscillations ............................................ 122 3.8 ARTFL: A New Encyclopedic Assemblage .............................................................. 128 4.0 Chapter 3: Epistolary Assemblages: Exploiting the Written Word .............................. 135 4.1 An Assemblage on the Page ....................................................................................... 142 4.2 Worth A Thousand Words: Sabran’s Portrait in the Epistolary Assemblage ..... 156 4.3 Please Mr. Postman, Look and See, Is There a Letter, A Letter for Me? ............. 170 4.4 Captives, Slaves, Chains, and Irons .......................................................................... 178 5.0 Chapter 4: Thérèse philosophe and the Sexual Assemblage ........................................... 195 5.1 The Assemblic Prostitute ........................................................................................... 211 5.2 Assemblic Stimulation ................................................................................................ 223 5.3 Material Inevitability ................................................................................................. 229 5.4 Expanding the Sexual Assemblage ............................................................................ 237 5.5 Final Thoughts ............................................................................................................ 241 6.0 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 251 6.1 Assemblage of Infection ............................................................................................. 254 6.2 From Network to Assemblage ................................................................................... 255 6.3 Networks and Imagination ........................................................................................ 257 6.4 Final Thoughts ............................................................................................................ 259 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 261 vii Preface I would like to thank my friends and family, all of whom helped motivate me to finish this dissertation. I would also like to thank the Faculty and Staff of the Department of French and Italian for their many years of support. Above all, I would like to extend a special thanks to Dr. Chloé Hogg, whose endless patience and enthusiasm allowed me to finally complete this study. viii 1.0 Introduction As denizens of the 21st-century, our lives are heavily influenced by the omnipresent reality of a world defined by interconnectivity. An increasingly wide spectrum of networked machines communicate, facilitate and complicate human existence, providing those with enough access to them an ever-expanding panoply of services, distractions, and dangers. It might be easy to point to these phenomena as manifestations of an entirely contemporary revolution, not only in the domains of technology but also in the underlying epistemologies and ontologies that form the foundation of a networked society. While the technology required for the amalgamation of computerized networks such as the ubiquitous “Internet of Things” arose primarily within the last century or so, philosophical explorations of different forms of interconnectivity abound, from Democritus’ classical imagining of atomic particles to Diderot’s vision of a swarm of bees. This dissertation explores early modern manifestations of these epistemological