Constantine Samuel Rafinesque and the Limits of the Posthumanities
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University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Electronic Theses and Dissertations 5-2013 The autodidact : Constantine Samuel Rafinesque and the limits of the posthumanities. Elijah Pritchett University of Louisville Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd Recommended Citation Pritchett, Elijah, "The autodidact : Constantine Samuel Rafinesque and the limits of the posthumanities." (2013). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 1157. https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/1157 This Doctoral Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. This title appears here courtesy of the author, who has retained all other copyrights. 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THE AUTODIDACT: CONSTANTINE SAMUEL RAFINESQUE AND THE LIMITS OF THE POSTHUMANITIES By Elijah Pritchett B.A., University of Louisville, 2002 M.A., University of Louisville, 2005 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Louisville in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Humanities University of Louisville Louisville, KY May, 2013 THE AUTODIDACT: CONSTANTINE SAMUEL RAFINESQUE AND THE LIMITS OF THE POSTHUMANITIES By Elijah Pritchett B.A., University of Louisville, 2002 M.A., University of Louisville , 2005 A Dissertation Approved on April 12, 2013 By the Following Dissertation Committee: ______________________________________ Dissertation Director: Aaron Jaffe ______________________________________ Annette Allen ______________________________________ John Gibson ______________________________________ Stephen Schneider ii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to Eric Rensberger who first showed me the infinity of a life devoted to thought iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many hidden hands and minds made this dissertation, contributors, mentors, muses who, though invisible, are nonetheless part of its essence. To them I give deserved (though inadequate) thanks and recognition. Luminous guides showed the way: Eric Rensberger, Tom Hastings, Ron Keith, Karen Gray, Robert Luginbill, Elaine Wise, Charles Breslin, Nancy Potter. Special thanks to Annette Allen, a life-saving beacon and true friend throughout my graduate career. To these great influences I add my chair, Aaron Jaffe, whose guidance forced me to acknowledge obstacles I otherwise never would have even recognized, let alone been able to overcome. I thank John Gibson and Stephen Schneider for their generous time and thoughtful input. Without these many people I’d be just another autodidact wild child, untamed, unclaimed, and lost in the wood of indiscipline. I thank my patient and loving family who have supported and inspired me throughout: my wife Lori, my children, Alexandra, Maxine, Judah and Sadie, and my beloved mom, Staci. Julie Wade gave essential commentary, and along with dear comrades, James Leary and Carol Stewart, helped me work out ideas in the gym of the mind. I especially give thanks to my very good friend, Monica Krupinski, who made space in her life for me and this dissertation: it is no exaggeration to say that without your careful critique (nitpicking) and attentive encouragement (nagging), this document would never have been brought into existence (note litotes, passive construction, and veiled reference to being/becoming and the Heideggerian Nothing). To everyone mentioned, I hope this document does some justice to the incredible assistance and inspiration I have iv so selfishly taken from all of you. v ABSTRACT THE AUTODIDACT: CONSTANTINE SAMUEL RAFINESQUE AND THE LIMITS OF THE POSTHUMANITIES Elijah Pritchett April 12, 2002 The autodidact has a curious structural relationship to knowledge, education, and that assumed distillation of institutional learning, the academy. Because of its subjectivity-producing function, knowledge represents a site of tremendous cultural investment, and one that is challenged, if not even undermined, by the renegade ethos and idiosyncratic approach of the autodidact. Nineteenth century self-taught scholar and Renaissance man, Constantine Rafinesque, serves as a vivid exemplar, or even theoretical matrix, for demonstrating certain problems that the autodidact raises for post- Enlightenment knowledge as it assumes the various institutional states, metaphysical postures, and ideological closures necessary for its culturally privileged function. As the work of Michel Foucault has demonstrated, in its capacity as a crucial component in the makeup of the modern individual, knowledge is a cultural good of unequaled value; but its horizon is often one of force, regulatory and normative. This dissertation posits the autodidact Rafinesque as a path for illustrating and exploring these various implicit, but nonetheless binding, regulations, limits and boundaries. Although a prolific contributor to fields such as taxonomy, botany, economics, linguistics, philosophy, and ethnography, Rafinesque continues to stir debate and generate vi perplexity among scholars. This is due, in no small part, to his unusual status as both social and intellectual outsider, one who in more ways than one challenges the coherence of disciplinary knowledge. Eccentric, unorthodox, self-taught, and with few friends, Rafinesque came to symbolize knowledge in its most unregulated state, and to a large degree this status persists. Each chapter of this dissertation departs from an episode in Rafinesque’s intellectual career. Using Rafinesque’s writings and correspondence with intellectuals of the time, it joins these to a contemporary post-structural theoretical discussion involving the relationship between subjectivity and knowledge, knowledge and cultural value, and the role of the academy in the modern world. By uniting these theoretical and research trajectories this work posits the autodidact as a type of post- structural subjectivity, one whose very existence offers unique possibilities for the critique of contemporary knowledge as both the engine of apparent self-creation, and of the subject’s cultural/intellectual domestication. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE DEDICATION______________________________________________________ iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS_____________________________________________ iv ABSTRACT________________________________________________________ vi BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE______________________________________________ 1 INTRODUCTION: MYTHOLOGIES AND ALLEGORIES OF THE AUTODIDACT______________________________________________ 3 PECULIARLY MY OWN: THE AUTODIDACT’S CONDITIONS OF BEING___ 27 RAFINESQUE’S HERBARIUM: THE INDIVIDUAL AS KNOWLEDGE, KNOWLEDGE AS COLLECTION___________________________________ 55 ARTHROLOGY: TAXONOMY, CATEGORY, VALIDITY AND THE ARCHIVE--77 INSTABILITIES: WALAM OLUM, KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND DISCURSIVE FORMS_______________________________________ 113 THE BONES OF RAFINESQUE: VIRTUALITY AND KNOWLEDGE’S DEFERRED PROMISE___________________________________________ 144 REFERENCES_____________________________________________________ 171 CURRICULUM VITAE______________________________________________ 178 viii BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, son of a wealthy French merchant and a Greek mother of German descent, was born in a suburb of Constantinople on October 22, 1783. Rafinesque spent the early part of his youth in Marseille, but as a result of the French Revolution the family fled to Leghorn, Italy in 1792. These circumstances had a determinate effect on his upbringing such that from early youth Rafinesque was polyglot, cosmopolitan, and almost wholly self-taught. In addition to his passion for languages and literature, Rafinesque showed early interest in the natural sciences, in particular botany, ichthyology, conchology, and the day’s unifying science, taxonomy. He studied these and many other subjects relentlessly and largely in isolation. In 1793, Rafinesque’s father, while on business in Philadelphia, died when an epidemic of Yellow Fever swept the city. Less than a decade later the young Rafinesque made his own trip to Philadelphia where he botanized and established contacts before returning to Italy to follow in his late father’s footsteps as a businessman. Having amassed a significant fortune, Rafinesque left behind his money as well as his young wife, Josephine, and their daughter in order to embark on a scientific career in the New World. He would never see his family again. An extensive collector, Rafinesque was obsessive in his fieldwork, hunting the unexplored forests for plant specimens and undiscovered animal species. Not only did this process lead to thousands of new discoveries, it also drew Rafinesque into a variety of collateral pursuits such as ethnology and linguistic studies, the cataloging of Native 1 American earthworks, topography, viticulture, oenology, pharmacology, meteorology and countless others. In 1819 Rafinesque took up residence in Kentucky to continue his discoveries on the frontier of the New World and teach at Lexington’s Transylvania University. By 1826 Rafinesque was terminated from his professorship and shortly thereafter returned to Philadelphia where he continued to research and self-publish on diverse topics such as economics, education, linguistics, astronomy, metaphysics, and an array of scientific