A Tissue of False Memories Sarah Ellenzweig (bio) Traditionally defined historical fields—like eighteenth-century studies—can be charged fairly with an under-developed relationship to theory and to certain kinds of conceptual abstraction. Yet it is also the case (though less frequently acknowledged) that on the theory side of things, an overly crude sense of the past leads to ill informed assumptions and prejudices about history. A crude sense of the past hampers our capacity to understand, as Thomas Pfau puts it, “how ideas and conceptions actually develop over time—viz., as a long, if uneven dialectical progression.”1 In telescoping historical time, in other words, we fail to understand both the past and contemporary realities as well as we might.2 I will explore this problematic by examining the rhetoric of the “new materialism” and the way it positions itself in relation to history. New materialism’s recent bid for our attention centers on a key claim about the ontology of matter: that we understand it better now than philosophers did in the past. As the story goes, the “Cartesian-Newtonian” legacy erroneously understood matter to be mere extended stuff—uniform, passive, and inert—and thus always in need of something outside itself to render it active.3 By contrast, new materialist writing celebrates their “discovery” of matter’s self-active nature as an explicitly polemical correction to history. Since so much of new materialism relies on this supersessionist reading of the history of philosophy, it seems to me that those of us who work in the fields designated as “old” should weigh in. We should weigh in not only about [End Page 217] what early moderns thought about matter, but also about the larger question of present theory’s relationship to a deeper historical-intellectual context. Might that deeper context provide us with a perspective on the blind spots of our own time? Early modern matter theory, whatever that might have been, functions as a straw-man for new materialism, a paper tiger against which today’s theoretical advances are allowed far too easy a triumph. Part of the problem here is that new materialists do not appear especially interested in actually reading the diverse writings of someone like Descartes. They are satisfied, instead, with relying on standard cliches about dualism, many of which have been generated by theory itself.4 For theory, Descartes has long been an enemy, since he was one of the first to usher in the age of “reason” that appears to have led to so many retrograde social-political constructs, including most recently, human exceptionalism. It is not remarkable, then, to see Descartes invoked once again as part of a story about a reactionary past. The more interesting aspect of this story speaks to this forum’s concern with the problem of intention. Though we typically place Descartes the metaphysician among the champions of free will, his physics always suggested a more deterministic view of the natural order.5 Once again, Descartes’ legacy is far more complicated than new materialism has allowed. My concern here, however, is less with how Descartes understood intention, than with how we, as scholars of the Enlightenment, understand intention in the history of ideas. Foucault tried to teach us that authors of a theory, tradition, or discipline create “a possibility for something other than their discourse, yet something belonging to what they founded.”6 One need not spend a lot of time investigating the reception of Cartesianism during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to discover the pertinancy of Foucault’s insight. What Ronald Meek calls the “law of unintended consequences” was exactly what many seventeenth-century readers of Descartes worried about.7 To anyone getting his Descartes from today’s theory, it is surprising to learn that many contemporaries thought that Descartes’s mechanistic account of matter failed to register matter’s passivity strongly enough. Once body and matter were separated from spirit in the Cartesian sense, they threatened to become sufficient explanatory models, and thus, more than merely passive and inert substances.8 The important and unexpected point here is that Descartes’ dualist separation of immaterial mind and material body, which modern theory made notorious...
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Oct 7, 2024
E A Rybolova + 2
Open Access