and presumptions of mastery. And when it is illuminating, I do just this. But more often, what this book attempts is not the critique of projects, but rather the revival of their former possibility by reimagining what once was dreamt as a sign of that culture’s understanding of itself and its capacity to change. Mine is a hermeneutics of salvage that gathers historical evidence in order to reanimate old enterprise. What this resuscitation contributes to eighteenth-century studies and culture studies more broadly is a demonstration of how to think with the past’s inadvertent posterity in the moment it tried to build an unknowable here-to-come that we are used to viewing through hindsight.
The specific past futures that I study originated between 1660 and 1730, a period when “project” retained its old associations with Caroline monopolists and parliamentary state building while amassing new connotations derived from discourses of science, finance, exploration, and technology. I argue that it was during these decades that projects became ubiquitous, assuming a foundational role in the making of Anglophone culture that they did not previously possess or have since relinquished. It was after the Restoration that projection engendered an adequately broad and self-reflexive discourse for Defoe to declare it the spirit of his age. By the 1720s, projects came to seem less like a notorious invention than an unavoidable practice and unquestioned social fixture. While authors continued to debate the value of particular schemes, they were less prone to attacking the project itself as a vehicle for ambition.38 Defoe’s “Age of Projects” never really ended, though we have grown oblivious to its experience over the last three centuries. This book scrapes away the sediment of familiarity to remember the project as an eighteenth-century inheritance we use and inhabit daily.
Projects as Literature
My investigation of projects employs methods of literary inquiry, in particular close reading, genre criticism, book history, performance studies, and historicist analysis. Project writing belongs to the domain of rhetorical and literary criticism, I argue, because it attempts to make worlds out of words, words with the potential to remake the actual world. Borrowing the terms of structural linguistics, we can understand projecting as an act of signification in search of a referent. Until the moment that action is conjured out of language, when a proposal either becomes fact or burns out the fuel of its hopes, the project resides neither in nor outside of the material reality it would re-create. Bruno Latour equates this limbo stage with fiction in Aramis, a postmortem investigation of a twentieth-century project to build an automated transit system in Paris. “A technological project is a fiction,” he explains, “since at the outset it does not exist, and there is no way it can exist yet because it is in the project phase.”39 Project for Latour is a mode of expression as well as the “phase” that Aramis inhabited when it hung between implementation and its ultimate scuttling.
As a discipline that knows its way around fiction, literary studies is well suited to grasp the imaginary ontology of projects that existed in made-up stories, fleeting fabrications, and predictions later proven false. Scholars of literature are also trained to recognize how arguments, like those made by projectors, could be cunning and self-aware. Though few of the proposals I have read display belletristic mastery, many employ conceits, modes of emplotment, and perspectival shifts that we have come to associate with poems, novels, and drama. Even some of the period’s most prosaic pitches for land banking and clover cultivation recycled passages from Virgil and staged dialogues between made-up discussants. They fawned over patrons in dripping panegyric and burst with dedicatory puff made of heroic couplets. Although most projects never became pleasing aesthetic objects, many at least sought to gratify the tastes of culturally literate readers.
The formal challenge of making unreal things seem real, or at least realizable, burdened project proposals with two incongruous missions: to deliver a believable report of practical ideas and to provoke readers with revelation. Proposals likened themselves to established enterprise at the same time they strove to appear fresh, even altogether newfangled. On the one hand, projects could not be “bright ideas appearing out of the blue” as Joan Thirsk observes, but instead “clustered in places where facilities already existed to give the enterprise a promising start.”40 In this vein, Defoe presented a project to renovate England’s deteriorating highway system as an example of what Maximillian Novak calls the “rediscoveries of ancient devices.”41 Defoe summons memories of Britain’s Roman colonizers, excellent road makers who built a durable network of stone causeways across the island, to shame officials into renovating the kingdom’s rutted and mire-prone dirt tracks. His plan entailed the reclamation of a neglected legacy rather than a dauntless adventure in new public works.
On the other hand, projects had to offer an unthought-of solution to persistent trouble. They needed to break with tradition to position themselves as unique interventions—as writing that outsmarted a problem’s existing proposal literature. Like the eighteenth-century prose form that came to exemplify novelty, so much so that it derived its name from that word, project writing sought to be “critical, anti-traditional, and innovating.”42 These are the words of Ian Watt, who endows the novel with narrative procedures that conveyed “truth to individual experience,” an individual “free from the body of past assumptions and traditional beliefs.”43 But unlike novels, which recorded past events, it was a view of the future that project proposals tried to make realistic. In pursuit of what we might call future realism, the projector surfaces inherited assumptions about society and its management. This exfoliation becomes credible through its ability to seem like disinterested testimony. The fictional qualities of proposals authorized projectors to guide readers through future prospects by inscribing such hypothetical events within “some ‘reality’ that is cut off from the actual historical continuum.”44
Project writing uses distinct rhetorical conventions for visualizing the future as the direct result of present action. In promoting an as-yet unrealized vision, the proposal Designe for Plentie equates civic virtue with delight in nature, likens stewardship to statecraft, and even suggests that orcharding will play a consequential role in man’s redemption as it did in his fall. These devices help the author bridge the temporal and modal chasm between a forthcoming paradise of fruit and the moment of postbellum worry in which it was conceived. The challenge of suturing an indicative present to a subjunctive future forced projectors to become nimble rhetoricians. A Designe for Plentie warrants close reading not just for its provocative recommendations, but for its use of language to create belief.
Projection also invites literary analysis because so much of its historical evidence is contained within writing we understand as “Literature” with a capital “L”—poems, plays, novels, and songs. Projectors’ representations of the future engrossed a variety of authors in the late 1600s and early 1700s, whose creations usually illuminated the fissures between the conception and realization of schemes. Jane Barker’s Galesia declares in response to the sudden death of her suitor, Brafort, “human projects are meer Vapours, carry’d about with every Blast of cross Accidents.”45 Milton’s Beelzebub upbraids the Congress of Pandemonium for “projecting peace and war” in book 2 of Paradise Lost.46 Galesia characterizes courtship projects as the trifle of indifferent fate. Beelzebub perceives how oratorical projects license idleness, a want of the very action they endorse. The term, for Barker and Milton, implies a lacking response to grave ordeal.
Authors relished making a stock fool of the harebrained and vainglorious projector. Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704) presents Lord Peter, a “projector and virtuoso” who schemes to purchase continents, cure splenetic worms, and establish “a Whispering-Office, for the Publick Good and Ease of all such as are Hypochondriacal, or troubled with the Cholick.”47 Two decades later, Swift’s Gulliver would visit the Academy of Projectors, where he witnessed experimenters scheming to extract sunlight from cucumbers, weave garments from cobwebs, and transform excrement into food.48 Gulliver’s experiences at Lagado comport with Alexander Pope’s description of an even more ludicrous institution, the court of Dullness in The Dunciad, overrun by “wild enthusiasts, projectors, politicians, inamoratos, castle-builders, chemists,
