Intentions suggests that this (un)making has a rhetorical form and material history. Failed enterprises encapsulate what Reinhart Koselleck calls “since-superseded future,” a nonexistent temporality that can nonetheless ventilate a past thick with multiple possibilities, including unenacted plans that challenge progressive accounts of human development.66 Projects instance since-superseded futurity, indeed constitute one of this imaginary ontology’s most observable units. Old projects reframe the past as an ongoing “present” brimming with former potential. Inhabiting this past is, according to Michael Bernstein, “not merely to reject historical inevitability as a theoretical model. Far more important, it means learning to value the contingencies and multiple paths leading from each concrete moment of lived experience, and recognizing the importance of those moments not for their place in an already determined larger pattern but as significant in their own right.”67 Bernstein and Gary Saul Morson use the term sideshadowing to refer to interpretive modes that admit not just “actualities and impossibilities,” but also “a middle realm of real possibilities that could have happened even if they did not.”68 This “middle realm,” I suggest, is identical to Latour’s “project phase,” a duration when an aspect of the future can be thought but not yet experienced. Wreckage of Intentions surveys some of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain’s paths untaken or not fully taken. It traces what Herbert Butterfield, archcensor of teleologies, calls the “crooked and perverse … ways of progress,” while rejecting the assumption that progress need always be found (let alone in linear form).69 In dwelling on what Morson calls the “presentness of the past,” I propose the project’s evocation of past presentness as a means of unstreamlining the histories we inherit and make.70 Old plans enable us to recover history as a scatter plot of lived experiences and to appreciate how each unconstellated moment implied futures that we can recollect and learn from today.
The Project Itself
The project was a popular vehicle for voicing public opinion and personal ambition in early modern Britain. Its writings fashioned distinctive rhetorics of persuasion that migrated into some of the era’s most popular and canonical literature. Its proposals index a world of defunct possibility that shapes and shadows histories of the real. And yet, the project is hard to grasp as a distinct, history-bearing idea. The word can feel less like a salient topic than a mere topical container—the context for discourse rather than its matter. Despite its breadth of usage and colorful history, “project” has failed to achieve the status of a cultural keyword or enduring episteme.71 Why is this?
Part of what makes projects so hard to track is that action in potential is ephemeral. Many plans anticipated becoming real, but most remained fantasy. While Designe for Plentie imagined prodigiously, it failed to fashion anything beyond the matter of a pamphlet. Visiting its universally planted world today requires a willingness to veer off the course of empirical history to engage with the counterfactual world that the author imagined. Designe’s instructions form just one unenacted proposal among thousands of obsolete plans for poor relief, academies for women, vineyards in Cambridgeshire, fisheries in the North Sea, and a host of newly invented domestic goods. Other projects, such as those related to New World settlement, engendered more striking triumphs (and telling debris).72 Still other schemes left nothing except for passing accounts of their expired potential.73 When a select few ventures managed over time to establish institutions in fields like experimental science, banking, and postal delivery, their project status—their former ability to come or not come into being—might be forgotten, allowing once-uncertain endeavor to harden into the empirical fact of achievement.74 Successful enterprise sometimes spawned imitation or ramified into subsidiary schemes whose authors reckoned new sets of contingencies by taking for granted the improvements that came before them. The project remains elusive today because it is always turning into something else—including the origin of further projecting—or into nothing at all.
Confounding matters is the fact that proposal authors, who were aware of projection’s stigma, referred to their labors by “other termes of Art,” like “invention,” “improvement,” and “public works.”75 In so doing, they facilitated the absorption of their ventures into the respectable status quo they set out to reform. For example, the early modern drainage of Anglian fenland began as a string of faltering projects before it eventually rendered a landscape so dry and full of farms as to conceal these past struggles and enfold itself into grand narratives of progress, reclamation, and modernization. Jeremy Bentham identifies as a project anything that ever made England “more prosperous than at the period immediately preceding it” and attacks Adam Smith for not acknowledging how England benefited from once-degraded schemes.76 Remembering old projects as “projects”—that is, as writing and potential action—therefore means assessing the cultural impact of a broad spectrum of enterprise, from ventures that flopped to ones so proficient in creating the conditions of the future, even our present, that it is hard to recall how these pursuits were ever under development or in doubt.
Another obstruction to seeing the “project itself” arises from presumptions built into our methods of humanities research. The bounding of scholarship by disciplinary field and time period tends to highlight the contents of specific schemes while taking for granted the availability of the project as a vehicle by which ideas for future action circulated and materialized. Today it is common to see “project” fused prepositionally to finite subject matter—husbandry projects of the Elizabethan era or forestry projects from the Restoration. But it is rare that someone confronts projection decoupled from its discrete implementations the way writers like Defoe, Bentham, and Smith did.77 Aided by technologies of database keyword searching, we are well outfitted to latch onto taggable particulars of the past but can struggle to grasp structures of thought so massively pervading and deeply embedded within society that they go unnoticed, even unnamed. Projects, in their ubiquitous invisibility, both overwhelm and escape the digital tools and specialized modes of scholarly thought we expect to presence them.
The experience of calling for Designe for Plentie at a rare books library illustrates the dissonance between the self-conception of old proposals and modern efforts to classify them. Designe’s author refers to his work as a project (as well as a design and assay), but the English Short Title Catalogue files this pamphlet under the subject headings “Fruit trees—England—Early works to 1800” and “Food supply—England—Early works to 1800.” These textual strings indeed touch on the central concerns of this Commonwealth orcharding pamphlet. But they also reflect habits of organization that overlook Designe’s self-understanding as an instrument of social reform. The proposal’s will to remake the world through trees is absent from these tags. This means furthermore that the search string “project” will likely miss Designe, which includes the term only a few times in its body text, as well as many other projects that, for various reasons, did not identify as such.
Topic-driven bibliography captures a mass of empirical particulars but does not return the project as an indexable concept. The taxonomies that organize our archives have made it difficult to see that even projects with dissimilar contents can share the same formal features and self-conception. Like Watt’s realism, which “does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it,” what made project writing recognizable was not its coverage of a particular subject, but rather its methods for locating future solutions to various needs.78 The privileging of searchable content over pervasive forms has given projection a fragmentary critical literature in which “project” means different things to different readers. Projects were agro-industrial initiatives in the Tudor and Jacobean period for Joan Thirsk.79 Novak associates them with the “age of Newton and Newtonism or the ‘Augustan Age.’”80 Christine Gerrard regards projectors as speculators who “floated shares in new enterprise on a stock market.”81 John Brewer confers the title on civilians who put forward unsolicited proposals for government reform and “usually received short shrift from the incumbent officials they sought to displace.”82
These definitions treat projection
