Taken alone, none can show how “project” performed multiple services for speakers ranging from Renaissance courtiers and Commonwealth sequestrators to Restoration experimenters and Hanoverian bureaucrats—to anyone who wanted to categorize and shape perception of these figures. To deny the project’s own historical subjecthood hazards underestimating what one Caroline writer called the “protean” character of the projector, who disguised himself as “a decaied Merchant, a broken Citizen, a silent Minister, afore-judgd Atturney, a busy Solicitor, a cropeard Informer, a pickthank Pettifogger, or a nimble pated Northern Tick.”83 Wreckage of Intentions seeks to recover the wide range of personas and pursuits that belonged to the early modern word “project” by connecting ideas of enterprise scattered across scholarly fields ranging from the history of science and technology to theories of state formation to studies of Restoration theatrical satire. Retrieving projects beyond their idiosyncratic deployments entails scanning the horizons of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century print culture for the traces of old enterprise, and then scrutinizing those traces. Methodologically, I alternate between what Brad Pasanek calls the desultory reading of “page images and passages indexed and made available in large electronic text collections,” and minute examination of how particular proposals and their critiques solicited readers.84 This negotiation of reading up close and at a distance, of individual works in the context of many, can begin to draw the project out of history and restore the singularity it possessed therein.
A final impediment to seeing the project as a distinct history-bearing concept—as well as a stimulus to do so—is the difficulty of establishing critical distance from a subject that is inescapably central to modern society. Project terminology endures to ubiquity today in the form of client projects, art projects, book projects, housing projects, infrastructural superprojects, and the projects of self-fashioning dramatized in television series like The Mindy Project and Project Runway. The project has become so fundamental to modern ways of life that it has become ungraspably abstract, proliferating almost imperceptibly within entrepreneurial rhetorics and managerial modes of thought, as well as philosophical discourses ranging from Heideggerian ontology and Freudian psychoanalysis to Sartrean existentialism and Marxist definitions of value.85 The astonishing versatility of projects is neatly demonstrated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, translators of Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk, who assembled Benjamin’s unfinished reflections under the title—among countless options for English renderings—Arcades Project. This usage appears to signify the work’s incompletion, perhaps even its status as a “blueprint for an unimaginably massive and labyrinthine architecture.”86 Benjamin appears to encourage this conception of Passagenwerk by imagining within it a dream city comprising “building plans, street layouts, park projects, and street-name systems that were never developed.”87 “Project” signifies both futuristic planning related to the growth of Paris into a nineteenth-century capital, as well as a program for redeeming past opportunity scattered within the “rags” and “refuse” of history.88 Like my own project of projects, Benjamin’s reflective collage culls the debris of old possibility for cultural insight—in his case, for evidence of how commerce, technology, and urban development created the conditions for modern bourgeois experience.
Projection’s idiom has proven so resilient that it threatens to impede investigation by conflating the object of study with the instruments of its analysis.89 In this vein, Georges Bataille grudgingly conceded that projection had become an insuperable employment of modern philosophers when he described his Inner Experience as a “projet contre projet,” a manifesto for “existence without delay” that ironically (but inevitably) took form as a book project.90 Given this problem of immersion, a theoretical goal of this book is to establish the project as an investigable form. In looking back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, I seek to dislodge an aspect of present experience so given we hardly notice it.
The overall goal of my project is to restore the remarkable early modern life of an idea today mired in anodyne ubiquity. The hollowness of modern projects, their signification of everything and thus nothing, is the result of gradual naturalization. The first step toward represencing projects as a touch-stone cultural concept is to return them to the categories of thought and expression in which they existed for authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We should remember that the word “project,” as noun and verb, engendered a distinctive kind of writing in the 1600s and 1700s, as well as a form of print and mode of performance: text, the matter containing it, and embodied attempts to realize its vision.
In this spirit, my chapters confront the project’s conceptual slipperiness by dividing the idea into concrete stages: the articulation, circulation, undertaking, and reception of ideas for new enterprise. Project authors composed persuasive arguments to render their schemes plausible and attractive. They worked alongside stationers to disseminate new proposals through print. They enacted written designs through performances known as undertakings. Finally, these attempts at reforming society stimulated public response. The idea of projects in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain encompassed acts of writing, print, and performance. Therefore, my approach combines techniques of rhetorical analysis, book history, performance theory, and genre criticism to illuminate the multifaceted phenomenon of projection, from some of the era’s most ephemeral schemes to a few of its most enduring.
Chapter 1 shows how projects began as words. It identifies the rhetorical strategies that enabled Andrew Yarranton’s 1677 pamphlet England’s Improvement by Sea and Land to foresee the nation’s perfection through the establishment of a land registry, the dredging of canals, and the building of textile mills. This work employs several signature conventions of projection, including the comparison of a troubled present with better futures, the reconciliation of profit motives with the public good, and the representation of the Dutch Republic as a menacing threat and economic model. It is Yarranton’s occupation and evacuation of different conceits that makes his tract a striking example of how authors justified the work of reforming society. As a former captain in the New Model Army and suspected Presbyterian conspirator, Yarranton used projects to legitimate himself as a moderate reformer fit to voice an Anglican kingdom’s future interest. Close reading of England’s Improvement reveals how an especially resourceful projector manipulated language to solicit readerly belief in his ideas and talents.
Chapter 2 argues that print played a crucial role as an enabling medium of projection. It investigates a series of stationery artifacts generated by Aaron Hill’s star-crossed attempt to manufacture and market beech seed oil in Georgian England. The beech oil venture rose to prominence and then disintegrated between 1714 and 1716, one of many entrepreneurial busts in an era renowned for Agricultural Revolution. Hill’s failed enterprise left a paper trail that included patent petitions, investment tracts, newspaper advertisements, and Tory panegyric. This study in project print culture shows how the material requirements of different documents shaped the experience of projects for authors, readers, and potential participants. In so doing, it intervenes in modern academic debates over the role of mediation in historicist scholarship by asking how nonaction governs the materiality of its proposal and the conditions under which it can be read today. While issues of publication concerned all aspirant industrialists of the early 1700s, beech oil makes a particularly intriguing case study because so many of its founding documents survive, a low attrition due to Hill’s reputation as a prominent poet and playwright.
Recognizing that successful projects eventually needed to become more than paper and ink, my third chapter builds on the insights of performance theory to show how new enterprise was enacted through a process called “undertaking.” This study of projected action concentrates on efforts to drain eastern England’s Great Fen during the middle seventeenth century. Approaching this land improvement enterprise through evidence of its once-embodied labors enables us to ask what can be known about projects once they make the leap from words in pamphlets to bodies toiling on land. This analysis of enactment offers an extended view of the final stages of a project from the vantage
