Systems of Life: Biopolitics, Economics, and Literature on the Cusp of Modernity

By Timothy C. Campbell, Mrinalini Chakravorty, James Edward Ford and 6 more

Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid– eighteenth to the mid–nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economics as a joint enterprise. The volume’s contributors consider politics, economics, and the biological as distinct, semi-autonomous spheres whose various combinations required inventive, sometimes incomplete, acts of conceptual mediation, philosophical negotiation, disciplinary intervention, or aesthetic representation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Nov 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9780823281732

Timothy C. Campbell

Timothy C. Campbell is professor of Italian at Cornell University. In addition to his translations of Roberto Esposito’s Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy and Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, he is most recently the author of The Techne of Giving: Cinema and the Generous Form of Life (2017) from Fordham University Press.

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Systems of Life

INTRODUCTION

Systems of Life, or Bioeconomic Politics

Richard A. Barney and Warren Montag

The best way to learn any Science, is to begin with a regular System, or a short and plain Scheme of that Science, well drawn up into a narrow Compass.

—ISAAC WATTS, The Improvement of the Mind (1741)

That the fitness of any system or machine to produce the end for which it was intended, bestows a certain propriety and beauty upon the whole, and renders the very thought and contemplation of it agreeable, is so very obvious that nobody has overlooked it.

—ADAM SMITH, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)

In the eighteen years between Isaac Watts’s and Adam Smith’s remarks regarding the utility of systematic thinking at the middle of the eighteenth century, we find a conceptual arc—in miniature—that fits the broader development of European thinking about system from the early eighteenth century to the early nineteenth. Both authors stress the attractions of systematic efficiency and coherence, for instance, but whereas Watts focuses his appreciation on the relatively narrow compass of the epistemological benefits for knowledge formation (where science could designate any field of developed expertise), Smith expands system’s importance to apply potentially to any kind of practical, social, or scientific enterprise whose end also incorporates a definitively aesthetic dimension of fitness or beauty. Not quite three decades after his brief consideration of the relevance of system to sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith would demonstrate all the more emphatically the significance of systematicity to an ambitious project articulating the complex relations of political economy in his Wealth of Nations (1776), where the term system and its variants appear more than 165 times. Furthermore, not only was book 4 of that treatise devoted to Systems of Political Oeconomy, but Smith eventually identified versions of systems in fields that included agriculture, commerce, physics, ethics, administration, finance, taxation, and philosophy.

This collection of essays takes its cue from the ascendancy of system indicated by Smith’s work in order to articulate a framework in which to grasp the complex relations among biological knowledge, economics, and politics in Europe and its colonies from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. In these terms, this volume aims to draw on recent scholarly accounts of the significance of system in Renaissance and Enlightenment contexts in order to reevaluate the importance of the systematic to biopolitical theory, which has paid particular attention to the importance of this historical period, especially in the case of analysts such as Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Roberto Esposito. Considered as a whole, the essays in this volume can therefore be taken as an argument that the concept of system can help specify all the more concretely the ways that the bio was articulated in relation to the political in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century biopolitics, with economy serving as a useful mediating term between them by offering a way to articulate their order as a matter of exchange, valuation, or management. Given Smith’s remark about the beauty of systems, moreover, it is no accident that several of the essays in this volume examine the relevance of aesthetic production—whether poetry, fiction, comedy, or visual art—to the deployment of economic values in relation to both biological and political spheres.¹

During the period in question, the term economy could have a range of relevant meanings: On the one hand, for instance, it could denote the specific domain of financial investment, capital transactions, and the sale of goods; on the other hand, it could pertain to a much broader notion of a calculable network of value, exchange, and circulation—the very qualities increasingly championed as part of the general usefulness of system by writers such as Smith. As several of the essays in this volume attest, it is precisely the malleability of the term economy that enabled biopolitical discourse to attach itself to the concrete elements of financial arrangement while also claiming for itself the kind of holistic cohesion characteristic of an economic system broadly conceived. Put another way, the logic of economy as a system of commerce enabled authors ranging from William Blake to Charles Darwin to link the operations of biological life to their larger sociopolitical implications, while the logic of economy as coherent system provided a rationale by which to imagine the biological, economic, and political spheres as intricately connected in an articulation of life writ large.

A brief glance at the history of the term system reveals that it too has contained multiple valences. Although the Greek term sustēma had been known since the time of Plato and was widely used in different contexts to denote groups, assemblages, and compositions both human and nonhuman, the term was rarely used in classical Latin. In postclassical Latin systema denoted an organized whole, and by the mid-sixteenth century it acquired a new set of meanings and applications. Michel-Pierre Lerner has meticulously demonstrated its importance: The concept of system became the notional cornerstone of the scientific and theological debates regarding Copernicus’s proposal for a heliocentric rather than geocentric model of what we now call the solar system. Although at first it served the purpose of supporting what seemed a far more coherent explanation for planetary movements, Lerner shows that the rhetoric of system had been adopted by all sides of the debate in an attempt to establish the most coherent and inclusive explanation. From this dialogical process emerged the key phrase world system.² For Walter Ong, who concurs regarding the importance of Copernicus’s new astronomical arguments, the notion of system would have far-reaching influence in the advent of what Ong calls epistemological visualism, which underscored a shift toward knowledge based on spatial, objectified terminology, and which, within the next two centuries, would be applied to other fields, including philosophy, medical science, and ethics.³

What is particularly germane here is that from these early modern roots, the term system registers a profound and ineluctable split in its meaning, since on the one hand, it describes the features of a natural or material phenomenon—for instance, astronomical orbits, climate, or human social behavior—while on the other, it identifies the analytic discourse aiming to organize what may otherwise seem to be incongruous elements. As the Oxford English Dictionary records among the earlier uses of system, for instance, in 1676 Matthew Hale would echo the first sense in remarking that the Universe … comprehends the Systeme, Order and Excellencies of all created Beings.⁴ By contrast, in 1699 Thomas Baker would stress the second sense when he observed that the moderns [are] … more pleas’d with their own inventions, than with the dry Systems of the Old Philosophers.⁵ Several decades later, Samuel Johnson would confirm this semantic divide when, in his Dictionary, he described system as both any complexure or combination of many things acting together and a scheme which reduces many things to regular dependence or co-operation.⁶

The persisting ambiguity in the meaning of system fuels the suspicion that systems are individual creations rather than discovered truths, invented formulas rather than found artifacts. But for system’s advocates, the abiding semantic duality also attests to an underlying assumption—or at least an enduring hope—that the phenomenon in question and its description can ultimately arrive at a profound correspondence in which both are equally matched for the purposes of scientific, social, or political achievement. In fact, it is precisely system’s dual conceptualization that ideally qualifies it to serve as the mediating term in the biopolitical imagination, since it promises to bridge the formidable gap between natural and artificial registers—between the biological patterns that have been observed and the political gambits that motivate the desire to govern. The prospect of achieving such coordination—perhaps even concord—is underscored further by Clifford Siskin’s description of system as the late eighteenth-century genre par excellence. One sign of system’s rise, he points out, is quantitative: Whereas in 1700, 5 percent of all publications in England used system in their pages, by 1800 the number was a striking 40 percent.⁷ By the turn of the nineteenth century, he argues, this numerical increase had a conceptual corollary: System’s features not only saturated fields ranging from medicine to ethics to literary criticism but also provided the overarching framework by which the modern disciplines could be differentiated during the next several decades.⁸ It was precisely this kind of systematic organization—in which categories of knowledge are both distinguished from and linked to one another in a purportedly all-encompassing grid—that sustained the period’s ongoing interest in harnessing what were perceived as increasingly complex patterns of biological phenomena to the goals of political management.

In making the case for a biopolitical perspective that highlights the importance of both economics and system for late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century science, this volume draws on and extends the arguments found in one of the most important collections on the history of science to appear in the past two decades, The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, published in 1999 and edited by William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer. Like the editors of that book, we track an anti-idealist approach to the history of science, with a particular interest in the ways that Michel Foucault’s work helps describe the institutional, material, and disciplinary contexts for modern science’s emergence at the turn of the nineteenth century. For that reason, we take one of our cues from the editors’ remarks regarding how the free market, liberal politics, and enlightened science dovetail in the period’s construction of a new public space in which scientific ideas and institutional authority could be promulgated.⁹ It should be noted, however, that with one exception, the contributors to Sciences in Enlightened Europe rely primarily on Foucault’s work prior to his turn to examine what he called biopower in 1976. That exception is Andrea Rusnock, whose essay, titled Biopolitics: The Political Arithmetic of the Enlightenment, draws on the first volume of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality in discussing the political implications of new methods for demographic calculation that emerged in the early eighteenth century.¹⁰ Given what we know now about Foucault’s lectures that followed that volume of History of Sexuality, Rusnock’s argument is strikingly prescient, and here, Systems of Life takes advantage of the additional benefit of the several volumes of Foucault’s lectures that were published more recently and that reveal in greater detail his analysis of modern biopolitical regimes.

In the volumes that we have now documenting Foucault’s university lectures during the late 1970s—including The Birth of Biopolitics (2008) and Security, Territory, Population (2009)—we find him making a strong case for the importance of economics in the formation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century biopolitics in Europe. Regarding the eighteenth century, Foucault focuses particularly in Security, Territory, Population on the French physiocrats, whom he credits with formulating comprehensive theories of agricultural production, goods circulation, and scarcity patterns that proved instrumental in the growing European interest in the political management of the economy.¹¹ In turning to the nineteenth century in The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault expands the parameters of his discussion to a more international scope, including Germany, Britain, and the United States, in examining what he calls liberalism’s new form of political calculation regarding economic prosperity, which evolved from the Enlightenment’s decisive rejection of mercantilist principles.¹²

Although Foucault has offered by far the most extensive observations on the economics of biopolitics during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it should be noted that two other prominent philosophers have also written more recently about similar topics. Inspired in part by Foucault’s commentary, Roberto Esposito has offered an incisive discussion of John Locke’s theory of property, arguing that Locke’s construction of property follows a logic of immunitary protection, in which the process of asserting ownership of objects in the world serves the ambiguous function of exposing the liberal subject to potentially pernicious outside influences, while also presumably transforming them into a reliable benefit.¹³ Most recently, Giorgio Agamben has briefly discussed Adam Smith’s articulation of political economy in the context of the Christian theological tradition of oikonomia, a term capturing the complex measures by which divine purpose is effectuated in the world—thereby revealing all the more concretely the providential logic of Smith’s famous remark about the invisible hand that presumably guides the outcome of food markets.¹⁴

We cite these arguments in order to acknowledge the significant role that economics has periodically played in biopolitical discussions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while we also note that by and large, scholars working in these fields who draw on biopolitical perspectives have tended to overlook or downplay its importance. Systems of Life therefore aims to intervene in at least three ways in the current moment of biopolitical analysis, as well as in scholarly discussions pertinent to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. First, in reaffirming the importance of economics as indicated by Foucault, Agamben, and Esposito, this volume seeks to expand elements of their arguments, while exploring new areas they have not considered. The contributors, for instance, examine further Foucault’s claims about a structural homology among the emerging disciplinary fields during the eighteenth century (as in Christian Marouby’s essay), and they also consider the ways in which Agamben’s notion of the inherent order in oikonomia can be mapped onto vitalist notions of system in the 1790s (as in Richard Barney’s piece). A second goal is to make Adam Smith a more central part of biopolitical analyses of the period, since Foucault’s commentary on his work has been relatively slight, while Agamben’s has been notably short, though also compelling.¹⁵ Since, by and large, the bulk of biopolitical analyses of economics during the period have emphasized Continental contexts, we include here two essays (by Marouby and Catherine Packham) that reassess the relation of Smith’s political economy to contemporary medical and biological science of the age. A third goal is to include the role of the aesthetic or the literary in our understanding of the relations among biological, economic, and political registers, since that element has rarely appeared in discussions by Foucault, Esposito, or Agamben, but as several of the essays here attest, it has played a significant discursive function in articulating the ways that biomedical issues could be ordered by economic or political concerns. In Amanda Goldstein’s analysis of William Blake’s First Book of Urizen and Milton, for example, as well as in Mrinalini Chakravorty’s consideration of the legacy of Smithian economics in the visual art of colonial and postcolonial India, the aesthetic plays a key role in absorbing, reshaping, and often deflecting the biological dogmas of the day in relation to their economic and political implications.

The tripartite framework that this volume advocates regarding the biological, economic, and the political also suggests that for the purposes of theoretical and historical clarity, we can benefit substantially by prying apart—if only briefly—the two sets of terms that otherwise have by now been considered a consolidated unity: both political economy and biopolitics. Although we recognize the signal accomplishment of Adam Smith and his eighteenth-century European contemporaries, who forged an unprecedented and sophisticated conception of how the economic and the political could be coordinated, we want to consider that achievement not as a monolithic unity, but as a process with various strategies of translation and accommodation that merit close analysis, particularly with the added component of biological science involved. Regarding the nomenclature of biopolitics, by contrast with Agamben and Esposito, who make claims for the ultimate historical collapse of the biological into the political by the mid-twentieth century, we want to stress the ways that during the earlier era in question, the alliance between the political and the biological was often provisional, partial, and piecemeal—subject, that is, to frequent revaluation and revision, especially when the economy of that relation was in question. This is to say that rather than tracking the logic, for instance, of Esposito’s imagery of politics crushing biological life by the imposition of sheer force or power,¹⁶ this volume identifies a crucial intermediary space or agency constituted by the economic broadly conceived, whose emerging role during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was to mediate between the biological and political spheres. In order to resist at least partially the historical telos invoked by Esposito and Agamben who look toward the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we therefore aim to consider the emergence of modern biopolitics as a far more exploratory, open-ended, sometimes even tentative process in its early stages.

We turn now to offer a more detailed, though brief, overview of the status of system with respect to the three areas that are this volume’s focus: the biological sciences, economics, and politics. What follows describes not three variations on the notion of system that could fit into a neat unity—no matter what the talents of the era’s systematizers—but instead a composite of distinct articulations whose potential for compatibility was precisely the challenge.

In 1792, the Scotsman Adam Ferguson declared that the love of science and the love of system are the same.¹⁷ Indeed, during the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, the biological sciences fairly bristled with landmark discoveries, fundamental paradigm shifts, and ever more ambitious projects of systemization. In the medical sciences—including anatomy, physiology, and pharmacology—during the early 1700s, the term system was used relatively sparingly and, typically, it was applied primarily to denote the network of the body’s nerves. In Anatomy of the Humane Body, for instance, first published in 1713 by the eminent surgeon William Cheselden, there is only one reference to a bodily system—the nerves—with only a few additions to that citation in the thirteen succeeding editions that appeared up to 1792.¹⁸ By the end of the century, however, system was being consistently applied to physiological systems of all kinds, including the limbic, arterial, digestive, cranial, and sensory versions. On a related front, by the middle of the eighteenth century, in the wake of arguments by Albrecht von Haller and others, an older, quasi-pneumatic model for the nerves had been generally replaced by one based on the description of the systemic cooperation of tensile fibers. George Cheyne, who was largely responsible for popularizing this model in Britain during the 1730s, would use the term system sparingly but also tellingly in The English Malady, even speculating about what he called the inanimate material System of Things as evidence of God’s divine plan in the world.¹⁹

By the mid-1700s, the spheres of plants and animals received painstakingly meticulous and large-scale reorganization by experts such as Carl von Linné and the Comte de Buffon, whose natural systems—while frequently offering competitive interpretive perspectives—launched new confidence for at least another half century in the prospects of formulating a comprehensive biological science in their terms. Whereas Buffon preferred the rubric of natural history for his research, Linné was forthright in his advocacy of system as the solution to what he considered the confusing zoological and botanical categorizations of the past. His masterwork, first published as Systema Naturae in 1735 and rapidly translated into English, was to undergo numerous expanded editions during Linné’s lifetime and after his death. His systematic ambitions also proved to inspire scientists long after he died: At the turn of the nineteenth century, in ten volumes under the title A Genuine and Universal System of Natural History, Johann Friedrich Gmelin, physician and professor of natural history in the Royal Society of Göttingen, undertook the task of making Linné’s work improved, corrected, and enlarged by combining it with the work of Buffon, François Levaillant, Marcus Bloch, Albertus Seba, Maria Sibylla Merian, and Georg Wolfgang Knorr, among others.²⁰ The trend of systematic assimilation extended as well to imagining a complete system of knowledge tout court, as in William Duane’s text, called An Epitome of the Arts and Sciences. Being a Comprehensive System of the Elementary Part of an Useful and Polite Education, first published in 1805.²¹ It purported to encapsulate the areas of mathematics, languages, physics, architecture, agriculture, geography, politics, metaphysics, botany, mythology, astronomy, and zoology—a scope of description even broader than that in Diderot’s project in the Encyclopédie.

The turn of the nineteenth century consolidates a number of developments in the biological sciences by ultimately producing the new discipline of biology, which proposed to unify the study of life in all its forms. The first influential use of the term biology has varied accounts, since it appears in texts by Thomas Beddoes, Karl Friedrich Burdach, Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in dates ranging from 1799 to 1802. Nonetheless, two factors in biology’s emergence are worth stressing here. First, persistent advancements in microscopic technology supported research that culminated in the sea change of modern cell theory, articulated particularly by Theodor Schwann in the 1830s. That theory proved a conceptual linchpin for unifying an object of study whose specific cases—ranging from plants to animals to human beings—seemed otherwise impossibly disparate in other terms. The second thing to note is that cell theory was in some ways the laboratory confirmation of a much loftier, sometimes metaphysical, perspective articulated under the rubric of vitalism, whose aim of describing the fundamental principle of life itself—even with a capital L—found numerous scientific and literary advocates in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including Lamarck, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Xavier Bichat, Humphry Davy, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, John Thelwall, and Percy Shelley, to name only a few. Although vitalism’s scientific arguments were often the target of skepticism or even controversy, they nonetheless relied heavily on the notion that life was a unified phenomenon precisely because it was systematically organized. As several of the contributors to this volume (e.g., Barney, Goldstein, and Annika Mann) also describe, the system of vital existence included not only the pure form of life biologically conceived, but also its inevitable ties to the economic and political realities of the historical moment.

As a last example of the biological and institutional legacy of system at the turn of the century, we turn to Edward Jenner’s discovery of the first reliable form of vaccination against smallpox—then the most formidable disease in Europe—and the result that was both an immunological and sociopolitical revolution. In 1798, Jenner’s description of realizing that controlled exposure to cowpox could in turn produce immunity to smallpox was carefully argued on the premise of a functional immunological system—a term he used frequently in his landmark publication, An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of Variolæ Vaccinæ, in order to link the distinct biological mechanisms related to bovine- and human-communicated disease.²² Not only would his techniques inaugurate a new era of preventing medical disease, they would also, in the ensuing decades, dramatically transform England’s self-governance at home and abroad in the form of new national campaigns promoting public health, new protocols for upgrading military preparedness, and new methods for procuring the safety of the empire’s colonial personnel around the globe.²³ During the next several decades of the nineteenth century, the economic and political windfall of Jenner’s medical discovery became increasingly palpable as a source of national and colonial pride.

As a final note on the politico-economic stakes of the biological sciences, particularly as related to race and colonialism, we turn briefly to the expanded edition of Linné’s Systema Naturae mentioned earlier, since it highlights a theme of particular importance to several of this volume’s contributors. That theme regards whatever inevitably resists or opposes systems, including, for example, chance, empirical singularity, the variable, and the nonconformist. Whereas Esposito has drawn on contemporary systems theory in order to describe a perspective that advocates for open, rather than defensive, versions of biopolitical relations, the emphasis of the essays in Systems of Life is on those elements of systems that both subtend and undermine them.²⁴ In the context of Linné’s work, then, the signal role of the asystematic can perhaps best be pinpointed by considering the striking frontispiece to volume 2 called The Orang-Outang Carrying Off a Negro Girl (see Figure I.1) since it illustrates in graphic ways the very challenge Linné faced in constructing his systematic anatomy of living forms.

Although several eighteenth-century travelogues reported such incidents, and although writers including Jean-Jacques Rousseau remained skeptical of their reliability, we want to focus here not on whether this incident actually happened so much as on the possibility that it offers one clue to the inevitable problems that systems confront in attempting to be systems. Put another way, we interpret this orangutan less as a misguided ape than as an allegorical and overweening natural taxonomist. If the heuristic goal of any system—its desire, if you will—is to relate but not to conflate, then this is precisely the problem at stake in the orangutan’s apparently erotic seizing of the young black woman.

These are particularly acute stakes when we remember that one of the most controversial innovations of Linné’s system of organization was to include both simians and human beings in the same category called Anthropomorpha, based on the similarity of their anatomical structure. This move obviously blurred the line between the human and animal—for many, it even conflated what ought to be kept securely apart. We might say that in synchronic terms of abstract categorization, Linné had gestured toward what Charles Darwin would later establish diachronically across time as the evolutionary link between lower species and human beings. In this context, it could be said that the orangutan in question has acted on perceiving an exaggerated similarity between itself and the woman. It has produced a disturbance in the system of species organization by violently threatening to collapse a distinction that that very system has both previously asserted and at least partially undermined—a violence compounded further in the illustration by the native archer poised to act in retaliation. To be sure, it is no mere coincidence that the trauma of this systemic instability is played out by being inflicted on the body of a non-European female and, potentially, on that of a nonhuman animal. The biopolitical implications of this kind of systemic violence—in terms including racial definition, social relations, and colonial policy—are in this volume the particular focus of James Ford and Mrinalini Chakravorty, who explore topics that include the problematic assertion—and telling erasure—of the human-animal distinction.

FIGURE I.1. Frontispiece, volume 2 of Carl von Linné et al., A Genuine and Universal System of Natural History (1794–1807?). Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

As might be expected, the increased use of system in a variety of fields was accompanied by an ever-increasing semantic differentiation that makes isolating the discrete meanings of system in this period unusually difficult. Even the Oxford English Dictionary, normally a dependably authoritative source for all the meanings of a given word, whether current or obsolete, literal or figurative, seems to falter at the exponential increase in the use of the word system, above all, outside of the physical and biological sciences. But if there is indeed a lack of clarity in the exposition of the distinct meanings of system according to the chronology of their appearance, it should be regarded as objective, existing at the level of discourse itself and the semantic and lexical linkages found there. This is not to say that the confusion that the use of the word generates can simply be understood as a contingent effect of its increased frequency, but rather points to the fact that there is something systematic about the ambiguities of the word system, as if its history as word and concept is marked by the paradox according to which system cannot accede to the condition (of systematicity) it designates. There is nothing metaphysical or transcendental about this paradox; it is immanent in the decidedly unsystematic history of the word system. In this context, rather than attempt to identify and assemble the meanings of system as it was used outside the sciences in a coherent arrangement, it might be more productive to locate indices of semantic dispersion, a few points at which meanings cluster or clump: Hobbes, Swift, and Adam Smith.

The Oxford English Dictionary cites Hobbes as the first to use system to signify a set of persons working together as parts of an interconnecting network. The reference is to a sentence in chapter 22 of Leviathan (1651), the only chapter, in fact, where the word system appears: "By