Periodic Reporting for period 1 - RUSTEE (Rust and Revolution: Understanding Social Technologies in Enlightenment Europe through metaphorology)
Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2024-12-31
The researcher’s first book, Narrative, Catastrophe in Historicity in Eighteenth-Century French Literature (2022) explored the way in which communities tell and re-tell stories of catastrophe to explain their own origins, imagine their future, and work for their survival. It approached this question, so vital for our present moment, through narratives produced in a tumultuous period when a new understanding of a properly “modern” national history was being elaborated. While researching the representations of Babel, the Great Flood, the Fall of Rome, and natural disasters which writers deployed to imagine the possible return of a barbaric “Dark Ages”, a metaphor connoting slower and less spectacular change repeatedly appeared. This was the image of barbarism as rust, gradually eating away at civilised and “polished” nations. From this observation the project “Rust and Revolution: Understanding Social Technologies in Enlightenment Europe through metaphorology” developed. RUSTEE embraces literary and philosophical history, scientific controversy, revolutionary politics, conflict and expansion in the colonial Atlantic, and antiquarian and museum history. The project is able to take such a broad multi-perspectival view of Anglo- and Francophone culture by staying always on the trail of rust, whether as chemical mystery, technical problem, or metaphor.
The use of rust as a metaphor for civilisational decline is ancient, dating back to the Hebrew Bible, but flourished into a wide variety of new expressions during the eighteenth century. RUSTEE aims, first, at understanding the way in which concepts related to Time and Civilisation were crafted – and not simply "expressed" – through metaphor. It is allied with theories of metaphor which maintain that concepts are not pure abstract ideas which are then decoratively enhanced with rhetorical features drawing on the material world, but that analogies taken from the sensed world are fundamental to the development of concepts. Second, RUSTEE aims to test theories (as developed by Bruno Latour and New Materialists) which place humans together in networks with non-human "actors", and which understand agency as shared among all such actors (and not confined to the self-conscious human). It asks in what ways such networks might account for, and include, metaphors and concepts. This goes beyond simply tracing new expressions of the rust metaphor to new scientific ideas or technical innovations: it asks in turn how the metaphoric life of rust influenced interactions with material rust.
The deliverables/outputs of this research are single-authored publications, intended to form the basis of an eventual monograph (to be produced in the years after the end of the grant period).
The use of rust as a metaphor for civilisational decline is ancient, dating back to the Hebrew Bible, but flourished into a wide variety of new expressions during the eighteenth century. RUSTEE aims, first, at understanding the way in which concepts related to Time and Civilisation were crafted – and not simply "expressed" – through metaphor. It is allied with theories of metaphor which maintain that concepts are not pure abstract ideas which are then decoratively enhanced with rhetorical features drawing on the material world, but that analogies taken from the sensed world are fundamental to the development of concepts. Second, RUSTEE aims to test theories (as developed by Bruno Latour and New Materialists) which place humans together in networks with non-human "actors", and which understand agency as shared among all such actors (and not confined to the self-conscious human). It asks in what ways such networks might account for, and include, metaphors and concepts. This goes beyond simply tracing new expressions of the rust metaphor to new scientific ideas or technical innovations: it asks in turn how the metaphoric life of rust influenced interactions with material rust.
The deliverables/outputs of this research are single-authored publications, intended to form the basis of an eventual monograph (to be produced in the years after the end of the grant period).
Extensive library and archival research (at the French Archives nationales and Archives nationales d'outremer) has been undertaken towards all strands of the project. Archival research at the Archives nationales d’outremer, in particular, has revealed a rich seam of anxiety about both material and moral decay in the writings of French colonial administrators in the Caribbean. Iron technologies emerge as a crucial marker of French civilisation: important for trade with Indigenous groups and the extraction of value from the land. But these technologies are also seen to be highly vulnerable: decaying much more quickly in a tropical environment, likely to be stolen due to the general scarcity of goods from France (and general weakening of ethical constraints amongst the colonists), and difficult and slow to replace. Evidence has been uncovered of some attempts to conduct scientific experiments with a view to addressing the perishability of iron in the Caribbean. The desire for standardisation and control of human beings in the French colonies, as moral and medical subjects, has been much discussed by critics; research accomplished as part of the RUSTEE project reveals the material culture of the colonies as another focal point for such desires.
The project has also identified the process of chemical analysis as an important metaphor for social breakdown, in the work of philosophe/anti/philosophe and revolutionary/counter-revolutionary writers. Analysis and synthesis were geometric and philosophical operations before they were chemical ones, but by the end of the eighteenth century anti-philosophes could present all manner of philosophical analyses as misguided extensions, through metaphor, of the materially destructive work of chemistry. This research has extended our understanding of how modern divisions of knowledge arose by identifying the ways in which counter-revolutionaries accused revolutionaries, and the philosophes who inspired them, of treating society like a chemist treats a compound, rather than developing a science of society itself.
In the domain of Aesthetics, the project has traced the symbolism of rust in poetry, and in writing about poetry. In the latter, “rusty” rhymes and words stand for all that is barbarous. The metaphor is initially negative but, as with attitudes to barbarism itself, this slowly begins to change: both become objects of interest, especially aesthetic interest, in their own right. At the heart of this development is a fascination with an entirely different past and the traces it leaves in the present, in catastrophe, renewal, and the energy released in violent upheavals or chemical reactions. A self-guided walking tour of Freie Universität’s “Rostlaube” or Rust-Bucket campus building and its sculpture collection has also been made freely available, addressing these aesthetic considerations in the present day. The tour introduces the reader to the aesthetic use of corrosion and decay in art and architecture. It addresses the tensions between such controlled or intended decay, and the unintended or uncontrolled decay that conservation seeks to minimise.
The project has also identified the process of chemical analysis as an important metaphor for social breakdown, in the work of philosophe/anti/philosophe and revolutionary/counter-revolutionary writers. Analysis and synthesis were geometric and philosophical operations before they were chemical ones, but by the end of the eighteenth century anti-philosophes could present all manner of philosophical analyses as misguided extensions, through metaphor, of the materially destructive work of chemistry. This research has extended our understanding of how modern divisions of knowledge arose by identifying the ways in which counter-revolutionaries accused revolutionaries, and the philosophes who inspired them, of treating society like a chemist treats a compound, rather than developing a science of society itself.
In the domain of Aesthetics, the project has traced the symbolism of rust in poetry, and in writing about poetry. In the latter, “rusty” rhymes and words stand for all that is barbarous. The metaphor is initially negative but, as with attitudes to barbarism itself, this slowly begins to change: both become objects of interest, especially aesthetic interest, in their own right. At the heart of this development is a fascination with an entirely different past and the traces it leaves in the present, in catastrophe, renewal, and the energy released in violent upheavals or chemical reactions. A self-guided walking tour of Freie Universität’s “Rostlaube” or Rust-Bucket campus building and its sculpture collection has also been made freely available, addressing these aesthetic considerations in the present day. The tour introduces the reader to the aesthetic use of corrosion and decay in art and architecture. It addresses the tensions between such controlled or intended decay, and the unintended or uncontrolled decay that conservation seeks to minimise.
The project results go beyond the state of the art by showing that the modern demarcation of Nature from Society was to an important degree effected by knotty assignations of literality/metaphoricity. The questions pertaining to New Materialisms set out above – notably, of whether non-human beings and objects can be said to "really" have agency, or whether the notion of non-human agency is always metaphorical and anthropomorphising – require a monograph for full exploration. It is projected that this will be produced in the years following the end of MSCA project funding.