Chapter 2 ACTIVE MATTER, VITAL FORCE

I

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Newton’s speculative writing on the forces of gravitation in his “Queries” to the Optics are the iconic portrayals of matter for our time. From their own age onward, the contribution of these texts to the status of the “thing” has been widely visible: readers have understood that Newton “was trying to reshape the entire conception of matter” and that Robinson Crusoe represents for literary history “an expression of modern materialism.”⁶ These texts inspire and enact a redefinition of the material world—one for the new science and the other for the new imaginative experience of literary realism.

In the case of Robinson Crusoe, we are in the presence of the most often redacted imaginative work of the modern period. The recent film The Martian (2015) demonstrates the currency of Defoe’s representation of the “castaway” (Matt Damon), the “desert island” (Mars), and the compelling assemblage of things that come to populate an “empty” landscape. The label “robinsonade” was coined in 1731 by Johann Gottfried Schnabel in his preface to Die Insel Felsenburg, but this subgenre had its inception immediately, in the year after the publication of Robinson Crusoe, with the publication in 1720 of the Voyages, Dangerous Adventures, and Imminent Escapes of Captain Richard Falconer.⁷ Across a range of scenarios—from survival, labor, production, accumulation, economic agency, children’s literature, and even homemaking—Robinson Crusoe’s immersion in the realm of objects has drawn modern readers to its imaginative world. For example, even in the context of children’s literature, where adventure would seem to be the source of attraction, instead the world of objects presides: Robinson Crusoe can be seen as supporting or even helping to establish an educational theory of experiential learning, which promoted “fictions about direct experience of the object world.”⁸

In the discipline of economics, immediately emergent in the decades following the novel’s publication, the engagement with Robinson Crusoe begins with David Hume and Adam Smith, then famously includes Karl Marx, and extends to the present day. A recent collection of essays—Robinson Crusoe’s Economic Man (2011)—continuing the novel’s visibility among economists and advancing the development of this field of study—“uses the device of Robinson Crusoe to contribute to a genealogy of economic agency and a critique of the discipline of economics.”⁹ Robinson Crusoe has been cited in conceptualizations of instrumental rationality, of labor and value and the nature of their connection, and of the homo economicus—for which Crusoe is the model. Marx, most significantly, uses Robinson Crusoe to illustrate the labor theory of value, crediting the long-standing role of the novel for theorists on this topic—“Crusoe’s experiences are a favourite theme with political economists”:

[Crusoe] knows that his labour, whatever its form, is but the activity of one and the same Robinson, and consequently, that it consists of nothing but different modes of human labour.… This our friend Robinson soon learns by experience, and having rescued a watch, ledger, and pen and ink from the wreck, commences, like a true-born Briton, to keep a set of books. His stock-book contains a list of the objects of utility that belong to him, of the operations necessary for their production; and lastly, of the labour time that definite quantities of those objects have, on an average, cost him. All the relations between Robinson and the objects that form this wealth of his own creation, are here so simple and clear as to be intelligible without exertion.… And yet those relations contain all that is essential to the determination of value.¹⁰

Ian Watt brought the “Robinson Crusoe Economy (RCE)” into the canonical literary critical conceptualization of the rise of the novel, by highlighting Crusoe’s established status as an economic paradigm:¹¹

[Defoe] takes his hero to a primitive environment, where labour can be presented as varied and inspiring, and … there is an absolute equivalence between individual effort and individual reward, … [thus enabling] Defoe to give narrative expression to the ideological counterpart of the Division of Labour, the Dignity of Labour.… Robinson Crusoe is certainly the first novel in the sense that it is the first fictional narrative in which an ordinary person’s daily activities are the centre of continuous literary attention.… The dignity of labour helped to bring into being the novel’s general premise that the individual’s daily life is of sufficient importance and interest to be the proper subject of literature.¹²

Watt connects the novel’s distinctive portrayal of labor with Calvinist individualism and introspective discipline; the eighteenth-century secularization of Puritan ideology explains Robinson Crusoe’s canonical role in the rise of the novel. But, Watt concedes, “Defoe departs from psychological probability.”¹³ For Watt’s Rise of the Novel, significantly, Robinson Crusoe is both designated as “the first novel” and also strangely tangential to Watt’s core thesis, which counterposes Richardson and Fielding through Watt’s important analysis of the relationship between “realism of presentation” and “realism of assessment.”

Virginia Woolf helps us to explain this discrepancy and to define the tension within Watt’s engagement with this novel. Woolf’s account of Robinson Crusoe acknowledges the striking absence that Watt identified as a lack of “psychological probability”:

It is a masterpiece, and it is a masterpiece largely because Defoe … thwarts us and flouts us at every turn.… It is, we know, the story of a man who is thrown, after many perils and adventures, alone upon a desert island. The mere suggestion—peril and solitude and a desert island—is enough to rouse in us the expectation of some far land on the limits of the world; of the sun rising and the sun setting; of man, isolated from his kind, brooding alone upon the nature of society and the strange ways of men. Before we open the book we have perhaps vaguely sketched out the kind of pleasure we expect it to give us. We read; and we are rudely contradicted on every page. There are no sunsets and no sunrises; there is no solitude and no soul.¹⁴

But Woolf sees what Watt neglects: there is no human soul on Robinson Crusoe’s island, but there is a powerful nonhuman entity:

There is no solitude and no soul. There is, on the contrary, staring us full in the face nothing but a large earthenware pot.… By believing fixedly in the solidity of the pot and its earthiness, [Defoe] has subdued every other element to his design.… And is there any reason, we ask as we shut the book, why the perspective that a plain earthenware pot exacts should not satisfy us as completely, once we grasp it, as man himself in all his sublimity standing against a background of broken mountains and tumbling oceans with stars flaming in the sky?¹⁵

Woolf here registers the force of the material thing in this novel so strongly that she posits a dramatic contrast with “man himself”—with human subjectivity—in which even the most “sublime” definition of human being does not eclipse the power of the pot. In fact, as Woolf expresses the self-efficacy of the pot here, the thing actually gathers the sublimity of the world—as seen through human being—into its own solidity and completeness.¹⁶

Woolf’s eloquence—or her ventriloquy of Robinson Crusoe’s eloquence on behalf of the pot—urges us to extrapolate across the scope of the robinsonade—whose purview extends from castaways to labor value and from homemaking to children’s instruction—to posit a powerful counterhuman through line in the reception of Robinson Crusoe over the past three centuries: the “completeness” of the material thing even in the face of “man himself in all his sublimity.” The pot is an intuitive icon for this completeness. In fact, this pot has become a very resonant metonymy, on its own, for the power of the thing independent of the human. Like Woolf, Bill Brown, in recounting Heidegger’s conceptualization of the “thing” as a resource for new materialist thinking, also portrays this same powerful pot. Brown calls attention to Heidegger’s notion of das Krug: its “independence,” its “self-sameness,” the “force of [its] form,” its capacity to “be in its Being” and by that means (“thinging”) to make the world manifest—“the thing things world.”¹⁷ This capacity of completeness is a kind of climax in the theorization of new materialism for Brown. He argues that it “culminates Heidegger’s strategy for thinking beyond the Subject, … for overcoming the merely ontic and the merely phenomenological: for overcoming the subject.”¹⁸

And just as the encounter with the pot enables Woolf to assemble the scene of “man himself” and his “mountains, … oceans, … and sky,” das Krug raises for Heidegger the status of the maker of the pot—or, in its originary occasion, Crusoe the potter. The potter—even or especially Crusoe—serves only to establish the solidity of the pot as an object of production: the completeness of the pot. Brown develops Heidegger’s account of the potter’s “giving way” to the pot by emphasizing the potter’s solitude and by focusing on the potter’s definition as producer rather than consumer: “[Heidegger casts] the potter as the sole human actor to emphasize the production of the object rather than, say its consumption or its use. And once the potter exists, the objectness of the object (its relation to a subject) can give way to the thingness of the thing.… Thingness here, … the (indissociable) thinging of the world, names an activity, a productive function—but an activity animated by no human aim.”¹⁹ This Heideggerian pot, Brown shows us, has a long-standing heritage. Das Krug comes to Heidegger by way of Georg Simmel, Ernst Bloch, and Theodore Adorno—from Simmel’s engagement with the handle of das Krug as a mediating instrument for negotiating the subject-object relation to Bloch’s understanding of das Krug as “the imbrication of subject and object” to Adorno’s offering that “the hollow depths of the pot express … not a metaphor; to be in those depths … would be to be in the thing-in-itself, in what it is in the nature of the human being that eludes introspection.” And, as Brown then argues, “in Heidegger’s rewriting of the episode, such concern for the human being … is effectively beside the point, except insofar as they are assembled (gathered) by the thing.”²⁰

These counterhuman anecdotes of a jar—its completeness, its self-efficacy, its power of “thinging,” its “dominion everywhere”—suggest that the pot is a heuristic for modernity’s engagement with and theorization of materialism.²¹ In this sense, Heidegger, Bloch, and Adorno’s pot enables us to see the prescience of Woolf’s understanding of Defoe’s pot, going forward in this history. Or, going backward, Woolf’s pot marks the ongoing realization of Defoe’s iconic materialist vision, now redacted as a (so-called) “new” materialism. All these portrayals of the pot implement Robinson Crusoe’s counterhuman redefinition of matter, of the complete “thing” as possessed of a new force “standing against” the “sublimity” of the human.

II

Newton’s understanding of gravity launched a vigorous, visible, sustained debate about whether the forces of repulsion and attraction—the motion observed in particles affected by gravitation—were an indication of powers inherent in matter itself or were imposed by an external source. According to John W. Yolton, “the understanding of gravitation and motion centered on what matter was thought to be capable of on its own.”²² This question of matter’s power or completeness “on its own” was a nexus of tension in Newtonian thought and in the scientific, philosophical, and theological debates of the eighteenth century. In this context, as Ernan McMullin asserts, “Newton was trying to reshape the entire conception of matter” for the new science and for modern ontology, in an effort that was an ongoing process of reflection and revision. McMullin shows that Newton’s laws of motion and their corollaries, examined in context, while clearly indicating “the abandonment of the principle of the strict passivity of matter which had so heavily influenced earlier mechanics, … [reflect] obvious ambiguity, [which] was to give Newtonians many a headache in the century that followed.” This ambiguity arose from Newton’s simultaneous insistence both on the existence of “force” and on the inertness of matter, through his representation of inertia—the vis inertiae—as itself a vis insita—a form of “force.” McMullin explains that “in the story of the concept of matter, Newton plays a paradoxical role.… He struggled with the intricacies of this concept for sixty years while building his system of the world around it. Yet … he provided scientists with a neat and manageable substitute for it, one which would later supplant the older concept in the explicit symbolic systems of modern science.”²³

In Newton’s representations of the capacity of matter, throughout his works, the operative and challenging words were “force,” “power,” “energy,” “pulling,” “attraction,” and “acting upon.” Though Newton often sought to weaken this portrayal of active or vital forces by claiming that his language was figurative or that these notions were only mathematical, his readers interpreted these words to indicate that “gravitational force existed truly” and that they constituted, as Robert E. Schofield argues, “a new dynamic theory of matter.”²⁴ McMullin describes the ways in which Newton in the Principia attempted to “restrict that work to an ontologically neutral sense of such dynamic terms, … a sense which would be descriptive and mathematical, merely attributing certain sorts of regularity of motion to one body in proximity to another, without postulating the kind of agency responsible.… [But] Newton’s terminology was difficult to de-ontologize in this way. When he spoke … of bodies ‘attracting,’ or ‘pulling,’ or ‘acting upon’ one another, it was difficult to take these words as figures of speech.… Not only were his critics unpersuaded, but Newton, in his incessant drafting and redrafting, was just as prone as they to take such terms as ‘attraction’ to mean what they say.”²⁵

Newton’s most direct and sustained claim for the intrinsic motive force of matter occurs in the second edition of the Optics (1713), to which he added a set of “Queries” that “gave Newton greater freedom to speak more openly.”²⁶ Query 31 states,

Have not the small Particles of Bodies certain Powers, Virtues or Forces, by which they act at a distance, not only upon the Rays of Light for reflecting, refracting, and inflecting them, but also upon one another for producing a great Part of the Phænomena of nature? For it’s well known that Bodies act one upon another by the Attractions of Gravity, Magnetism, and Electricity; and these Instances show the Tenor and Course of Nature, and make it not improbable but that there may be more attractive Powers than these.²⁷

Newton’s portrayal of these “powers” may be attributable to his study of alchemy. In describing Newton’s alchemical notes from the decades from 1675 to 1695, McMullin shows that he was

seeking clues to the nature of chemical and vital processes and because the mechanical philosophy could not help him, alchemy seemed a likely place to look.… The alchemical literature he pored over was full of references to the active principles responsible for the transformations of matter. The alchemists’ belief was that the matter of all things is one and the same, and that variety and activity alike come from the animating principles they disguised under code names.… The gradual transition from alchemy to chemistry in no way diminished Newton’s conviction that the world is permeated by active principles of all kinds.²⁸

The recent recognition of Newton’s references to alchemy highlights our appreciation of the significance and scope of his redefinition of matter, for the realms both of knowledge and of the imagination.

The notion of the inherent capacity or completeness of matter is a motivating component of contemporary thought, extending from Newton across philosophical and theological discourse. For Locke, the question of the power of matter “on its own” is construed in terms of the power of “thinking”:

We have the ideas of matter and thinking, but possibly shall never be able to know, whether any mere material being thinks, or no; it being impossible for us, by the contemplation of our own ideas, without revelation, to discover, whether Omnipotency has not given to some systems of matter fitly disposed, a power to perceive and think, or else joined and fixed to matter so disposed, a thinking immaterial substance.… For since we must allow he has annexed effects to motion, which we can no way conceive motion able to produce, what reason have we to conclude, that he could not order them as well to be produced in a subject we cannot conceive capable of them, as well as in a subject we cannot conceive the motion of matter can any way operate upon?²⁹

The proposal, for Locke, is expressed as a core ontological challenge—in Yolton’s words, “could thought be an intrinsic or natural property of matter?”³⁰ And Locke explicitly expressed the corollary assertion that the immortal spirit need not be linked exclusively to immateriality:

The properties of a rose, a peach, or an elephant, superadded to matter, change not the properties of matter; but matter is in these things matter still. But if one venture to go on one step further, and say, God may give to matter thought, reason, and volition, as well as sense and spontaneous motion, there are men ready presently to … tell us that he cannot do it; because it destroys the essence.… But whatever excellency, not contained in its essence, be superadded to matter, it does not destroy the essence of matter, if it leaves it an extended solid substance; wherever that is, there is the essence of matter.³¹

The objection that Locke cites here reflects the urgent contemporary negotiation around the capacity of bodies in themselves: whether bodies are essentially, intrinsically defined by inherent activity or whether power, force, or “thought” is not attributable to bodies themselves but rather arises from an external source. The translation from the material to the theological debate was immediate for Locke, Newton, and their contemporaries. And the counterposition to the activity of matter—the notion that matter is “inactive, impenetrable, and resistant to change [and] has no active powers”—is expressed as the argument that “all those effects currently ascribed to certain natural [or inherent] powers residing in matter are immediately produced by the power of an immaterial Being.’ ”³² In Yolton’s account of this debate, he demonstrates the scope and impact of this issue, for Andrew Baxter, Joseph Priestley, George Berkeley, George Cheyne, Samuel Clarke, Robert Clayton, Anthony Collins, David Hartley, David Hume, Isaac Watts, and Richard Price, among others, showing that this challenge “raised a storm of protest and discussion right through to the last years of the eighteenth century.”³³

The Newtonian representation of matter is significant methodologically as well as conceptually. Throughout Newton’s lifelong engagement with the material world, he sought to model a form of knowledge-creation and a mode of discourse that emerge directly from experience. Method, of course, is fundamental to Newton’s contribution to the establishment of experimental philosophy, and Newton explicitly promoted and systematically pursued experiential reasoning in all his work. McMullin shows how, in the case of any particular physical claim or theory, Newton persistently seeks to argue from “an experienced property of experienced bodies”; for Newton, this experiential stance is a direct methodological counter to the “rational reflection so much relied on by Descartes.”³⁴ Newton expresses his commitment to this method directly in Query 31 (Optics): “to derive two or three general Principles of Motion from Phænomena, and afterwards to tell us how the Properties and Actions of all corporal Things follow from these manifest Principles, would be a very great step in Philosophy, though the Causes of those Principles were not yet discover’d.”³⁵ Query 8 (Optics) illustrates the experimental method and compellingly highlights its rhetorical tenor and its distinctive discursive effect. Here Newton is describing the sources of vibrations that cause bodies to emit light:

As for instance; Sea-Water in a raging storm; Quick-silver agitated in vacuo; the Back of a Cat, or Neck of a Horse, obliquely struck or rubbed in a dark place; Wood, Flesh and Fish while they putrefy; Vapours arising from putrefy’d Waters, usually call’d Ignis Fatui; Stacks of moist Hay or Corn growing hot by fermentation; Glow-worms and the Eyes of some Animals by vital Motions; the vulgar Phosphorus agitated by the attrition of any Body, or by the acid Particles of the Air; Amber and some Diamonds by striking, pressing or rubbing them; Scrapings of Steel struck off by a Flint; Iron hammer’d very nimbly till it become so hot as to kindle Sulphur thrown upon it; the Axletrees of Chariots taking fire by the rapid rotation of the Wheels.³⁶

Here, the wood, the hay or corn, the scrapings of steel, the amber and diamonds, the axletrees of chariots—these are Newton’s “things,” powerful in their efficacy, their solidity, and their completeness as “experienced bodies.”

Newton’s formidable contribution to the contemporary engagement with matter and experienced things matches up with Robinson Crusoe’s imaginative world, in a way that suggests a connection between literature and experimental philosophy at the moment when materialism finds its modern formulation. This connection suggests, first, that natural history’s theory of matter and Robinson Crusoe’s portrayal of things are, both, both conceptual and methodological, in the sense that they engage the representation or experience of objects, in order to offer a new way of understanding the essence of the material world. Second, if Defoe’s things are placed in the Newtonian context, they offer a distinctive perspective on the material and narrative premises and the discursive traits of modern realism.

III

Robinson Crusoe is an experiment in the representation of force. The novel is full of energy and activity: the solidity and completeness of Crusoe’s pot is framed by a set of shifting, intense, and vibrant scenes of action for its own sake. These are unmoored, contingent scenarios of indiscriminate force. They express an unbounded, “rough and terrible” energy, but they are conceptually rationalized by reference to contemporary religious and economic institutions—from Protestantism and from financial models of risk and speculation.³⁷ First, referencing a prominent strain of Protestant ethics, the novel describes Crusoe’s emphatic rejection of his father’s counsel to “settle” for the “easy circumstances” of the “middle Station of Life” (Defoe, 5, 6). The subsequent scenes of action and adventure enable Crusoe, in embracing contingency, to demonstrate the Protestant principle of submission to divine providence: Martin Luther describes the true Christian as “not presuming upon the future, and not trusting in any man or in oneself but clinging to God alone.”³⁸ Thus Crusoe—and the text itself—pursues activity, “adventures,” and “undertakings out of the common road” (Defoe, 4–6). In this context, uncertainty in regard to the engagement in the turbulent affairs of that world becomes an end in itself, and the allusion to doctrinal principle is matched by an immediate release of narrative energy.

Second, the context of unpredictable economic activity and risk, which is reflected in Crusoe’s choice of “enterprize” over “the middle State” (Defoe, 5), evokes the core tenet of venture capitalism, with its direct activation of contingency and indeterminacy as sine qua non. The vital economic engagement with risk—the accelerating speculation of the stock exchange; the institutionalization of risk in the rise of international capital markets, loans and mortgages, credit and debt, discounts, shares, futures, and securities; the attempts to manage risk in the establishment of actuarial science and in the development of joint stock charters and insurance—all attest to the centrality of contingent activity to the so-called financial revolution of the eighteenth century. Here, indeterminacy underwrites “a highly speculative and volatile economy, full of enterprise and initiative, open to an extraordinary degree to the vagaries of fashion and fad, encouraging quick returns and setting a premium on highly flexible and imaginative business strategies”—the “Ambition,” “Vicissitudes,” “Uneasinesses,” and volatile activity that Crusoe’s father describes in his warnings to his son (Defoe, 5).³⁹

The opening scenes of Robinson Crusoe dramatically and repeatedly enact these imaginative engagements with energy and force. The sequence of storm scenes that take control of the narrative upon Crusoe’s leaving his father’s house introduce and immediately highlight this representation of unmoored, dynamic activity. The portrayal of the ocean reflects an immense, unfocused, and shifting counterhuman power:

The Sea went Mountains high, and broke upon us every three or four Minutes: when I could look about, I could see nothing but Distress round us: Two Ships that rid near us we found had cut their Masts by the Board, being deep loaden; and our Men cry’d out, that a Ship which rid about a Mile a-Head of us was foundered. Two more Ships being driven from their Anchors, were run out of the Roads to Sea at all Adventures, and that with not a Mast standing. The light Ships fared the best, as not so much laboring in the Sea; but two or three of them drove, and came close by us, running away with only their Sprit-sail out before the Wind. (10)

Formally, this account is multifaceted, proliferative, and directionless: it refers to size (“Mountains high”), to speed (“running away … before the Wind”), and to dispersed action (“near us,” “a Mile a-Head of us,” “out of the Roads to Sea,” “close by us”) all at once. To “look about” in this world is to step out of an artificial assertion of “Temperance, Moderation, Quietness” into the experience of unstructured power and force.

This experiment with the representation of force dominates the pre-island imaginative experience of Robinson Crusoe, generating a persistent sense of proximate vitality: more storms, more “Mountain-like” waves of “mighty Force,” a fight with pirates, and even an encounter with a “dreadful Monster” (22). And all this energy results in more decisions “hurried on” or “push’d … forward” in a scenario characterized by ongoing “Confusion of Thought” (31, 12, 34).

The island systematically and suddenly redirects this vitality and resolves this confusion. Storms, waves, winds, pirates, and monsters are decisively replaced by a sequential proliferation of objects. The narrative retains the rapidity generated by the storms, as well as the attitude of experimental succession portrayed in those rapidly repeated opening scenes, but turns now to a focused imaginative engagement with materiality itself. The “desert island” is a singular enabling locale for this experiment with matter because it excludes the multifaceted vortices of energy that fill the world beyond its perimeter. Its isolation and barrenness offer a focal point for force and turn that focus to the narrative engagement with objects—with “experienced bodies”—whose powerful collective self-efficacy, like that of Newton’s list of the sources of vibrations in bodies, is revealed through the experimental method that assembles them.

This engagement with the material world is marked by an impersonal momentum, which repeatedly gathers a “strange multitude of little Things” (86) into a generative sequence of production—a sequence that impels the objects into motion and change in relation to each other. One “Thing” gives rise to another “Thing,” in a series that occupies the attention of the reader and the producer (Crusoe) and that populates the island world itself—in an activity that is aligned with Heidegger’s “thinging” and that expresses the systematic self-containment of the counterhuman. Here is the sequence of production of the earthenware pot, beginning with “the Clay”:

[I must] dig it [the Clay], … temper it, … bring it home and work it; … [then make] two large earthen ugly things, … Jarrs,.… [which lead next to] little round Pots, flat Dishes, Pitchers, and Pipkins, [then comes the firing of the pots].… I … plac’d three large Pipkins, and two or three Pots in a Pile one upon another, and plac’d my fire-wood all around it with a great Heap of Embers under them; I ply’d the Fire with fresh Fuel round the out-side, and upon the top, till I saw the Pots in the inside red hot quite thro’, and observ’d that they did not crack at all; when I saw them clear red, I let them stand in that Heat about 5 or 6 Hours, till I found one of them, tho’d it did not crack, did melt or run, … so I slack’d my Fire gradually till the Pots began to abate of the red Colour, and … in the Morning I had three very good, I will not say handsome Pipkins; and two other Earthen Pots, as hard burnt as cou’d be desir’d; and one of them perfectly glaz’d with the Running of the Sand. (88–89)

“Clay” brings forth “Jarrs”; next come a proliferation of “little round Pots, flat Dishes, Pitchers and Pipkins,” which then become the glazed “Earthen Pots.” Those then lead to the generation of the “Mortar,” the “Pestle,” and the “Sieve”:

I had made an Earthen Pot that would bear the Fire.… My next Concern was, to get me a Stone Mortar, to stamp or beat some Corn in.… After a great deal of Time lost in searching for a Stone I gave it over, and resolv’d to look out for a great Block of hard Wood, … and getting one as big as I had Strength to stir, I rounded it, and form’d it in the Out-side with my Axe and hatchet, and then with the Help of Fire, and infinite Labour, made a hollow Place in it.… After this, I made a great heavy Pestle or Beater, of the Wood call’d the Iron-wood.… My next Difficulty was to make a Sieve, or Search, to dress my Meal, and to part it from the Bran.… At last I did remember I had among the Seamens Cloths which were sav’d out of the Ship, some Neckcloths of Callicoe, or Muslin; and with some Pieces of these, I made three small Sieves. (88–89)

Activity is incessant in these sequences. Locally, the energy is portrayed through an allusion to the local contributions of the producer—“I ply’d the fire,” “as I had Strength to Stir”—but in the broader structure of these passages, energy is generated by the rapid, sequential emergence of the things, one after another. This energy is absorbed into the things that are represented as its outcome—in the sense that these things themselves, in their hurried transformation to a subsequent product, reflect a restlessness and potential for changeableness.

Again, here the following account of the progress of production of a “long Shelf” describes an irresistible trajectory marked by an engagement with “inexpressible” energy:

A large Tree … was to be cut down, because my Board was to be a broad one. This Tree I was three Days a cutting down, and two more cutting off the Bows, and reducing it to a Log, or Piece of Timber. With inexpressible hacking and hewing I reduc’d both Sides of it into Chips, till it begun to be light enough to move; then I turn’d it, and made one Side of it smooth, and flat, as a Board from End to End; then turning that Side downward, cut the other Side, till I brought the Plank to be about three Inches thick, and smooth on both sides. (84)

In the course of the movement from a “large Tree” to a “Log, or Piece of Timber” to a “Board” to a “Plank” and to a “long Shelf,” the producer’s “hacking and hewing” is another local signal—pointing to the force empowering the cumulative generation of objects in the sequence.

The experiment in the representation of force, on Robinson Crusoe’s island, takes the form of rapid and irresistible sequence. The successive presence of these things generates a narrative energy and attaches a portrayal of vitality to matter itself. As we have seen here, Crusoe’s plying, cutting, hacking, hewing, and stirring is systematically absorbed into the activity of the things so as to augment their own material force. This counterhuman force is an immediate narrative effect of these passages, and it highlights these things themselves as a vital presence—for Crusoe and for the reader. Crusoe’s solitary, repetitive, incessant activity enables the irresistible trajectory of the things themselves to dominate the narrative, foregrounding the “thingness” of these things and their consequent power of “thinging.” As Heidegger argues, the potter’s solitude demonstrates the thing-oriented activity of production rather than the human-oriented phenomenon of consumption, leaving the thing as “an activity animated by no human aim.”⁴⁰ In Heidegger’s concept, “That which in the jug’s nature is its own is never brought about by its making. Now released from the making process, the self-supporting jug has to gather itself for the task of containing. In the process of its making … the jug must first show its outward appearance to the maker. But what shows itself here … characterizes the jug solely in the respect in which the vessel stands over against the maker as something to be made.”⁴¹ Lynn Festa, from her focus on the discursive function of objects in relation to novelistic subjectivity, turns this “thinging” process toward the potter himself: “What we are given to see of the object—what Crusoe’s narrative describes—constitutes much of what we get of Crusoe’s subjectivity.… Character emerges through the subjective perception of objects, rather than through the transparent depiction of inwardness.”⁴²

Through this distinctive narrative impact, then, the force of the succession of “Things” constitutes a materialist premise, a theory of “Thinging.” Before the assemblage of “Things,” the island is emphatically “barren” (Defoe, 40). Crusoe’s first awareness, when he “began to look round” to “see what kind of Place” he was in, results in the observation, “in a Word, I had nothing” (35–36). And this context of “nothing” immediately sets off a frenetic sequence in the assembly of Things from the grounded ship: “Bisket,” “Rum,” “Cordial Waters,” “two Pistols,” “rusty Swords,” “Barrels of Powder,” “two Saws, an Axe, and a Hammer” (37–38), and then:

I now began to consider, that I might yet get a great many Things out of the Ship.… I resolv’d to set all other Things apart, ’till I got every Thing out of the Ship that I could get.… I brought away several Things very useful to me.… Bags full of Nails and Spikes, a great Skrew-Jack, a Dozen or two of Hatchets, and … that most useful Thing call’d a Grindstone.… Besides these Things, I took all the Mens Cloaths that I could find, and a spare Fore-top-sail, a Hammock, and some bedding. (40–41)

As a site of isolation and barrenness, the island immediately prompts the gathering of “Things”: in fact, the island is entirely constituted by these incoming “Things.” The “Earthen Pot” is a condensed example of this narrative’s focused engagement with the vitality of matter; it stands for the array of “Things” that populate Robinson Crusoe’s “desert island”—“thinging” its central site of absence, making it manifest as a world.

IV

This encounter—between the “inexpressible” energy of Robinson Crusoe’s things and Newton’s experiments with force—reflects the scope and impact of the modern engagement with matter. It records the mutually constitutive roles of imaginative literature and the new science for modern materialism. Tita Chico makes this mutuality the premise of her study of “the experimental imagination”: Chico seeks to define “the historical moment when what we now think of as literature and science were not codified as distinct epistemologies, but were understood as deeply … implicated in one another … [to] reveal a doubled epistemological trajectory: experimental observation utilizes imaginative speculation and imaginative fancy enables new forms of understanding.”⁴³

The encounter between Robinson Crusoe and Newton, in a “doubled epistemological trajectory,” brings two manifestations of materialism into view, both for the eighteenth century and for our own time. First, the perspective provided by Newton demonstrates the manner by which and the particular components in terms of which modern matter is founded—in an inductive, conjectural process that records the tangible world of Newtonian physics. Today’s “new” materialism emerges from that process and that world; viewing its conceptualization through the lens of Newton, then, explains and specifies current claims for the vitality and power, for the self-efficacy and autonomy, and for the movement of material things. In this context, for instance, Jane Bennett’s eloquent effort to “theorize a vitality intrinsic to materiality as such, and to detach materiality from the figures of passive, mechanistic, or divinely infused substance” can be understood as an acknowledgment of a powerful modern hermeneutic, rather than an “estrangement.”⁴⁴

Second, the perspective provided by Robinson Crusoe suggests that that very inductive process—driven by the representation of “experienced bodies” and leading on sequentially from body to body or from thing to thing—is activated through the literary imagination as a narrative of irresistible succession. This is the literary form of modern matter; things acquire their force, exhibit their vitality, and make the world of the island manifest through this discursive enactment of counterhuman vitality. Robinson Crusoe, then, offers a formal model for the mobilization of matter for literary critique and for the counterhuman imaginary, within a particular text and in literary history. This model brings to earth the wide range of outcomes that has been assigned by new materialist critique to the portrayal of “things”—from power or autonomy to disruption or obstinate solitude to self-efficacy, expansiveness, or innovation. From this perspective, power, disruption, or innovation are all heuristics for the imaginative creation of gravitational force by means of the formal strategies of the counterhuman imaginary—a common ground that offers a basis for interpretive coherence for new materialist literary critique.

The modern engagement with matter through the activities of the counterhuman imaginary that we are here witnessing in Newton’s “Queries” and Robinson Crusoe is an encompassing event, with vast consequences for modern thought and modern culture. Of course it shapes the science of physics, and it models empirical scientific method. It undergirds and continues to inform the modern conceptualization of economic forces. It establishes the discursive practice out of which the literary mode that we now call “realism” emerges—featuring the concrete, particular materials and experiences of a tangible, secular world. In describing the encompassing nature of this event across realms of understanding and imagination, Michael H. Turk includes the contributions of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Adam Smith, and d’Alembert with those of Newton and Defoe in order to outline

the bridging [of] the scientific with the philosophical and the literary.… One might take the general resemblance in … ideas [across these realms as] evidence of a commonality in consciousness, a mark of the intellectual currents, broadly understood, sweeping across Western Europe in the course of the eighteenth century. Those established an environment in which the conjectural, imagined as such or even cast in the form of fiction, would be perceived as leading to the construction or expansion of defined fields of knowledge.⁴⁵

The pot is both a form of knowledge and a form of imagination: as knowledge, it records the inductive character of modern matter; as a founding facet of the counterhuman imaginary, it asserts the vitality of the other-than-human world, even while it is experienced through human creativity.

1. 1. Jonathan Lamb, The Things Things Say (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), xii, xi.

2. 2. Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter,” Political Theory 32 (2004): 348.

3. 3. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Coole and Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 8, 9.

4. 4. Ilena Baird, “Introduction: Peregrine Things: Rethinking the Global in Eighteenth-Century Studies,” in Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context: From Consumerism to Celebrity Culture, ed. Baird and Ionescu (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 1–16; and Christina Ionescu, “Introduction: Through the Prism of Thing Theory,” in Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory, 17–30. Quotations are from Baird, “Introduction,” 14, 12, 8, 3, 8.

5. 5. See for example Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Baird, “Introduction”; Ionescu, “Introduction”; Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 1–22; Bill Brown, ed., Things: A Critical Inquiry Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Coole and Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms.” Meanwhile, critical analysis of description per se and of the appearance of objects—especially in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature—continues to deepen our formal engagement with this topic; for example Lynn Festa, “Crusoe’s Island of Misfit Things,” The Eighteenth Century 52 (2011): 443–71; Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Cynthia Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Mark Blackwell, ed., The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007); Julie Park, The Self and It: Novel Objects and Material Subjects in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

6. 6. Ernan McMullin, Newton on Matter and Energy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 43; Wolfram Schmidgen, “The Metaphysics of Robinson Crusoe,” ELH 83 (2016): 101.

7. 7. Andrew O’Malley, Children’s Literature, Popular Culture, and Robinson Crusoe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 48. For this context, see also Michael V. White, “The Production of an Economic Robinson Crusoe,” in Robinson Crusoe’s Economic Man: A Construction and Deconstruction, ed. Ulla Grapard and Gillian Hewitson (New York: Routledge, 2011); originally published in Southern Review 15 (1982): 115–42.

8. 8. Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 132; cited in O’Malley, Children’s Literature, 29.

9. 9. Ulla Grapard, Gillian Hewitson, “Introduction: Economics and Literature,” in Grapard and Hewitson, Robinson Crusoe’s Economic Man, 5.

10. 10. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (1906; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover, 2011), 88.

11. 11. “Robinson Crusoe Economy” is Michael V. White’s coinage in “The Production of an Economic Robinson Crusoe.”

12. 12. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 72–74.

13. 13. Watt, 88.

14. 14. Virginia Woolf, from The Second Common Reader (1932), reprinted in Robinson Crusoe: A Norton Critical Edition, by Daniel Defoe, 2nd ed., ed. Michael Schinagel (New York: Norton, 1975), 285.

15. 15. Woolf, 285, 287.

16. 16. Lydia H. Liu connects materialism and colonialism through Defoe’s pot. She sees this moment of efficacy in Woolf’s account as a “fetishized metonomy … between man and the thing he makes,” demonstrating that Defoe’s pot is an unacknowledged product of the eighteenth-century “global network of the porcelain trade” and thus that Defoe’s text is powerfully formative of the “colonial disavowal” that underlies eighteenth-century imaginative literature. Liu, “Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot: Science, Aesthetics, and the Metaphysics of True Porcelain,” in Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History, ed. Noah Heringman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 139, 146.

17. 17. Bill Brown, Other Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 29–30; Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Martin Hofstader (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 175, 178. Heidegger uses “thinging” here in the following context: “The jug is a thing insofar as it things. The presence of something present such as the jug comes into its own, appropriatively manifests and determines itself, only from the thinging of the thing.”

18. 18. Brown, Other Things, 30.

19. 19. Brown, 31.

20. 20. Theodore Adorno, “The Handle, the Pot, and Early Experience,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedeman, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 218; Brown, Other Things, 31.

21. 21. Wallace Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar” (1919), The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Knopf: New York, 1954), 76.

    I placed a jar in Tennessee,

    And round it was, upon a hill.

    It made the slovenly wilderness

    Surround that hill.

    The wilderness rose up to it,

    And sprawled around, no longer wild.

    The jar was round upon the ground

    And tall and of a port in air.

    It took dominion everywhere.

    The jar was gray and bare.

    It did not give of bird or bush,

    Like nothing else in Tennessee.

22. 22. John W. Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 94.

23. 23. McMullin, Newton on Matter and Energy, 1, 35, 1.

24. 24. Robert E. Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism: British Natural Philosophy in an Age of Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 8–9. Also see McMullin, Newton on Matter and Energy, 144n135, for examples of Newton’s attempts to “de-ontologize.”

25. 25. McMullin, Newton on Matter and Energy, 70–71.

26. 26. Yolton, Thinking Matter, 93.

27. 27. Isaac Newton, Optics, based on the 4th ed. (London, 1730; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover, 1952), Query 31, p. 376.

28. 28. McMullin, Newton on Matter and Energy, 41–45.

29. 29. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, abr. ed., ed. Kenneth P. Winkler (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 4.3.6, pp. 236–37.

30. 30. Yolton, Thinking Matter, 92.

31. 31. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, “Stillingfleet Correspondence,” 349; cited in Yolton, Thinking Matter, 18.

32. 32. Yolton, 96, 95, citing Andrew Baxter, An Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (London, 1737), sec. 2 heading, p. 79.

33. 33. Yolton, 17.

34. 34. McMullin, Newton on Matter and Energy, 23.

35. 35. Newton, Optics, 401–402.

36. 36. Newton, 340–41. Milton Wilson cites this passage in his account of “literary invention” in Newton: “Reading Locke and Newton as Literature,” University of Toronto Quarterly 57 (1988): 477–78.

37. 37. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Michael Shinagel (New York: Norton, 1994), 8. Subsequent references to this source appear parenthetically in the text.

38. 38. Martin Luther, Trade and Usury, in Luther’s Works, vol. 45, ed. Walther I. Brandt and Helmut T. Lehman (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1962), 257. For this argument, see Dwight Codr, Raving at Usurers: Anti-finance and the Ethics of Uncertainty in England, 1690–1750 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016).

39. 39. John Brewer, “Commercialization and Politics,” in The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Neil McKendrick, Brewer, and J. H. Plumb (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 213.

40. 40. Brown, Other Things, 31.

41. 41. Heidegger, “Thing,” 166.

42. 42. Festa, 452.

43. 43. Tita Chico, The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), 3.

44. 44. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, xiii.

45. 45. Michael H. Turk, “Economics as Plausible Conjecture,” History of Political Economy 42 (2010): 533–34.