Chapter 3 THE UNCREATION OF THE HUMAN

I

The Dunciad is an extended poetical enactment of force, expressed as a pervasive “pow’r” flowing across and among a material world of “dunces,” authors, publishers, books, lands, streams, oceans, and even suns and moons. The opening section of the last book of the poem offers a summary account of this power, which exercises a “Force inertly strong” (4.5–8). This passage summarizes the nature of the energy and the extent of the potency of this “Force.” Activated by “Fame’s posterior Trumpet” (4.71), force evidently exerts itself without any “guide” or external agent. It is “inert,” “inward,” “vast,” “sure,” and “transporting” (4.73–78). And it is exercised through “impulse,” “attraction,” and “gravity,” inclining all its objects toward one “centre” (4.77). The purview of this force extends to all the would-be human beings in the realm of the poem—authors, publishers, patrons, politicians—of any age:

The young, the old, who feel her inward sway,

One instinct seizes, and transports away.

None need a guide, by sure Attraction led,

And strong impulsive gravity of Head:

None want a place, for all their Centre found,

Hung to the Goddess, and coher’d around.

.….….….….….….….…. .

The gath’ring number, as it moves along,

Involves a vast involuntary throng,

Who gently drawn, and struggling less and less,

Roll in her Vortex, and her pow’r confess. (4.73–84)

The account of the powers that govern the dunces’ attraction to “Dulness” here exactly recites the contemporary Newtonian account of gravitational force, using the same terms advanced by Newton—“attraction,” “inertia,” “impulse,” “gravity,” “centre.” The poem dwells with, elaborates, and extends these powers across its human as well as its environmental/geological and cosmic entities and realms. The consequence is that all of these entities are systematically materialized—represented as subjected to gravitational force.

As to its purportedly human entities, The Dunciad as we have seen is famous for its numerous, specifically identified population of contemporary writers, the “dunces.” Pope fills the poem with the names of his contemporaries—“Fools”—who as we have seen are listed and relisted by name, at every turn (1.136). For example, during the close of the sleeping contest at the end of book 2, seven writers are named in five lines: Susanna Centlivre, Pierre Motteux, Abel Boyer, William Law, Thomas Morgan, Bernard Mandeville, and Benjamin Norton Defoe:

At last Centlivre felt her voice to fail,

Motteux himself unfinish’d left his tale,

Boyer the State, and Law the Stage gave o’er,

Morgan and Mandevil could prate no more;

Norton, from Daniel and Ostroea sprung,

Bless’d with his father’s front, and mother’s tongue,

Hung silent down his never-blushing head;

And all was hush’d, as Folly’s self lay dead. (2.411–18)

In effect, the poem designates these particular named authors only in order to repudiate their autonomy, their vitality, and their influence as individual animate human beings in the same verses: their voices “fail”; they disclaim their professions; and each of these named authors along with “all” they represent is “hush’d” in a state that would resemble death, were they actually living beings.

The “silence” of this population of authors is an ongoing refrain and an indication of the poem’s renunciation of human vitality (2.417). These authors are also systematically displaced from the human through a kind of mingling with expressions of manifestations of the other-than-human. For example, in the following passage, particular names of contemporary authors—Benjamin Norton Defoe, John Breval, and John Dennis—are indiscriminately mingled with the random sounds that instantiate the poem’s representation of force, replacing the purported human referents of these names with the “pow’r of Noise” (2.222) and human vitality with the hyperactivity of “Dissonance” and “Interruption”:

Twas chatt’ring, grinning, mouthing, jabb’ring all,

And Noise and Norton, Brangling and Breval,

Dennis and Dissonance, and captious Art,

And Snip-snap short, and Interruption smart. (2.236–39)

But the key locus in the poem for this materialization of individual animate human beings occurs in the extended account of Cibber’s burning of his books in book 1. In a review of a full population of authors, each individual human being is designated through the representation of a bound book; by this means, animate human beings become objects. For the classical authors,

But, high above, more solid Learning shone,

The Classics of an Age that heard of none;

There Caxton slept, with Wynkyn at his side,

One clasp’d in wood, and one in strong cow-hide;

There, sav’d by spice, like Mummies, many a year,

Dry Bodies of Divinity appear:

De Lyra there a dreadful front extends,

And here the groaning shelves Philemon bends. (1.147–54)

The heavy, physical “Bodies” weighing down the bookshelves here are “dry,” wooden or leather objects; they outlast the human life span “like Mummies,” providing material kindling for the fire that Cibber will shortly light.

The Dunciad’s images of bookshelves here reflect the poem’s imbrication with the rise of the modern library and the archive of contemporary material culture. Harold Weber describes the poem’s reflection of “the new age of libraries,” including catalogs, book clubs, circulating libraries, and private collections, which were a vital concomitant to the rise of the printing industry.¹² The poem makes material collections of books a pervasive feature of Dulness’s realm—initially in Cibber’s first appearance and his library-burning in book 1 and generally as an ongoing facet of the characterization of the dunces as walking libraries: “A Lumberhouse of books in ev’ry head, / For ever reading, never to be read!” (3.193–94). Weber argues that “the library emerges as one of the most powerful symbols of Dulness’s triumph.”¹³ In the context of the inherent counterhuman force of matter represented in the poem, The Dunciad’s gatherings of things in libraries and archives offer another demonstration of that proliferative or cumulative counterenergy that paradoxically stands against or transforms the human.

Animation is the corollary effect here: the materialization of the human into the form of the book in turn animates the material thing, as the books then, themselves, achieve opportunities for “flight” and “light.” In book 3, the same “Calf” or “cow-hide”-bound volumes “wing” away in their “new bodies” after their dipping in the waters of Lethe:

Instant, when dipt, away they wing their flight,

Where Brown and Mears unbar the gates of Light,

Demand new bodies, and in Calf’s array,

Rush to the world, impatient for the day. (3.26–29)

These “rushing” books are released to the world by the contemporary publishers George Brown and William Mears, and human being is replaced by the “new” and “impatient” energy of the material thing. As Pope explains in his note to this passage, “the allegory of the souls of the dull coming forth in the forms of their books dressed in calf’s leather, and being let abroad in vast numbers by Booksellers, is sufficiently intelligible”—“intelligible” as the effect of gravitational force on matter.

Meanwhile the operations of gravity extend across the world of the poem. Beyond the combustible, calf-skin bodies of the poem’s other-than-human population, The Dunciad also systematically and dramatically materializes its geography and even its astronomy—a realization of Newtonian physics as a universal, cosmic force. In book 1, this environmental/geological scope is demonstrated as the force of Dulness is shown to “shift” and “turn” oceans and continents, climate, and seasons:

How time himself stands still at her command,

Realms shift their place, and Ocean turns to land.

Here gay Description Aegypt glads with show’rs,

Or gives to Zembla fruits, to Barca flowr’s;

Glitt’ring with ice here hoary hills are seen,

There painted vallies of eternal green,

In cold December fragrant chaplets blow,

And heavy harvests nod beneath the snow. (1.71–78)

And while this force is upturning continents and waters, it can also “mold … a new World” (4.15) and configure stars and suns:

Yon stars, yon suns, he rears at pleasure higher,

Illumes their light, and sets their flames on fire. (3.259–60)

And it can then turn to engage the whole solar system:

Thence a new world to Nature’s laws unknown,

Breaks out refulgent, with a heav’n its own:

Another Cynthia her new journey runs,

And other planets circle other suns.

The forests dance, the rivers upward rise,

Whales sport in woods, and dolphins in the skies. (3.240–46)

The Dunciad’s ongoing engagement with force is thus systematically generalized across every object of representation in the poem, from the authors and publishers, the gentlemen on the “Grand Tour,” the virtuosi, the patrons of the arts, or the politicians to the rivers and oceans, the valleys and deserts, and the suns and stars.

And like Newtonian gravitation, The Dunciad’s force happens outside of human agency. On the one hand, this power seems to be associated with the Mighty Mother, Dulness, who appears to preside over the activities in the poem and over the apocalypse of its ending. As if performing a human or royal role, Dulness is seated on a “Throne” (1.36), “rules” the mind (1.16), exercises “imperial sway” (3.123), and “anoints” a monarch (1.287). But on the other hand, systematically repudiating such imputations of human agency is Dulness’s consistent removal from visibility, action, and eminence. Her majesty is invariably observed through “a veil of fogs” (1.262) or in “a Cloud conceal’d” (4.17). And likewise her own omniscience itself is such that she “beholds [only] thro’ fogs” (1.180); she is “all-seeing [only in] mists” (4.469). In effect, the poem creates Dulness only to repudiate her activity as the human-like agent of the poem’s force—referring that mysterious power outside of the figure of the Mighty Mother to pervasive, intangible effects like “the wond’rous pow’r of Noise” (2.222) or “music, rage, and mirth” (3.238) or to uncentered, distributed phenomena like “mobs” (1.67), “spawn” (1.59), “throngs” (4.82) or “crowds on crowds” (4.135). As we have seen, every object, scene, and entity in the poem is impelled by this distributed, pervasive power whose universal force is everywhere, while Dulness’s seeming agency dissolves in “fogs” and gives way to “noise.” The Dunciad’s theory of the force inherent in matter is universal in scope and exercises itself beyond, outside of, or counter to human agency.

II

Supplementary to this counterhuman representation of force, the scene of The Dunciad also disavows a human-generated system or process of hierarchy and order. On the one hand, the only word specifically and repeatedly proffered by the poem as an account of its other-than-human system seems to indicate an impossibility of order: “Chaos” (1.12). “Chaos,” repeatedly referenced, characterizes Dulness’s ancestral origin, serves as her nickname, and describes the world that Dulness beholds as she looks down from her throne: “the Chaos dark and deep” (1.55). But on the other hand, the systems and processes of the poem are characterized more specifically and fully than “chaos” can comprise. The Dunciad offers an ongoing and even insistent representation of intra-activity across the material forms that we have seen to be its population—authors, booksellers, books, dunces, rivers, lands, oceans, moons, and suns. Well beyond that initial assertion of chaos, the poem offers a complex repertory of relational indicators that quickly come to dominate its action. In effect, through this presentation of assemblages and processes, The Dunciad provides for an experiment in nonhierarchic, antianthropocentric, counterhuman theories of relationality. Like the new materialist approaches in physics, molecular biology, and vitalism reviewed earlier, The Dunciad, too, can be seen to explore concepts of entanglement, turbulence, chaos, intra-activity, flattening, and even cascading.

Almost every passage in the poem offers or implies an alternative scenario for process or relationality. We have already seen, in the poem’s play with names and noise—“Noise and Norton, Brangling and Breval, / Dennis and Dissonance”—an assemblage of authors, or at least of authors’ names, based on incoherent sound-making (2.236–37). But the base line for The Dunciad’s scenarios of relationality is set up through the poem’s pervasive insistence on “numbers”: hundreds, millions, mobs, or crowds—from the “hundred clenches” and the “Mob of Metaphors” at the beginning of the first book (1.63, 67) to the “hundred sons,” the “millions and millions,” and the “gath’ring numbers” that assemble throughout the poem (1.63, 3.31, 4.80) to the repeated convening of “thick and more thick” “crowds on crowds” of dunces (4.190, 135) that comprise the whole unfolding narrative of book 4. These hundreds and millions of things—objectified beings, books, genres, concepts, figures of speech, ranks, titles, insects, eggs, ripples, streams, sounds, yawns—are the raw materials of an extended poetic experiment in counterhuman relationality.

In the course of the poem, things may be assembled according to mixing, joining, listing, streaming, whirling, fires, storms, or even through sleeping. And each of these options is distinctively defined. For example, the operative linkage might arise from the intermediate space separating proximate objects—an intangible “betwixt”—which posits a relationship, though an undefinable one, “betwixt a Heiddegre and owl” (1.290). In the following passage, the space between authors (“’twixt”) and the intermediacy of the production (“past”/“future,” “old”/“new”) serve to describe this intermediate linkage of dunces:

A past, vamp’d, future, old, reviv’d, new piece,

’Twixt Plautus, Fletcher, Shakespear, and Corneille,

Can make a Cibber, Tibbald, or Ozell. (1.284–86)

Things may also be entangled through “linking” or “joining”:

Where Dukes and Butchers join to wreathe my crown,

At once the Bear and Fiddle of the town. (1.218–19)

Pluto with Cato thou for this shalt join,

And link the Mourning Bride to Proserpine. (3.309–10)

Things may simply be assembled in lists, “side by side” or one after another, leveling or flattening the distinctions among them:

There march’d the bard and blockhead, side by side,

Who rhym’d for hire, and patroniz’d for pride.

Narcissus, prais’d with all a Parson’s pow’r,

Look’d a white lily sunk beneath a show’r.

There mov’d Montalto with superior air;

His stretch’d-out arm display’d a Volume fair. (4.101–10)

“Behold yon’ Isle, by Palmers, Pilgrims trod,

Men bearded, bald, cowl’d, uncowl’d, shod, unshod,

Peel’d, patch’d, and piebald, linsey-wolsey brothers,

Grave Mummers! sleeveless some, and shirtless others. (3.113–16)

Or things may be assembled through fluid forms of cascading—“mixing,” “mingling,” or “pouring”:

an endless band

Pours forth, and leaves unpeopled half the land.

A motley mixture! in long wigs, in bags,

In silks, in crapes, in Garters, and in rags. (2.219–22)

[the water of Lethe] Pours into Thames: and hence the mingled wave

Intoxicates the pert, and lulls the grave:

There, all from Paul’s to Aldgate drink and sleep. (2.343–45)

Or they may be assembled through fluid forms of turbulence: “whirling,” “rushing,” “conflagration,” and “storm”:

Down, down they larum, with impetuous whirl,

The Pindars, and the Miltons of a Curl. (3.163–64)

All sudden, Gorgons hiss, and Dragons glare,

And ten-horn’d fiends and Giants rush to war.

Hell rises, Heav’n descends, and dance on Earth:

Gods, imps, and monsters, music, rage, and mirth,

A fire, a jigg, a battle, and a ball,

’Till one wide conflagration swallows all. (3.234–39)

Immortal Rich! How calm he sits at ease

’Mid snows of paper, and fierce hail of pease;

And proud his Mistress’ orders to perform,

Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm. (3.261–64)

And as the logical extension and imaginative realization of the inertia that defines this force, things may even be assembled through the positionality of sleeping, as we noted in the passage at the end of book 2 when Centlivre, Motteaux, Boyer, Law, Morgan, Mandevil, and Norton together all fall asleep: “And all was hush’d, as Folly’s self lay dead” (2.418). But most conclusively, at the end of the poem, sleep brings all the materials of the contemporary world into the flattening relationality exerted by the force of “the Yawn of Gods”: “Churches and Chapels,” “Armies” and “Navies,” “Right and Wrong,” “Wit” and “Art,” “Religion” and “Morality”:

Wide, and more wide, [the yawn] spread o’er all the realm;

Ev’n Palinurus nodded at the Helm:

The Vapour mild o’er each Committee crept;

Unfinish’d Treaties in each Office slept;

And Chiefless Armies doz’d out the Campaign;

And Navies yawn’d for Orders on the Main.

.….….….….….….….….…

Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,

Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.

See skulking Truth to her old Cavern fled,

Mountains of Casuistry heap’d o’er her head!

Philosophy, that lean’d on Heav’n before,

Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more. (4.613–18, 639–44)

These modes of relationality reiteratively work out the random consequences of the actions of gravitational force across the material world of the poem. And the final “chaos” with which the poem ends is inclusive of all the entities of that material world, including—as just one among many—the “human”:

Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;

Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!

Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor’d;

Light dies before thy uncreating word. (4.651–54)

The “human” is repeatedly assembled in relation to the material things of the poem as those things are “moved,” “transported,” and “shifted” by the vast, sure, inert force that pervades this counterhuman world. And then finally the “human” is “uncreated” by that “universal” force. By means of its engagement with gravitation, then, The Dunciad unleashes matter from notions of human order so as to reimagine not just the human itself but systems of hierarchy and relationality shaped by human being. The poem helps us ask the question of whether the counterhuman imaginary can propose a repudiation of the human, even from within the scenario of human creativity.

In fact and as we have seen, The Dunciad’s counterhuman imaginary is inextricable from the human-centered cultural imaginary—from human creativity and from the human literary canon. In that respect—inextricability—the counterhuman imaginary cannot directly repudiate the human. But The Dunciad does offer a metacaveat for human creativity that extends beyond its local representation of the other-than-human forms of vitality and the antihierarchical forms of relationality that we have documented in the poem. Through its engagement with the other-than-human, The Dunciad qualifies the assumption of the exclusive, inherent, supreme human power to create, adjudicate, or order. But it also warns us that we must draw back, as well, from the assumption that the poem’s counterhuman vision reflects either an unmediated proximity with “real” matter—an assumption that we might naturally be tempted to project on the basis of the poem’s connection with Newtonian physics—or, relatedly, some form of political efficacy or ethical judgment on “reality.”

The political or the ethical—and the “real”—are, for some new materialist critics and for many environmental and animal studies critics, the ultimate rationale and even point of reference. In Animals and Other People, Heather Keenleyside sees literary representations of the other-than-human as making “real-world claims” about “cultural and intellectual debates that are still with us.”¹⁴ And Tobias Menely in The Animal Claim seeks to show that the animal “voice” as expressed in literary or political discourse involves a process of representation that includes a direct “claim to rights” on the part of animals in the real world, which requires human action.¹⁵ Sarah Ellenzweig and John Zammito’s provocative summary account of new materialist methodology in their introduction to The New Politics of Materialism provides an overview of the terms of the investment by new materialism in this sort of “real-world” political claim: “new materialism invests in an ontology of vital matter in order to ensure new forms of political action and engagement.” But they go on to suggest that the authority for that claim to a proximity to the “real” and for an articulation of ethical values and political demands is based on a reprojection of “human values onto nature”: “New materialism’s eagerness to extend agency to objects … does little to unsettle a uniquely human obsession with agency and its correlates—selfhood, rationality, choice, intention, mastery,” and knowledge.¹⁶

Jane Bennett’s representation of thing-power in Vibrant Matter demonstrates the same caveat as that suggested by Ellenzweig and Zammito’s critique of the “uniquely human obsession with agency” and by The Dunciad’s imaginary world of gravitational force. In her introductory chapter, Bennett offers us a poetic scenario labeled “Debris”:

On a sunny Tuesday morning … in the grate over the storm … there was:

one large men’s black plastic work glove

one dense mat of oak pollen

one unblemished dead rat

one white plastic bottle cap

one smooth stick of wood

Bennett goes on to represent these things as “stuff that commanded attention in its own right, as existents in excess of their association with human meanings, habits, or projects.” Here is “thing-power,” she suggests, which, just like Dulness’s “uncreating word,” “issued a call, even if I did not quite understand what it was saying.”¹⁷

Bennett highlights the “impossibility” of understanding this poem to debris, as she tries “impossibly, to name the moment of independence … possessed by things,” “to attend to the it as actant.”¹⁸ The impossibility of Bennett’s debris is another redaction of The Dunciad’s uncreating word; both impossible scenarios enable us to question—and to uncreate—human creative agency, even as the human witness focuses on the effort to represent the agency of matter.

III

Taking seriously this requirement to uncreate the human—to continue using The Dunciad’s version of the concept—requires a significant adjustment to the conceptual groundwork around current approaches to the other-than-human, particularly for literary animal studies and new materialism. The thing-work of The Dunciad might be seen as contrapuntal to the world-making of the cultural imaginary, as that concept has been developed in social theory and cultural criticism. Cornelius Castoriadis defines the “imaginary institution of society” as each society’s “singular manner of living, of seeing and of conducting its own existence, its world, and its relations with this world.”¹⁹ The “uncreating” activity of The Dunciad suggests that that “singular existence” contains its own counterexistence, specifically if we attend to its intimacy with the evocation of the other-than-human. In fact, The Dunciad demonstrates that the human cultural imaginary is permeated by the counterhuman: it is a world-making consensus whose purview simultaneously includes those realms that are contrapuntal or even contradictory to the human, through processes of relationality not subject to human definition. Without claiming to use human power to endow matter with agency, the counterhuman imaginary opens an alternative site for the exploration of such agency, in an incommensurable relationship with the “singular existence” of human creativity.

In The Dunciad, this “singular existence” includes a powerful, integrated, encyclopedic synthesis of the development of the institutions of modern capitalism. The poem draws together and demonstrates the integration of a set of tropes that express the most vital elements of its historical moment: the leveling vitality of urban expansion, the capitalization and commodification of the printing industry, the volatility of credit and financial speculation, and the vision of an imperial British identity. In particular, the writers and booksellers that make up—simultaneously—the material and the human population of the poem are the local agents of capitalism for this historical moment. As I have argued elsewhere, this population expresses variously and concretely the fixation on profit and demand, the professionalization of authorship, the growth of productivity, and the focus on an expanding trade that define the capitalist development of an industry. Meanwhile, Dulness herself is a parodic manifestation of Britannia, the preeminent allegorical representative of the expansionist British nation; the scenes of Dulness on her throne echo the commonplace image of Britannia on contemporary English coinage; and the account of Dulness’s vision across oceans and continents directly evokes current claims to British imperial power and global influence.²⁰

What happens when capitalism encounters gravity? The material force that moves the counterhuman pulls the historical force of capitalism into the realm of the “impossible,” into the scenario of “chaos” that for this poem, for Lucretian atomism, and for modern thermodynamics envisions a turbulence beyond Enlightenment humanist certainties and beyond human creativity:

Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;

And Universal Darkness buries All. (6.653–56)

The Dunciad teaches us to look for scenarios of uncertainty and impossibility in imaginative literature, as a means to an embedded analysis of the other-than-human. The methodology that we might project from our engagement with the other-than-human in this poem entails a movement from observations of materialization and of jarring incommensurability to an account of turbulence that puts that incommensurability into unconventional, impossible motion. These processes of relationality and turbulence are the point of no return for an analysis of the counterhuman imaginary; they leave the human reader in an indeterminate “Darkness” by repudiating all conventions of discursive certainty and narrative conclusion, through the ongoing novelty of the “new Arms,” “new light,” and the “new world to Nature’s laws unknown” (3.240).

1. 1. See Laura Brown, Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 136.

2. 2. “Unprecedented things are currently being done with and to matter, nature, life, production, and reproduction,” as Diana Coole and Samantha Frost have asserted, and those moves inspire new terms of engagement with matter, for literary studies. Coole and Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Coole and Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 4.

3. 3. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 33.

4. 4. Nikolas S. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 47.

5. 5. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 20.

6. 6. David Webb and William Ross, introduction to The Birth of Physics, by Michel Serres, trans. Webb and Ross (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), 2, 3–4, 6–7 (originally published 1977).

7. 7. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, in Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 2.32.

8. 8. Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace, “The Things Things Don’t Say: The Rape of the Lock: Vitalism, and New Materialism,” The Eighteenth Century 59 (2018): 114.

9. 9. Alexander Pope, The Dunciad in Four Books, in Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, 3.215–16:

   ’Tis yours, a Bacon or a Locke to blame,

   A Newton’s genius, or a Milton’s flame:

   But oh! with One, immortal one dispense,

   The source of Newton’s Light, of Bacon’s Sense!

   Subsequent references to this source are cited parenthetically in the text.

10. 10. William Kinsley, “Physico-demonology in Pope’s Dunciad,” Modern Language Review 70 (1975): 26.

11. 11. Ernan McMullin, Newton on Matter and Energy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 35, 43.

12. 12. Harold Weber, “The ‘Garbage Heap’ of Memory: At Play in Pope’s Archives of Dulness,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 (1999): 4.

13. 13. Weber, 4.

14. 14. Heather Keenleyside, Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 1.

15. 15. Tobias Menely, The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 6, 1.

16. 16. Sarah Ellenzweig and John H. Zammito, “Introduction,” in The New Politics of Materialism: History, Philosophy, Science, ed. Ellenzweig and Zammito (London: Routledge, 2017), 10.

17. 17. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 4.

18. 18. Bennett, 3.

19. 19. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Karen Blamey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 145. Originally published as L’institution imaginaire de la société, 1975.

20. 20. Brown, Fables of Modernity, 137–42.