Chemical imagination and post-text poetics

The publication by " Classiques Garnier " of Fumie Kawamura's book after that of François Pépin¹ reveals a hitherto little-studied and little-known part of the history of science, inseparable in the eighteenth century from the more general history of ideas and the poetic strategies they mobilize. The subject is chemistry, the discourse on chemistry in the Encyclopédie and Diderot's appropriation of the chemical field and method. François Pépin approaches these questions as a historian of philosophy; Fumie Kawamura adopts an approach that is both anthropological and poetic to define a decisive node between the scientific debate of the Enlightenment, the imaginary and epistemological models that this debate mobilizes, and the forms of reasoning, writing and representation that these models induce or manifest.

This knot, this chemical device, only acquires pragmatic and theoretical evidence today, with the collapse of literature as an autonomous critical space. The circulation in question is neither properly literary nor properly scientific. Neither is chemistry anterior or posterior to Diderot's work. It is a knot: at a given moment in European history and culture, this knot was tied. Fumie Kawamura's book gives an account of this event.

Why chemistry ?

Chemistry, in Diderot's thought and work, is not a simple matter of content. Diderot was certainly interested in a scientific discipline whose position, in the scientific field of the Enlightenment, was ambivalent and controversial  heir to alchemy from which it was not completely detached, chemistry seems in many respects to refer to a bygone state of knowledge and to practices that nascent scientific reason and methodology reprove. Yet this old-fashioned rationality, these obsolete practices, resist and make a comeback, from medicine, from the heterodox currents of physics, as powers of proposition and innovation, from which to operate a radical critique of post-Cartesian mechanism.

However, this critique goes far beyond the realm of scientific experimentation. What's at stake for Diderot is not just the understanding and modeling of this or that natural phenomenon, but the very cognitive process of this modeling : not so much how to think about nature, but how to think about thought as closely as possible to nature, by rediscovering, in the mechanisms of thought, the natural processes of encounter and transformation of elements. I might as well say it straight away : such modeling is at the antipodes of the rhetorical tradition, even if it feeds on its forms and structures, and summons them to better divert them².

If the Enlightenment debate on the latest scientific advances concerning generation, fermentation, or evolution appears to be a debate of avant-gardists where imaginative speculation does not yet translate into concrete societal issues³, rhetorical modeling of the structures of thought then seems to constitute the undisputed centuries-old foundation from which, within the republic of letters, the devices of dispute and dialogue, the management of ideas and debates, the circulation of knowledge and the production of works of thought are conceived and organized.

Diderot doesn't approach chemistry as an object of knowledge within this rhetorical framework ; he mobilizes chemistry as a critique and overflow of the framework : it's not an object, a field /// of investigation in the midst of so many others that abound  it is the very conditions of debate that are at stake and, beyond that, a thought of the work no longer as a system of verbal articulations and sequences but as a chemical process of association, superposition, diffusion of ideas, by fermentation, contamination, transmutation.

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Lexicon and symptom

The articulation of field and frame must therefore be the constant preoccupation of the researcher who undertakes to explore Diderot's chemistry. Jacques Proust paved the way for this in a famous article, " Diderot et la philosophie du polype⁴ " : the polyp is both a biological phenomenon, to which the Encyclopédie devotes articles and plates⁵, and a model for the development of reasoning, through duplications of the same, paradigmatic extensions and, from there, both metonymy and analogy. Jean Starobinski has extended the field of investigation far beyond Diderot, in Action et réaction. Vie et aventures d'un couple (1999), a revolutionary book for the radical redefinition it institutes, in the tradition of Michel Foucault, of the object of criticism and the connections it now implies for the contemporary researcher. " Action and reaction " is not a theme, does not delimit a category (literary, scientific, political), but locates a transversal device of classical European thought.

Such a conception of the object of criticism is not, however, without its difficulties. Jean Starobinski first explores all the possible meanings of the terms " action " and " reaction " in the most diverse texts from the end of the 17th to the beginning of the 19th century⁶.

The result of the research is surprising : while for the contemporary public, in the field of science it is chemistry that is the queen discipline of reactions, this word appears only very rarely among the chemists of the time, and remains the prerogative of Cartesian physics⁷ : the reaction of the struck ball responds to the shock of the thrown billiard ball. Among chemists, the key notions are those of fermentation, triggered by affinity, and producing the aggregate or the compound⁸. Chemical phenomena only began to be treated in terms of reaction at the end of the eighteenth century when, to put it a little quickly, physical modeling triumphed over the competing modeling proposed by chemistry⁹. It is then that the political meaning of the term  appears: but the political reactionary can only be identified with the physical, or medical, reaction at the cost of a rather inconsistent psychological metaphor¹⁰ : the presence of the word " reactionary " in the Manifesto of the Communist Party leads Jean Starobinski to point to a " rhetoric of the Manifesto, which we know how effective it was¹¹ "A rhetoric that has lost one of the two terms of the couple and is now far removed from the original physical and physiological imaginary : can the incantation of a word whose origin is no longer perceived explain one of the most decisive political phenomena in contemporary history ?

The limits of lexical investigation  can be seen here:" I think we have more ideas than words. How many things are felt and not named ! ", writes Diderot in the /// Detached Thoughts on Painting¹². The word reifies, kills the couple, erases or crushes the imagination that summoned it, structures a differential game that simplifies, reduces the plasticity of the scene, the game, the configuration in which the idea was originally caught. It's not the word, it's the phenomenon that symptomatizes, even determines, the coalescences, shifts, actions and reactions constitutive of an episteme, a scientific, literary, cultural, social and political rationality.

However, the phenomenon at stake is difficult to grasp. Is there, linked to the action/reaction pair, a scientific phenomenon to which the scientific modeling of the Enlightenment stumbles, and from which will federate, imagine alternative productions of thought and discourse, revolutionary forms of government, modern models of sociability and society ?

...

This phenomenon, this typical event, is not the clash of two balls, with all that that implies in terms of linear modeling, the reduction of causalities. Nor is it the law of attraction, and its generalization from astronomy to all physical phenomena¹³. It is in the repetition of the couple, in the disseminating power of the reaction, that the fruitfulness of the model becomes apparent : a borderline model, at the limit of what can be modeled, where reaction absorbs action, divides it and anticipates it  a phenomenon that science fails to observe, an experiment without possible experimentation, or in which the imagination must supplement observation. But the word fermentation, which formed the starting point of Fumie Kawamura's investigation, cannot delimit the field of a lexical investigation either : if only in the Encyclopédie, we have to navigate from medical to physical and chemical articles, and, in the plates, from the chemist-alchemist's laboratory¹⁴ to the starch-maker's factory¹⁵ and the wax-maker's, the processing of whiting, the brewer's workshops¹⁶, brandy distillation¹⁷, bleaching operations¹⁸ and soap factories¹⁹, and from there to mineralogy and metallurgy, so many activities and techniques that nothing textually connects except the grouping operated by Jacques Proust in his edition of the plates of the Encylopédie²⁰.

Each time, chemistry is a symptom here, a symptom that the imagery of the plates helps to circumscribe and characterize : the alembic, the oven, the vat designate a somewhat mysterious, obscure and often smoking space, where matter is in transformation. The vessel often heats up, mixing is sometimes required, and both the scientist and the worker are busy. The fermentation of materials, their effervescence, their decomposition and recomposition, are all part of an intense activity : something very ancient, akin to the incantation and magic of witches' cauldrons, combines with a completely new phenomenon, the development of manufacturing, the first industrial revolution, the irruption of the places and processes of capitalism²¹, at once spectacular and hidden, ordered in the implacable rationality they bring into being and disordered by the very affair they set in motion.

The example of Quesnay

François Quesnay, /// the founder of the physiocratic school, is a remarkable example of this ambivalence. He was first and foremost a physician, and as such was interested in chemistry. His Essai physique sur l'économie animale, first published in one volume by Cavelier in 1736, then reissued enlarged in three volumes in 1747, then included a second section entitled " Chymie naturelle ". The physiology of the physician, who also wrote a Traité de la gangrène and a Traité de la suppuration (1749), was based on the observation and methods of chemistry : study and differentiation of acids, alkalis and neutrals, description of oils, processes of putrefaction (ch. 21), leading to the third section on humours : the circulation of blood and humours is opposed to fermentation, which implies stagnation and immobility²².

From humble origins, Quesnay owes his social ascent to his talents as a doctor, from which he began a second career as an economist. His famous Tableau économique de la distribution des dépenses annuelles d'une Nation agricole still obeys a taxonomic logic²³ : division of society into three classes²⁴, differentiation of these classes by the trade they reciprocally establish, differentiation of Nations among themselves in the " trading republic ". It was Quesnay's Philosophie rurale, published anonymously²⁵ in 1763, that took the decisive step towards making Quesnay the inventor of circulation :

" It is in employment & regeneration, that is, in consumption & reproduction, that consists the movement which condenses Society, & which perpetuates its duration. It is in this way that expenditure gives life to production, and that production repairs expenditure. This circulation has, like all others, exact rules of ebb & flow, which also prevent & the exhaustion of channels, & their clogging²⁶. These are the rules that are so important to know, not to bring the intervention of a reckless hand into conduits whose natural play depends solely on the impulse that is their own, & which do not suffer any foreign help, but to avoid what can harm them : it is, I say, these rules so important, & nevertheless so little known, that we are going to anatomize²⁷. "

Although the terms "action" and "reaction" are never uttered, we can clearly see here the balancing of a series of couples that seem to derive from them : employment and regeneration, consumption and reproduction, ebb and flow, exhaustion and engorgement. The underlying physiological metaphor is also betrayed by the neologism " anatomize ". But the comparison with blood circulation, often cited²⁸ as the model from which Quesnay would have worked, is never formulated. In contrast to the mechanistic, closed model of blood circulation described by Harvey in 1628, the Philosophie rurale insists on " le labyrinthe " (p. 120), its " canaux innombrables " (p. 122), its " tissu de lignes entrelacées & répétées " (p.108), its " retours & permutations réciproques " (p. 256) : for the very essence of economic circulation is loss (51 ref.), waste (13 ref.)  and its dread - stagnation²⁹, or rather its physiological equivalent, the state of languor³⁰ whose symptom is famine (24 ref.).

On the one hand, then, an economic rationality of circulation, involving the pendulum of ebb and flow, the optimization of losses, and constituting an objective to be achieved, Cartesian, physical, utopian, whose model that is becoming generalized in society is already intellectually outdated. On the other, the description of an economic reality, pointing to losses and retentions, excessive reserves (19 ref.), is treated explicitly as the clinical establishment of a diagnosis that refers back to the diseases in which Quesnay was most interested, the diseases of putrefaction. In the Traité de la gangrène³¹, we already found, opposed to circulation (30 ref.), languor was already at the heart of Quesnay's preoccupations: " for if one has recourse to amputation when the flesh has reached this degree of languor, one rarely succeeds " (p.38) ; " mais le plus redoutable..., c'est cette langueur, ou cette extinction presque entièrement de la vie " (p. 193) ; " Cet état de langueur semble nous présenter d'autre indication que celle de réveiller l'activité des esprits " (p. 194-5). Languor does not operate. Symptomatically, it says almost nothing. What interests Quesnay is the extreme limit of the mechanical model, at the point where it turns around and presents its non-modelizable, fermentative and chemical reverse side: on the one hand, to classify, differentiate, diagnose, quantify  on the other, as close to reality as possible, to apprehend the straying and stagnation of liquids, the wasting of flows, the uncontrollable decomposition of matter. Quesnay is not an interventionist; at most, when it's not too late, to restore the flow, by suppuration³², or expenditure³³.

This is because the economic rationality of what is being debated, among Enlightenment materialist thinkers, around the phenomena that chemistry and physics are concurrently trying to explain, is not the ultimate key to the network of models, methods, imaginary forms that develop around the chemical reaction, universal fermentation, games of coalescence and analogy : it would already be necessary to be able to formulate the reverse side of the model, and formulation alone is a major ideological and political issue. It is therefore to the modes of production of discourse that the emerging rationalities manifested here have to confront.

The Diderot event

Here we touch on what makes Diderot's thought and approach original : polymorphous and transversal, it enables him to combine, in a single movement, the chemical imagination of fermentations with the verbal and social practice of affinity, assent and dissent, with the sonic and musical experience of resonance, discordance and agreement³⁴, with the living critique of discourse, through digression, fragment, dialogue³⁵, by experimenting with alternative forms of reasoning, chiasmus versus syllogism, analogy versus taxonomy³⁶.

Highlighting these conjunctions always incurs the suspicion of an arbitrary critical metaphor : Fumie Kawamura guards against this by meticulously spotting the terms used, matching formulas and protocols, collating explicit references. It's not a word that moves from text to text; it's the very reality of chemical processes that, scattered in shifting lexical networks, emerges as reference, metaphor or /// as a structure in a grammar article in the Encyclopédie, a treatise on acoustics, a letter to Sophie Volland...

This is much more than a stylistic singularity. Diderot concentrates here, and exploits particularly acutely, a configuration that constitutes the true flip side, the fertile flip side of the Enlightenment : not the anti-philosophical, providentialist, scholastic, allegorical approach that still underlies all the structures of classical thought, but the polyphonic bubbling of thought, coupled with triumphant Reason, with the clarity and evidence of its developments, with the progress it heralds in knowledge and civilization, the delirious rockets of the imagination, the tension of paradox³⁷, the postures of detachment as revolt³⁸ and anonymity as commitment³⁹. This reverse side is manifest in the very movement of the Enlightenment : it is not asserted against them, but on the contrary produced at their margins, returning to what preceded them and projecting beyond them, thereby outlining not the logic of a model⁴⁰ and the history of a rationality, but the living rootedness and mobile network of a device.

The emergence of this device in Diderot coincides with the birth of chemistry as a science, with its emancipation from alchemy and its division from physics. This is Fumie Kawamura's main thesis. Diderot is a privileged witness to this coincidence; He may also have played a part in it, even in the teaching programs he devised for Russian universities⁴¹, thereby revealing, at the crossroads of the history of science and the poetics of texts, how thinking about nature and thinking about thinking, chemical experimentation and verbal practice, scientific imagination and pure fiction participate, not exactly in an episteme, but rather in a flipside both rooted in and projected from ideological discourse, mobilizing the same representations and expressions, claiming the same interests and concurring in the same efforts of the human spirit.

What's at stake is the very matter, iconic and sensitive, preverbal of thought, and its fermentative relationship to the superstructure of language and its discursive forms :

" In childhood, words were spoken to us. These words were fixed in our memory, and the meaning in our understanding either by an idea, or by an image ; and this idea or image was accompanied by aversion, hatred, pleasure, terror, desire, indignation, contempt. For quite a few years, with every word we uttered, the idea or image came back to us with its own sensation. But in the long run, we've used words like coins. We no longer look at the imprint, the legend, the cord, to know their value. We give and receive them by shape and weight. And so, I tell you, with words. We've left out the idea and the image, and stuck with sound and sensation. A spoken word is no more than a long sequence of sounds and sensations primitively excited. The heart and ears are involved, the mind is no longer. [...] And what does the philosopher who weighs, stops, analyzes, decomposes, return through suspicion, doubt, to the state of childhood? Why is it that the child's imagination is so strongly brought into play, while that of the mature man is so difficult? He looks in his head. A long period of time is no more for him than a series of old impressions, a "memory" of the past. /// calculation of additions, subtractions, a combinatorial art, Bareme's accounts⁴². " (Salon de 1767, Promenade Vernet, 6^e site, DPV XVI 218)

Meaning is tied up between the word that comes to us from outside and the idea, image, sensation we associate with it. The image is the rich, deep part of meaning; the word is the imposed figure, the empty, rapid form, the surface abbreviation. The rhetorical superstructure of words in circulation, their series and combinations, is contrasted with the true, slow, difficult relationship between word and image. The quest for meaning involves reactivating this primary relationship⁴³, which Diderot identified, in the Lettre sur les sourds, with the poetic hieroglyph.

Diderot's comparison between the circulation of meaning and that of money, as well as the obvious homology between Barême's accounting tables and Quesnay's economic table, invite us to a rapprochement and highlight, through the transversality of the fields called upon (linguistic, economic, psychological, social, philosophical), the presence of a device in the sense in which Michel Foucault understood it. We find here the double modeling, physical and chemical, at work in Quesnay  above, the action and reaction of words, quickly gauged like coins, by shape and weight, without prejudging the image ("  We no longer look at the imprint, the legend, the cord... "). But underneath, the philosopher urges us to regress to childhood, to exercise our imagination, to remotivate the sense, to awaken the spirit : Diderot details in Le Rêve de D'Alembert what this slow and difficult awakening consists of, what analogical games we then indulge in, what tenuous harmonics we become attached to ; at the same time, in Le Neveu de Rameau, he explores other connections, other knottings of meaning, dialogue, madness and pantomime⁴⁴.

The post-text

It takes all of Fumie Kawamura's methodical patience and analytical flexibility here to, without forcing the issue by brutally labeling all these phenomena as chemical, relate the analogical model extrapolated from the syllogism, the acoustic and musical model⁴⁵, the dialogical model⁴⁶, as a loose network innervated by the chemical metaphor of affinity and fermentation. Sometimes the image gets lost (in the aforementioned text from the Promenade Vernet, the slowness of the connection between word and image is not the fermentative slowness of stagnant matter), sometimes it is found in the fulgurance of a famous formulation (Rameau's Nephew as a fermenting grain of leaven⁴⁷).

The path of the book  can then be seen: from the external constitution of chemistry as a science to the internal understanding of Diderot's poetics, Fumie Kawamura outlines the contours of a Diderot-event that cannot be reduced to a text, for it permeates social space, the scientific field, musical practices and is understood, modeled by circulation to and from these exteriorities. It is from Diderot's chemical imagination, which is an imagination in the full, creative, productive sense, a bearer of rationality, that we can then think of a poetics of the post-text, that is to say, of the post-literature, in a world, our own, where this category, collapsed, allows us to reconnect with the transversalities of the Enlightenment.

 

Notes

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