Projecting agents: Epistemological critique and the rhetoric of belief in eighteenth-century British projects (Mary Astell, Daniel Defoe, George Berkeley, Henry Fielding)

"Projecting Agents" argues that eighteenth-century project literature constitutes a critique of both the representational epistemology that gained prominence in this period and the notion of the person embedded in that epistemology. While literary histories have tended to naturalize both the representational paradigm and its role in the development of novelistic realism, projects show that this paradigm's construction of knowledge and its account of character were not assimilated uncritically. I examine both popular projects and more substantive texts by canonical authors, showing how the genre functions as a mode of thought for contesting representationalism's tendency to privatize knowledge and assume a distinction between subject and object that radically problematizes relations with others. In particular, projects propose that moral claims stripped of their cognitive dimension can support only an ultimately unstable ethics of affect. By contrast, projects' "rhetoric of belief" promotes a realist construal of moral goods and proposes that an intuition of other minds remains critical for knowledge and ethics. Projects thus argue for the constitutive place of belief in eighteenth-century concepts of agency, complicating accounts that characterize belief in this period as necessarily vestigial or primarily tied to formal religious commitments and institutions. I first show how popular projectors sought to appropriate the prestige of the emergent genres of natural science and political economy by rendering extraempirical goods "matters of fact." Chapter readings of projects by Mary Astell, Daniel Defoe, George Berkeley, and Henry Fielding show how these authors developed a comprehensive critique of representationalism's evidentiary conventions and argued for the fundamental likeness and connectedness of persons despite what might seem empirically to be their indissoluble particularity. Astell rejects a voluntarist and contractarian ethics to argue that persons are "members of the Body of Christ"; Defoe's numerous projects take the likeness of persons as a fundamental epistemological principle; Berkeley's strange tar-water project premises agency on a recognition of persons' mutual "enchainment"; and Fielding's dark social tracts suggest that a strictly realistic literary mode hinders ethical knowledge and hence limits reform. Overall, "Projecting Agents" proposes that projectors in this period developed an epistemological critique for explicitly ethical reasons, that representationalism's connections with literary realism were seen as problematic by that realism's earliest practitioners, and that for projectors a commitment to goods rendered "invisible" by the representational paradigm remained crucial for articulations of agency.