Chapter 1
Autonomous Fibers and Secreting Organs
We judge the life of Elements by the life of crude masses. Maybe they are entirely different entities. One believes that there is only one single polyp; why shouldnât all of nature be of the same kind? When the polyp is divided into a hundred thousand parts, the primitive, generative animal is no longer, but all of its principles are still alive.
Diderot to Sophie de Volland. Grandval, 14 October 1759
Soranus, following the example of Hippocrates, could tell if a woman was barren or fertile. Their secret was the following: to put a clove of peeled garlic wrapped in wool, in the vagina, at night, when the woman went to bed. If in the morning when she awoke, her mouth tasted of garlic, he considered that she was able to conceive.
Denis Diderot, âConception,â ElĂ©ments de physiologie
On 23 April 1744, Le Breton, Briasson, David lâaĂźnĂ©, and Durand, the four future booksellers/publishers of Diderot and Jean Le Rond dâAlembertâs (1717-83) EncyclopĂ©die (1751-72), obtained the royal privilege to translate Robert Jamesâs A Medicinal Dictionary, Including Physic, Surgery, Anatomy, Chemistry and Botany (3 vols, London, 1743-45). The translationâDictionnaire universel de MĂ©decine et de Chirurgie, published between 1746-48âwas Diderotâs first major literary employment.1 It was also his introduction to the study of medicine beyond the little he had learned about anatomy, physiology, and the ancients âau college.â2 While working on the Dictionnaire, Diderot studied anatomy with the surgeon Cesar Verier, author of AbrĂ©gĂ© de lâanatomie du corps humain (1743), and later with his eclectic neighbor from the rue de lâEstrapade, Marie Marguerite Biheron (1719-95), who had an impressive collection of colored wax bodies and body parts that she used in her eight-day-long intensive anatomy course. These courses and the dictionary project, however, gave Diderot only cursory knowledge of medicine and science (Diderot, homme de science, p. 30).3
Nonetheless, either from a growing curiosity sparked by this introduction to the study of the body or from the requisite needs of the massive encyclopedia project, which he and DâAlembert undertook as chief editors beginning on 16 october 1747, Diderot spent the rest of his life avidly studying anatomy, chemistry, medicine, the natural sciences, physics, and physiology. It is also rumored that he worked on the Elements de physiologie (1778 [1765-84])4 up until a few months before his death (Jean Mayer, âIntroduction,â ElĂ©ments de physiologie, p. xvi).5 He conversed frequently with medical and scientific scholars (Tronchin, Petit, Buffon, and others) and participated in the important medical debates of his time. The largest single profession represented by the collaborators of the EncyclopĂ©die was medicine. Of the 125 contributors, 22 were medical doctors and surgeons (Proust, p. 35).6 And, as Diderot humorously stated himself, âThere are no books I read more readily than medical treatises; no one whose conversation interests me more than physicians; but this is when I am feeling wellâ (Elements, DPV, XVII:510).7
In all of his texts, Diderot questions the bodyâs role in the production, reception, experience, control, and questioning of knowledge. He is equally fascinated by the question of life, for him, synonymous with activity and movement, from its most simple to complex forms. He examines the opened body and all of nature to reveal the heterogeneity of living things, their origins, and their various forms and levels of connectivity. Nature, he posits, is an oversized version of the tiny freshwater Hydra that the Swiss Abraham Trembley (1710-84) rediscovered in 1737 and that was at the center of the debates on the origin of life in the eighteenth centuryâa vital regenerative mass made of autonomous parts.8
By the early 1750s, Diderot had already begun to acquire a formidable scientific knowledge that would dramatically inform his texts and philosophical positions.9 In particular, early scientific and philosophical inquiries such as Promenade du sceptique, MĂ©moires sur diffĂ©rents sujets de mathĂ©matiques (1748), Lettre sur les aveugles, Lettre sur les sourds et muets, and PensĂ©es sur lâinterprĂ©tation de la nature are texts in which Diderot uses contemporary scientific discoveries, studies, and questions as well as aesthetic debates to formulate an alternative to past and current scientific methods, epistemologies, and cosmologies. Embracing neither the reigning esprit du systĂšme of Cartesian logic nor the nominalism of Baconian empiricism, neither the regularity of Newtonian physics nor the tenuous psychologism of Lockean sensualism and Berkeleyâs idealism, Diderot looked increasingly to experimental science, art, and fiction to interpret as well as express his notions of vitality, materialism, and the chaotic universe.10
During the 1740s and 1750s, when Diderot was working on the aforesaid texts, several scientists conducted physiological experiments that challenged existing theories of the bodyâs structure, function, and organization and its organs as well as the scientific methods used to substantiate these theories and experiments. Two scientists who participated in the writing of the EneyelopĂ©die conducted significant experiments: Albrecht von Haller on sensibility and irritability or contractility and Theophile de Bordeu (1722-76) on gland secretion. In this chapter, I focus principally on the changing relation between part and whole engendered by these experiments and others in the second half of the eighteenth century. I also examine Diderotâs adaptation of these experiments to his physiological and aesthetic concerns. I argue that Bordeuâs and Hallerâs experiments helped Diderot to articulate scientifically a conception of the part as relatively autonomous with respect to a whole.
When Diderot speculates in the Elements de physiologie on medicine and physiology, in addition to emphasizing the autonomy of each gland, muscle fiber, and organ by building on the work of Haller and Bordeu, he also describes medical experimentation in a language that positions it paradigmatically, not hierarchically, within discourses of knowledge. Moreover, his medical and physiological description itself shifts among disparate modes of inquiry: Competing scientific positions, myths, anecdotes, experiments, and speculations all inhabit the same syntactical space. This accumulative parataxis accords the part a status above that of a mere proof of the static whole. Meaning is produced by the continual collaboration, reformulation, and expression of the various notes, clauses, and words âthat all beings have an infinite number of relations with each other through the qualities they share; and that it is a certain assemblage of qualities that characterizes and distinguishes themâ (Indiscreet Jewels, p. 184-6 [DPV, III:183], translation modified). In emphasizing the multiplicity, movement, horizontality, and animated topologies present in the formation of everything from organisms and bodies to ideas, artworks, theatrical performances, and texts, Diderot envisions a new somatic, dramatic, artistic, and textual practice. The relative autonomy that he accords to the part requires, however, that the whole be rethought as well. In the Elements de physiologie, Diderot reflects on the impossibility both of defining a whole as the sum of its parts and of using parts to define a whole: âThere is only one way to know the truth, which is to proceed by parts, and conclude only after a full, exact enumeration. Even then, this method is not infallible; truth can belong so profoundly to the whole image that one is unable to assert or deny anything based on the rigorous details of the partsâ (DPV, XVII:464). Gillispie also places emphasis on an idea of the whole in Diderot that is not a sum of its parts: âFor nature [for Diderot] is the combination of its elements and not just an aggregateâ (The Edge of Objectivity, p. 190).11 while Bordeu and Hallerâs various experiments encourage an understanding of the autonomy of the part, the works of the Scottish physicians John Brown (1735-88) and Robert Whytt (1714â 66) play an instrumental role in the conception of a dynamic whole not vitiated by its decomposition into parts. Diderot embraces both positions in rethinking the relation of part to whole.
To address the changing economy of part and whole and its place in Diderotâs scientific thought and writing, I examine a number of scientific theories, experiments, and debates with which Diderot was engaged. In the first section, I analyze François Boucherâs Triomphe de VĂ©nus (1740) in order to consider the connections between the underlying questions that motivate aesthetics and scientific inquiry in the eighteenth century and to situate Diderotâs work in the context of these questions. In the second section, âSensibility and Irritability,â I contextualize these two physiological properties in the scientific discourse of the eighteenth century and examine their contribution to Diderotâs understanding of the relation between part and whole and, in particular, the relative autonomy of the part. The third section examines Whyttâs and Brownâs conceptions of a dynamic whole. The fourth section explores the idea of continuity in art and the universe and the possibility for difference in a continuous spectrum, all questions raised by Boucherâs painting. This section also examines Diderotâs interpretation of these questions in the context of biological missing links (the âChain of Beingâ), normativity, sympathy, and sexual generation. The autonomy of irritable muscle fibers visible in Hallerâs experiments plays a vital role in eighteenth-century theories of organicism. In the fifth section, I consider these theories of organicism, in particular, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffonâs (1707â88) molecules organiques, Bordeuâs experiments on secretion, and his theory of organicism and sensibility, which Diderot appropriates, to address the formation of physiological and artistic assemblages. Having established the theoretical and physiological framework within which Diderot explores the relation of part and whole, in the final sections I provide close readings of the sections on the fiber and the nerve in Diderotâs Elements de physiologie. I argue that Diderot extends the idea of the relative autonomy of the part and the dynamic whole visible in various life forms to the construction, organization, and interpretation of texts and works of art.
Difference in a Continuous Spectrum
Many works of the Rococo painter François Boucher (1703-70) exemplify and signal aesthetically a profound conceptual change that took place in the eighteenth century. Boucherâs paintings bring the eighteenth-century discourse of continuity, in all of its ambiguity, to the realm of flesh, sensation, and the body. Although Boucherâs work reflects the very changes that interested Diderot, Diderot loathed Boucher for his artificiality, commercialism, and lack of precisionââI defy you to find a single blade of grass in any of his landscapesââhypocrisy, and moral depravityââI donât know what to say about this man. Degradation of taste, color, composition, character, expression, and drawing have kept pace with moral depravity. [âŠ] Out of the Salon, out of the Salonâ (Diderot on Art I, pp. 22-3, 26 [DPV, XIV:54, 61]) (See Figure 1).
In Le Triomphe de Venus, completed in 1740, bodies and graceful erotic nudes intermingle with dolphins, putti, water, and mist.12 No object is clearly delineated: The water, clouds, floating fabric, and rocks in the right-hand corner of the painting fuse together as mere variances in gradation of color that give the bodies and landscape a certain vibrancy and interconnectivity. All the forms and colors in the painting are continuous. Even sexual identity is breached or made ambiguous by the effeminate rendering of the males and the erotic positioning of animals common in Rococo painting
It is precisely this mingling of forms and colors that Diderot keenly dislikes in Boucherâs paintings when he begins to criticize Boucher in his correspondence and
Salons:
And then thereâs such a confusion of objects piled one on top of the other, so poorly disposed, so motley, that weâre dealing not so much with the pictures of a rational being as with the dreams of a madman. Itâs of him that it was written:
⊠velut Ćgri somnia, varnĆ
Fingentur species: ut net pes, nec caput⊠(DOA, I:23 [DPV, XIV:54])13
He criticizes Boucherâs clouds, saying they resemble a womanâs toilette or painted face more than they do nature; he questions the loose moral atmosphere in which goddesses and prostitutes look the same; he thinks Boucherâs compositions are garrulous, confused, and blurred; finally, Diderot asks the same question Fontenelle asked of the sonata, which was to be a centerpiece of the Querelle des Bouffons: âSonata, what do you want from me? Painting, what do you want from me?â (DOA, I:24 [DPV, XIV:56]).14 To Diderot, Boucherâs paintings are muddled by too many harmonies, their lack of virtue.
Diderot insists on continuity in both his aesthetic and scientific writings: âIn art, as in nature, nothing happens by leaps; nihil per saltum; or else one is punished by making either holes of darkness or circles of light, and cutting out the image from the pictureâ (PD, p. 805). This continuity, he insists, should not leave confusion between forms in the medium of painting or in the body. Each form must show its subordination to a unity and its difference; each form must be distinguished from the other elements in the painting. While continuity is essential to an aesthetic composition, according to Diderot, the connections must be so fine as to be invisible. Moreover, we can never know or see more than an infinitesimal part of this universal continuity.15 What he dislikes in Boucher is the representation of a continuity in which transitions are highly...