System in William Blake's 'prophetic books'

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In Jerusalem William Blake's creative figure Los declares 'I must Create a System or be enslav'd by another Man's.' My thesis will seek to question the meaning and nature of 'system' in the long illuminated poems known as the 'prophetic books.' Recent studies in social theory have shown a great interest in systems as networks. Clifford Siskin's System (2016) places the idea of 'system' as a species of knowledge formation squarely in the long eighteenth century Blake inhabited. My research questions in their broadest form will move between the specific enquiry 'what is Blake's system?' to the wider question of 'what is a system?'. From a broader historical perspective, Blake's will to system reflects a wider impulse to classify and systematise knowledge associated with the Enlightenment. Critics have often overemphasised Blake's opposition to Enlightenment thinkers as evidence of his anti-systematicity; however, my thesis will propose that the nature of system within Blake's work shows that the poet and artist was aligned with contemporary system-builders, such as Kant, Godwin and Bentham, more closely than previously thought.My methodology combines theoretical and material approaches to the texts. I will consider systems aesthetically and formally through the framework of architectonics, alongside the material study of Blake's medium, through which his system comes into being and can be dis- or re-assembled. Kant's architectonics will provide a useful way into interpreting system in Blake's. Not only were they near-contemporaries, but there are important parallels between their conceptions of the nature and formation of the world. Both experience the world as something not yet conceptualised but offering itself to be formed; in other words, a potentiality, in which the ordering subject becomes the synthesising and systematising power. Kant defines architectonics as 'the art of constructing systems.' Blake similarly clearly understood system-building as an art; but he also understood art as a form of system building. My thesis will be separated into three sections, on 'Building', 'Bodies', and 'Books'. In order to chart Blake's systematisation of not only the poetry of his prophetic books but his method of producing them, I will work on a selection of his poems: from the early manuscript An Island in the Moon, to the later prophecies, The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem. To enhance a full engagement with the physical form of Blake's book, I will study his final prophetic poem Jerusalem in particular detail because it represents his latest and most sustained attempt to produce his own system. In addition to present-day systems theory from Siskin, who claims system is best understood as a genre, and De Landa's assemblage theory, I will address recent deconstructive angles on systems in the Romantic period. For example, work from Rajan and Colebrook, who study the prophetic books through Deleuze's 'body without organs,' and work from Connolly on Blake and the body, which exemplifies Blake's vexed relationship with systems by exploring his 'simultaneous adoration and abomination of the human body.' I will also examine theories of the virtual, including Otto and Makdisi's work on unfinishability and open-ended texts, following the idea of the 'indeterminate text' popularised by McGann. My research will investigate how the medium of the prophetic book reinvents traditional systems of knowledge by subverting the idea of the codex as a site for its dissemination. By contrast, Blake's illuminated books of relief-etched plates are neither stable nor identical between copies, undermining the idea of the book as a reliable source of truth. Kant's architectonics will bring a new lens to these texts, and will highlight the cultural purchase that Blake's art has today by engaging with wider debates within Romantic studies and the humanities regarding systems and the formations of knowledge.