[This is the text of the paper I presented at this year's IMC, Leeds. Thanks to Catherine-Rose Hailstone for organising, to Catherine-Rose and Edward James for their papers and to Simon Loseby for effortlessly stylish chairing. It is an effort to counter claims about material agency, object biographies and so on, by reference to the Derridian concept of iterability and the ever-present possibility of misrecognition or miscommunication, which returns all the crucial aspects of agency to the human agent and to the issues of the so-called linguistic turn. From there it looks at how costume was used in the citation of identity but subject to the same issues, and thus a crucial locus of social change.]
1. A First blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of the Material Turn
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| Figure 1 |
I’m not a
fashionable historian – stylish maybe; never fashionable – so it will come as
no surprise that I am a little skeptical of the new materialisms. All of these of course have important things
to offer but I wonder to what extent they are being employed critically. As
approaches drawn upon in post-humanism I find them, potentially at least,
politically problematic and I wonder whether they represent the radical way forward
from the so-called linguistic turn (figure 1, left) that some
claim.
In Kristina
Sessa’s recent tour-de-force critique of environmental historical approaches
to, and explanations for, late antique history, Sessa writes that new
materialist approaches are a way beyond seeing everything in terms of social
construction and rhetoric which she appears to equate with the linguistic
turn. We read about the agency of
non-human actors – animals, objects, the environment. Sadly, ending a very fine
composition on a little bit of a bum note, Sessa writes of the possibility of knowing ‘what the
physical world actually looked like’, which sounds uncomfortably like a
translation of ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’.
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| Figure 2 |
With some
help from a learned colleague (figure 2, right), I have several
questions to hang over the theme of this year’s congress, gradually rippling
outwards in their implications. The
first is whether a critically-undigested Material Turn is simply a convenient
‘line of flight’ for historians unsettled by the epistemological challenges of
the Linguistic Turn. The second is
whether the so-called Linguistic Turn ever really made itself felt in
Late Antique/Early Medieval history beyond a few exemplary but isolated
studies. Rippling outwards again, if
history is to remain a human science (in the sense of Wissenschaft) is it
actually possible to go beyond the Linguistic Turn?
2.
Derrida 101
Let’s go
right back to basics, with apologies to those for whom this is elementary. Here’s a passage from Simon Blackburn, a
professor of philosophy at Cambridge (figure 3).
If
there’s nothing outside the text, how can you be hit by a bus? Ho ho. If you’ve
actually read Derrida you will know that he never actually said there was
nothing outside the text and you’ll know that, by ‘text’, he meant much
more than writing on a piece of paper, or similar surface; and ‘il n’y a pas de
hors-texte’ doesn’t mean ‘there is nothing outside the text’ anyway! And Blackburn and his ilk like to set themselves
up as the policemen of analytical rigour… By ‘text’ Derrida meant something
that went to the very bases of recognition and communication.
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| Figure 3 |
The keystone
of Derridian philosophy is his notion of iterability. Once something conveys information to
something or someone else, that sign becomes capable of reproduction in
infinite contexts, whether or not the original transmitter or receiver of the
signified information are present. This
applies to any signifying unit (grapheme in Derrida’s term), in any
sensory context: visual, aural, whatever. It applies whether the information
conveyed is of the most general kind; whether
it applies to categories or their members (figure 4);
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| Figure 4 |
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| Figure 5 |
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| Figure 6 |
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| Figure 7 |
This blurs
the distinction between the human and the animal, and even the natural, world,
as Derrida’s late work emphasized. The
iterability always already present in a sign means that there can never really
be an original context and that graphemes can be deployed in situations where
their content is played with.
Things disguise themselves as or mimic other
things on the basis of that very principle (figure 7, right).
There is always potential for slippage and miscommunication:
deliberate or accidental. The bus might bearing
down upon you might only be a papier-maché model… (In the UK we are quite used
to the concept of bus-related miscommunication: figure 8, below)
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| Figure 8 |
The
ever-present possibility of miscommunication (and of wager and irony that go
with it) is central to my critique, and indeed to my conception of history.
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| Figure 9 |
In Lacanian
philosophy the order of the Real is that which eludes signification – inclusion
in his orders of the Symbolic and Imaginary: it’s the unassimilated material. This
includes the pre-symbolised and (I would add) mis-symbolised. Yet we can only understand the inevitably
traumatic - if not fatal - encounter with the Real retrospectively –
teleologically – by its incorporation/reincorporation into the orders of
language. To illustrate this, no one
encounters the Real as often, or as traumatically, as Wile E. Coyote (figure 9, right). But the joke
– even if you don’t find Loony Toons very funny – depends entirely upon textual
signification and irony.
3. Actors,
agents and actants
So, to return
to the material world (by which I mean principally the insentient, or the
artifact), can an object have agency?
Can it occupy a subject position?
Can it recognise itself? Most importantly, can an object misrecognise
itself? – that question, it seems to me, remains valid even in the age of
AI. It’s difficult to respond to those questions
in the positive, so it helps to think instead of Latour’s notion of the actant:
the element of the network that acts upon a human actor or agent. Again, I am skeptical and the notion of
miscommunication and misrecognition is the key.
If you throw
a ball at a wall and the ball bounces back unexpectedly and hits you in the
face can you say the wall acted upon you? Perhaps. Has the cliff face acted
upon Dr Coyote? Do material objects prompt
human action? Did the bowl allegedly from the sack of Rome really exert
a political force on the Goths who objected to its being handed over to the
Franks? Does an object’s biography add
to its estimation in the eyes of people, like, perhaps, the great silver bowl
made by Chilperic I? Did the treasure
being sent by Fredegund to Spain with Rigunth really provoke anxiety on
the part of ‘the Franks? Did the finger
bone of Saint Sergius really excite Mummolus and the pretender Gundovald
to have an undignified scrap with a Syrian merchant on the floor of his house? Did climatic change and plague produce human
responses in the later sixth century? Bracketing
for now whether or not one would agree in the last case, you can, with Latour,
answer all of those questions in the positive, and that is important.
However, a
crucial modification is necessary. Every instance relies upon recognition. Although
the cliff face clearly acts upon Wile, it possesses no agency. The only agent
is Wile E Coyote, who misread it as a tunnel. Does it matter whether the
Visigothic bowl really had been captured at the Sack of Rome?
Does the reality of an object’s biography have any bearing? Was
the bit of bone in a house in Bordeaux really the finger bone of
the martyr Sergius? Was it even human? That didn’t matter; Mummolus and
Gundovald thought it was. What matters is nothing intrinsic to the
object itself, but to its perception. When the leudes of the Rhineland
Franks betrayed their king for Clovis they did so for an enormous treasure of
gold coins. But those coins turned out
to be bronze. The perception of
the value of Fredegund’s treasure mattered; who knows whether it was more - or
less - valuable than the Franks thought, or whether it had, as Fredegund
claimed, really come entirely from her own revenues? If one accepts that various later
sixth-century beliefs and behaviours were responses to climatic and
environmental events, was the climate or environment the agent? Or was it people’s misreading of those events
as the sign of the End of the World?
There is no
guarantee against misrecognition; that possibility inheres in – is the
guarantor of – all communication; all noesis.
A human subject experiences – intends – an object not simply in
its material givenness, but textually: as that subject reads
or misreads that givenness.
4. The
Materialisation of Identity in 6th-Century Gaul
Now comes the
twist. The philosophy I have been discussing – the sort of thing widely
believed to be central to the Linguistic Turn – is in fact, materialist. That’s another reason why, in crucial regards,
the so-called Material Turn can’t be set up in opposition to, or as an advance
on, the Linguistic Turn.
The
materialization of identity can be explored on the basis of the points I have made
so far. Identity is one of those words
that is ubiquitous in early medieval studies, in the titles of books, chapters, articles, papers and conferences. Yet I know of almost nothing serious written about
identity as a concept.
Identities are categories: means of organising the world. As
such, they are constructed as signs, or groups of signs, and function in the Imaginary
as well as Symbolic registers. That is, the signified is the ideal member of
the category (young woman, male elder, monk, king etc.), created by social and
ritual mores, etc. Identities are constituted in citation and in performativity.
Identity is itself a motion towards an ideal. That
ideal can never be attained, because it never had a pure, originary existence.
It’s a motion of desire: what do I want to be, but also, crucially, what
do they want me to be? What do I think they want me
to be?
In any interaction there are at least two sets of signifieds
in play: both parties’ ideals of what their status and identity and that
of the other person mean. These might,
of course, not coincide. The
performative citation of identity is always, to some extent, a risk, a wager. That’s one of the most important things I
want to stress.
Those ideals are always themselves changing in the course of
social practice. They can never be entirely recreated so it’s critically
mistaken to talk of the maintenance of an identity by a group, whether
the bearers of the Traditionskern or an equally mythical group of Gothic
Königsfreie; no such thing had ever existed that was capable of
maintenance in the first place. It was
always already in a state of renegotiation and reinvention.
How does one
convey a subject position? Another thing
that interests me about the sixth century is the break-down, redefinition and
relocation of the architectural delineations of space which acted as a brake on
the social change inherent in social interaction. (I have discussed this
elsewhere.) In the absence of those classical
spatial delineations, the cues about identity and appropriate behavior were
given through a relatively greater investment in costume.
Merovingian
cemetery-analysis has repeatedly shown that costume, was capable of transmitting
quite detailed information about the social categories to which the deceased
belonged. Sufficient evidence supports the hypothesis that funerary
costume at least bore a reasonable relationship to formal dress. One might suggest that the very degree to
which Merovingian people lived their lives in the gaze of the community
suggests that even ‘everyday’ costume may have borne some sort of relationship
to the formal and stylised construction of social categories in death.
Clearly, the elements of costume – broadly defined – transmit
information textually, individually and in combination. A trace, in Derrida’s term, governs the
spacing and interrelationship on which their signification depends. Elements of
costume can also be disassembled and reassembled, providing new contexts. I’m not suggesting that any of this is
unusual or specific to sixth-century Gaul, but I do think it had a
particular valence in earlier Merovingian social formation.
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| Figure 10 |
Identity’s materialisation isn’t simply about its
signification via objects. Merovingian
people were – like Clovis – well aware that you could disguise one object as
another to produce a desired effect, via alloys, by silvering or gilding
bronze, or even in objects like Balthild’s chemise (figure 10, right). It is also about the very fact
that performative or citational identity is itself the materialisation
of identity. And it is about the
material effects that that had.
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| Figure 11 |
Merovingian law, which penalises the touching of women’s bodies,
shows some of the ways in which costume created social space. These parts of the body are generally those
highlighted by Merovingian jewellery (figure 11, left). The system of wergilds also
set out levels of legal protection for particular categories: women of child-bearing
age; young boys; Franks; royal officers, and so on. All these seem to have been visible in
costume.
Costume could work reciprocally with specific occasions to
furnish a script for the bodily comportment expected.
If, with Giddens and Bourdieu, you see social
structure constraining but simultaneously constituted by practice, a
constantly rewritten archive of the right (and wrong) means of relating to
people of particular social categories, then there is another aspect of the
materialization of identity that can be mentioned.
The perceived
objects making up costume, transmitting information, are in effect the
repositories of those archives.
As we’ve seen, iteration implies the ever-present chance of
misunderstanding or miscommunication.
This is a key support of Butler’s work on performative gender and
drag. An example close to Butler’s might
be found in the Poitevin who appears in Gregory of Tours’ account of the
tribunal that ended the Nuns’ Revolt. In
Gregory’s report, this was a man who dressed as a woman, he said, because he
was ‘incapable of manly work’. This is a
difficult text from which to read that person’s identity. The difficulty is only magnified by another
iteration of feminine costume. Several
late antique texts notionally about paganism condemn the practice of dressing
up as an old woman on the Kalends of January.
This alone gives us a range of different possible ways of reading
feminine costume: different signifieds.
My final point concerns how one might escape
situations where a miscue, misfire or miscommunication had occurred. Even if elaborate costumes or layers of
social skin aim to convey one identity, they can be peeled back to reveal
others. Laying aside the weaponry that
conveyed Frankishness or an age-grade, for instance, could strip that persona
back to a shared general masculine identity; buckling such items back on could
remake distance. The multiplicity of identities assembled in the subject makes
this possible.
5. Conclusion
I have had several aims in this paper. I have at
one level wanted to suggest that costume, by communicating textually key
information about identity, creates both social space but a sense of one’s
place within it and that this mattered in particular in a sixth-century Gallic
context. I have tried to suggest that it
functioned as the archive for social knowledge and thus imply that it
was crucially implicated in processes of change. I have attempted to stress the fluidity of
such communication, of the extent of uncertainty and wager involved, not least
because of the constitutive possibility of miscommunication, and how reference
to the same battery of material signifiers could provide lines of flight from
such situations. More than that though I
have wanted to argue that you can have material effects without a concept of
the agency of objects and, above all, that seeing a supposed material turn as
an opposition to, or an advance on a hermeneutics based upon the concept of
textual or linguistic communication is crucially mistaken.
