Nordic/Germanic Pagan Interpretations of Style I: A draft of a critique

[I am working up - very belatedly - the paper on Style I that I gave at the Leeds IMC in 2010.  I got a little distracted by critique of a particular school of archaeological thought on the topic. I present here, in draft from for discussion, that bit of the paper.  The footnotes etc are omitted because they aren't finished.]

Less satisfactory than the descriptive analyses, however, are the explanations of how, in Dickinson’s own phrase, ‘animal art gained its place in early medieval affections’.  Previous analyses have, in my view, tended to be constricted within an unsatisfactory and problematic conceptual matrix. 

One principal axis of this matrix is the cultural description of the art-style as ‘Germanic’.  The explanatory weaknesses of the term ‘Germanic’ become very evident when one encounters phrases like the following:

‘[Style I’s appearance] is marked by the sudden disappearance of all sea creatures, which up till then dominated Scandinavian ornament and represents the beginning of the Germanic interpretation of the animal world’ (emphasis added)[1]

This begs two crucial questions: ‘why then?’; ‘why like that’?  We are entitled to ask why, if the term ‘Germanic’ can satisfactorily perform any analytical work, the ‘Germanic interpretation of the animal world’ in art only ‘begins’ in the late fifth century, when Germanic-speakers had dominated the region for centuries.  Furthermore, why does this art take this particular form after (and indeed before) centuries within which the metalworkers of Germania Magna had proved more than capable of reproducing Roman models or otherwise producing coherent figures and interlace?  Appeals to a pan-Germanic cultural ethos get us nowhere in response to either question. 

That the notion of pan-Germanic identity and ethos emerged in the precise, contingent circumstances of sixteenth- to (especially) nineteenth- and twentieth-century German politics is surely now well established. The idea that all speakers of a Germanic language can be treated as culturally interchangeable can no longer be sustained.  Scandinavian origin myths among post-imperial peoples cannot be traced before the sixth century and, even then, among the Italian Goths alone, where it was clearly only one of a number of stories circulating.  Alleged Scandinavian origins for other early medieval peoples (like the Lombards or Burgundians) emerge later, in emulation of the Goths.  Yet, such appeals to ‘Germanic’ culture remain as common as ever.  A swathe of recent work on Style I has attempted to read it in line with changes allegedly occurring in Scandinavia at this time which produced the Germanic concept of the hall.

Another appeal to the pan-Germanic ethos is associated with the fairly widespread claim that Style I was a badge of a ‘shared Germanic aristocratic identity’.  When applied to decorative art, this argument is circular.  Style I’s popularity is explained because its ‘Germanic’ nature appealed to the ‘Germanic’ social élites who sponsored its production.  For the irrefutable reasons previously outlined, ‘Germanic’ is a label that can carry no analytical, or even descriptive, weight, either for the art or the people.  That a common élite identity existed amongst Germanic-speakers in the late fifth and sixth centuries finds no more support in any written data, such as exists for at least some of the regions this shared aristocratic culture allegedly encompassed.  This explanation has no empirical grounding whatsoever.  Therefore, the existence of a shared ‘Germanic’ élite ethos has to be argued in reverse, from the distribution and popularity of the art style.  And so on...  Furthermore, if ‘Germanic’ art only emerged in the later fifth century, in spite of the long-standing existence in Scandinavia of Germanic-speakers, then it would seem that, to be popular among a Germanic élite with a shared culture, that ‘shared Germanic culture’ could – logically – only have emerged at the same time, alongside the art.  How this might be possible across a wide area of diverse, frequently antagonistic peoples is not an issue that appears to have troubled students of Style I who espouse this argument.  If there were any area where a common, non-Roman, military identity might be employed to unify Germanic-speakers of diverse cultural, geographical and familial backgrounds, that area would not be Germania Magna but, ironically, the Roman Empire itself, where fifth-century politics were increasingly focused around military leaders of at least a claimed non-Roman origin.  It may in fact be that material culture did come to be employed in precisely that way to unify exactly that disparate élite group but, if it did, it was material culture originating in the Mediterranean, not the Baltic. 

The other component of the problematic analytical matrix is religious.  Style I imagery frequently continues to be read according to concepts drawn from Norse sources from (at the earliest and most optimistic) c.1000, half a millennium after the appearance of this form of decoration.  These texts are then supplemented by (and indeed read via) anthropologically-derived ideas of shamanism and tribal ritual of uncertain application.  It must never be forgotten that the principal sources upon which any view of Nordic paganism is based, the Prose and Poetic Eddas, were both written down in earlier thirteenth-century Christian contexts, the former by Snorri Sturlusson.  The extent to which they represent earlier texts (written or oral), the faithfulness with which they do so, and how much earlier any such texts can be dated are all matters for guesswork, not fixed starting points for analysis. 

The ‘pagan’ axis of Style I interpretation nonetheless assumes that an image of pagan belief obtained from these texts can be applied, in detail, to artwork no less than 750 years earlier.  However, between the late fifth and the late twelfth centuries artistic motifs changed dramatically in the Nordic world.  Style I gave way to Style II, Style III, and then the array of Viking styles – Oseborg, Borre, Jelling, Mammen and Ringerike – before, with Urnes Style (in its early, middle and late forms of course), we arrive at the end of the Germanic/Viking Animal Art ‘era’.  Even at Urnes Style’s demise we still have fifty years or so to wait before Snorri wrote down the Prose Edda.  While Scandinavian decorative art between c.475 and c.1170 went through no fewer than nine changes (not counting Urnes Style’s subdivisions) of sufficient importance to necessitate a change of art-historical categorisation, the mentalité it represented is thus supposed somehow to have drifted along unchanged beneath this turbulent surface of actual, documented expression, eventually to be written down in effectively the same form as it had taken 750 years previously.  The difference between the supposed stasis of Scandinavian pagan belief and the dynamism of its artistic expression is made yet more problematic by the paradigm itself, which sees the emergence of Style I animal art (surely correctly) as symptomatic of important social and cultural change.  If that were the case then something similar surely lies behind the many subsequent changes of style.  Scandinavian archaeology, reveals important, dynamic change in social and economic structures throughout the second half of the first millennium.  Against this background, an entirely stable set of religious beliefs and practices defies credibility.

These problems are only exacerbated at the earlier end of the period.  If Style I’s content is religious, does its difference from earlier art mean that this religion only emerged c.475 and, if so, why?  Or, if the religious beliefs were older, why did art not manifest it before the emergence of ‘Germanic animal art’, or why did it represent it in such different ways?  These are the same problems as we encountered with the ‘Germanic’ construct, and they are equally fatal to the approach.  The religious axis takes us nowhere – in answer to the questions of ‘why then’ and ‘why like that’ – just as quickly as the ‘Germanic’.   

The strongest argument offered in favour of the approach is the depiction on Style I metalwork of episodes identifiable, with varying degrees of plausibility, as those mentioned in the Eddas.  There are two problems with this justification.  A fourth-century depiction of Christ at, say, the marriage at Cana might be recognisable as such to a twelfth- or thirteenth-century western European Christian.  We would quite wrong, however, to assume on that basis that Christian theology, practice and organisation from 1300 could be applied in any detail at all to the church of c.400, or even of c.900 and its artwork.  In that instance, moreover, a series of more or less canonical written texts existed, around which beliefs could be anchored to some extent.[2]  It is worth pointing out, furthermore, that the earliest runic texts actually to mention the gods of the Nordic pantheon come from slightly later than the period of Style I and frequently from areas far to the south, in ‘Alamannic’ regions.  One inadmissible justification for the use of later Eddic evidence is the assertion that structures would remain intact within traditions even if the details changed.  It is difficult to see what the basis for such a statement could be and, in any case, the ‘structures’ adduced are modern interpretations, rather than being explicitly described in the texts.  At the weakest end of the scale is the simple acceptance of the method, ‘faute de mieux’.  Tania Dickinson, one of the most careful and knowledgeable of Anglo-Saxon archaeologists, simply says that most schools of archaeological ‘theory’ accept the approach.  That will not suffice to exclude critical reflection on the issue.

These analytical axes are sustained, first by a raft of similarly evidence-free, mystifying ideas about the magic quality of the artefacts and then by ideas of ethnicity, migration and of a rigid Christian-pagan divide which are all inadequate to the task.[3] 

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[1] Haseloff 1974: 12

[2] This means that, even if one could assume that the religious ‘texts’ of the Eddas (written or otherwise) had been transmitted, unchanged, for 700 years before being written down, we would be in no sense authorised to assume an unchanging accompanying theology.

[3] The most alarming element of what we might call the Nordic/Germanic Pagan’ school of writing about Style I is that it seems, intellectually, to be entirely hermetically sealed; discussion appears to be locked within a particular academic circle.  The sorts of questionable readings just discussed are repeatedly built upon, adding further assumptions and interpretations, which then in turn become building blocks for further work and so on, producing pyramids of dubious assertions.  With so much now at stake, in terms of academic status and power, there seems no way that a fundamental, scholarly critique of the approach can emerge from within this paradigm.

A Picture Says (Several) Thousand Words

Have a look at this picture.  It is entitled 'Genseric's Invasion of Rome' (Нашествие Гензериха на Рим), painted in 1835-36 by Karl Briullov (1799-1852) and is the property of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.  It is a new one to me and I came across it today as a result of its reproduction in a very interesting article in the American Historical Review: 'Barbarians Ancient and Modern', by Norman Etherington (AHR 116.1, Feb. 2011, pp.31-57: if you have access to JSTOR you can read it here), for which reference I am very grateful to Alex Woolf (although I ought to have known about it before...).

Notice that, although Genseric (or Gaiseric as he appears in my own book) is depicted as fairly 'white' he is nevertheless shown in very Turkish guise (this, after all, is a painting from Tsarist Russia, old, old enemies of the Ottomans): n.b the helmet.  But look, too, at how Gaiseric's warriors are overwhelmingly 'black'.  Not merely 'black', but veiled and black.  Now, it is documented that Gaiseric had Mauri (Moors) in his army when he sacked Rome in 455 but, leaving aside the difficult issue of whether the Moors were 'black' or not, and indeed of whether labels like 'black' and 'white' are applicable to late antique history, these veiled north African Moors are depicted as Muslims (which - obviously - was impossible in 455!).  The veiled North African Moor is an image that dates from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when the Almoravid Moorish caliphate invaded Spain (fighting Andalusian Muslims and north Spanish Christians alike).  The Almoravids belonged to a particular Muslim sect which prescribed the veil for men as well as women, as a mark of distinction and superior religious purity.  It's more than likely, of course, that Briullov knew nothing of this and just depicted the Moors as he knew them from more recent history, rather than deliberately 'islamicizing' them.  The overall point, though, remains the same.

When one looks at the general 'swarthiness' of even the 'white' Vandals (all darker-skinned than the Romans, especially the fair maidens of the latter), one of whom is wearing a turban, the story told by this picture is clear enough to decipher.  Here, the barbarian 'other', that 'blot' or veil hung to obscure the fatal flaws in the political status quo - pretty necessary in earlier nineteenth-century Russia, ten years after the Decembrist revolt - has been clearly filled in, or inscribed with, 'the Turk'.  Turks with their North African auxiliaries to be precise.  The Vandals attacked Rome from the south and the Turks lay to the south of Moscow, 'the third Rome'.

Obviously, this is just another example of how the barbarian figure has been used to personify the contemporary bogey-man, although quite an interesting one at that.  But, especially when one considers the long history of abuse of the barbarian figure (and how that is very much alive, well and currently, as it happens, inscribed with Turks, Muslims and indeed the veil) it behoves us to think very hard about how we write about the Barbarian Migrations to avoid that inscription.  It does not take a great deal of thought to realise this, which is why I have been so shocked by just how thoughtless - to put it mildly - the products of supposedly elite universities and holders of handsomely-remunerated chairs have been in their writing on the subject: people you'd like, however mistakenly, to think were at least capable of serious thought.  How can one study the Barbarian Migrations and not be aware of the baggage that that accompanies it?  I have also been disappointed - not surprised, but disappointed - to see myself labelled, by the apologists of these people, as the person who made the discussion of the uses of this bit of the past 'tasteless', 'bitter' and, most recently, 'nasty'.*  That depends on the scale of values of the observer.  It is pretty revelatory, nevertheless, and more than slightly disappointing, that the paideia of politically-conservative, supine middle-class academe comes out as more worthy of defence than the modern treatment of immigrants. (A lame defence of politically-supine history can be found here, as indeed can my continuing vilification as The Nasty One).  More on all this anon.

***

* In this regard, you might want to compare the tone and nature of any 'engagement' (if it can be so called) with my own ideas in this book with how I treat the author of that book, to whom we refer as 'Gussie Finknottle' here at HotE, in my book: n.b. pp.xv, 18-19 (esp. n.46), 177 n.48, (most critically) 180-85, 332 n.46, 334-5, 472-3, 474, 477 n.82.  See what YOU think...  I'd be interested to know.

The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation: New Narratives of the fifth-century crisis (in which I decide to dabble in Art History...)

This is the text of the paper I presented last summer at the International Medieval Congress.  I have been asked before whether I was going to post it here and at the time, when the blog was strictly linked to my 'Year 600' project I said no.  But as I have renamed the blog andcut that strict and direct link, there seems no reason not to post it now.  I will add the accompanying figures as and when I have time.  As it is I am not entirely happy with this, because in discussion afterwards I was convinced that rather than leaving the discussion with the issue of trauma I should have developed the idea of playfulness and visual riddling or humour as a means of coping with the stress of the period.  This is a suggestion I like and I would want to make more use of it.  Anyway, see what you think.  As I'm always having a go at historians and (especially) archaeologists, I didn't see why art historians ought to get off so lightly!

***

One might say, with a certain irony, that the study of the end of the Roman Empire from a Lacanian perspective is only in its infancy; indeed one could probably say that it has not yet reached the Mirror Stage. Yet this perspective has much to offer, not simply in understanding people’s actions and responses in the fifth century but also in understanding why people cling wilfully to outmoded narratives and explanations. My approach in this paper was initially inspired by a chapter of Alain Badiou’s 2005 book The Century, dealing with the politics of twentieth-century avant-garde art, and then by Slavoj Žižek’s brilliant early work, The Sublime Object of Ideology.

This is a first go at trying out a different way of looking at the major new decorative style around the North Sea, Salin’s Style I, the principal features of which are the dissolution and ambiguity of the image, to argue that its popularity is to be understood in the context of the Roman Empire’s dramatic, traumatic fifth-century political demise – an end of civilisation, one might indeed say. These traumas can quite easily be understood as an encounter with the Real, the un- (or pre-) symbolised, in the sense that Žižek uses Lacan’s concept, and the fragmentation and disintegration of the image, especially the figure, in decorative art can be understood as a product of the collapse of a long-established symbolic order.

There has been continual, thorough and splendid structural and formal analysis of Style I. Günther Haseloff’s monumental study of Germanic Animal Art appeared in 1981 and my colleague, Tania Dickinson – to list but one authority – has produced exemplary, rigorous stylistic analyses, particularly of its use on Anglo-Saxon Saucer brooches. I am in no position to add anything to any of this and am not going to try. Quite the opposite: everything I am going to say is entirely based upon it.

Less satisfactory than the descriptive analyses, to my mind, are the explanations of Style I’s popularity across north-western Europe: explanations of how, in one of Tania’s own phrases, ‘animal art gained its place in early medieval affections’. Analyses are in my view, constricted within an unsatisfactory and problematic conceptual matrix, one principal axis of which is the cultural description of this art as ‘Germanic’. The idea that all barbarian speakers of a Germanic language can be treated as culturally interchangeable can no longer sustain any analytical weight whatsoever. Even former Germanists like Jörg Jarnut have argued forcefully that the term should be abandoned, except when discussing language groups. Even were ‘Germanic’ a meaningful analytical term, its explanatory weaknesses become very evident when phrases are encountered which state that Style I’s appearance:

‘is marked by the sudden disappearance of all sea creatures, which up till then dominated Scandinavian ornament and represents the beginning of the Germanic interpretation of the animal world’ (Haseloff 1974: 12)

 
This begs two crucial questions: ‘why then?’; ‘why like that’? Why does ‘Germanic’ only begin to have analytical value then, when Germanic-speakers had dominated the region for centuries? And why does this art, after centuries within which the metalworkers of Germania Magna proved more than capable of reproducing Roman models or otherwise producing coherent naturalistic figures, take this particular form? Appeal to pan-Germanic cultural ethos gets us absolutely nowhere in response to either question.

The other analytical axis is religious: Style I iconography is read in line with a view of pagan, Nordic religion, based principally on twelfth- and thirteenth-century written sources, and upon anthropologically-derived ideas of shamanism and tribal ritual of uncertain application. The perils of an approach that understands iconography, in any detail at all, in the light of sources written nearly a thousand years later are insurmountable and should hardly require setting out. In any case, even if we ignore them, the religious axis takes us nowhere – in answer to the questions of why then and why like that – just as fast as the Germanic axis. These axes of analysis are sustained by ideas of ethnicity, migration and of a rigid divide between Christianity and paganism which are inadequate to the task.

There is no time to detail the other theoretical problems with current approaches. The main point is that, to anyone about to dismiss an approach drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis in the usual way, i.e. for being ‘anachronistic’, I say this: while it may be based upon a possibly problematic claim to being diachronic, it is actually – demonstrably – less anachronistic than the approaches currently employed. More to the point, perhaps, I am going to analyse the Style for what it did to established artistic traditions, whose symbolic content can be suggested less problematically. In this sense it is rigidly contextualised. Further, I am not going to analyse it in terms of iconography or function – religious, social, ethnic or whatever – but in terms of its aesthetic: why did late fifth and sixth-century people like this style, as they clearly did. What drew them to it? What appealed to them about it?

***

The key point in explaining Style I and its popularity is the date of its appearance, around 475, in other words at the precise time of the western Empire’s disintegration. This is an issue that I have touched upon before. I cannot see this chronological conjunction as being a mere coincidence. In the past I have dwelt on the non-Roman import of Style I – its breaks with Roman decorative tradition, its southern Scandinavian origins. That a style with such symbolic content should appear at the time of the Empire’s political demise must be significant, although the point is hardly ever raised. Nevertheless, this does not go the whole way towards explaining Style I’s precise nature or its popularity: its profound symbolic significance.

There are two or three important points that must be set out as background to this change. One is the inextricable inter-linkage of the Empire and barbaricum. One cannot see a simple opposition or binary line between the two. Changes in the Empire had deep effects on barbarian society and politics.

In particular, the North Sea was a cultural province, with movement around and across it throughout the late Roman period, and the overwhelming balance of cultural influences was from the Empire to barbaricum: pottery, metalwork, cultural forms (inhumation), maybe even what have long been thought to have been ‘Germanic’ architectural forms (the Grubenhäuser), and artistic style. The last has a long history. Throughout the Roman Iron Age, Roman brooches were imported into Germania Magna and copied. Roman style had such a profound influence on northern barbarian art up to and throughout the fifth century that, in explaining it, it is quite unnecessary to invoke, as Haseloff did, the kidnapping to northern Germany of entire workshops of Roman artisans.

My final background point is the catastrophic crisis that the withdrawal of effective imperial governmental presence caused in the north-western provinces and in North Sea barbaricum in the fifth century: manifest in diverse areas by pretty much analogous responses and material cultural forms.

Any attempt to comprehend fifth-century animal art must be set against this backdrop. To understand it further we need to back-track into the art and mentalité of the Late Empire. The centre-point of the Roman thought-world was the idea of the civic Roman male, which embodied a set of ideas: freedom, the law, reason, moderation. The civic Roman male was, in Lacanian terms, the point-de-capiton, the quilting point, of the whole signifying system: the master signifier which provided all the others with their precise meaning. Concepts such as womanhood, barbarism, the animal, freedom and so on, all acquired their meaning by reference to this. The point de capiton fixes other potentially shifting signifiers and oppositions. Even the martial model of Roman masculinity is essentially defined by this, illustrating how the Lacanian model provides several conceptual advantages over my previous thinking about this problem.

The civic masculine ideal lay at the heart of all Roman imperial politics, whether at the local or the Empire-wide scale. Its performance was required for participation. The signifier was also – and this is key – shaped by the Emperor and those who held power at court, at the imperial core. They defined who was, and who was not, really a Roman male.

So the depiction of the human figure in late imperial art is not – it cannot be – a simple representation of a bipedal hominid. It carries enormous signifying weight, the burden of which might be visible in the changes to figurative art in the late imperial period.

We can see some of this in the decoration of official imperial metalwork, the lineal ancestor of Style I as has long been known. This followed very strict rules. The centre of the design is always made up of geometric or otherwise plant-based designs, very regularly set out. Around the edges – always – are the animals, depicted naturalistically in spite of the fact that they are pretty much always mythical hybrids. All is as it should be. One does not have to think very hard to see this opposition between centre and periphery as equating, not least in its layout, with other oppositions: the regular and the disordered; the natural and the unnatural; the civilised and the uncivilised; the human and the mythical or divine; the cultivated and the wild; and so on: in short, perhaps, the Empire and barbaricum. The crucial dimensions of this decorative art, visible on artefacts of many types in the imperial north-west, are, in my view, its regularity, its unambiguity and its timelessness. By the last term, I mean that the overall picture can be seen and understood at a glance and, regardless of when it is viewed, it is always the same; it requires no contingent, active participation on the part of the viewer. It has no active present; what I mean by this will really become clearer in considering its opposites, later on.

***

Artistic style is one of many areas in which the actual fifth-century evidence tells a rather different story from that adopted in modern migrationist, Germanist, narratives. What is clear for most of the century is not the gradual spread of influences from Germania Magna into the provinces, but the continuing, grip in which the rules of imperial style held decorative expression. If we restrict ourselves to the north-west of Europe, within and without the dissolving political frontiers, fifth-century decoration continued, on the whole, to play within the imperial ornamental guidelines. Chip-carved styles generally perpetuate the rules of composition. Quoit Brooch Style has long been known to do this. What is known as ‘Saxon Relief Style’, similarly, is pretty much entirely bound by these rules. Peter Inker has argued that this shows a vigorous Germanic reworking of Roman models. I find difficulty knowing exactly what this means, analytically, and in any case I can’t see any vigorous reworking myself. But he’s doubtless correct that one doesn’t need Roman craftsmen to produce Roman-inspired art. To my mind it is rather the compliant nature of this style which goes a long way towards explaining why it was widely adopted around the North Sea in this period, possibly as a conscious political expression in opposition to other clearly Romanised decorative styles, like Quoit Brooch Style: a point which must bear importantly on discussions of art and identity in fifth-century Britain. There’s nothing about Saxon Relief Style that would be shocking to a provincial Roman concerned about claims to legitimacy, which might have made it entirely appropriate in the context of Romano-Saxon polities emerging in a fifth-century British context. This, I should stress, is a slight but significant modification of my previous views on this topic.

Whatever its stylistic genealogy, though, none of that could be said about Style I. Style I can be positively shocking compared with its parents, particularly in the forms it takes around the North Sea. First, the animals take over the centre of the field. This isn’t general though; especially outside the North Sea region there are Style I objects that stick within the old rules of composition. Second, the animals’ nature changes; the shift from aquatic or semi-aquatic beasts, to quadrupeds, has long been appreciated but what interests me is the equally well-known incoherence of the Style I beast, fragmented into different components, ultimately to appear in what Haseloff memorably called Tiersalat: animal salad. The animals’ bodies lose their edges, being reduced to a series of parallel contour lines, sometimes to a single line. All of this is compounded by the ambiguity of Style I animals, which can terminate in a beast’s head looked at one way, or a human head viewed another way, sometimes with knock-on effects for how you read the body of the animal in question. But, obviously, as with all such things, they can only be one thing at a time. The figure, in its coherence or in its interpretative clarity, has gone.

This and the disentangling of the bodies, which all too often simply disappear, or can be interpreted more than one way, but never simultaneously, make this very much – in contradistinction to imperial art – an art of the present. Its reading is active, and possibly different each time. It is quite the opposite of imperial metalwork, the symbolic background against which it must be read. It lacks resolution; it is an ‘art of beginnings’ and indeed shares many of what Badiou identified as features of the avant-garde.

So, for the last quarter of my paper, I want to suggest why this style should have proved so aesthetically pleasing and popular at the end of the fifth century and the start of the sixth. For one thing it has significant metaphorical value. Most British archaeologists these days, when they talk about metaphor, actually mean synecdoche.  Peter Inker, for example, says that, when Saxon Relief style was based upon Roman badges and shield designs, it was a metaphor for Roman-based status.  That’s synecdoche, not metaphor. The take-over of the centre of the field by the periphery can be read as metaphor. If my analysis of the symbolic associations of imperial metalwork is not pure fancy, one might see it as metaphor for the control of the political centre by the peoples once regarded as peripheral animals. Or, as I would prefer, it is more a metaphorical representation of the absence of the old imperial centre.

A useful way of understanding the process at work is provided by two quotes from Judith Butler:

‘One might speculate: the act of symbolization breaks apart when it finds that it cannot maintain the unity that it produces when the social forces it seeks to quell and unify break through the domesticating veneer of the name.’ (Butler, Laclau and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony and Universality, p.27)

‘When people see the schema used to justify domination the dialectic collapses’ (ibid., p.28).

The master narrative of the fifth century is that of the collapse of an age-old signifying system, as the political centre that served to maintain and regulate it lost its hegemony – both in the usual and in the Gramscian sense of the term. The point de capiton – the old master-signifier – the Roman civic masculine ideal, which had symbolised the social structure and concealed internal divisions within a set of binary polarities based around it, became unfixed. This is a fine historical example of what Butler is talking about. Once that happened all the other signifiers and oppositions began to float free again.

In the north-west of the Empire and in some parts of the North Sea Barbaricum beyond, that did indeed spell a traumatic collapse of social and economic structures: an end of civilisation. In this context it is, it seems to me, hardly surprising that the human figure ceases to be depicted in anything other than (at best) stylised and (usually) ambiguous form or that even the animals show these characteristics.

As the fifth century wore on, but especially from its last third or quarter, the West – the North-West in particular – was entering a new world, one without any of the old symbolic fixed points. Everything was up for grabs. Social structure was unstable, authority at local levels as well as those of the new kingdoms could be created, lost and won bewilderingly easily, quickly and unexpectedly. Social relations were renegotiated, often dramatically, in ways that could not have been envisaged a hundred years previously. Even areas like Denmark, which remained fairly stable through the fifth century, nevertheless felt keenly the demise of the great imperial power at the centre of the European political world, which had served to keep everything in its place.

This was a world of permanent beginnings. Great kingdoms rose, and fell, within a couple of generations. Local power seems to have changed hands equally swiftly as a result. It was a world in permanent encounter with the Real: that which could not be symbolised, indeed it was something pre-symbolic. How to symbolise, even retrospectively, events with no precedent? Maybe it is actually no surprise that it took fifty years for people to start creating a new narrative, of the End of the Roman Empire.

The first time I showed students how to identify Style I animals, one of them actually did ask me if I had been smoking anything before class. It is an entirely valid response to Style I; this, if ever there was, is an art of the ‘what the hell is going on?’ It would take more than 3000 words to really develop this argument but what I hope to have suggested this morning is that, set against the narrative of the fifth century, placed in this context, Style I reveals a true contemporary resonance and aesthetic; in short, as the avant-garde of the late fifth and early sixth century, Style I is unambiguous: it makes perfect sense.