Meandering from the Individual to the Human

[In a particularly inchoate and convoluted stream of thoughts that I have found hugely difficult to write, I am going to try and critique the idea of the individual, on the basis of various bits and pieces of philosophy that I've been reading.  This will involve me unpicking some of my own work to address and maybe resolve something of an aporia within it - that is to say between wanting to write a history that enables in a radical, left-wing political sense and my insufficiently theorised use of the term 'individual' which could be read to (and perhaps does) imply an adherence to key concepts of bourgeois, liberal capitalism.  It also exposes the fact that my own discussion of 'the individual' in fact saw it as anything but individual.  Thinking on the basis of what my earlier writing implied (in the light of what I've read and written since) suggests that the social actor is overdetermined by identities.  Those identities, furthermore, involve (obviously enough) identification with others, so that the social/historical actor overflows the boundaries that might be seen to be imposed by the body or the notion of the individual.  Going further, exploration of how identities function in action shows that psychoanalytically the actor is not individual; s/he is a 'dividual' in Simon Critchley's terms.  As an umbrella term I want to use the word 'human' to encompass all possible acts of identification with other actors.  Multiple identities and the lack of an absolute, totalising individual 'core' permit an ethical engagement with the past which moves us past 'identity politics' history.  It also permits a more diverse ethical political action in the present, not prescribed by dominant or hegemonic identities (as, in turn, defined by party political dogma.  Well ... see what you think ...  As always when I write about this sort of thing, any reference to a theorist or philosopher's works should be prefaced by 'if I understand it correctly'.  ]

As you know, I’m not a philosopher.  I always feel the need to say this for several reasons.  One is that I get very annoyed by people who set themselves up as historians, who aren’t, and I’m sure (indeed I know) that philosophers get annoyed by people who set themselves up as philosophers, who aren’t (some indeed deny the title of philosopher to extremely important philosophers by holding a prescriptive definition of what philosophy is, but that’s another issue).  Another is that a small group of ‘post-modernist’ philosophers of history has had an influence out of all proportion to its value; the problem is not that these people aren’t historians so much as that they aren’t really philosophers either.  The position they have adopted is that (discussed in my piece on so-called interdisciplinarity) of the interlocutor: the person who stands at the edge of the ‘set’ of one academic discipline and reports on or critiques it through appropriating the perceived stance of another, without actually being situated within that discipline. 

I am a historian but, as you also know, I am interested in exploring a theory of how the study of history has ethical and political value in the present.  This, as yet again you will know, stems from a view that assigns a value to historical study not on the basis of the knowledge of ‘what happened in the past’ but on the basis of the ways in which one studies ‘what happened in the past’.  This project has led me to an ever-greater interest in ‘continental philosophy’, which seems to me to be far more meaningfully politically-engaged than its ‘Anglo-American’ ‘analytical’ counterpart.  My approach is (ideally) not just to see how I can employ this philosophy in thinking about history (the classic ‘interlocutory’ move), but also to see how my understanding of history allows me to engage critically with the philosophy.  As yet, though, my reading has been more of an exploration of different strands of philosophy, getting myself oriented within a large and complex body of traditions and ideas, and with less (thus far) of the critical engagement from a historical perspective.  What this series of meandering and largely inchoate thoughts will be about is how I might get from the problematic notion of ‘the individual’ to a more helpful (if in some areas unfashionable) concept of ‘the human’ and, simultaneously, about how I might get from the analysis of social action in the past (in other words from historical explanation) to an understanding of and guide to action in the present. 

I have to make it clear that I am a very long way from being an expert in or authority on any of what follows.  I’m using this as a means of putting my thoughts into some sort of order, to attract comments and criticism and in the hope that it might be of some use to someone out there as well.  I have recently (Early Medieval Europe 19.4 (2011), p.461) been described as ‘only a theorist en passant’, using theory ‘pragmatically’.  This is just, and indeed possibly even more so than intended.  I’m not a pragmatist in the Rorty sense but my readings of philosophy are themselves pretty pragmatic rather than truly, rigorously systematic let alone dogmatic.  This (especially the lack of rigour) will doubtless be underlined in what follows.

So, preliminaries aside…

The individual is a subject I have been mulling over of late.  It has a particular historical weight.  In the British (and especially English) context it has an especial resonance.  What is held to be specific and different about the trajectory of British/English history (its Sonderweg – special path – to borrow the German term) is very often couched in terms of individualism.  Alan Macfarlane classically considered the origins of English capitalism and thus individualism to be sought in the end of a true peasant class in England at a point at the end of the Middle Ages, much earlier than in other European nations.  Richard Hodges later tried to move the origins of English individualism even further back, into a putative tenth-century Anglo-Saxon ‘industrial revolution’.  The links between this form of analysis and a nationally-centred, economically- (and perhaps politically-) conservative form of history is clear.  Indeed, the concept of the individual is something of a corner-stone of modern capitalist politics and economics, of all shades, not just the conservative.  Individualism is connected with the (competitive) pursuit of personal interests and the ability to pursue personal interests, vis-à-vis other people’s interests is widely held as a mark of liberty and even (even more problematically) of ‘human rights’.

Another famous historical aspect of the problem is the ‘twelfth-century discovery of the individual’, presented in a classic article by Caroline Walker Bynum.  I have never found Walker Bynum’s argument especially convincing but it raises the question of the reality of the individual as an analytical unit.  The approach, perhaps, is mistaken on two counts.  First, it might teleologically be looking for a ‘point at which’ where the conception of what we regard (now) in liberal capitalist western democracy to be a fundamental unit or building block of society emerged from an earlier concept of society.  Again, the idea might have been to push Macfarlane’s ‘point at which’ back earlier into the Middle Ages.  But to do this it needs to assume something ‘natural’ – even essential – about the notion of the individual, as we understand it.  Maybe it is not so natural.  So maybe past understandings of (let’s call it) personhood cannot be so easily assimilated with modern ideas.  Second, more fundamentally, what if our concept of the individual is itself just a misleading, politically-contingent construct?  If that were the case, then it would be no more meaningful to talk of the twelfth-century discovery of the individual than it would be to talk about the fifth-century (BC) discovery of Atlantis, or the fourth-century (AD) discovery of the hippocamp, or of Pliny’s discovery of the African Blemmyes (with faces in their chests), or Aethicus Ister’s discovery of the cynocephalus (the dog-headed man).  Discovery would be the wrong word.  Did twelfth-century people develop a concept of the individual that is like that of the modern world?  That would be the less politically-loaded formulation of the question (the answer in my view would still be ‘no’ but that’s a separate issue).

To indulge in a little autobiography, my work has very often been concerned with the individual.  Ever since Settlement and Social Organisation (1995) I have tried to open up the possibility that every individual social actor has a role to play in history.  The course of history, in other words, is not just determined by the actions of a few ‘great men’ and nor is it determined by economic, technological, climatic or ecological considerations beyond ordinary human intervention.  I also wanted to avoid seeing history governed by faceless ‘class analyses’ of classic Marxist formulations and similarly I wanted to argue against the idea that past people acted in equally predictable ways according to other ways of dividing up society (gender, kindred or ethnicity).  Now, some people expressed the thought (in conversation) that this meant that I was, by stressing the individual, advocating a fairly conservative approach to history.  What I was trying to do (in a work written during what seemed at the time to be an interminably disastrous period of Conservative government) was to argue, from a historical analysis, that claims that there was nothing that we, individuals, could do, or that certain things represented the ‘natural’ and thus unchanging/unchangeable ‘common-sense’ or ‘human-nature’ way of things could and should be countered.  Or, you might say, ‘Change?  Yes We Can!’

My analysis of Merovingian social interaction saw social change as happening as the result of myriad infinitesimal modifications to the social structure (formed not as a body of laws and modes extrinsic to social action but as continually constituted by action, by a society’s accumulated knowledge of all previous interactions, those deemed correct and those considered wrong).  Interactions were based on the interplay of identities chosen situationally by social actors in order to pursue their own aims (achieve power/wealth/general satisfaction in life).  This could be fundamentally be based around a struggle for finite material resources between particular types of élite group and their competitors (as I saw it in Warfare and Society [2003]) or less uniquely concerned with material gain (Barbarian Migrations [2007] made some important changes by acknowledging the existence of affective bonds that might transcend material advantage).  Nonetheless the image was, one might say, agonal if not agonistic.  This was in opposition to what I saw (and see) as a historically and politically deeply problematic conception of ‘consensus’. [Again, that’s for another time; for now let me just say that the idea of ‘consensus’ and the repressive political work that the term does has not been sufficiently rigorously theorised.] 

So: agonal, based around competition for resources or the achievement of other ‘satisfactions or aims in life’: there are points of contact here between my conception and that of the liberal, bourgeois notion of the individual.  That must be acknowledged. 

Digression: Words and Why they Matter: There is an interesting point here about how one’s political intentions for a piece and how it can be read might not match up.  As some of you will remember I have made the point forcefully (indeed deliberately shockingly), and I will make it again at some point (just how is the issue that concerns me), that it is simply not good enough to disclaim any responsibility for the use made of one’s words, as an excuse for lazy thinking and lazier writing in the discussion of politically sensitive, current issues like, oh, ... say (for the sake of argument), immigration.  One hard-of-thinking possessor of a D.Phil accused me (in an offensive message) of having a ‘shallow’ understanding of history because I didn’t appreciate (or accept) that how someone uses your words is independent of what you write.  One might call this the philosophically-uneducated man’s post-modernism because it shows absolutely no understanding of the issue at all.  This kind of lazy get-out-of-jail-free card – or, as I would rather call it, this kind of complacent, elitist, sophist fuck-wittery – just won’t wash.  All readings are not equal (and, as far as I am aware, neither the terribly-maligned Derrida nor any of the other continental philosophers regularly blamed for the idea ever said they were).  At one extreme, no guilt can be laid on an author for a clearly forced reading with little or no regard to the text itself; but when, at the other extreme, one can interpret one’s words (whether or not the author agrees) via a more or less straightforward retelling, then – whatever you believe – you have responsibility for not being able or willing to think more carefully and responsibly about the composition of your text.  Taking (ironically given the usually avowed contempt for what they call ‘post-modernism’) the relativist line that anyone can read your text any way they like might enable you to quaff your free port at Saint Frithfroth’s high table with a clear conscience the next time someone, drawing their motivation from a matrix of ideas and attitudes to which you have - however unwittingly and in however small a way - contributed, fire-bombs an immigrant hostel or guns down an island-full of Norwegian children in the name of the defence of Europe, but it cuts no ice around here.

So, as you can imagine, whether or not my earlier writings can be taken as a straight endorsement of capitalist individualism is an issue that troubles me more than somewhat.  Indeed, with the current neo-liberal UK government and its policies, it troubles me deeply.  Going back over the texts I’m not sure it could be done very easily, given the stress I laid on everyone having a role to play and everyone being able to change the system, to it being a way of moving away from ‘safe’ history (Settlement and Social Organisation, p.281), and to putting people back into their history (Barbarian Migrations, p.518).  At no point do I say anything like ‘anyone can do what they like and stuff society; and that’s how progress comes about.’  Nonetheless if someone presented a deconstruction that showed how what I said was actually supportive of an opposing political stance, then I would have to put my hands up and admit that I hadn’t thought it through hard enough.  A fortiori if someone were able simply to juxtapose verbatim quotes to make the point via an entirely unforced reading.  Well, to suggest that I was either right-wing, careless or stupid would be fair enough.  [And yes, that is a challenge, by the way…]

Similarly, I think that the consensus theory of medieval politics and the ways it envisages social/political power are, if you scrutinise the concepts closely, pretty reactionary and thus quite the opposite of the political beliefs that I know are held by some of its proponents.  I could not, however, (I think) make that reading and interpretation emerge simply from a series of quotes from, say, Dame Professor Janet L. Nelson’s writings.  It would have to be a close, deconstructive reading.  And because of that it would have no adverse critical bearing on the quality or intentions of the original work itself except (if it could be done) to say, ‘I think one needs to probe these concepts more carefully’.  I admit I need to probe my own concepts more closely - see below.

Satis.

As a (however gloomy) analysis of how things happen in social change, I still think that this is broadly on the right lines, though always susceptible to greater refinement and subtlety, but with one key drawback to which I will return at the end.  That does not imply that that is the way I think things ought to be or of how I think one ought to behave.  However, the fault-line that I can now identify within my argument – its aporia if you like – is that my concept of the historical actor was in fact anything but individual.  It could be divided along any number of lines.  The actor (let’s call him/her that) is a unique node where different identities meet.  But this node is not static and never just identified with a single identity (it is this that makes me opposed to identity politics and – more so – to the writing of history for the purposes of identity politics).  This is not simply because there is nothing immanent about an identity and not simply because an actor often can choose which identity to play in a particular situation.  It is also because the nature and range of identities changes through time (gender modified by age or the life-cycle for example; the precise value of an age-based identity changing through life; etc.).  And it is because the nature of an identity deployed in a given social situation is governed by the broader historical setting.

The situation:setting opposition was something I adopted and adapted in Barbarian Migrations from an article on ethnicity by J.Y Okamura ( ‘Situational ethnicity.’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 4.4 (1981), 452-65).  The situation is the specific encounter between human beings during which identities are deployed, and the setting is the broader social background against which it is set, and which defines the precise ways in which identities are seen.  What I did was to assimilate this with the reflexive relationship between social structure and social interaction that I had already long used, inspired by Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice and the ‘habitus’ and Giddens’ theory of structuration.  Thus the ‘setting’ determines the weight and nature of particular identities and how they can be used in particular ‘situations’ but is itself constituted by the results of all previous ‘situations’.  Although I used this to discuss ethnicities, the idea could be applied to any sort of social identity.

This, in turn brings up the question of what an identity is.  The key point about identity – and it is one I haven’t really made enough of in the past (though there is a nod towards this on Barbarian Migrations, pp.168-9) – is that it is fundamentally an identification, an association, a sameness with an other.  In this perspective, then, what might be called the ‘individual’ is only created through an identification with the other.  At this point one can employ Žižek’s use of Lacan’s ‘graph of desire’ to explore subjectivity in The Sublime Object of Ideology, focussing as it does on the inter-relationship between identities and the way that behaviour is defined as much by what someone thinks other people expect (“Che vuoi?”) if someone playing a particular role as by ‘free will’ and intention.  Žižek more than once quotes Lacan to the effect that ‘a fool who thinks he’s a king is no crazier than a king who thinks he’s a king’: in other words identities and roles are not immanent but constructed from people’s expectations about how they behave and how to behave towards them (which in its own way brings us back to Bourdieu and Giddens).

The ‘individual’ can, as I see it, never be all the things that it is at any given time.  It is never a totalised/totalising whole.  It is an overdetermination.  Perhaps, too, it only has something like unity bestowed upon it and its actions in retrospect.  In any given situation, which is always a situation of becoming, after all, an actor could try to deploy/could be allowed to deploy different identities, to greater or lesser effect.  Only afterwards, in retrospect, once their results are perceived, might his/her actions be understood as those of a male/female, young/old person, person of a particular ethnicity, family, religion or social rank, etc.  I wonder whether, when we confer meaning upon interactions, there is a point of contact here with the Derridian notion of différance.  This may or may not work.  I also need at some point to sit down and read Badiou’s Being and Event and The Logic of Worlds and his application of set theory to social action, to see whether it can be harmonised with some of the other ideas I have been playing with.

So, thus far we can see that an ‘individual’ is not really individual at all.  S/he is not singular, sui generis – far from it – even if s/he occupies a particular, unique place on what I once called the social map.  This is true even in terms of self-identification.  Therefore the individual is in psychoanalytic terms not individual either, as a subject.  One is measuring one’s own actions against the sorts of images and backgrounds I have already discussed: this is the realm of the super-ego.  In these terms, Simon Critchley therefore calls the subject a ‘dividual’.  No matter how one looks at it, then, the individual is a myth.  The twelfth century can thus no more have discovered the individual than it can have discovered the unicorn.

One must then be very wary of the ideology of the individual, where the latter is a figure for liberty.  We must look behind the figure to the ideology that it obscures.  I wonder if you could unpick the figure of the individual how much of the rest of capitalist ideology would come adrift.  I wonder whether the figure of the individual is the ‘point de capiton’ of the whole signifying system (as I argued the figure of the civilised Roman male was in the Roman Empire).  Now, unpicking the individual is not necessarily a move back to simple ‘class analyses’ or a move toward dismissing human life in the interests of a greater good (I think Alain Badiou comes close to both of these things in some of his writings, like The Century).  Quite the opposite.  This is where I want to start thinking in terms of the human instead.  Now, I know that the concept of the human is historically localisable and was in many ways bound up with enlightenment ideas that were Eurocentric, sexist, racist even but I think that it is salvageable as an important concept, for reasons to which I will return.  After all, I have spoken before about putting the humanity back into the humanities. 

I think this means that I am critiquing the ‘individual’ in a similar way to that in which Jeffrey Jerome Cohen critiques the ‘human’ in Medieval Identity Machines (though I’m as yet not too far into that very interesting volume).  However, while I am irresistibly attracted to the idea (if I correctly detect the way Cohen’s argument is going) that Europe was post-human before it was human, there are ideological reasons why I want to stick to the individual, rather than the human, as the term for the notion I am critiquing, and for why I want to preserve the human as something to strive for.

I recently read Le Mythe de L’Individu by the argentine philosopher and ex-guerrillero Miguel Benasayag.  This – funnily enough – was one of the prompts to write this piece.  Dating to 1998, it’s a remarkable book, weaving philosophies together from Plotinus through Spinoza to the present.  [You will understand that I don’t buy his critique of Camus’ Le Mythe de Sisyphe as entirely fair, but there you go.]  One of the things I like is Benasayag’s way of thinking of the human being as not individual and not bound by the body (coming close to Cohen’s critique of the human) but as a sort of shapeless, amoeba-like thing that extends arms (or pseudo-pods, as he says) in all sorts of directions, binding with particular other people in particular times and places: family, friends, colleagues, fellow travellers.  In all these cases the human sees him/herself as part of other people and (I suppose) vice versa.  This I think is implicit in what I said earlier about identification.  Going back to the ways I thought about things sixteen years ago, in Settlement and Social Organisation, what I said about links and barriers could be transposed into a situational willingness or otherwise to ‘extend’ oneself towards identification with someone else or to accept or refuse someone else’s ‘pseudopodal’ extension towards oneself.  Benasayag’s philosophy is phenomenological, focussing on ‘the situation’ and stresses trying to see the universal in the particular, the eternal in the fleeting.  He postulates that one can free oneself from the condition of lack, of ever-waiting, of desire for mastery that never – can never – come that the concept of the individual brings with it, by living in and for the situation.  There is thus an ethical side to all this that brings me back to ideas I have expressed before, about pre-rational ethics and history, etc.

Meandering my way towards a conclusion, then, what I think has been wrong with my thinking in the past has been its concentration upon the ‘rational’, the conscious pursuit of aims, with regard, say, to control of material resources etc.  This is not to deny that this is important but simply to push the idea further (re. the ‘affective’ community mentioned in Barbarian Migrations, p.41) that the non- (or pre-) rational also play an important part in such relationships.  There are two points that I think could emerge from this admittedly disorganised thinking.

One is that in ‘identification’, in that extension of a ‘pseudopod’ towards others there is some of that pre-rational ethics of empathy, of seeing oneself in others that I discussed before.  Therefore the most creative and positive identification of all must be (as Schopenhauer thought) the recognition of another striving, struggling human being.  And this, because it permits no exclusions (apart from other species, which is a problem I admit), must be crucially important.  As I see it, it trumps all the other identifications.

The other point, which stems from the non-immanence of identities, and the non-existence of the individual, affects historical methodology and political action equally.  We don't have a single dominant 'individual' identity - and even if we did, its nature would perpetually be changing, as above.  This makes history written to extend present identities backwards problematic.  For the same reasons I am dubious of identity politics generally, I suppose.  What I think the movement away from the individual to the human might permit, politically, is a non-doctrinaire, non-partisan, piecemeal kind of political action that operates situationally according to the ethical demand.  This, then, would be the sort of ethical ‘anarchist’* politics of commitment that Simon Critchley advocates in Infinitely Demanding.  By stressing a shared humanity we might be able to get around having to choose which identity we see as most important in an absolute way, and thus get some purchase on the problems of hegemony and socialist strategy (on which I need to go back and finish my reading of Butler, Laclau, Žižek, Mouffe etc.).  We might find a new kind of ethically-founded community (which reminds me that I need to get round to reading Agamben on The Coming Community) – one that would itself be (in my way of seeing) as ‘amoebic’ as the ‘human’.

* Not anarchist in the traditional sense of Bakunin, Kropotkin and the rest, but as rejecting the rule of a single political dogma and programme.

[This took me days to write and it has made my head hurt (although that might admittedly be because my varifocals were broken when I got attacked in Poppleton town centre a couple of weeks back) - I might keep tinkering with it for a while yet.]

On evil and rejoicing

Be ye not glad when thy enemy shall fall! And let not thy heart rejoice in his ruin, lest the Lord see and it displease him, and he turn away his wrath from him (Proverbs 24:17-18).

I'm grateful to James Fraser for putting this quote my way today, with regard to the fall-out from the killing of Osama Bin Laden.  I am disturbed by the open scenes of celebrating, the chanting of 'USA, USA', and so on.  So, Proverbs 24:17-18 seems a timely, relevant and very humane thought to ponder, even in rather hasty and disjointed fashion, as here.

I've been interested in the problem of evil for some time and how one should respond to it as an historian.  Some fine historians refuse to use the word (I believe Sir Ian Kershaw is one); other, rather less fine, ones (Michael Burleigh) treat evil as a pathology.  I admit that I haven't reached any sort of conclusion - indeed I haven't decided whether one can have a concept of evil outside theology - but my gut feeling is that the modal verb for 'evil' is 'to do' rather than 'to be'.  People do bad things - very bad things.  Maybe some achieve badness.  Perhaps others have the doing of bad things thrust upon 'em.  But no one, I think, is born bad.

It seems to me that unless one appreciates the essential humanity even of people who do unspeakably bad things, one will never really be able to make any progress in understanding or dealing with these issues.  Part of being an historian is opening oneself up to the understanding of other people.  That is what lies behind all of the usual, standard advice about careful, sensitive, critical ways of reading sources and analysing other societies. 

Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou have pointed out that some of the architects of the Holocaust can be seen to have very human sides.  But, they ponder, should we see such people as human?  Žižek has asked relatively recently, citing a Middle Eastern proverb that an enemy is simply someone whose story we haven’t heard, whether we should we invite the concentration camp guard to tell us his story?  Should we, in other words, open ourselves up to understanding his version of events, in the way I just mentioned? I am afraid that my answer to all these questions is yes we should.  This is all part of what I call 'the uncomfortable ethics' of history.  It is uncomfortable to admit that there is potentially (unless we really are saints) probably a bit of the Bin Laden, a bit of the Heydrich maybe, in all of us human beings.  But unless we admit that I don't think that, as historians, one can ever really explain, understand and help to prevent the recurrence of the actions of these people.  But that is the demand laid upon us as historians and if you don't want to shoulder it, don't be an historian.  I'll nevertheless repeat one of my teaching mantras: to explain is not to excuse.

But I will also repeat the comment of Derrida, which I have mentioned before, that only the unforgivable can truly be forgiven.  Osama Bin Laden did very bad things, no doubt.  It may well also be the case, I think, the case, that in terms of Realpolitik killing him had perhaps become inevitable.  That said, there are still people alive and flourishing in the world who have committed, or have ordered, deeds that are as bad or worse than anything Bin Laden did or ordered (I could name George W. Bush, for one).  Some are supported by the West, as (as it has become glib to remind people) was Bin Laden and Saddam before him.

Bin Laden may have deserved to die; perhaps there was indeed no alternative to killing him.  We might be relieved at his death because it might, with time, prove to make the world a safer place.  But he was nevertheless a human being.  And I don't think that a human being's killing, or the fact that a human being made his own killing necessary, is ever something to celebrate or rejoice about.  Doing so is understandable; it is human, all too human, and therefore something that the historian must open up to, but I think that it is also regretable because it simultaneously reduces our shared or fellow humanity.  Doing so evaporates any attempt to create a moral high ground.  Justice may have been done (although with no due process, it's difficult to make the claim stick), but rejoicing about it debases any cause that thinks of itself as just.

Here are two nice quotes (one from a truly great man; the other from someone now more famous than she was last Sunday, and whom I salute), summing up the situation more succinctly and stylishly:

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy." - Jessica Dovey (a US English teacher) 

"Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that." - Martin Luther King

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.