Changing Minds around 600

[I was very kindly invited to give one of the once-a-term York Medieval Lectures yesterday (in-house speakers are not often invited), which was an honour of course.  I reprint the text as given, minus introductory burble.  It is all very provisional and doubtless all much more complex.  Indeed maybe just plain wrong, but at the moment these seem to me to be interesting lines of enquiry.

The argument goes like this.  Many things were changing around 600, of which I give a sample.  The problem is how to explain this wide range of changes across many geographical areas, social, political, military and cultural aspects, etc.  Pirenne blamed the Arabs of course, but that obviously won't work.  In the past I looked at short-term, important political events, then moved on to see things more in terms of a conflict for resources between kings and aristocrats.  Now I am exploring the idea that a combination of features, contingent political historical events, the knowledge of living 'after Rome', an ideological crisis as a result of the latter, inside and outside the old Empire, and theological worries about the end of the world (dependent upon the long-standing belief that the Roman Empire and the Sixth Age were commensurate) came together to produce a very distinctive world view, one that soon passed but left far-reaching changes in its wake.  Well, see what you think.]

For the last two and a half years, I’ve been working on a project entitled ‘The Transformations of the Year 600’, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. 

I’ve been exploring the notion of the ‘end of the late antique state’ around 600.   This may or may not be descriptively adequate but it involves discussing the end of a Roman world view, and the need to create new ways of thinking about power, gender-relations and so on and so forth after the end of the Roman Empire.  That was what the ‘changing minds’ element of the title referred to.  But it’s that area – that mental shift – which, over the last two or three months, has really taken over my thinking about the period. It also relates to a lot of other reading I’ve been doing over the past two years about the meaning and importance of history itself.  So, what I present tonight is a long way from being a coherent, fully-worked-out thesis; it is a snapshot, as of February 2012, of where my own mind is at, in thinking about the period between roughly the last third of the sixth century and the first half of the seventh.  In descriptive terms – and in many explanatory ideas too – I have little new to say.  What I have to offer is rather an attempt to bring together various disparate elements – written and excavated data, social and political history, both of those and religious and intellectual history – and to try to confront some important issues, such as how change happens, especially what, with Foucault, we might call epistemic change.

Now, there are four caveats that I need you to bear in mind throughout what I am about to say, as I don’t have the time to reiterate them with every point I make. 

1: The first concerns the diversity of experiences and strands of the story.  If you are trying to give a whistle-stop overview of a period of between, say, eighty and 100 years in less than an hour, you have to generalise.  The period I discuss saw many different histories, whether looking at geographical regions, social groups or historical themes.  They don’t all run at the same speed and with the same chronological shifts.  Some may indeed run counter to what one might see as a main trend.  Classical and medieval thinkers liked to use music as a metaphor for unity in diversity. If you like, this paper represents me whistling something which might be recognisable, overall, as the melody of a particular piece of music but which corresponds in detail to none of the parts played by individual instruments or voices.

2: The second, related, caveat is that I am not discussing a dramatic, revolutionary change, a seismic shift from one thing to another.  I’m not suggesting that on 1 January 601 a bell tolled and everyone changed their ways of doing everything.  There were of course continuities for the ‘old’ ways and precursors, models and forerunners of the new.  What I am taking about is a change of emphasis or of pace.  It’s significant – indeed vitally important – but we need to be clear about how I understand such a change.

3: I don’t for example (and this is my third, again related, caveat), see it all as all happening suddenly, at once or all at the same time.  I might argue that the decades either side of 600 were a ‘Schwerpunkt’ but the period of change spans two or three generations. 

4: Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this is not the period of change.  I stole my project’s title, shamelessly, from that of my namesake, Guy Bois’ controversial book The Transformations of the Year 1000.  Unlike Bois, however, I am not postulating that this X marked the spot where the ancient world became the medieval world.  The period c.600 is often described as the start of the medieval world.  Indeed one short-lived journal of the 1990s, Medieval History, set its opening date, very precisely, as 594.  What happened in 594?  As I’m sure you know, Gregory of Tours died.  He bore a huge weight on his shoulders; he took to his bed, breathed his last, and the classical world ended.   But, the start of the medieval world?  What does that mean?  I don’t know; it’s one reason I don’t think of myself as a medievalist.  If it means that the world c.650 is more recognisable to people who study the twelfth or thirteenth centuries than the world c.550 then I’d have to agree, but then the world c.750 would be even more recognisable and the world c.450 even less so.  It might well be that many of what one might, were one so inclined, think of as defining features of the medieval world were significantly shifted around 600 but the danger with that sort of thinking is that, like Bois’, it assumes two periods of greater or lesser structural stability on either side of a point of transformation or transition.  The world as it was in western Europe in c.550 was a pretty recent creation and the world that emerged after my period of change did not remain unaltered for long.  A lot happened around 700. 

You must bear all four of these general points in mind, throughout what I am going to say, as qualifying an oversimplifying overview.

2: Description of Period

The Column of Phocas, Rome
Nothing says 'the end of the classical world'
like the Column of Phocas

So, you might be asking yourself, what is so interesting about the period around 600?  Well, I’ll tell you…  This will of necessity be a rather breathless and selective round-up.  I will return to the elements that concern me; others can perhaps be dealt with in discussion.  One topic that most interests me is time and how people thought about it, so this listing has something of a focus on that area.  As ever Gaul/Francia is the area about which I know most and it will retain its centrality within my discussion.  I’m not assuming that what happens in Francia must necessarily happen everywhere else; in some cases clearly it doesn’t; in others there are distinct variations on the theme.  It nevertheless gives a reasonable approximation of the general directions in which things were moving across the West.  One thing that has long been said, and it still seems to be true, is that it was this period that saw a decisive shift of focus towards the north of France and the North Sea cultural zone province from the Mediterranean.  This might be of more general cultural significance than I hitherto supposed.

The material that first drew me to the importance of the changes around 600 was the funerary archaeology of north-eastern Gaul.  I have talked about this Just – So – Very often, not least here, that I will – you’ll be pleased to hear, be very brief but it is important and must be mentioned.   The principal issues are these.  First of all, one of the major shifts in the form and design of artefacts took place sometime between c.575 and c.600.  This involved, not least, a radical shift in the balance of investment in material and decoration from feminine to masculine artefacts.  At the same time, the focus of funerary ritual moved from the comparatively transient (if quite multi-dimensional) display of the grave-goods ritual, to a greater degree of investment in more permanent – if more one-dimensional – commemoration in above ground monuments, and perhaps in other, written or liturgical  forms of memoria.  Monuments include the construction of barrows on the fringes of the Frankish realms, churches (in northern Gaul moving gradually out from the cities, via the smaller administrative nodes, to the countryside), grave-stones, sarcophagus-lids visible at surface level, walls around burials, and so on.  Commensurate with this is a significant growth in the number of cemeteries, usually smaller than their sixth-century precursors. 

Now, it is possible to see similar shifts in other regions of the West, both inside and outside the former frontiers of the Roman Empire.  The rash of lavish barrow burials in Anglo-Saxon England, most famously Sutton Hoo, of course, most recently Prittlewell, is well-known.  Not just the investment in the display is noteworthy, but also the process of separation – both of which find their parallels in Francia, particularly on its fringes.  Many of the changes involved in the move towards what used to be called ‘Final Phase Cemeteries’ – or ‘Conversion Period’ cemeteries (I don’t think the description is very much more helpful) – are recognisably similar, though rather different in detail.  The increased concern with above-ground commemoration extends to the reuse of prehistoric barrows and other monuments – something which has some parallels in Francia, especially in the east, though elsewhere it might be that the standing remains of Roman villae were more important.  North of the old Roman frontier in parts of the Pictish kingdom it is the case that above-ground monuments were becoming more popular at this time, too, with the use of symbol stones, cairns and various types of barrow. 

The usual political interpretation of the Anglo-Saxon burials is as a sign of the emergence of kingship.  The Pictish developments are usually placed in a sequence allegedly charting the growth of the Pictish ‘state’.  I will present some reasons to rethink this interpretation later on.  The standard interpretation of the Anglo-Saxon trend towards the reuse of barrows and other ‘ancient monuments’ is that seventh-century people were attempting to associate themselves with the ancestors, in other words with the past.  I find this reading entirely unconvincing, for reasons I have set out at length, especially with regard to John Moreland’s reading of the Wigber Low barrow in Derbyshire.  There seems to me to be no evidence to support it and, in broader context, especially looked at across Europe, it is far more likely that this represents an over-writing of the past and a concern with the future.

Whilst were on the subject of the future, here are two clauses of Frankish law concerning what you have to do if you can’t pay a legal fine.  The first is clause 57, De Chrenecruda, of the early sixth-century Pactus Legis Salicae – a favourite of any student who has to read the text.  The guilty man goes before the mallus – the court – and declares publicly, with twelve oath-helpers, that he has no property left, above or below the ground.  Whereupon he must take handfuls of earth from the four corners of his house and throw them over his shoulder onto those of his closest relatives, on his father’s and mother’s sides, who must help him pay.  He does this to all those who are related to him within three generations.  Something over a hundred years later, the equivalent clause, 12.2, of Lex Ribvaria, probably issued in the 620s or 630s, though this is uncertain, simply reads that if a man cannot pay the fine, his sons can pay over three generations.  What we have here, whilst the concern with three generations remains constant, is a shift from a public, ritual display bringing in living relatives, towards a spreading of the responsibility into the future.

This is not the only concern with the future in Ripuarian Law, which contains, to my knowledge, the first reference to the procedure whereby, if a written document is not drawn up, young boys are brought to a legal transaction and boxed around the ears to make them remember it.  The reference to documents is important.  Ripuarian Law, and in this it is entirely different from Salic Law, repeatedly says that customary law, partible inheritance and similar matters can be modified if a document exists.  And indeed it is from around 600 that documents start to survive in Francia.  Various chance explanations for this have been proposed but none is very satisfactory.  In the tenth century, the oldest charters Flodoard of Rheims could find in the cathedral archive were from the period between 580 and 600, apart from a couple of bishops’ wills, notably that of Saint Remigius, presumably kept as a relic.  The oldest original charters belong to Chlothar II’s reign (584-629), there’s a possible interpolated charter from the reign of Chlothar’s cousin Theudebert II (596-612) and the oldest genuine copies come from the earlier seventh century.  The numbers of authentic charters really take off from about the 640s and into the second half of the century, though.  The most forged Merovingian king is not, as you might expect, Clovis, founder of the dynasty; Theo Kölzer could only find six forged charters of Clovis.  It is Dagobert I (621-639), for whom Kölzer tracked down no fewer than forty.  Forgers, it seems, picked a reign from which it was plausible that a charter might have survived.  Clearly, no one had ever seen a charter of Clovis, evidently making attempts to claim him as a donor almost as suspect to early medieval readers as they are to modern ones. 

Forged Merovingian Charters, by Reign, Childeric I
to Dagobert I

It is interesting too that for the century or more between Childeric I and Childebert II’s accession in 575 Kölzer found seventy-four deperdita – charters referred to by, or inferred from, other sources but now lost.  He catalogued no fewer than 133 for the sixty-four years between 575 and 639; mostly from Dagobert’s reign.  Now, that evident three- or fourfold increase in the relative frequency of documents must be relativized by the growing survival of written evidence from around 600: a vitally important change in itself.  Doing so reminds us that the sixth-century Merovingian kingdom was highly literate, generating all sorts of documents – almost none of which survives.  Indeed, there are almost as few surviving documents from Gaul north of the Loire before 600 as there are for the British Isles.  Apart from warning us against assuming that a documentary blank indicates illiteracy or illiterate government, this shows that the increased document survival after 600 is not an issue of the introduction of writing as much as the decision to retain documents (an issue not even addressed in John Moreland’s book).  Why that might be the case is an issue to which I will return.  It sheds a different light on the production of northern formularies from the seventh century, for one thing.

Associated with the survival of these documents is the development of aristocratic estates.  Northern Gallic Merovingian aristocrats might have had more secure control, more eminent ownership of, lands and a greater ability to dispose of them as they pleased – far more wills survive from the seventh century than the sixth; Salic Law did not even recognise the possibility of testamentary disposition and a story in Gregory of Tours suggests that some kings did what they could to back this up.  This might also have been because sixth-century royal grants were grants of government and of revenue, rather than of ownership of the land.  Higher-status settlement sites become archaeologically visible in the seventh century.  Associated with this is the growth of immunities, preventing royal officers from entering specified estates.  That itself suggests two crucial developments.  It illuminates the well-known decline of taxation around 600 but the prohibition on royal officers entering estates to collect fines for non-performance of military service suggests, with other evidence, an important change in the raising of armies.  In my book on the subject, I argued that sixth-century armies still functioned effectively as royal coercive forces, raised from administrative units, commanded by royally-appointed officers.  Seventh-century forces appear to be ever more focused upon aristocratic retinues.  There are other military changes at this time that I don’t have time to discuss.  The rites to extract local surplus and military service seem by the middle of the seventh century to have devolved to local aristocrats.  This may have been the case in Spain as well as in Francia, although the Spanish case seems to me to be more complex and to require more thought. 

The key shift that unifies most of the preceding points is a growth in aristocratic power.  Thus one can detect changes in the description of aristocrats.  Magnate dynasties begin to be securely traceable in northern Gaul.  One reason for this is their promotion of rural monasticism, in Gaul often associated with the Irish monk Columbanus but which, as Ian Wood has shown, rapidly became Frankish to all intents and purposes.  The foundation of these monasteries was a focus for the donation of lands, a means of securing aristocratic control over lands and so on. 

The growth in aristocratic power is certainly to be associated with the economic revival of the North Sea zone from around 600.  The trading sites or emporia become more visible than hitherto, and northern Gallic towns experience an upturn after two centuries of stagnation.  An increase in craft-specialisation is detectable in the metalwork and ceramic evidence, and smaller-denomination coinage reappears.  This is doubtless related, too, to the well-known shift in trading patterns at about this time, from the so-called Mediterranean system that predominated in the fifth and sixth centuries to the ‘Continental System’ of the seventh.

Finally, there are major cultural shifts too.  The use of the Bible, and especially of the Old Testament, in political writings increases at about this time.  About twenty years ago William Daly wrote an important piece about the difference between Gregory of Tours’ Clovis and the Clovis who appears in contemporary sources, showing that the Clovis of his own day was a much more Roman and Christian figure than Gregory’s.  Daly didn’t make the point, though, that Gregory’s Clovis is very much a Clovis for the late sixth century: an Old Testament king who walks righteously in the sight of the Lord and smites His enemies.  Robert Markus brilliantly discussed the importance of typological thinking to Gregory the Great, and how, when compared with earlier thinkers (most notably Augustine) Gregory is able much more easily to pass through the sign – the word – to the signified beyond.  This sort of development, I think, is more widespread than perhaps Markus thought. 

Jacques Fontaine argued that the seventh century saw an acceleration in the importance of rhythmic verse but especially of a type of poetry that was composed in autonomous strophes making more use of parallel phrasing and synonyms.  This can be set alongside Gregory the Great’s thought and Gregory of Tours’ historical writing.  Another shift that has been remarked upon is in the greater use of miracles in religious writing.  It has been argued that Caesarius of Arles makes almost no use of the miraculous in his Sermons, but that his vita, composed in the 540s contains many miracles and by the time one arrives at the Gregories, especially the Bishop of Tours, the miraculous can be argued, as by Ray Van Dam, to dominate explanation, to the exclusion of theological debate.  Finally the period I am concerned with is, more or less, that of the floruit of Salin’s Style II, which shows a number of key differences from its late fifth- and early sixth-century predecessor, funnily enough known as Style I.

The world's most famous Style II Object

It’s possible to sketch all of these developments too starkly, as I have doubtless done, and there are, as stated, many regional variations, but the selection given at least sets out the background to what I want to talk about in the main section of the lecture.  One thing I would like to stress, to any Anglo-Saxonists in the audience, is just how well the Anglo-Saxon picture fits alongside that which I have just sketched, which I hope will make you reconsider the way in which explanation is still widely hung upon conversion to Christianity – at least ponder whether conversion was a cause or a symptom of change.

3: Explanations

All of which brings us neatly to the issue of explanation.  The most famous explanation is, I suppose, Henri Pirenne’s from the early twentieth century, blaming seventh-century changes on the Arab conquests.  This might still be popular as an explanation in some quarters, for obvious reasons.  But the Arab conquests come too late to explain the western Mediterranean changes and again you have to ponder the extent to which they were themselves cause or symptom of the changes taking place at this time.  Pirenne, famously, thought that the rupture of the Mediterranean from the north-west caused Europe’s centre of gravity to shift towards, well, his native Belgium, really.  That economic dislocation, though, can be traced as early as the fourth century and the Mediterranean economic crisis comes too early to have had much to do with the Arabs – although it might have had crucial knock-on effects in the British Isles and it does have a role in explaining some of the variations in trajectory between northern and southern Europe.

Twenty years ago, I pinned the Gallic changes on the royal minorities that occurred between 575 and 613, decisively altering the balance of power between the royal court and the aristocracy, towards the latter.  I still think that that’s very important in explaining the end of the Late Antique state in Gaul.  But to what extent does, or can, it explain developments elsewhere?  It probably did have effects in southern England but there’s only so far that one can push such an explanation.  It’s true that there were political upheavals in Spain around 600, too, that could have had similar effects, but one must also note that (according to Shetelig in the 1930s!) there were changes at about this time on Norwegian cemeteries that look very like those that took place in Gaul.  Frankish and Gothic political instability surely didn’t have effects that rippled out that far!

One also has to ask why dynastic crises in Spain and Gaul should have had the same sorts of effects (if they did!).  So I moved on to consider the end of the late antique state.  Many western European polities in the sixth century fit a reasonable, uncontroversial definition of a state, whereas they don’t (as I see it) in the seventh.  My explanations for that focussed on a rivalry for control of comparatively finite material resources, both at a local community-level and at a higher political level, between kings and aristocrats.  That nevertheless questions why crisis should automatically lead to a hoarding of power by the aristocrats.  It raises the problem, as Chris Wickham put it in 1984, using evidently Gramscian terminology, of ‘how the state lost consent’.  The materialist explanation only goes so far here.

So we need to enter the world of ideas.  Markus discussed the period 400-600 as one of ‘desecularisation’.  There was an ‘ascetic invasion’, a shift towards more monastic ways of thinking about the world, which left little room for the secular.  Markus was a very fine historian and obviously there is a great deal in his argument.  Yet, it too falls short.  Like all of us, Markus had his blind spots.  One was a curious lack of interest in the contemporaries of Gregory the Great, who, for Markus, simply stands at the end of a line that starts with Augustine and passes through Cassian and Cassiodorus.  Markus says little about the other Gregory – of Tours – or Isidore of Seville, let alone other types of text.  It’s difficult, moreover, to avoid the impression that Markus saw Gregory as illustrative of a something of a sorry decline when held up to Augustine.  Again, as far as I can judge, there’s something in that but I think that we need to interrogate this more clearly.  Markus saw the epistemological shift around 600 in terms of decline.  His reading is rationalist, as from a sort of analytical philosophical viewpoint but while instinctively I agree with his judgement I think there must be a more positive or creative way of reading the shift.

Markus’ idea of an epistemological crisis is one in which the old ideas cannot provide answers to new questions, forcing a radical shift in ways of thought.  But, says Markus, like a true classicist, the old ways could solve all of these problems.  How could classical civilisation not?  The idea that that sort of thinking might be found wanting is clearly unimaginable!  This is what I want to explore in what remains of this paper.

In 1988, after a paper by Jocelyn Hillgarth about eschatology and political thinking around 600, Karl Ferdinand Werner said (in my translation),

“I just want to say that I am wary of whether an ‘atmosphere’, or certain intellectual ideas can be a driving force.  Does a particular thought dominate men and their behaviour?  I’d like to express some scepticism about taking that too far.” 

It is a fair question.  How far was the rarefied air of a Pope Gregory breathed by kings, or the men hauling Sutton Hoo Man’s ship up a hill in Suffolk, let along those carving Pictish symbols in areas that the Roman Empire had never governed?  This is what I want to explore, using a potpourri of ideas from a range of thinkers, used in my own Humpty-Dumpty-ish sort of way.  They will cluster around the reciprocal relationship between the subject – the social or historical actor – and the symbolic order.

4: Attempt to try and bring all this together



The Immediately Post-Justinianic West



In Barbarian Migrations I dealt with the issue of narrative and the tyranny of a particular narrative of fifth century history – a theme I develop in my new book, Worlds of Arthur.  I tried to write a history in the ironic mode, a history, in other words, determined by unintended consequences of actions aimed at doing something else entirely.  My view of history is as something entirely chaotic.  The period from 550 to 650 presents a very different, if related, set of issues.  For one thing there is no overarching narrative of any sort, once the Roman Empire dissolves.  That is one reason why the importance of the decades around 600 has not really been realised, unlike in the East, where an imperial master-narrative still pertains. 



The Point de Capiton



It seems to me to be crucial to understanding this period to acknowledge that, after Justinian, his ideological output and especially after his wars and their failure to reconquer territories that he now proclaimed had been lost to barbarians, it was impossible to go on believing that Roman Empire still existed in the West, just as before.  By the end of the period that concerns me it was impossible to believe that in the East either, and many of the responses were analogous.  This has important implications.  For one thing and this is a weakness in Markus’ thinking, it cut away the key anchors of the old signifying system.  One is born into a world of language, of signification, which is why Lacan and Derrida were correct to reverse Saussure’s formula and insist on the priority of the signifier over the signified.  But the removal of, in Lacanian terms, the points de capiton of the classical signifying chain meant a fluidity of meanings.  If one were to combine that with Derrida’s not dissimilar view of language, then it seems to me that this would precisely render the old ways of thinking unsatisfactory in a new context, in the way that Markus failed to acknowledge. 

Help, however, was at hand.  One of the crucial changes of the fifth century – perhaps the crucial change of that century, more so than the old narrative of barbarian invasion, which makes it ironic that I didn’t really spot it in my book – is a shift in the way of seeing the world.  In the classical Roman vision, the centre, the core, of political legitimacy was defined by the ideals of the civic Roman male.  Closeness to that core, or distance from it – along analogous axes of barbarism, femininity or animalism – defined relative political legitimacy.  That nearness or distance was of course ultimately determined by those who controlled the imperial court.  For various reasons, that centre fractured in the fifth century and the world came to be structured in terms of religious orthodoxy, and distance from that, towards various heresies for example, was what defined illegitimacy.  You can track that shift at all sorts of levels of fifth-century politics and across a wide spectrum of cultural forms.  One advantage was that the centre, here, was less fixed but it is clear that this was still played out within an essentially Roman framework.  Many Christian values at this time mapped directly onto those of the civic Roman.  Compare the preambles of Valentinian III’s Novels with the laws of his great-grandfather and namesake Valentinian I and see how things have changed.  Even into the sixth century in the West, religious orthodoxy was still a matter linked with the Emperor.  In the East of course it continued to be but in the West what the Emperor thought largely became a matter of indifference after the Three Chapters Schism.  That increased concern with Christianity provides both the cause and the cure of the post-Roman anxieties of the period around 600.

The problem about being Christian in a post-Justinianic world was this.  At least for two and a half centuries, since Eusebius had synchronized biblical history with classical, the sixth age of the world had been seen as commensurate with the Roman Empire.  Christ, after all, had been born during the reign of the first Emperor.  Gregory of Tours added that Saint Martin, his hero, had been born during the reign of the first Christian Emperor.  So, what now?  Now that the Empire had so clearly ceased to exist?  This, I propose, is the key to understanding all sorts of aspects of this period.  Many of those alive in the decades around 600 – which they knew was 600 years after Christ – thought they were living after the end of history, after linear time.  Hence the new and apparently qualitatively different apocalypticism that one finds so strongly so strongly marked in Gregory the Great’s writings.  Less widely appreciated is the fact that similar concerns appear in the works of his direct contemporary and namesake, the Bishop of Tours.  Gregory seems to perceive the approaching end, almost malgré lui in Giselle de Nie’s reading.  In de Nie’s view, Gregory began with the idea of reassuring his readers that the end of the world was not nigh but by the time he finished the Histories the evidence of his eyes seemed to tell a different story.  Signs and wonders were on the increase and with them false prophets.  There is a lot in this.  The only problem is that the Preface to Book V of the Histories contains an unmistakable apocalyptic allusion.  Die Nie thus has to argue that V.Praef. was composed late and inserted into an earlier composition.  I’m not convinced by this and have argued that it is actually – at the opposite extreme – the first part of the Histories that Gregory composed.

So, what do you do in a world after time?  In a world devoid of its centuries-old fixed points?  The solution seems to have been to turn to another source of fixed points and underpinnings, the Bible.  Given the synchronism of Christianity and the Empire and the unpicking of the quilting points of the Roman signifying system, then it is not surprising that the Old Testament should have become more of a constant touchstone than before.

This new set of reference points works in a number of directions.  For one thing it allows western kings to find new forms of legitimation.  This is the moment when kings become new Davids and Solomons rather than new Constantines or Trajans.  Religious underpinnings of kingship come to the fore and in a new way.  Earlier, I contrasted the legal pronouncements of Valentinian I and Valentinian III.  If we skip forward another 100 years to the Edict of King Guntramn of Burgundy, issued before the Council of Chalon in 585 we see something qualitatively different again.  This, it seems to me, is the appearance of kingship as divine ministry.  Kingship is a God-given position you don’t find that under the Empire) and the king is responsible for the spiritual well-being of his people.  What I find interesting is that this royal document predates Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Rule by eight years or so.  This suggests to me that Gregory’s thinking, where there’s really nothing to allow a distinction between spiritual and secular pastors, may be rather more typical of his age than has been appreciated.  It suggests to me that the idea of the pastor as answerable for the souls of his flock – for which there were plentiful Old Testament reference points -  was keyed into the apocalypticism of the period.  A judgement was coming. 

Nonetheless, that was useful for royal ideology in what I suspect might have been something of a hegemonic crisis.  In the Empire there had been a what one can label, in Gramscian terms, a civil society in which normative codes served to maintain and legitimise the status quo.  With the unpicking of the classical points de capiton in the period up to c.550, all this will have been questioned.  Why should one do what one’s king said?  A religious – what has been called a monastic or ascetic – replacement must have helped to resolve that crisis.

It might also explain some other religious synchronicity.  In 589, Reccared of the Goths called the Third Council of Toledo, where he renounced the Arian creed that his people had followed for more than two centuries.  Within a decade of that, Æthelberht of Kent allowed Augustine’s mission into his lands and shortly afterwards converted to Christianity.  I have long thought that these events are linked in a current of political and religious thought.  The late and post-imperial trend of adopting a religion that differentiated the military élite from the civil, provincial population was coming to an end.  Perhaps this was because the two groups were by now indistinguishable.  By the time that Ripuarian Law was issued, for example, Romani, rather than being a parallel if legally disadvantaged group of the free population, were semi-free, dependant at law upon free Ripuarians – Franks.  Perhaps, too, in the new world, that way of thinking, locked as it was into an imperial framework, was no longer viable. 

In the intellectual climate of the late sixth century, with the idea of royal ministry gaining ground, perhaps universaility was more important.  This might be equally important inside and outside the former Empire and among former pagans as well as former heretics if – as I suspect was the case, the consciousness of living in a post-Roman world caused ideological crises there too.  This point is of course more readily grasped once one abandons the ‘Invasions’ narrative and sees barbaricum and the Empire not as two antagonistically-opposed worlds but as two inextricably linked parts of the same world. 

The other element of this conjuncture of material, social and mental circumstances was indeed those political crises.  I mentioned at the start the question of why these should have produced what I see as the collapse of the state at this time.  A crisis of the old hegemony would create conditions in which a new order of (in Gramscian terms) civil society could be created but in which also the rules of politics were significantly renegotiated.

A regional aristocracy that acquired a security of local pre-eminence and of the control of surplus could have done what it had done under the Christian Empire, got involved in urban building, sponsored and sent its children to civil schools, had its children educated in the old way, forged a class identity, a control of culture and taste and so on.  But the reference points for that were lacking.  The fixed points according to which the old culture was triangulated had gone.  So new aristocratic cultural forms – like royal – were needed.  Therefore it is at this time that aristocratic (and royal) involvement in monasteries really takes off across the West, from Rome itself as far as Britain.  This expression fits the intellectual currents I have described, not least the concern with ministry and the care of souls, and I suspect a concern with the Day of Judgement.  None of this denies the material advantages bestowed upon the élite by these new forms.  It serves to explain or at least thicken our description of the change in forms.

The coexistence of apocalyptic world view and continuing material politics can be well enough understood via the Lacanian formula much cited by Žižek: Je sais bien mais quand-même: I know very well [that the world is ending] but nevertheless [I’ll go on trying to do the best I can for my family via-à-vis everyone else’s].

We can thicken the description further by considering the nature of the changes in thought.  How does one conceive of a world after time?  The increase in the use of typology is key.  The epistemic change can be nicely illustrated by comparing two large-scale, long-term historical projects: Orosius’ Seven Books of History Against the Pagans, written c.417, and Gregory of Tours’ Ten Books of Histories, written 576-592.  The projects of both are similar to the extent that Gregory quotes Orosius in the key Preface to Book V.  Orosius, though, was more up-beat in his message than Gregory, something significant in itself.  However, although Orosius’ message is very much ‘it was ever thus’, his history unfolds in characteristically classical linear fashion.  Gregory’s Histories, by contrast, concentrate on his own time and are entirely discontinuous.  They work typologically.  The Histories begin not with Creation but with the Cain killing Abel, the type of the event that led Gregory to begin his work: Chilperic’s murder of his brother, Sigebert, in late 575.  After the end of linear time, consequences come about vertically, from God to earth according to the nature of human behaviour.  Gregory writes history as though it were hagiography.  Self-contained anecdotes have their own outcomes manifesting divine presence and they are piled high, typologically, repetitively. 

Pictish symbols: metaphors?

I have already mentioned the prevalence of the miraculous in explanation.  It has been shown, most recently in Charlotte Kingston’s PhD thesis, that Gregory the Great’s discussions of the miraculous manifest the same intellectual traits as his theological writings.  Gregory of Tours seems to reject theological debate in favour of miraculous proofs.  It might be the case, though, that the two Gregories can be brought together, alongside other cultural shifts around an increasingly metaphorical way of thinking.  The Isidorean Style of poetry works, I read, in analogous fashion to Gregory’s history/hagiography; it is episodic and works through synonym, paraphrase with no linear connection between verses.  The model, evidently, is the Psalms. The effect seems to me to be to unsettle and, thereby enable a shift to meditation on meaning, on the issues in question.  In that sense I think that Gregory the Great’s ‘freewheeling’ theology and Gregory of Tours’ preference for the ‘sign’ over the text (so to speak) might be more alike than has been appreciated.  It’s possible, idly, to wonder whether Style II on the one hand and the Pictish symbols on the other might themselves be different manifestations of a metaphoric current of thought.

Je sais bien mais quand-même…  We can return to the attractions of all this in a new political world, a new civic society.  Disjuncture, discontinuity, typology and metaphor might be very attractive to new or redefined élites.  The aristocracies on either side of the Channel, maybe north of Hadrian’s Wall and in other areas, even in Italy, were frequently new groups.  This is where typology and metaphor are so valuable.  They imply the ‘always, already’.  Groups with no lineal descent – even if trying to create such – find their justification typologically. 

So we can end by returning to the above-ground monuments.  If there is a link on occasion with the past, I think we ought to conceive of this in other than simply ancestral terms.  I think it is more important to see it as a discontinuous over-writing but above all the concern is with a monument that will last into the future.  The irony is that that concern with the future, which I see in the burial monuments, the retention of documents and their increased use, is that on the eve of the Apocalypse it was essentially a very short-term view!

Apocalypse soon?  Agilbert's Sarcophagus, Jouarre (c.670)
Does anyone know of an earlier depiction of the Day of
Judgement?

That leads me to my concluding thought.  The conjuncture of political, material and intellectual circumstances around 600 created a very specific world-view.  Within half a century the moment passed.  The world didn’t end.  Of course Apocalypticism persisted, but Bede, born not long after the end of my period, returned to the Augustinian idea that the Day of Judgement was not coming soon.  It is interesting that according to Mark Handley’s studies, after III Toledo, the use of the Spanish Era largely dropped out of use for a few decades.  To me it’s as though they thought they had better stop counting.  By the second quarter of the seventh century they had started again. 

Apocalyptic worries, c.700.  An inscription
from Mellobaudes Memoria, Les Dunes,
Poitiers: ALFA ET Ω INITIUM ET FINIS.
QUONIAM QUIDQUID QUOTIDIAE
PEIUS ET PEIUS QUONDIAM FINIS
APPROPRINQUIT

In Barbarian Migrations I narrated the end of the Roman Empire in ironic terms. 

The most ironic thing of all, however, is that during the preceding century it is almost impossible to identify a single figure who had actually tried to cause its demise.  All the decisive acts in bringing down the Empire were carried out by people attempting to create a better position for themselves within the sorts of imperial structures that had existed in the fourth century.

Similarly, if the mental, cultural and political world c.650 was more recognisably medieval, if many of the tramlines that defined ‘medieval’ thought, culture and politics were set in place around 600, then this was largely because many people thought the world would end at that sort of time.  That would mean that – if you like to think in these terms – the creation of the medieval world, like the end of the Roman Empire came about by accident.  It was a monument to history’s inevitable irony.

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.]