In last week’s post I was
determined to discredit Achille Mbembe’s necropolitical taunts about the
romance of individual sovereignty. It seemed to me that in the particular case
of Sir Gawain the thorny experience
of reading and the traction of genre expectation impeded the wholesale
application of Mbembe’s argument about killing to a text so fixated on the act
of it. It would appear as though in my challenge of an impulse to apply Mbembe
to Sir Gawain I have made the
individual sovereign and triumphant.
But then, I feel
Bruno Latour, of the essay “Networks, Societies and Spheres,” aggressively tap
my shoulder, nudging me to think otherwise. He reminds me that “to believe in
the existence either of individual or of society is simply a way to say that we
have been deprived of information on the individuals we started with; that we
have little knowledge about their interactions; that we have lost the precise
conduits through which what we call ‘the whole’ actually circulates. In effect,
we have jettisoned the goal of understanding what the collective existence is
all about”(12). In simpler terms,
Latour chides me for not getting enough data. And I must admit that analyzing
Gawain alone omits a lot of data. For when we try determine Gawain’s character,
or the “drama of identity” in Patterson’s terms, we must analyze in reality a
series of interactions and performative roles: Gawain as knight in King
Arthur’s court, as challenger to the Green Knight, as traveler in Bertilak’s
inn, as beloved of Bertilak’s wife, etc. At the very moment that we as an
audience could begin to state who Gawain is, we find Gawain is networked with
many others becoming a profile of various connections.
Still, Latour does
not characterize our lack of data as a simple omission or innocuous
forgetfulness that can be recovered; he calls the lack that leads to our
conception of the individual as a deprivation
and as a loss. Defining the myth
of the individual and the insufficient data that created this myth in this
fashion recalls Jacques Lacan’s psychological concept of lack wherein as humans, the objects of our desire are always beyond
our grasp. In these terms, our quest to get to “the whole” Latour argues always
escapes us.
I find that the
inability to get to a “whole” Gawain is a point of anxiety that marks the text
itself—particularly as Gawain and those in his network try to attach meaning to
the green girdle. At the end of the poem, Gawain adopts the green girdle as a
marker of his virtue. Yet, in his 1983 essay “Unlocking What’s Locked: Gawain’s
Green Girdle”, Ralph Hanna points out that the Green Girdle gains an assigned
meaning from every major character in the text: Bertilak’s wife, Bertilak,
Gawain and King Arthur’s court[1].
Hanna concludes that in the characters’ insistence on creating some meaning
from the green girdle “…the poem
approximates a process of discovery or exploration, the process of recognizing
the persistent intractability of experience, its potential variousness, and the
often self-willed limitation of human efforts to comprehend that variousness.
The multitude of interpretations to which characters subject a green silk belt
adorned with gold thread suggests both the difficulty of knowing a simple
physical object and the potential caprice involved in all human claims to
knowledge” (158). I draw attention
to Hanna’s argument about the slippery semiotics of interpreting one singular
object within the frame of the poem illustrates that not only can we have
difficulty identifying all the ways Gawain is networked but also how difficult
it can be for the network to orient itself around objects, Gawain and events.
In other words, it is not enough for scholars to pick out who is networked to
whom, or how they are networked to each other, but also how the network
wrestles with its reality in the grip of a lack of data. I wonder, in this
world of lack, where even the actors and networks we study are also bounded in
lack, that instead of defining individuals (as we are want to do) or listing
their attributes (as Latour suggests ANT should do), if we should rather list
the ways individuals define themselves.
Additional Works Cited:
Hanna, Ralph. "Unlocking What's Locked: Gawain's Green Girdle." Viator 14 (1983): 289-301. Reprinted in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Norton Critical Edition. Eds. Marie Borroff and Laura L. Howes. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. 144-158.
[1] The wife
presents the girdle to Gawain as an object of magic that can help him evade his
death. Bertilak later characterizes the girdle as a sign of his conquest over
Gawain. Gawain names the girdle as a sign of his cowardice. Lastly, the fellow
knights of the Round Table hail the girdle as a sign of their shared humanity.
4 comments:
Hi Ashley,
As I was reading your post, I found myself questioning your reading of Latour. It seems that you argue that he offers a pessimistic view of society's chance at reaching a collective understanding, "our quest to get to 'the whole.'" However, I see his speech as largely optimistic, viewing the advances of networking as clearly incomplete, but still full of possibility. Although Gawain's wearing the girdle is a symbol of his individual humanity and cowardice, it is also a natural connection to other human beings, a sign of mortality and Arthurian honor (i.e. through penance). If we view the girdle as a symbolic representation of Gawain's connection to the other knights, since Arthur and his followers choose to wear similarly colored cloth in solidarity with Gawain, I wonder to what extent a network is created by the object itself and the social understanding of it, or, conversely, by Gawain alone through wearing the girdle. If there is a lack of data for categorizing common attributes, what are some elements that demonstrate this lack in the text? I see the girdle as a symbol of overcoming individuality, since it centrally ties Gawain to others. If you think it would be beneficial to list the ways that individuals define themselves, then to what extent is this list imperatively connected to relationships?
-Zach
Hey Ashley,
Thank you for drawing our attention again to this long passage from Latour about the folly of believing in the individual/society construct. On one hand, I can totally buy his explanation of what a society consists of. That a "society" (whether that be humanity in general or a specific population) can be described as the birds-eye-view of very many complex, overlapping networks, makes sense to me.
However, I'm still unclear as to how exactly those constitutive networks break down. What is a network? Is it six degrees of Kevin Bacon, where the connections only exist between individual people? If it is, what exactly makes my relative or friend part of my network? Lineage, location, similar interests? Do non-human elements such as ecology create and sustain networks? Unfortunately this is the only text by Latour that I've read, so maybe somewhere else in his body of work my confusion is addressed.
Your discussion of Latour's concern with the deprivation and loss that supposedly accompanies our inability to grasp the "precise conduits through which … 'the whole' actually circulates" reminds me of Derrida's discussion of "totalization" in "Structure, Sign, and Play". Here's a quote from page 289:
"If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field -- that is, language and a finite language -- excludes totalization."
Putting this quotes next to each other, it seems like Latour's language of information starvation belongs with Derrida's description of the former, mistaken reason for judging totalization impossible: that we simply don't have the means to do it (yet).
Derrida on the other hand, seems to me to be saying that if we adopt a different "field" or viewpoint of structures (such as society), then totalization (or "the whole") is excluded, becomes invalid and unnecessary on the field of play.
Thank you Zach and Jenny for your comments.
While I could see how reading Latour's speech about ANT theory is quite optimistic, my object of analysis this week was the question of "deprivation." For Latour, the impulse to read the individual as the locus of action was not simply an omission but a "deprivation" which I read as a Lacanian sense that we can never get everything. This focus on "deprivation" was not necessarily to suggest that ANT was bad or that Latour was not optimistic-- but rather to suggest that even in a text where we can "identify" networks, merely identifying common attributes, like the girdle, is not sufficient enough for us to understand the girdle. In other words, saying that the characters are linked by the girdle is not enough: and in fact, the characters' understandings of themselves in relation to the girdle reveal misunderstandings and "lack" of connection among themselves. The fact, for instance, that Gawain's shame in the girdle can then be used to show universal humanity by Arthur's court or conquest by Bertilak shows that even while the characters are connected by the green girdle, saying they are connected to Gawain through the girdle does not do enough service to show the disruptures and disjunctures as well as their quests to comprehend and appropriate Gawain's material existence for their own self-identification. By opening up this example of the green girdle, I hoped to demonstrate how ANT theory, while optimistic, requires even deeper work than identifying networks between characters especially when characters themselves are found "in lack"/deprived of the evidences "needed" to read their connections with each other.
But, on the other hand, I guess that this inability to get to "a whole" sense of a text, even when we can edge towards it, is very much like Derrida's sense of totalization. In fact, since we can only ever uncover some data, but never "all" of it, I think it is quite fruitful to look at the play going on in the network! Instead of focusing on how the characters, as I suggest, never quite fully "get" their connection we can focus instead on how the connections between each other and objects are misappropriated, reappropriated, understood, misunderstood and constructed. For instance, by somehow seeing Gawain's Green Girdle, the court somehow feels the need to create their own signification of the girdle. How come? and how do they come to the signification they do? Why are these connections there in the first place? And what does it mean for the connections to be constructed the way they are?
As a final note, Jenny, in We Were Never Modern Latour frames his book as a project aimed to dismantle the binaries between what we call "nature" and what we call "culture" by suggesting that the materials we use from nature construct our culture and that our views of nature are filtered through the lenses of our culture.
Thanks for the dialogue, y'all. It's always helpful and exciting to talk more about our reactions to texts and our reactions to others' reactions to our reactions about the text.
Hiya, Ashley et al.:
I think I’ll throw my support behind Ashley’s interpretation of Latour here. I agree, Zach, that Latour himself frames things in very optimistic terms: the shift from what a thing is to what a thing has represents for Latour a means of bypassing or retheorizing enigmatic binaries like nature/culture. However, I’d say Latour’s argument hinges on the assumption of perfectly legible data. Inside the network, idealized and fully describable entities—defined by their individual collations of attributes and producing networks by their mutual overlap (or something like that)—are only meaningful insofar as their attributes are identifiable. Ashley, your emphasis on lack and deprivation seems to point toward this potential impairment. Or, put differently, Latour’s network theory leads to a question of interpretation, the question of which data are meaningful in which contexts, and how to read them. (Seems as though several posts on Latour have pointed out this problem in some form—Jenny, I think you bring up this idea of legibility by questioning which attributes might constitute a network.)
Also, Ashley, you make a good observation about Derridean play: paying attention to play is a means of identifying the ways a text fails to be whole. The girdle becomes a slippery locus for signification then, for us as much as for the characters who variously reread and misread it. Something similar happens in “Ghosts, Cowboys”: the story is built as a set of alternate readings (and potential misreadings) of “the story” of the narrator’s mother’s death (2). The narrator eventually frames this process of re-telling as an attempt to “weigh [history] upon [her]self” (20), by which she suggests that the numerous retellings and alternate beginnings of “the story” become performative acts of historiography, a kind of miniature project of fictionalized archival research into her mother’s and father’s lives. In a previous post on Latour I argued that these retellings might be conceived of as “profiles” of histories, each possessing a set of atemporal attributes and linked to the others by the overlap of these attributes, but this ignores the problem of loss that Ashley points out. Rather, because each alternate retelling lies alongside the next, neither more or less valid than any other, it might be more fruitful to think of the narrator as engaged in an act of narrative play. And this impetus toward play, moreover, stems from lack, loss, or incompleteness—the incompleteness of the narrator’s understanding of her own origins. I see evidence of this lack in the way that certain images and bodies either acquire an oversaturation of attributed meaning or repeatedly refuse to signify. Silver, for example, crops up in several of the narrator’s retellings: as the Comstock Lode, as “cursed dust” (3) that is later dispersed by a nuclear detonation, and as the “hairlike silver ribbons” of a woman’s kidney tumors (8). The character called Razor Blade Baby, in contrast, remains stubbornly enigmatic—the audience and the narrator are always unsure of her presence and relation to to the body of the narrator herself. Even the circumstances of her birth—out of Charles Manson’s infamous Family—function only to obscure any notion of origins.
To wrap up I’ll bring this back to the notion of reading and legibility. In “Ghosts, Cowboys,” reading is carried out in a performative fashion, as a reading of the past. Narrative play, maybe, compensates for narrative lack. Can we read the girdle in Gawain similarly? that is, do the rereadings, misreadings, and competing glosses of the girdle indicate a kind of play in which characters are engaged? Or is our anxiety over the girdle, as readers, perhaps symptomatic of some kind of historical-textual lack in our encounter with the text itself? I’m curious to hear y’all’s take on this.
Hope this has been productive—
AB
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