This is one of those wonderful moments in which something one reads for “breadth” turns out to be an essential spark for restarting the engine of the project one is supposed to be working on. But perhaps that’s not so surprising: the brain becomes attuned to thinking about certain things. It might not even strictly be thinking, because while new flashes of insight can come of it, it is really a kind of mental path of least resistance through which new information is processed by reference to old. The brain – or perhaps I should say ‘the mind’ – likes patterns. As shown in the famous, or infamous, pigeon experiment discussed by Richard Dawkins in The Enemies of Reason (above), it is attuned to seeking them in the exterior world; it is equally attuned to performing them in the interior mechanisms of thought. Thinking about, or returning to the familiar idea of codes and encoding as a mode of producing and understanding texts (whether we mean then or now) is one of my ‘mind habits’, as some readers may know.
So, speaking of patterns, I suppose no one ought to be surprised that this comment leapt out at me from Michael Camille’s discussion of Derrida’s engagement with the image of Socrates and Plato from Matthew Paris’ copy of The Prognostics (Oxford, Bodleian, MS Ashmole 304, f. 31v.), videlicet:
[a] message… is encoded and its decipherment is dependent upon the addresser and addressee sharing the same code.[1]
This is something I would regard as a fundamental assumption of my work. I do bang on quite a lot about the shared context or contacts of person A and person B that might permit B to understand a particular subtext in a letter from person A; to find it flattering, or persuasive, or off-putting, or even offensive. I maintain that good letter-writing in the high middle ages, or indeed any old time, is basically a balancing act in which received formulae have to be personalized and particularized without taking them out of the realm of the recognizable. The code, in other words, has/had to hold true, without the message appearing completely predetermined: disconnected from time, place, or person. That’s no easy task, and I don’t think the scribes and notaries of ‘formulaic’ texts get enough credit for their ability to put the needs and desires of individuals credibly into appropriate phrases. So far, so much like what some of you may have heard me talk about (perhaps ad nauseum?) at various conferences…
What suddenly struck me reading Camille this week was that for those outside the immediate communicative context of a given text (i.e. for those of us for whom understanding the addresser’s intended meaning isn’t an urgent or complete motive, whether it be through the luxury of academic distance or just the passage of time), perhaps not sharing the code, or understanding only part of it, or understanding it but also having other codes notionally available forms a fault line capable of generating new ways of theorizing communication in general. I don’t mean that misunderstanding the original message is desirable in a historian. However, it seems to me that thinking about it ‘sideways’, as it were, might be a productive philosophical exercise. It might be a process through which we can see the meta-communicative strategies and elements that were/could be at play without those hypothetical persons A and B even knowing.
Does that make sense? Or do I just need more sleep, and/or coffee?
Either way, Happy New Year!
[1] Michael Camille, ‘The Dissenting Image: A Postcard from Matthew Paris’, in Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages, ed. Rita Copeland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 115-50 (p. 120).
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January 8, 2013 at 10:41 am
Jonathan Jarrett
I think this does make sense, and I think that I think this because I’ve seen similar arguments deployed in the rather extended disputes over the importance of ritual in tenth-century kingship. This basically runs: (Gerd Althoff) Political behaviour in the Ottonian court is structured round rituals, so much so that the players have very little latitude to vary what they do from what is expected by the political community [who would be your outside audience here, for Althoff setting what he termed the Spielregeln, 'rules of the game' – my apologies if this is not new to you, by the way, I shall hope your readership profit by it...]; (Geoffrey Koziol) That’s really interesting because something like it is happening in France too but there there’s far more scope for negotiation and reorganisation of the rules than you show in Germany, (Philippe Buc) You’re all imagining it because our writers expect there to be rules and so tell the stories they have to fit that expectation, we can never know if there were rules or not; (Koziol) that kind of destroys all history, haven’t you got a more positivist approach?; (Buc) No positivism! (Stephen White) If you people were dispute scholars you’d realise it’s all about conflicting norms, plural sets of rules in opposition… and so it goes on. Certainly, political behaviour, be it Ottonian or Plantaganet, is played out before a political audience, as the lecture you linked in a previous post makes more than clear. Everyone seems to agree that what we see in the sources for it in the tenth century is concealing a huge amount of backstage negotiation, not necessarily between the main participants but certainly sometimes… But when we see elaborate court rituals, or even more so, elaborate ecclesiastical ones (coronation ordines, for example) I can’t help wondering who’s in on the code and whether the effects we see as intended in these behaviours are meant for more than a very few people.
For a classic example of misunderstanding by the audience, though, there’s always William I’s coronation! Orderic Vitalis, as usual on the basis of very uncertain information, records:
Sadly, only the first of several recorded incidents in which Norman knights’ reaction to unexpected events was to set fire to all the nearby houses…
January 8, 2013 at 2:03 pm
Kathleen Neal
This is a lovely and succinct summary of the early medieval ‘ritual’ debate, Jon. It’s not completely new to me (especially after so many years of reading Tenth Century Europe!) but yours is probably the coolest version I’ve met yet. Now I’d like to see it developed as a graphic novel…
Oh yes – I think I’ve met this episode of Orderic in a similar context once before. A classic. Surely an example of what Buc would call ‘Bad Ritual’?
A few thoughts more specific to the epistolary context arise from your comments. After Althoff: epistolary rules (which -despite Bucish reserve- we can say existed with more certainty than ‘ritual rules’, because, you know, folks wrote books about ‘em) did circumscribe letter production, and maybe the latitude of letter-writers wasn’t that great in absolute terms; and yet, (with Koziol), looking at letters themselves reveals that there was actually much more flexibility in these rules in practice than prescriptive texts like artes dictaminis otherwise admit; but also (with Buc, to an extent) the adherence or departure from these ‘rules’ by letter-writers certainly arises partly from their expectation that (a) letters have rules and (b) that letter recipients expect them, although I wouldn’t go so far as to say that rules were therefore meaningless or *merely* imaginary… I’m with Koziol on that front. My main criticism when I read The Dangers of Ritual was that it seemed to throw the baby out with the bath water, as it were… Anyway, I think we could probably run a not-precisely-identical-yet-parallel conversation off into the sunset, which is one reason why I’ve found reading Koziol, Buc et al. so useful in thinking about letters. In the end, meaning has to be wrung out of the spaces in the warp and weft of the bits that stick to rules, and the bits that don’t – but this only works if you also keep in mind what Gabby Spiegel called the ‘social logic of the text’ and its anticipated readership.
You also remind me that while letters appear to be doing the negotiation up-front, there is still a lot going on backstage (and in stage whispers if you listen closely); in fact it almost seems that a key function of letters is to perform exactly this kind of theatrical misdirection. I’m liking this metaphor: thanks again!
P.S. Welcome back to the interwebs! It feels like it’s been a while.
January 9, 2013 at 12:11 pm
Jonathan Jarrett
It’s been a while since I was in this part of the Interwebs, for sure, I’m sort of cycling through the blogs I’d like to have kept up with at the moment, and should have a couple more posts up myself in the next few days. But meanwhile, this:
is very well pointed out. One of my problems with the ‘ritual debate’ as you probably know, and with Stephen White’s competing norms ideas, is what happens when someone’s actually trying to be contrary? Althoff sort of considers this, at least, but finds it a less effective way to behave, largely on the basis of one example (a would-be rebel sleeping in the king’s bed at one of his palaces while he’s away). But at least he admits there are things that don’t fit the rules! But yes: as with your letters, so also with a ritual surrender or whatever: there are more people watching than just the key participants, even if the actual letter contents are going out under seal or the actual ritual’s in a private chapel…
January 9, 2013 at 6:55 pm
Kathleen Neal
Aha! Yes – How to be contrary without going completely off-piste is one of the many interesting phenomena. Sophie Ambler dealt with a nice robust occurrence of such expression in a paper I heard her give at KCL a few years ago, describing how the rebels under Simon de Montfort used deliberately affronting non-standard practices in a letter to the papal legate denying him entry to England. But most instances are less blunt – people aren’t generally in such a privileged (or desperate) position that they can afford to burn the bridge in this outrageous manner, even when they are actually very powerful. I’m grappling at the moment with how to describe a possible reading I detect in some royal correspondence, viz., the subtle expression of disdain and denigration albeit through language which complies to the letter (if you’ll excuse the pun) with both dictaminal and diplomatic expectations. In this case I’m thinking of the language is so standard I expect lots of people to think I’m a bit barmy, but I maintain that given the right receptive context it would have been possible. I suppose the point is not merely that there are as many readings of a letter (or ritual) as there are Normans with burning brands to hand, but that sometimes participants in letter-writing/rituals were probably actively exploiting this, and nudging the observer/s towards one (or more) of them with intent.
January 16, 2013 at 11:17 am
Enname
*takes notes quietly in the corner*
January 29, 2013 at 10:04 pm
Thomas Baudinette
Hi Kathleen, it’s Sam’s brother doing some procrastinaction!
I might not be overly familiar with epistolary and whatnot, but as an avid reader of Derrida (who I employ in my own sociolinguistic work) what I find particularly fascinating is the idea of ‘shared codes’. Perhaps we can take this a step further and say that without this shared code, it would be very difficult for person A to glean any kind of meaning behind person B’s text.
This puts me in mind of Derrida’s famous theory of ‘differance’, and I wonder how we could apply that to what you have all been discussing here. Unfortunately, I don’t have the necessary historical background to make these kinds of analyses
January 30, 2013 at 10:26 am
Kathleen Neal
Welcome Tom! I completely agree with you about shared codes being fundamental to meaning exchange. This is kind of what Eco was talking about when he argued for the centrality of reception in communication theory: if a message is to be received and understood, there have to be some recognisable rules to which it adheres, and its composition must take place with these in mind. If all communication were completely free, then there would be no possibility of conveying intent between individuals in the same time & social space, let alone of meaningful historical analysis of communication from other times/spaces. Of course, this doesn’t preclude the possibility that no two people’s codes perfectly align even if they each consider them to be shared, which is one way to account for misunderstandings like the one Jon raised above with the coronation of William I. However, since communication *can* evidently work, we also should assume that most of the time individuals’ concepts of what constitutes their shared code are reasonably congruent, flexible enough to adapt to minor deviation, and sensitive enough to recognise deliberate contrariness.