ersatz, bodily crystal ball
CBC Ideas: The origins of the modern public Sept. 17 2010Episode 2 - The ReformationCBC Ideas is the only reason I listen to the radio. I already was excited about the content of their programming, but just last week I stumbled on a series of episodes discussing “The Origins of The Modern Public”, which at first glance sounds about as exciting as watching paint dry. However, episode two deals with, unbelievably, the subject of Transubstantiation and how it contributed to the birth of the Modern notion of public.
To listen to the entire episode click
here:In an instance of academic synchronicity, I attended a lecture at Goldsmiths University on Monday (Nov. 15 2010) led by Michael Newman discussing the development of the Modern Public. The main part of the lecture focused on the public typically being represented after the French Revolution by images of a hand holding the decapitated head of the King, signaling the severance of the state's sovereignty from the head of the king and transferring it to the ‘Body Politic’.
All further writing in this post will be drawing from information contained in the lecture and radio series (episodes 1-9).
I should really describe the images in the lecture as the dis-embodied hand of the ‘body politic’, holding the guillotined head of the King, as it points out a fundamental paradox that seems to emerge in the 1600’s, or ‘early modern’ period (as it’s now being called by a group of researchers called “Making Publics” based at McGill University in Montreal). This paradox is the problem of sovereignty; where it goes and how it is expressed.
Before I elaborate on this I will give a cursory outline for the key components of the birth of the Modern Public presented by the CBC, and if you want more detail you can listen to the archived podcasts.
(click More for a very long history lesson)
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In the episode that interests me, Torrance Kirby, Matthew Milner, and Robert Tittler talk about a new form of consciousness that emerges out of a few interlocking factors: the new technology of maps and navigation tools, the distillation of regional dialects into an official, written language and the corresponding invention of Grammar, and the printing press. These technologies allowed people to create a new relationship between themselves and the world. Suddenly someone in France could compare the size, literature, language, or costume of their country to that of Italy, England, or anywhere else that had access to the same technology. Suddenly the idea of being a citizen in a Nation, with an Official Language that could be distributed and read came into being. There were also radical advances in science that proved many sacred doctrines of the church (like the humours, astrological notions, etc) to be false.
Alongside these technological developments was the cataclysmic emergence of Protestantism. In 1534 the Affair of The Placards shook France when radicals used a printing press to produce a denouncement of the Catholic Church and put up flyers around Paris and the surrounding area.
In Germany, 1517, Martin Luther nailed The Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Church of All Saints and was excommunicated by the Pope.
In England, it’s 1532 and Henry VIII wants to divorce Catherine of Aragon, and defects from the Church of Rome to found the Church of England, but only after publicly denouncing Martin Luther and being awarded the title of “Defender of The Faith” by the Pope.
The key issue that united these refusals of Rome was that of Transubstantiation. It refers to the practice of eating bread and drinking wine, as outlined at the Last Supper by Jesus before he is sacrificed. A person is considered to consume what is called the Host and the Eucharist, which in the Catholic tradition is thought to be not only bread (or cracker) and wine (or grape juice), but also the blood and body of Christ incarnate. Pre-modern minds treated the activity as an allegory; the deed and the idea were one.
Protestantism proposed that this was at best absurd, at worst evil, and that the Eucharist was an empty sign, referring to nothing other than the belief held by the person consuming. As their take on the doctrine developed, they became known as Iconoclasts (literally: destroyers of images) and throughout the Reformation destroyed Catholic objects, imagery and decoration in cathedrals.
For Protestantism, the rituals and objects stood between the believer and God, and the only way for someone to receive the Host was directly by The Word. This shifted culture from one of embodied practices to one of persuasion, or salvation through Evangelism (Etymological root: Good News).
This was bad news for the Monarchy. The sovereignty of the King was determined by his being appointed by God. He was literally the Host incarnate, the embodiment of Divinity. If Protestantism was right, then it would not be possible for the King to be possessed by the Host, and thus his sovereign right to rule was compromised. Also, since he was the living incarnation of the God-Head, he got to decide how the entire country would practice religion. Saying the King wasn’t possessed amounted to not only heresy, but anarchy as well.
This, alongside the technological developments, demanded that subjects begin to make up their own minds about what they thought was necessary for salvation and subjectivity. As Protestantism grew, the Monarchy needed to assert itself as still relevant. St. Paul's Cathedral in London began a series of what you could call public sermons, where groups of individuals came to listen to pastors preach about the falsity of Transubstantiation, and also the relevance of the monarchy in-spite of the King not being ordained by God. The interesting thing about these sermons was that they were not mandatory. Previously, if a subject did not attend Sunday Mass, they risked being imprisoned. For the first time in history, people were gathering on a basis of personal interest and investment. There was not as large a pedagogical effort in France, who preferred to kill off Protestants by burning them at the stake or by hanging. Riots broke out across Europe as leaders switched religions by the decade. A subject could no longer trust the ruler to decide how they would be saved, so they started to decide for themselves, to see themselves as an individual in a body of invisible, but likeminded ‘others’ who shared their belief, opposed by an (also) invisible group of people with an opposing set of values.
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Through all this it becomes clear just how dependent the political sphere was on religious pedagogy, and how this defined the inner life of a subject. This brings me back to the idea that sovereignty moved from the head of the King to the Body Politic, which was just beginning to develop. For the first time society, and by extension subjectivity, was thought of as something to be discussed, or publicly debated.
The Body Politic became sovereign, and here lies the paradox that interests me. First, sovereignty was exclusive to men. Women were relegated to an increasingly restrictive and patriarchal domestic sphere (it didn’t always exist that way!) and the care of a newly invented class of citizens, children*. Servants were not considered citizens either, and thus both groups were denied access to sovereignty. It was limited to landowners, men. Queen Elizabeth even had to de-sex herself (referring to herself as a virgin, or with male pronouns) in order to have access to the sovereignty required to rule.
The second point of paradox is in the location of sovereignty. Both Politics and Religion were contained in the head of the King. After his head was cut off, Sovereignty was said to move into the Body Politic. However, this was in large part instigated by Protestantism, which, by attacking Transubstantiation, removed embodiment from politics and religion. In this way Sovereignty is still located in the head; the mouth for discussion and evangelizing, and the ears for hearing the Word.
Sovereignty was thought to be a lived practice, or embodied, and available to one person. From there it was abstracted into Language, and available to a few people. The key myths commonly preached during this time were the
Tower of Babel, an example of language dividing, and the
Day of Pentecost, where people are possessed by every different tongue (The Word), and unified through language. People were divorced forcibly from ritualized objects, and rigid forms of taxonomy began to develop, the kind typified later in the Enlightenment. The body was forgotten in favour of the mind, subjective experience replaced by reason, and Calvin burnt anyone who disagreed.
As it turns out, this was not a cursory post. Instead, I will consider this an outline for a further trajectory of inquiry. Where did sovereignty go? What does it mean now? Walter Benjamin wrote about the Melancholic - the sovereign who is overwhelmed by objects and unable to decide. He is joined by Agamben describing sovereignty as ‘he who decides the exception to the law’. Where is individual sovereignty located, regardless of gender? Where is sovereignty without exclusion? Can I locate sovereignty in my body, rather than in my head? Can I exorcise this possession of rhetoric, not hear the Word, but practice it in ritual?
To come: attempts at providing answers for these questions, especially in the context of what looks like a return to Feudalism for industrialized Western society, thanks to the WMF and the collapse of the economy.
*this is a topic that warrants many more essays.
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