Afterthoughts Brian Stock Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 3. (Autumn, 1986), pp. 73-78. Stable URL hitp:/flinks.jstor-org/siisici=0300-7162% 28198623% 29 16% 3A3%3C73%3AA%3E2. CO%3B2-1 Diacritics is currently published by The Johns Hopkins iniversity Press, Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hup:/www,jstororglabout/terms.hml. ISTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at hutp:/wwwjstor.org/joumals/jhup.himl. ch copy of any part of'a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission, ISTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @ jstor.org. hupulwww jstor.org/ Sat May 20 08:07:55 2006RESPONSE AFTERTHOUGHTS BRIAN STOCK lam grateful to Eugene Vance fora thoughtful review. What | have in mind here is nota reply in the normal sense. We are agreed on fundamentals; and | need not remind readers of this journal than an author's rereading of his text, especially after a time lapse of a half a decade, is bound to be something of a new departure. What | should like to do instead isto {try to respond to an issue implied in the review which has been put to me ina variety of ways by other readers. Thisis the question ofthe book's intellectual background: where my ideas ‘come from, how they evolved overtime, and how I see The Implications of Literacy i rela tion to other teends in history and theory. Let us begin with the situation, as I saw it, some fiteen years ago, when the project ini tially took shape. AS an intellectual historian with interests in contemporary thought, | was aware of being isolated in two senses. Firs, there were few medievaliss who shared my background in such fields as anthropology, philosophy, and critical theory. The conceptual schemes one encountered in writing about the Middle Ages were largely models inherited from the past. One thinks of such enduring figures as Pirenne, Huizinga, Haskins, Marc Bloch, or Etienne Gilson. When | began my research, there was no single figure in the field to whom one naturally turned for a new conceptualization, as, fr instance, many anthro pologists turned to LévStrauss in the 1960s. The great refugee scholars of a previous genera- tion, some of whom I had the privilege of knowing. were passing from the scene. Ernst Kantorowicz and Erich Auerbach were dead; and Erwin Panofsky, who initially ofered me advice, died long before Iwas able to put my thoughts on paper. I should add that the men- tality ofthese scholars trained before World War II, and in some cases before World War was necessarily rather different from my own. loften liked to think of one or another of them as providing an ideal model. But this turned out to be an illusion, After a number of unsuc- cessful attempts to utilize earlier interpretations, | concluded that what | most respected in these venerable figures was not a specifie method but a tradition of serious learning. When it ‘came down to comparing notes on actual projects, | was aware of a disturbing dissonance between their ways of doing things and my own. A different dimension of isolation arose from simply being a medievalist during the 1960s. Earlier, no one would have much questioned this sort of scholarly orientation. Before World War Il, all humanists had a certain amount of classics and medieval studies as par of their literary and historical curriculum. In Europe an introduction to the Middle Ages aso formed part ofthe programme of national” histories, which were then entering a decisive phase. In Germany, popular medievalism underpinned a number of excesses, such as the search for “Volk” roots, or the transformation of Wagner into a political liturgy. In France, ‘more than a few chartistes were members of the Action Francaise. Rightly or wrongly, ‘medieval studies was associated in both countries (as well as in the minds of a minority of Germanists in England and the United States) with a type of traditionalism which was tolerant of the displacement of democracy in the name of a return to a vague ethnico political heritage. After the War, it was natural that scholars should turn to unmedieval disciplines, if not unhstorical ones, in order to create anew outlook. The most renowned sg1oup of medievalists in France since the War is centered loosely around Annales, a journal 74Afterthoughts diacritics / fall 1986 2hich is notable for is relative lack of interest in the literary, philosophical, and above all theological aspects of medieval culture which were the focus of most French medievalss before the War Gncluding such outstanding defenders of civil liberties as Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson). Inthe heady atmosphere of Pais in the 1960s, in which I found myself ait voluntarily leaving Cambridge, medievaiss were not winning scholarly popularity con tess. Had it not been for men lke Jacques Le Gof, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Georges Duby, whose investigations were both medieval and contemporary, the subject might well have sipped entirely ou of the educated imagination in France. “This account isa byproduct of my own experience, and, however overgeneralized it ‘may be, | feel that it roughly characterizes the situation in which | found myself when | began to contemplate some studies in medieval literacy. What it seemed to me the field needed was new directions. There were many texts which had come to light in some three quarters ofa century of manuscript research; there were many more awaiting edi- tors in the great collections of Pais, London, the Vatican, and elsewhere. These needed to be integrated into the overall picture of medieval cultural development. But there was a ‘mote serious problem as wel. In addition to the necessity of broadening the empirical bas, the theoretical or interpretive framework needed to be almost entirely ethought. it ‘was not thatthe older questions of chronology, literary history, or philological analysis were wrong; but the configuring of issues within old models had effectively prevented many new questions from being asked. Interal histories of the various branches of medieval culture, such as art, Iterature, and philosophy, had made much progres. In sgeneral, the field had been placed on a more scientific footing than ever before. But the Concerns of medieval had become overspecialized, and scholars had los the ability to ‘communicate directly withthe public on issues of contemporary relevance. Like Eugene Vance, | believed that some ofthese issues arose in the Middle Ages. Accordingly, it was to medieval culture that we were obliged to return if we were to have a deeper under- standing of them. The method I chose for dealing with my subject, the rebirth of literacy, goes back to Burckhardt: it was to abandon strict chronology and to treat diferent aspects ofa civliza- tion simultaneously. Each separate discussion could then approach the book's central theme through a diferent type of evidence. This method has been adopted in our time by ‘wo major historians, Kantorowicz and Foucault neither of whom would have felt com- fortable withthe comparison to Burckhardt or withthe comparison to each other) In The King’ Two Bodies, Kantorowicz said that his purpose was "to understand and, if possible, to demonstrate how, by what means and methods, certain axioms of a political theology—which, mutatis mutandls, was to remain valid until the twentieth century, be- fan to be developed during the Middle Ages” [The Kings Two Bodies vii. By restricting himself toa single theme within the field, he added, he hoped to avoid “certain dangers customary with some alltoo-sweeping and ambitious studies in the history of ideas” (o Foucaulfs means were somewhat similar, but his objectives were diferent. His purpose ‘was to demonstrate how certain continuities in representation masked confcts, contra- dictions, and hidden power relations in society. If Kantorowicz provided us with one of the great imaginative reconstuctions of Weimar culture, Foucault persuasively reinstated the role of language in shaping the concepts through which we understand social and cultural change. He insisted that we not study disciplines as had most medievalists, but instead nexuses of epistemology. Foucault, it seemed to me, had also adapted the bes in Structuralism to his own needs, without abandoning, as Edward Said has noted in The World, the Text. and the Critic, a sincere concern forthe manner in which texts influence behavior I come by this circuitous route to two issues appropriately raised by Eugene Vance: Cone, the intentional restriction of my overall scope, So that afew points could be docu- ‘mented and defended; and two, the placing of language and culture atthe center ofthe debate, athough not in quite the way Foucault would have wished. {should perhaps say a word at this point about my relationship to what is commonly known as mentalité. There have been so many recent accounts ofthe origins and devel ‘opment ofthe French school of social psychology that there is no need for me to tell the diacritics / fall 1986 7story again.’ In any case, | was 100 young to have experienced anything but the recent chapter of a long history. It is also fashionable nowadays to associate oneself with An: rnales, even if that association is often more emotional than intellectual. In view of the popularity of the “school” I should perhaps state clearly that my methodological presup- Positions do not fit squarely into the Annales tradition in at least one respect. The major influence on my outlook is not postwar French history, including Marc Bloch (who did not have much influence on mentalité before the War), but rather an eclectic group of German historians of literature and culture, who profoundly redrew the map of medieval intellectual development just about the time their own political system was collapsing. | have already mentioned Auerbach and Kantorowicz; | should add the members of the Frankfurt School, as well as followers of Wilhelm Dilthey, including the remarkable Wal- ter Goetz. It was only after the influence of such figures, and many more,* was well established that | had the opportunity to work in Paris and to compare my methods with those of innovative French historians. | have since learned a great deal from them as well, in particular from Georges Duby. But | am not, as is sometimes maintained, a byproduct ‘of Annales,” however great is my debt to friends like Jacques Le Goff and the opportuni- ties they gave me ata critical point in my work. The French tradition was grafted onto an already existing German one. While | am considering intellectual background | should mention the greatest of the ‘Weimar figures in social history, Max Weber. My book does not take up recognizably ‘Weberian problems such as charisma, institution building, or bureaucracy. But, as review- cers have often failed to notice, Weber exerts an underground influence throughout. The key issue is found in the well-known set of definitions which precedes Economy and Society and consists of the subjective components of purposeful social action (see Max ‘Weber's Economy and Society: an Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Roth and Wittich eds New York: 1968. Vol. 1, ch. 1, 4-24). Weber was concerned among other matters with the multiple roles of subjectivity against the backdrop of a progressive objectification through economic and social change, and he saw western religion asthe stage on which the unique dramas of “rationalization” and “modernization” took place. | have tried to take the discussion ina different direction. I saw as one of my tasks the questioning of the link between literacy and rationality implied in many classical pictures of human develop- ment, although not, | might add, in Weber himself, who maintained, as did Nietzsche, that instrumental rationality was both a principle of liberation and enslavement. Yet Weber healthy skepticism about rationality never crystallized into a statement about literacy and society, and later commentators, like Habermas, who have taken the philoso- phy of communications seriously, have not notably broadened the historical basis of Weber's generalizations (see Habermas, 143-271). Foucault, | might add, in whom such matters were critical, only touched on the Middle Ages in his first book, Madness and Givilzation, while Derrida—to whose vocabulary much recent discussion is indebted —is chiefly interested, ike most historians of philosophy, in great minds rather than in social changes, The problem of rationality, in my view, could not be solved by historical analysis alone, since historians, by and large, sill consider writings to be objective repositories of ‘meaning or truth, whereas I was prepared to look upon every source of historical infor mation as a “text” that is, as a repository of both subjective and objective components. ‘One could not proceed, as many historians do, by means of a contemporary adaptation (of a medieval allegorical method, and look for a kernel of truth beneath the integument ‘of conflicting opinions, sources, and types of evidence--the historian, so to speak, play ing a god in a positvistic cosmos in which readers and audiences did not participate in meaningful ways. In my view, as far as the problem of literacy was concerned, there were ro privileged texts, no hidden truths. Each text was what it was, a work of language, “Yor 2 wel recent review of the ise, see Roger Charter, “intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The Fench Trajectories: n D.laCapra and S. Kaplan, eds, Modern European Intellectual History. Reapprasals and New Perspectives. thaca: Cornell UP. 1982: 13-46, “Ido not mention persons sil alive should perhaps make an exception Jor Gerhart Ladner. see the thoughtul review of Implications by 5. C. Nichol, J, Jn Speculum 61 (1966): 208-09, 76discourse, and imagination, irreducible to anything else, unable to suggest special rela tions independent ofits context. This was tantamount to looking upon all medieval texts, ‘no matter whether they were historical, philosophical, or theological, as works of litera: ture, They may or may not have treated “events” or established “facts” but they were all written “discourses” Their central feature was simply their textuality. In adopting this strategy, | attempted to undermine the sense of privilege enjoyed by certain genres, notably theology, which the medievals regarded as “the queen of the sciences” But | engaged in this destructive activity for a good reason. By de-emphasizing artificial diflerences between texts, | endeavored to restore the potential to reveal many dimen: sions to all medieval texts. Orality, then, as | saw it in the context of my own work, was not an independent issue, inseparable from textualty In the Middle Ages, as in other cultures, the oral cannot be discussed intelligently without some reference to the written, as Derrida has consis ently emphasized. Words are linguistically embedded in texts, and the records of oral discourse are all in fact texts. As statements about orality, texts automatically undercut the postion they are trying to establish. They have all committed the original sin of being ‘written down (which is, incidentally, one of the understated themes of medieval com- mentaries on Genesis). Oralty, then, and text production are parts of the same dialectical processes in which word and text are intertelated in much the same way as language and thought. In my view, the only way one could frame a defensible hypothesis about medic val oralty in its social context was fist to restore to texts their full spoken and written Contexts—a task which, | was compelled to note, medievalists had avoided in favor of endless minor modifications of the Parry and Lord thesis on oral composition and per- formance (ef. Paul Zumthor, “The Text and the Voice," New Literary History 16 (1984): 67~ 92). In order to avoid ths labyrinth, into which so many of my colleagues had unwittingly stumbled, never to emerge, as wel as to present my own approach coherently, | arbtrar- ily decided to limit my study to the Latin Middle Ages and to a relatively narrow time: zone around the turn of the eleventh century. | was aware that | was neglecting much else. | said nothing about Judaism or islam, and litle about early Christianity; and, as Eugene Vance and 8. G, Nichols, Jr, have diplomatically noted, very little about Old French, twas here that anthropology was of great use. | had studied physical anthropology as part of my medical training, and | had a reasonable library in such areas as ethnogra- phy, occult belies, and curative systems, to which | was in the habit of turning for bedtime reading somewhat in the way that the Edwardians turned to travel books, But it ‘as owing to the kindness of two good friends, jacques Le Goff and Natalie Davis, that | saw the potential of anthropology for my own work. There is no single anthropological _guru behind my book, although the voices of Jack Goody, Clifford Geert, Victor Turner, and Erving Goffman can frequently be heard. Rather, what appeared to me was the possibilty that historians and anthropologists are part of the same discipline. This had been suggested by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and emphatically restated by Keith Thomas, but the idea was not really exploited until the late 1960s, when anthropologists became less ‘concerned with fieldwork and more and more concerned with asking what they were doing in the field. It now seemed to them that they were not only observers but partici- pants and shapers of the societies they studied. This interest in subjectivity combined ‘with the utilization of historical documentation, as in the case ofS. J. Tambiah and the later work of Marshall Sahlins. Medievalsts were also venturing into the territory. From a large number of studies 1 might mention the work of Jean-Claude Schmitt, the popularly successful books of Carlo Ginzburg, and, on the literary dimension, the Ftymologies and Genealogies of R. Howard Bloch. | suspect that anthropological history will never become 2 dominant force in medieval studies. But it has already brought about a substantial reexamination of archaic attitudes. There was another sense in which it seemed to me that the time was ripe for a cultural anthropology of the Latin Middle Ages. The last direct link between the period which Curtis aptly described as a “structural unity’ and more recent culture lay in the Catholic Church. Despite efforts at revival like neo:Thomism, the Church has gradually moved away from a direct involvement with medieval culture. In my view, a symbolically diacritics / fall 1986 7