Author Archives: Maranda Christy

Final Thoughts

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In studying object-oriented theory over the course of the semester, I feel like I have undergone a fundamental transformation in how I relate to the world around me. I pay attention to things more than I ever have before. Putting things or objects into separate categories has become something I question on a daily basis, which is remarkable considering how normalized a practice it was before these ideas were introduced to me.

In reference to an example from the beginning of class: a window is not simply a window, an opaque object which one looks through in order to view something on the other side. Now, I look at a window and I notice it for what it is, not what it is (or how it is supposed to function) in relation to me. As a human being, there will always be limitations to how I am going to perceive the world, especially in relation to myself, but this class has shown me how all things, human and nonhuman, actually work together.

No longer can I consciously and/or casually dismiss an object as insignificant, knowing that it has its place in a larger network or assemblage that might also, potentially, count me as one of its participants. Humans are neither the lowest nor the highest, nor can we consider ourselves in terms of inferiority or superiority. In this way, the “natural” order of things might not be so natural after all.

As much as I have struggled to wrap my brain around these concepts, I have also gradually integrated them into the most mundane corners of my life. For instance, simply walking down the street is a completely new experience. The street I’m walking on, the small animals in the trees, the grass that covers the ground, the door I eventually open—all of these are actants with equal agency and, perhaps even, equal vibrancy. Ultimately, the sights, sounds, and smells of everyday life take on new meaning when viewed through the lens of an object-oriented ontology.

Paper Proposal

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For this final paper, I plan on writing about the hybrid nature of the werewolf in Marie de France’s Bisclavret. I’ll be using some the critical resources from my annotated bibliography (all of which deal with ‘animal studies’ in some way) to explore my subject in detail. I am interested in the question: who (what?) is the real monster in this story? If it is an important distinction to make, then how does that affect our interpretation of the werewolf’s actions?

Furthermore, it seems that he is happier in his “werewolf” form than in his human form; what does this suggest about our tendency to value humans over animals/beasts/monsters regardless of the individual worth of the animal or human in question? Animals that retain some semblance of humanity are looked upon with less derision precisely because they are more human and less “beastly.” The hybrid nature of the werewolf is such that it is considered an abomination to nature—it is neither a human nor a monster (occupying some “freakish” in-between state) and anything less than fully human is inevitably, even willfully, misunderstood by humans.

I particularly like the ideas surrounding Jeffrey Cohen’s “monster theory.” He talks about the simultaneous materiality/immateriality of monsters (in this case, werewolves) and, how, as humans, that is a frightening prospect because they defy categorization, in a very physical sense of the word. I will probably also utilize Charlotte Otten’s article in which she discusses the physical state versus mental state of being a werewolf, i.e. there are degrees of “beastliness.” Should one who transforms into the state of a beast (although maintaining human thoughts and judgments) still be considered a beast?

These are just some of the ideas I am considering, but I haven’t nailed down an exact argument yet. As far as a title, I have no idea, but I was thinking that “The Hybrid Nature of Werewolves” will work for now.

A Negative Assemblage

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Is there such a thing as a negative assemblage? In Marie de France’s Equitan, we see how the love affair between the king and his seneschal’s wife is wrong and will have terrible consequences for them in the end. Marie is clearly subverting the courtly love virtues of the time (like ones espoused in Guigemar for instance) in her cynical (rather than sincere or straightforward) presentation of the love affair.

In the courtly love tradition, love was not really love without pain and suffering. Truly loving someone could be described as fundamentally irrational, but necessary for the love to say alive. However, it is obvious that, in this story, their love is characterized by destructive tendencies. The affair literally destroys them—it is a lack of loyalty, honor, or discretion leads them toward a painful demise.

Ultimately, the message is one of reciprocity: your evil deeds will not go unpunished. At the end, she admonishes: “whoever wants to hear some sound advice/can profit from this example:/he who plans evil for another/may have that evil rebound back on him” (lines 307-310).  The “love” assemblage in this story, not only does not work, but proves to be fatal for both lovers. They committed the sin of loving too strongly, the irony being than in any other story “loving too strongly” is often viewed as a virtue.

We think of assemblages as working toward the common good, but are they all necessarily performing this function?  The affair (demonstrating the “power” of love) in Equitan does not end well for the ones involved. The resolution of the love affair suggests that something was out of balance in the first place. The king values his love over his loyalty, and in doing so, allows his passion to overwhelm his reason. Considering the primary imbalance of the assemblage, it is clear that the fate of the unfaithful couple will not end well.

The Transcendent Power of Love in “Eliduc”

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What is the significance of the weasel scene in Marie de France’s Eliduc? Eliduc’s complicated love life comes to a head when his wife finds out about his affair with another woman. Surprisingly, her reaction is one of acceptance rather than anger. In fact, she goes so far as to bring his love back to life in an imitation of how the weasel brought his companion to life with the red flower.

It is significant that the weasels exemplify love’s power in this scene—its power to heal or destroy. In resituating its mate, the weasel also embodies the importance of loyalty or fidelity in the relationships between Eliduc and the two women. It is interesting that weasels would be used as the medium to express the ways in which love can overcome potential pettiness or jealousy and even death itself. The weasels’ love is not inferior; the love between the two weasels is analogous to the love between the two humans.

The wife’s reaction (i.e. to imitate their actions rather than dismiss them) shows how love transcends the divide between human and nonhuman. The exhibition of loving traits, even in the bodies of animals, does not alter the meaning of love itself but reaffirms the power of love to transcend body, space, and time. There are certainly different forms of love (and a ‘divine’ love may indeed be more important than an earthly one), but the fact remains: the weasels show how, in at least one respect, animal behavior mirrors its human counterparts.

The weasels may be important in and of themselves but, in renewing life through an act of love, they almost rise above the animal body itself—that kind of power is no respecter of artificial bodily boundaries. In portraying the scene as charming rather than ridiculous, the story illustrates the agency of love and the implied agency of the nonhuman actants as well.

The “Agency” of God

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There has been a lot said about how God (or more broadly, the divine) fits into our object-oriented understanding of agency. I remain confused as to how God can fit into an assemblage and still be God. First of all, I have to admit that thinking about spiritual matters in relation to the theory we’ve been delving into for the past few weeks requires effort on my part—it’s forcing me to rethink the way I think about the world and how I know all things to be related to each other.

For instance, if God is simply another part of the assemblage (with just as much weight as any of the other objects or non-objects), then must we rethink his uniqueness as a divine being? I understand, from our recent discussions, that an assemblage is more complicated than that—i.e. there are degrees of agency within any given network or assemblage. Fair enough, but I fail to see how God fits into all of this.

By its very nature, belief in God requires a person to accept that God is above all of us, including human beings. His ways are not our ways; his thoughts are not our thoughts, etc. I’m not saying it is ridiculous to include spirituality in object-oriented theory (or that the two are fundamentally incompatible), but its inclusion does raise interesting questions. Does the divine presence of God take away from the agency of ordinary objects? For example, should we understand the cherries in Sir Cleges as having its own particular kinds of effects independent from God, even though He made them in the first place?

Even the werewolves (whose hybrid nature complicates our need for the strict divide between human and non-human) in Bisclavret, Melion, and Biclarel seem to embody an agency with which I struggle to apply to God. It’s telling that I can accept food, power outages, or even werewolves as possessing agency, but as soon as God is thrown into the mix, I’m immediately suspicious.

I, for one, find it problematic to say that God is a part of an assemblage when I feel that He operates in a realm beyond human/non-human understanding. However, if I step back and look at it from another perspective, I can see how the spiritual makes sense in an assemblage. It is this process of reevaluation (in reference to my own preconceived notions) that pushes me toward a more comprehensive understanding of how God may fit into object-oriented theory.

Escaping a Symbolic Reading of Chevrefoil

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In Chevrefoil, the love of Tristan and his queen is encompassed in the metaphor of the hazel tree and the honeysuckle. The two are inseparable, like the “honeysuckle that attaches itself to the hazel tree/…the two can survive together/but if someone tries to separate them/the hazel dies quickly/and the honeysuckle with it” (69-76).Their love is of such vital importance that they would never voluntarily leave each other. Consequently, an external force, or agent, is requited to turn their love into a destructive thing. In light of these parallels, the hazel tree-honeysuckle scenario is nearly impossible (for me, at least) not to read symbolically.

However, the “piece of wood” the queen sees on the hillside is a sign that only she can interpret. It derives meaning through their exchange, but it also has meaning in and of itself. Why choose a piece of wood, for instance? There were other “things” in the woods that he could have chosen which would have been just as appropriate for his purpose, but perhaps the wood chose itself as a messenger, rather than the other way around. In that case, not just any other thing would have worked to transmit the secret signal.

Their joy comes about “by means of the stick he inscribed” (109). They could not have experienced those moments of happiness together without the wood’s effort in communicating a message. One could say that the wood was merely acting on their behalf, which brings us back to considering it as an object of human agency (a conduit of human desire) rather than an agent that works within a larger network of assemblages. Who’s to say that this second possibility isn’t true though? Sure, its immediate purpose is to communicate a message from one lover to another, but it still acts within a network of other actants and events—its sole existence doesn’t rely on the human narrative that is imprinted upon it.

Bisclavret’s Humanity?

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Bisclavret changes the way we perceive human versus non-human. The monster (werewolf) in the story is not actually a “monster” at all—he is noble and loyal to the king. Even the king recognizes this, marveling at how a “beast” bows before him in respect. Interestingly, the king says that the beast’s “sense is human.” Even though a beast, he never loses his sense of dignity. He, instead, retains his humanity. The story says he acts like “a noble man,” which implies that perhaps he has not undergone a complete transformation of body and mind.

Projecting human qualities, even onto a werewolf, makes him more acceptable (and less savage), but what does that say about how we value non-humans? Non-humans are automatically imbued with a savage quality, while humans (no matter how uncivilized) are assumed to be above certain kinds of behavior. However, we then have to ask ourselves, who is portrayed as the real monster in this story? His wife, who acts selfishly throughout, is the monster, while he is the noble hero.

Although it could be argued that the beast retains his humanity, it does not explain why he seems content to leave his wife and his human existence. In fact, he is noticeably at his happiest when he is being kept like a pet by the king at the end. The king’s approval pleases him more than his wife ever did. So, does this mean that he has forsaken his humanity in favor of living as a werewolf? Like Jeffrey Cohen mentioned in class, what is so wrong with preferring the non-human over the human? It seems preposterous that he might actually want to be a werewolf for whatever reason.

How does his wife react toward him? His wife, once she finds out about his plight, demands that he return to his humanity. She pays the price for her betrayal in the violence done to her in the end, but it is questionable whether she deserves quite such a harsh fate as that. For all that the beast displays good qualities he is still a beast and understandably reacted to as something to be feared.

All in all, does he (or should he?) reconcile his animalistic impulses with the fact that he seems to retain some “human” qualities as well.

Embracing Change

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The social sciences, according to Bruno Latour, seek to explain the “presence of something at once invisible yet tangible, taken for granted yet surprising, mundane but of baffling subtlety…” (Latour 21). We, as human beings, struggle to define our social interactions by labeling them. However, most of these interactions (especially involving non-human entities) are so complex as to preclude the need for strict categorization. In attempting to tame “the wild beast”, we forget that the beast resists our attempts to categorize it.

Other disciplines, like cartography, use abstract means of making sense of its findings. Latour says that (in reference to the community of social sciences), “we, too, should find our firm ground on shifting sands…” (Latour 24). Making sense of the world requires a theoretical standpoint, particularly when dealing with the social. A more abstract approach is the better way to tackle questions and/or problems of such enormous complexity, rather than preempting the reactions with a ready-made box to facilitate “organization.”

Latour defends ANT theory in conveying the overall message that the social sciences need to embrace change. Rather than rely on strict categories to define or order the social, sociologists should get used to the unpredictability inherent in trying to explain the interactions between the human and non-human. Also, recognizing that social forces are unpredictable puts more of the emphasis on the reactions, rather than the one observing the reactions (who most likely has a preconceived notion for what “category” something fits in anyway). In other words, “the task of defining and ordering the social should be left to the actors themselves, not taken up by the analyst” (Latour 23). Latour’s whole concept of “reassembling the social” centers on, first, changing what we perceive to belong in a certain category and, then, questioning the usefulness of those categories in and of themselves.

Edible Matter as “Vibrant” Matter

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Thinking of food or “edible matter” in terms of assemblages encourages us to go beyond treating food as something we consume on the basis free will. Without conscious acknowledgement, we all enter into a rather intimate relationship with food every day that isn’t entirely dependent on what we, as consumers, want to eat. The food has just as much of an effect on us as we have on it.

We eat to survive, but our survival isn’t the only part of the equation—we, like edible matter, are only one part of a larger network or assemblage. And while the act of eating is usually conceptualized as a reciprocal relationship, the implications of this reciprocity are rarely contemplated.

The act of eating a potato chip, for instance, can be thought of in terms of an “assemblage.” Bennett is not asserting that our actions are devoid of intention, but that intentionality is beset by other factors that lessen its importance. The hand reaching for the chip is “…only quasi- or semiintentional, for the chips themselves seem to call forth, or provoke and stoke, the manual labor” (Bennett 40). This scenario calls into question how much an action is dependent on the subject and how much is dependent on that which is considered an object. In contrast to how we view ourselves as the sole “actants” in an event, the potato chip is active in its influence over our actions.

As far as the debate over what influences our collective eating habits is concerned, we usually look to the media in ascribing blame. Asserting that the food itself is an active influence is something entirely unique. However, that doesn’t mean we should turn around and blame food for the “obesity crisis” in the absence of another more appropriate entity to blame. Bennett is trying to get away from this human tendency in emphasizing the fact that “matter” (whether intentionally or not) works within networks too complex to attribute individual culpability.

Everything (even food in this case) works together to create a “living” world. Vibrancy cannot be measured in weight, height, or value—all things are equally vibrant for the simple fact that they “persist in existing.” Things have a tendency to fade into the background, but they enrich our lives in numerous (often incomprehensible) ways. Jane Bennett’s notion that objects occupy the roles of “context, tool, and constraint” is an undeniably accurate description of how most of us perceive objects in relation to us. As part of an all-encompassing “background,” objects (including edible matter) blend into the world in a way that deemphasizes their agency.

Familial Relationships in Sir Degaré

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Family is a central part of the narrative in Sir Degaré. Abandoned as a child, Degaré’s main purpose is in the search for his family and, by extension, a respectable place in society.

Degaré attains knighthood through physical strength, but his journey as a character is more complex than rescuing an earl from a dragon or defeating a king in combat. In showing bravery and overcoming obstacles through sheer physical power, he is lead closer and closer to a reunion with his family. However, there are unforeseen complications. For example, he gains a marriage to his own mother (unbeknownst to him at the time) in his triumph over the king in battle.

It also struck me that the story was like an inverted version of the tragedy of Oedipus. Sir Degaré marries his mother, but realizes the error in time to avoid consummating the relationship. He fights his father in the end, but ultimately does not kill him. During the inevitable confrontation between father and son, a reconciliation occurs rather than the “standard” death of the father. This is an unusual outcome for a story dealing with issues of patrimony and quasi-incest. For instance, Mordred (the illegitimate son of King Arthur in Arthurian legend), kills his own father in battle.

In light of everything that happened in the story, the family situation is, at best, confusing. How could his mother reunite with the father in the end after she had been raped by the very same “fairy knight?” It seems like a happy ending until the implications of what they all mean to each other sinks in, which is to say: how do they all relate to one another? In fact, I would characterize the ending as curiously happy considering the seemingly uncomplicated reunion of his parents in conjunction with any lingering issues of resentment he should have felt toward them for abandoning him as a child.