Tag Archives: assemblage

Autumn’s Assemblage

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I have to be honest, currently my life is a series of tasks–things I must get done in order to accomplish life-long goals.  Of course, I don’t mind this at all and I know it’s only temporary.  However, situations can get a little taxing at times (as I write this I see the clock spurting towards 8 pm and I’ve only just begun after completing a different project for another class).  It is when the going gets tough that I rely on my own assemblage the most.  Disclaimer:  I know there are elements of this assemblage that I am probably entirely unaware of, so let’s keep with what I deliberately put together in my knapsack of magic:

-My iPhone, my iPad, and my MacBook Air.  Yes, I have and need all three.  I am a big supporter of Apple Inc because I think that they have the best products, and Steve Jobs is a personal hero of mine.   When I’m in a tight spot I easily have access to all of my email addresses’ inboxes and my calendars on my iPhone.  If I were a knight, my iPhone would my dagger.  It is small, but when wielded correctly it can be very powerful.  (Siri is my magical fairy that goes and retrieves things for me).

-My red book bag.  I hate this bag and I would rather not talk about it–I am so tired of carrying around hundreds of pounds of books in it.  But, like an ugly pilgrimage coat, it is pretty vital to my survival.  This bag carries everything for me and even keeps my technology gadgets dry in times like that torrential downpour I walked several blocks in on Monday night.

-My loafers.  I have walked hundreds of miles in those.  They didn’t quite fit at first, but you can believe they have molded to my feet by now.

 

 

-Coffee.  This is pretty self-explanatory.  You know that magic potion that all fairy tales require?  It’s probably really just coffee.

I am almost to a Gold Card! (Also, another reason why I love my iPhone...I can pay for coffee with it on the Starbucks app!)

-And, finally, in my assemblage I have my values that guide all my actions (including why I have chosen the above items in particular).

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.

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 “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.

The rocks are the humans

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Latour wants us to do some major changing as humans when it comes to looking at innate things and for that matter so does Jane Bennett. The idea of granting power to where it seems to be coming from was exceptionally foreign to me before this class. While Jane Bennett’s motives for granting power are ethically driven, the motives of this class seem to focus more on creating a novel way of reading literature. It amazes me that we have the ability to take a fairly new and steadily emerging theory and apply it to texts that are 100s of years old.

Latour and Bennett both point out the heterogeneous nature of assemblages and the necessity of disentangling them in order to be able to see the agency of everything involved. I feel like this is one of the most important concepts in the entire class because without it I felt somewhat lost. The agency of things seems so much more comprehensible when you take into account the array of actants affecting the final outcome. It seems impossible to look at one particular thing and give it all the agency and power but people tend to do this all the time by giving all the power to humanity.

The rocks in The Franklin’s Tale were revisited during Monday’s class and I think they are a perfect example of the power of assemblages. The rocks never actually hurt anyone but the assemblage that they possibly unknowingly participated in caused a great deal of turmoil. The wife in this tale did not recognize the assemblage and placed all the power on the rocks claiming that they killed people and brought her great troubles. The rocks alone did not do these things. They worked within an assemblage of things such as the ocean, the boats, the men, and even the wife’s blame that caused them to be a burden. It’s interesting to think that if the wife had of never involved them in the relationship between her and her immoral suitor she may have never been faced with the obligation to betray her husband.

The power that the wife gave the rocks seem to be very much like the power that both Latour and Bennett are encouraging society not to give humans. The recognition of assemblages seems to be vastly important to successful thing theory readings of texts, social matters, and ethical matters.

Agency and God in “Biclarel”

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There is a lot of God present in this week’s Biclarel.  We have touched on the subject of God and agency a few times, so I would like to try to work through it myself as well.

In line thirty-three we are told that “As it pleased God, Biclarel / [has] a trait that he hid” (33-4).  We are well-aware that this trait is that Biclarel becomes a “beast / [t]wo or three whole days” every month (38-9).  Then, when Biclarel’s wife is begging for him to share his secret she invokes God by reminding him that God created all including their marriage, and that by hiding things from her he is “transgressing greatly against God” (61-70). She goes further by saying that God will abandon them (101) and hate Biclarel for his lying (108).  However, notice that it is not the threat of eternal damnation that prompts Biclarel to reveal his secret.  It is instead when she begs for death (138).

Let’s pause here.  Biclarel hides his secret and that pleases God.  Okay.  Does Biclarel does this because it pleases God, or is that just an unintentional result of him hiding his wolfhood for his own reasons?  I would argue the latter because, again, Biclarel isn’t really phased by these threats of God.  Could you say then that Biclarel doesn’t give God much agency?  Let’s continue….

Biclarel explains to his wife that he would speak to no one of his secret but God (151).  However, this is not his reason for keeping it secret.  He doesn’t keep his secret because God would disapprove, but because he “should nevermore have honour, / [n]or should [he] be esteemed in any court / [i]f everyone ever knew of it” (152-4).  He doesn’t fear God’s damnation for sharing his secret, but is instead afraid of how other people will react.  It is this reason and the previously mentioned one that I think that God does not have a lot (though he does have some) of agency in the assemblage of Biclarel’s life.

When Biclarel reveals his secret his wife says that if she were to reveal his secret she would lose God’s faith (190).  Biclarel never evokes the wrath of God on himself as a consequence for his revealing the secret.  However, for the wife God has a lot of agency.  This reminds me of yesterday’s class when we were discussing if agency is given.  Could I say here that the wife gives God a lot of agency in her life?  From what we have been studying, no.  Would it be right, then, to say that she is more aware of his agency?  That she recognizes it more than Biclarel?

Skipping to the end here I noticed that Biclarel doesn’t “commend [his wife] to the devil” like Melion does (Melion 581).  Instead, he requests only that she be killed—he doesn’t invoke the spiritual at all (453).

Horoscopes and Psychics

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Marion’s post about fortune cookies reminded me of a thought I had the last time few times I read my horoscope. Whenever I read my horoscope it always seems to be spot on or completely off the mark, never anywhere in between. Of course when everything it says seems to apply directly to me, I find everyone I can to read it aloud to so everyone can remark “wow! that’s so true about you!” and I usually try to make an effort to ingrain the advice it gave me so knowingly about my life into my brain to use to tackle my current debacles. However, when I read my horoscope and it seems to have nothing to do with me, I instantly write it off and think something along the lines of, “these stupid things are nonsense. I mean please, I wonder whose job it is to think up these ridiculous things.”

This reminded me of when we talked about how we only recognize an object’s ‘thing-ness’ when it doesn’t perform the way we expect it to. I find it interesting that humans, such as myself, can take a 100 word explanation and suggestion about their deepest secrets, thoughts, and feelings so much to heart if an assemblage happens to line up on the day. But when something doesn’t seem to fit, we write it off as something silly, seeing the horoscope for what it is, a made up prophecy written by someone somewhere who knows nothing about us as individuals and has probably only studied the characteristics of each sign.

To this day, I have been terrified to go to a psychic because of how real my few friends’ who have gone say it is. A psychic seems a lot harder to write off than a measly horoscope. It is interesting to think how the agency of a living person in front of you telling you things about your life has less agency than a piece of paper doing the same thing, even if both are equally accurate or equally inaccurate. I know we have spent the semester considering that all ‘things’ have equal agency but in this case it would seem that the human would exert more agency than the paper. But then again, that is because we, as humans, have whole assemblages associated with psychics telling the future rather than horoscopes which seem to verify that a psychic would have training or special powers or at least deal with you in person…

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.

Deliberate and Unacknowledged Assemblages in “Les Deus Amanz”

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Neustria

As I was reading Les Deus Amanz I noticed two assemblages in particular.  The first one I took notice of because of Jeffrey Cohen’s visit when he pointed out all the assemblages we had all put together on our desks.  So when I got to the part that describes all that the young man puts together to journey to see his mistress’s aunt the assemblage was pretty obvious.  I’d like to discuss this assemblage in two parts:  the deliberate assemblage and the unacknowledged assemblage.  By deliberate I mean the items that the young man deliberate gathers to take with him on his journey:  “rich clothes, money, / palfreys and pack mules; / only the most trustworthy of his men” (122-5), and the letter from his mistress (129).  This young man thought that these were the items that would aid him most on his journey and deemed them necessary.  However, the lai does not go into detail about how these things effect his journey so it is hard to say how agency is spread out among this assemblage.  However, we do know that the letter has great agency in aiding him in acquiring the potion (130-4).

However, the young man does not realize there would be a number of other things accompanying him on his journey—this is the unacknowledged or unanticipated assemblage.  This assemblage consists of all of the things that I have previously mentioned along with the advice of his mistress (118), the idea of retrieving the medicine (117), the king’s sadness (28) that makes a journey up a mountain requiring a strength potion necessary, and the years of his life in term of age that have not yet provided him with the title of adult leading the king to scoff at him (109-2).  All of these things (and more, I am sure) are all acting upon the young man and his situation.  Yet unlike the items that the young man deliberately collects to bring with him not all of these agents will aid him.

The same kinds of assemblages are present when the young man prepares himself to journey up the mountain—the second assemblage that stood out to me in the lai.  The deliberate: the mistress (174), the chemise the mistress wears (173), the small phial (175), and the potion (175).  The unacknowledged:  the mistress’s desire (166), the crowd who would distract the young man (193), and the young man’s lack of control (179) that results in the couple’s demise (203-27).  I would say that the young man’s lack of control is the agent with the most power here because it ends both of their lives.  If the lack of control had not been present perhaps the young man would have taken the potion and that would have had the most agency.

“Two Lovers Illustration” by Yoon.Ji Kim.  This is an interesting comic interpretation that I found online (clicking the picture should lead you to a larger version).  It didn’t occur to me that the mistress may have been overweight and needed to fast because of it.  I just thought the journey was tumultuous and long so she wanted to be as light as possible.  

Food and behaviour

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Bennett espouses the view that everyone’s mental and bodily reactions to food changes with time, as with Thoreau’s aversion to meat, which developed over the course of time: ““With every year”, fish-flesh became more and more viscerally unappealing. Eventually, he stops consuming “animal food””. We try to universally define food by forcing products into narrow pigeon-holes, as shown by Cornaro’s prescriptive text and others like it which speak of the perfect diet. However, it is ultimately impossible to fully predict how any one person will react when placed in an assemblage with anything they consume, even accounting for prior experience. We therefore must view things we consume as not just affecting our bodies, but also our behaviour, in ways unique to each of us. By doing this, humans can function better, because they will be able to understand their own behaviour, and moderate it more effectively.

These reactions that humans have to things they put into their bodies emphasises the power which things have in relation to us. Food is a necessity for survival, but it has also come to mean so much more, both culturally, and to the individual’s psyche. Bennett speaks about the impressive chemical capabilities of certain foods, specifically “a 35 percent reduction of offences amongst British prisoners given omega-3 fatty acids”. On a personal note, coffee sometimes give me a much-needed burst of energy, but sometimes make me super-hyper, so that reading or writing anything becomes near-impossible. However, individuals’ psychological interaction with food is also crucial to analysing the complex assemblage which humans and what they consume entails. Chocolate cake, for instance, can make a person enormously happy, because of its sweet taste, or make the same person on a different day feel greedy.

We must accept that we cannot always control the agency of things we put in our bodies, let alone the agency which our bodies display. If we do so, we can make reasoned allowances for the behaviour of ourselves and others, thus enabling us to work better as a social assemblage.