tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post3713036871172681443..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: The Forest Law and the Deer's Lively CarcassCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-36347391108598686342012-07-16T20:49:17.061-04:002012-07-16T20:49:17.061-04:00Ryan,
Yes, please do send me a copy of your articl...Ryan,<br />Yes, please do send me a copy of your article. I love Sykes' work, although I haven't read <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/norman-conquest-a-zoological-perspective/oclc/170033141&referer=brief_results" rel="nofollow">her monograph yet</a>, nor this <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/extinctions-and-invasions-a-social-history-of-british-fauna/oclc/520769004&referer=brief_results" rel="nofollow">anthology</a>, which I'm already regretting. Will be able to get to them only after NCS, sadly.<br /><br />We don't have a particularly detailed breaking: we have no sense, say, of the legs going to different folk, or the hanging up of the corbin bone, but still, I do think this law institutes something like the breaking procedure, in that the head and skin keep their importance (at least in later hunting manuals, as I'm sure you know, the skin goes to the person responsible for killing the deer -- so in this case, the distribution of the skin, ultimately, to the king ensures that the king's retroactively marked as the deer's killer). <br /><br />I think that irrational laws (from a human perspective) will be altered, but not easily: simply from an accounting perspective, hunting in post-conquest England was never rational, and I doubt its social capital outweighed the actual capital that enforested land could have generated had it been freed from the forest law. However, the forest law eventually faded, and English hunting assumed a wholly different cast: but this took centuries.<br /><br />In terms of what my goal is, to borrow from a recent email: <br /><br />My forest/carrion project's trying to avoid what I think of as two ways of reading medieval forests: anthropocentric rationalization, on the one hand, and psychoanalytic derationalization on the other. The latter gives us an interpretation of the weird aspects of forests as evidence of the failure of the logic of any system or human endeavor: the stain of the Real always presses against our logic, undoing its pretensions (eg Zizek), or humans have an urge towards waste (eg Bataille), etc etc. Anthropocentric rationalization either erases the seemingly illogical elements of the forest by saying that, in fact, it did produce a profit, or that forests weren't really for hunting (but see S. A. Mileson's recent <i>Parks in Medieval England</i>, which argues that parks were terribly expensive to maintain and that they were definitely for hunting); or it discovers how the seemingly non-profit-generating aspects of the park produce social capital. My trick is to take elements of the park as having their own reason to which humans are secondary: I don't have to give up on the rational elements of the park too quickly (as I think a psychoanalytic reading would do), but I don't have to reduce the rationality to human reason.medievalkarlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12440542200843836794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-61013805194476282972012-07-16T20:49:11.808-04:002012-07-16T20:49:11.808-04:00sorry Michael and Ryan for the tardy reply to your...sorry Michael and Ryan for the tardy reply to your excellent comments -- I've been traveling and preoccupied with various family matters.<br /><br />So, Michael -- I can't make that claim confidently, because I don't know much, say, about the hunting cultures of what's now Germany etc. I do know that post-conquest England institutes a particularly elaborate hunting culture and, well, biopolitics compared to France, and that we might find the origin for this culture in the conquest itself. I'm thinking the conquerors had a chance to remake the land, and hunting and parks offered the way to do this best.<br /><br />In re: Middle English lit -- maybe, but you've read <a href="http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/sgas41int.htm" rel="nofollow">King Edward and the Hermit</a>? Edward's hunting, gets lost in the forest, and is rescued by a poacher posing a holy hermit. Edward himself keeps his royal profession secret. Eventually, the "hermit" brags about his great success in poaching, shows Incognito Edward his bow, which Edward finds he can't draw. And that's it, basically. We're missing the romance's end, where, presumably, the hermit/poacher would have visited Edward's court and got his comeuppance/reward, so what we have is a romance that reveals the hermit/poacher--a kind of green man, certainly--as the true, best hunter, and Edward a sad imitation.<br /><br />The James Brundage thing is <i>fascinating</i> and definitely something I'll want to use in the longer version of this paper. I hadn't thought about 'natural law,' but that would be a rich direction to take all this, definitely.<br /><br />It's from the <a href="http://books.google.fr/books?id=Un1RAAAAYAAJ&dq=statutes%20at%20large%201765&pg=RA1-PA25#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow">Customs and Assizes of the Forest, here,</a> although I'd love to see this law re-edited from its manuscript, since this 18th-century edition is, I think, all we have right now.medievalkarlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12440542200843836794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-52773392979372336792012-06-29T15:10:19.121-04:002012-06-29T15:10:19.121-04:00This post was a very interesting read. I view medi...This post was a very interesting read. I view medieval hunting almost purely from an anthropocentric perspective, as an expression of various human values and ideologies projected onto animals and landscapes made to perform in sync with them, and so your angle is enlightening and makes me stretch mentally more than a little. Thank you.<br /><br />I wonder if you might find it useful to compare these carrion corpses and the apparent anxiety over what to do with them to the highly ritualized "breaking" at the end of the par-force hunt, which displays an extreme attention to the body of the deer, how to cut it apart, and where to distribute the meat (the king, the forester, the huntsman who brought the deer down, the clergy, the poor, etc.). Naomi Sykes has a couple of brilliant zooarchaelogical articles ("The Social Life of Venison" and "Zooarchaeology of the Norman Conquest") that show that the breaking ceremony took place in reality much as the hunting manuals idealize it. I also have an article coming out in Jan. in JEGP on chasing and breaking deer (from an anthropocentric perspective). If you think it would be of interest, I'd be happy to send you a copy.<br /><br />On another note, I wonder where one finds the limitations of the law as an agent? I would think that laws that become too "irrational" would be relatively easily modified, since the goal of the law is to express certain social or class values or maintain privilege or so forth. To what extent is it possible for a law, created by and for humans, to become a non-human assemblage with agentive force?<br /><br />Finally, I'm just starting to follow this blog and to read about object-oriented philosophy and such, so it's quite likely that I've just missed something that would be obvious to most, but I'm not quite clear where the end point of a discussion of forest law and deer corpses as nonhuman agents is. Does it teach us something about medieval culture? About human perceptions? Is the point that it doesn't have a clear outcome, but simply makes us think differently, which is a valuable goal in itself?<br /><br />Again, great read, and thanks.Ryan Judkinshttp://ryanrjudkins.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-84490520933750845732012-06-29T13:03:53.644-04:002012-06-29T13:03:53.644-04:00Fascinating indeed, Karl! I am curious as to wheth...Fascinating indeed, Karl! I am curious as to whether you’ve found this particular human and nonhuman assemblage, which seems to orbit, if unpredictably, around forest law, to be something peculiarly English—more specifically, Anglo-Norman? The medieval English (in literature, at least) were wont to give up control to green men and other feral forces of the forest in order to ultimately imbue their cultural character with a cultivated wildness. (Sorry for the alliteration; I only half-intended that!) But also, as James Brundage has noted in a book that I can’t fully recall, English assize judges publically appealed to notions of natural law in order to legitimate their legal decisions in the imagination of a rural people who wouldn’t see bias in a law sprouting organically from nature—and thus they would hold court underneath trees to give the impression of a law sprung from the earth rather than a human actant’s predilections.<br />And thus, for me at least, it seems comparisons of this sort can fold this all back into a bowl of human desire and cultural goals. Drawing a parallel between this and penitentials really helps to underscore the non-human agency here, though—perhaps more of that? To help move readers/audience members like me, who are stubbornly anthropocentric, beyond conceptualizing this (primarily) as a network of human desire and motivation, addressing philosophies of natural law and how what’s going on here is inexplicable in those frameworks might be useful. But this is a convincing read as is, and you only have so much time to talk about these things. But MAYBE such issues would come up in a Q&A. And maybe I’m completely off point.<br />Great stuff! Is this from Carta de Foresta, btw?<br /><br />Best,<br />michaelMichael Sarabiahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03364693856262276415noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-86393381138697987032012-06-26T16:00:20.305-04:002012-06-26T16:00:20.305-04:00Thanks "stantoro" and Jeffrey for your c...Thanks "stantoro" and Jeffrey for your comments (and thanks as well to a fb friend who sent me a private message with a lot of insider knowledge about deer hunting).<br /><br />"stantoro": YES. That's a great idea, and that's exactly what a more expansive posthumanism should attend to. As you probably know, a lot of critical animal theory does charismatic megafauna better than it does the weirder animals, or the swarming ones. And then there are animals that, in a sense, might as well be plants, or minerals. Like any discipline, it bumps up against its limit cases. Thinking of the scavengers strikes me as a necessary way, at the least, to challenge critical animal studies (and my own thinking).<br /><br />Jeffrey, thanks. That's a great question, and frankly it's the thing that's hardest for me to wrap my head around in new materialism/ooo. When Bennett's talking about the power outage in 2003, a lot of what she talks about are "heterogeneous concatenation[s] of the cultural and the material," different kinds of energy and energy regulation, for example. She's my model thinking here. I'm also on board with Bogost's 'unit' over Byrant's 'objects', because there's nothing that sounds 'material' about 'unit.' A unit really can be anything, both denotatively and connotatively.<br /><br />I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't done enough to get deep into Foucault, yet, since he seems to be cropping up even more strongly these days (Cary Wolfe's Biopolitics book is big on Foucault and Esposito, largely at the expense of Agamben, Ranciere, and Zizek, for example). However, what I like about Bennett and ooo for thinking through the Forest Law as a unit that includes humans, deer, poachers (and can't seem to find space for maggots and the erotic energies of deer), is that things aren't going to come back to humans. Here's where, I think (maybe wrongly), we get the advantage of Bennett and ooo over Foucault.<br /><br />As for your final questions, I don't know yet. My inclination is to say that bodies, in a traditional sense, have a different kind of being than ideas and practices, but that's just the inclination I'm questioning in my paper.medievalkarlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12440542200843836794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-30823624520178427992012-06-26T10:40:39.486-04:002012-06-26T10:40:39.486-04:00I like this a lot.
I am wondering, though: what h...I like this a lot.<br /><br />I am wondering, though: what happens when the new materialism and OOO encounter something that doesn't of itself possess much material heft, even as it exerts material effects? That is, hunting laws as a social assemblage used to be the thing one would do a Foucaultian or some other kind of constructivist analysis of. The new materialism mainly takes things as objects as its actants (even while placing them into an assemblage so that they can assert their agency). What changes (if anything) when the "object" isn't matter per se, but a heterogeneous concatenation of the cultural and the material? Does that make any difference at all?Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-27350167531734162462012-06-25T18:07:49.291-04:002012-06-25T18:07:49.291-04:00Most interesting. You might also think about other...Most interesting. You might also think about other nonhuman animals who are implicitly at play in the situation the law limns; viz., scavengers (birds and mammals) and parasites (maggots and worms) who could potentially make use of carrion in the forest before it was found and disposed of according to the statute, and whose interests would be harmed by an efficient human removal of the carcass, whatever its destination. Not a zero-sum game, obviously - one assumes that the statute holds even if it's been torn at, partially eaten, or decomposed by maggots to some extent (one wonders just how little would have to be left of a carcass before those responsible would just say, "oh fuck it").<br /><br />In any event, I think one could plausibly view these competing interests within the objective, posthuman frame you envision here.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com