no, first he wrote the medium is the message, then he wrote a short
book with the pun you cite. so we're both right.
r
On Jan 23, 2005, at 4:42 PM, Joann McNamara wrote:
medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion
and culture
ArialI simply
can't resist interjecting a little pedantry into this lofty
discussion. Marshall McLuhan wrote The Medium is the Massage----not
the "message."
ArialJo Ann McNamara
Arial----- Original Message
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Arial
From:
0000,0000,EEEErichard
landes
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0000,0000,EEEE[log in to unmask]
ArialSent:Arial
Sunday, January 23, 2005 1:43 PM
ArialSubject:Arial
Re: [M-R] Method and ugliness
On Jan 23, 2005, at 12:27 PM, Jim Bugslag wrote:
medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and
culture
okay, i'll bite; what do you mean by foucauldian? what's the fence i
can't sit on?
Richard,
Although somewhat unintended, it appears we have a discussion on our
hands. It
might even turn into a thread! By Foucauldian, I was referring to
Michel Foucault's
"archeology" of knowledge, principally enunciated in his book, The
Order of Things,
in which he equates knowledge and power on a theoretical level.
here's part of what i have trouble with. related? of course. equated?
why? what does that mean?
I can hardly
pretend to be an expert on Foucault, but I think that it is important
to make such
connections explicit, particularly for the Middle Ages, when what
written sources that
we have were virtually all written by a clerical elite, whose
activities, first in creating
them and subsequently in archiving them, served their own hegemonic
ends.
agreed. one of my main points about apocalyptic discourse (the End --
however conceived -- is nigh) is that since it's always wrong (End
still not here), while churchmen (and women) may have waxed
apocalyptic, the archivists and copyists do the clean-up job on what
they said. hence augustine rules the documentary world (a real
hegemonic discourse about Revelation) in a way that i
doubt he ruled the oral world.
my problem with hegemonic discourse as i most often see it invoked, is
that as far as i can make out there is no unitary hegemonic end that
unites all these clerical voices. granted there are some that carry
particularly great weight -- eg the welfare of the church -- but even
that is up for grabs at various points of reform when what is "good
for the church" changes tack. this is where the equation of power and
knowledge becomes problematic. indeed, what is so striking about
medieval western europe is how contentious the discourse was, and how
often "knowledge" subverted various forms of power. when you can't see
that happening (eg in the various phases of the peace of god) and
insist that the discourse is a hegemonic one from the start (ie the
bishops "peace", or the "seigneurial" peace) then i think you miss
critical nodes of transformative rather than hegemonic discourse.
Practices and ideas that do not conform to their interests only rarely
get mentioned
and at that, are mentioned only in a negative or proscriptive sense
(e.g. in
inquisition records, when they were being prosecuted in an attempt to
stamp them
out).
precisely. and we need to look for the vestiges of what is being
repressed and ask ourselves what role these discourses played in oral
culture (ie the world where, among other things, political decisions
are made), which in most cases may differ radically from the
impression given by written sources.
As Marshall McLuhan put it back in the 60s, "the medium *is* the
message".
and that was one of McLuhan's problems -- he had a brilliant insight:
"the medium *is* *a* message, and he packaged it (to illustrate the
point) as *the* message. medium is incredibly important and much
underestimated by scholars who assume literacy and therefore identify
most easily with the literate (ie the clergy who produce their
documents). but so is content.
That is why, I believe, the subsequent discussion about "urban
legends" has taken
the tone it has: the very "medium" represents social and ideological
interests that
not everyone shares.
what medium? urban legends? or written documentation.
In historical terms, that makes for something of a
methodological quagmire (although one that might be theorized down to a
minimum, if there were an adequate effort at it).
you mean becoming aware of the problem may help us deal with it? i'm
in favor. i'm just not sure that foucault, despite his brilliance, is
the best theoretical handle.
That is why I mentioned
ethnography, which takes a very different approach to "legends", which
it takes for
granted represents *somebody*'s social interests and tries to analyse
them in order
to see how they fit into broader social patterns and structures.
one of the things i've noticed is that people can believe things that
are not in their interests, and that to analyze things in this
functional way (e.g., the documentary hypothesis with the Bible) is
only partly useful, and often misleading. it leads to a kind of venal
marxism where everyone is corrupt and only says things to serve
personal or corporate interests understood in the basest (zeero-sum)
terms. i think that while that is going on, there's more as well.
You began this discussion (unintentionally) by clearly distinguishing
"urban
legends" from "sources". Yet, you seem, as well, to be implying that
you have
somehow been making use of "oral sources" in your work. From where I'm
sitting,
that is sitting on both sides of the same fence.
when i heard it was an urban legend, i assumed that meant that the
story of a beguine refused entry for being beautiful and scarring her
face to get in was not to be found in the medieval sources, but in
modern, uinfootnoted discourse (ie if i cd remember where i'd read it,
i'd find it didn't have a footnote). when i asked if it were an urban
legend, i meant, "do we have a narrative from the 13th? cn that tells
this tale -- whether it actually happened or not (another level of
"urban legend"). we may have confused levels of urban legend here.
r (from blizzard-swept boston)
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