Volume 3 of Groundings Ancients

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GROUNDINGS ANCIENTS Volume 3, April 2015 www.groundings-ancients.co.uk

EDITORIAL BOARD Ilian Mitev, Editor-in-Chief Lucy Lou, Managing Editor Peter Stewart, Production Editor

(Glasgow) (Edinburgh) (Glasgow)

Hanna Bailey Jonathan Bertulis-Fernandes Andrew Cluness Emily Grant Klara Kofen Imants Latkovskis Fiona Macdonald Ruairidh MacIntosh Carl Pierer Linn Vardheim Zoe Whittall

(Aberdeen) (St Andrews) (Aberdeen) (St Andrews) (Glasgow) (Glasgow) (Glasgow) (St Andrews) (Edinburgh) (Edinburgh) (Edinburgh)

ACADEMIC ADVISORY BOARD Dr Ben Colburn Dr Faye Donnelly Dr Elizabeth Elliot Dr Emma Hart Dr Lotte Hoek Dr Catherine Jones Dr Stephen Marritt Dr Robert Mason Dr Angela McClanahan Professor Elizabeth Moignard Dr Samantha Newington Dr Christopher Ogden

(Glasgow) (St Andrews) (Aberdeen) (St Andrews) (Edinburgh) (Aberdeen) (Glasgow) (Edinburgh) (Edinburgh) (Glasgow) (Aberdeen) (St Andrews)

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FRONT COVER Mark McCahill Peter Stewart Crests reproduced with the permission of the Universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and St Andrews TEXT © The contributors WITH FINANCIAL SUPPORT FROM THE University of Aberdeen University of Edinburgh University of Glasgow University of St Andrews WITH THANKS TO Greta Loughlan PRINTED BY J. Thomson Colour Printers, Glasgow PUBLISHED BY Glasgow University Dialectic Society Glasgow University Union, 32 University Avenue, Glasgow, G12 8LX

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CONTENTS Editorial

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Columba at Keil Point: Uncovering the Myth

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Alex Alexander and Allan Stroud (Glasgow) An Anthropology of American Gun Culture: the Productive Tension between Ideology and Embodiment

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Joseph Anderson (Edinburgh) Oppressive Realities: Reconstructing Children’s Agency through the School Experience

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Walt Andrews (St Andrews) The Construction of the (Convincing) Child Subject in Victorian literature

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Katie Arthur (Glasgow) Thinking at the Limits of Humanity: Humanism, Otherness, and Queer Materialisms

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Michael Awdankiewicz (Edinburgh) Expressions of Violence as Determining Reality in Archilochus

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Maxwell Fabiszewski (St Andrews) Eating Disorders in the United States Military: Approaching Incidence and Treatment through the Tensions between Institutional and Gendered Identities

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Emily Grant (St Andrews)

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Engaging with the Troubles: the Role of Art as Explored in the Poetry of Ciaran Carson and Derek Mahon

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Helen King (Aberdeen) Romanian Pig Sacrifices: a Discussion of Peasants’ Engagement with Their Surroundings

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Alexandra Onofrei (Aberdeen) Mythical Measures: the Problem of Objective Inequality Measurement in Economics and the Social Sciences

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Max Schröder (Glasgow) 'I Have Had My Vision': the Tension between Change and Eternity in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and James Joyce's Ulysses

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Sarah Spence (Aberdeen) Exploring Crises of Identity in Contemporary Japanese Film through an Analysis of Perfect Blue

Zoë Vincent (Edinburgh)

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EDITORIAL Produced in a year dominated by debates on the Scottish Independence Question, Groundings Ancients’ second volume was an inwardly concentrated effort, focusing on Scotland and the United Kingdom. Conversely, volume three expands the journal’s paradigm, examining topics broader both spatially and intellectually, while still keeping a degree of relevance to home. Spatially, it centres on foreign lands, examining the Romanian, Japanese, and American cultures. Intellectually, it assesses the limits of human thought, objectivity and agency. Keeping with the journal’s promise of quality and diversity, this elaboration preserves our dedication to inter-disciplinarity and high standards, while retaining relevance. In keeping with tradition, each Ancients University explores a theme of its own. The themes are a direct product of each University’s particular mood and atmosphere, filtered through their respective student editors and the subjects they inhabit. Concentrating on their individual strengths resulted in the following themes: Aberdeen - ‘Separation and Engagement’; Edinburgh - ‘Tensions and Limits’; Glasgow 'Constructs, Myths, and the Ideal'; and St Andrews - 'Expression and Realities'. Writing on these themes, the authors present a plethora of articles that are diverse in topic and subject area. Groundings Ancients’ continuous evolution depends on the sustained efforts of students (both authors and editors) working together to soar to even higher academic peaks. Of course, pursuing altitude without direction does not always result in the desired outcome, which is where the guidance of the Academic Advisory Board is crucial. The Editor-in-Chief would like to thank both the students and the academics whose dedication, creativity and support have made this volume possible. Last, but by no means least, the Editorial Board would like to thank all Universities, and their incredibly dedicated staff, for their continuous support in funding the journal and providing the invaluable opportunity for students to soar academically.

GROUNDINGS ANCIENTS EDITORIAL BOARD

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Columba at Keil Point: Uncovering the Myth Alex Alexander and Allan Stroud. Until recently, it has been taken on faith that Columba, the sixth-century Irish monk, landed at Keil Point, Kintyre, in Argyll in 563AD on his way to Iona. Truth or otherwise, historians have perpetuated this myth, which was later championed by the tourism industry. This article will investigate the archaeological remains at Keil Point that have been used to support the claim that Columba was once there, and attempt to uncover the truth behind this claim. It will be argued that there is no archaeological evidence or written historical record in support of the myth. It will also be argued that the domination of the Columba myth is effectively suppressing other aspects of Scottish history. This investigation demonstrates how accepted history can be challenged by archaeological evidence.

Myths, say anthropologists, are folktales believed to be true and regarded as sacred.1 Further, Allen and Montell posit that ‘what people believe happened is often as important as what actually happened’. 2 This could be said to be true of Columba, the sixth-century Irish monk regarded today as one of the leading saints in Scottish history.3 Many tales about his life have been woven into Scottish history, leading us to ask how many of these tales are real. However, myths are more than simple untruths: they convey something of the beliefs and priorities of those who tell them. 4 Myths can also be an expression of cultural identity,5 and are frequently used to justify political systems.6 Therefore, it is not enough to say that a certain story from the past is a myth: ALEX ALEXANDER is a third-year student of Archaeology at the University of Glasgow. Her interests include the prehistoric and Early Christian periods, as well as landscape archaeology. She intends to continue her studies at postgraduate level. ALLAN STROUD is also a third-year student studying Archaeology at the University of Glasgow. His areas of interest include early Middle Age Argyll and the archaeology of religion. He hopes to continue studying at postgraduate level and to become employed. K. Flannery & J. Marcus, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery and Empire (Cambridge, 2012), 56. 2 B. Allen & L. Montell, From Memory to History: Using Oral Sources in Local Historical Research (Nashville, 1981), 89. 3 T. O. Clancy, ‘Scottish saints and national identities in the early middle ages’ in A. Thacker & R. Sharpe (eds.), Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West (Oxford, 2002), 397. 4 A. Gazin-Schwartz & C. J. Holtorf, Archaeology and Folklore (London, 1999), 11. 5 R. Bultman, ‘New Testament mythology’ in H. W. Bartsch (ed.), Kerygma and Myth translated by R. H. Fuller (New York, 1972), 46. 6 R. Graves, ‘Introduction’ in F. Guirand (ed.), New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, new Edition (London, 1989), v. 1

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it is also necessary to say why that myth was created and what its creation reveals about the culture of the time.

Figure 1. Map showing location of area of study (in red) © Digimap 2015.

This article will attempt to deconstruct one particular myth about Columba’s life and the processes behind its creation. Teasing out truths from historical documents, particularly hagiographic material, can be very difficult, and so other methods must also be applied. In this case, an archaeological study of the evidence at a Columban site, Keil Point in the Kintyre Peninsula (Figure 1), will be used to challenge the myth that this was where Columba first landed in Scotland in 563AD. This will demonstrate how archaeology can be used as a tool to test aspects of Scottish history. While there is no documentary or archaeological evidence to contest the claim that Columba first landed at Keil in 563AD, it can be demonstrated that the local community has used certain artefacts at Keil to perpetuate a myth about Columba. The use of archaeology, along with historical sources, will demonstrate how this myth was created and why this was part of a wider trend of myth-making in Victorian Scotland.

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COLUM OF THE CHURCH Columba was born in present-day Donegal, although the year of his birth is not known for certain. The Annals of Ulster record that Colum Cille was born in 518,7 but later states that he sailed to Iona in 563 at the age of 42,8 which would put the year of his birth as 521. Other sources suggest he was born sometime between 520 and 523. 9 He is named in the Annals of Ulster as Colum but referred to in other texts as Crimthann, and it is not known for certain which name he used throughout his life. The name Columba, Latin for ‘dove’, was not used until after his death. As a descendant of Conall — the founder of the powerful Cenél Conaill dynasty — Columba had politically powerful kin in the Uí Néill, a group of families that held power in the northern half of Ireland.10 After completing his ecclesiastical training, Columba allegedly played a role in the events that led to the Battle of Cul Dreimhne in 560, where the northern Uí Néill defeated the Irish high king. Although some of the stories surrounding Columba’s role in the build-up to the conflict are now regarded as fictitious,11 it was recorded in the Annals of Ulster that the battle was won, thanks in part to the prayers of Colum Cille.12 Therefore Columba is involved in events at some level, although his full role is still under debate. In 563, Columba and twelve companions left Ireland for Britain. The reason for the voyage is thought to be either voluntary pilgrimage or forced exile. 13 Columba established his seat on the Hebridean island of Iona, where he also founded his church.14 The facts of Columba’s life thereafter become contentious and much of what we assume about his life is based on texts written a century after his death. Folktales about Columba, including his ability to perform miracles, began to circulate around Scotland. 15 This reached all aspects of society, for even King Oswald of

W. M. Hennessy, The Annals of Ulster: a Chronicle of Irish Affairs from A.D. 451 to A.D. 1540 (Dublin, 1871), 41. 8 Ibid., 61. 9 B. Lacey, Colum Cille and the Columban Tradition (Dublin, 1997), 12; R. Sharpe, ‘Introduction’ in Adomnan, Life of St Columba (London, 1995), 9. 10 J. E. Fraser, From Caledonia to Pictland: Scotland to 795 (Edinburgh, 2012), 95. 11 Lacey, Colum Cille, 13. 12 Hennessy, The Annals of Ulster, 57. 13 Lacey, Colum Cille, 21 and Sharpe, ‘Introduction’, 13. 14 Hennessy, The Annals of Ulster, 61; I. Fisher, ‘The early Christian period’ in D. Omand (ed.), The Argyll Book (Edinburgh, 2004), 72-4. 15 A. P. Smyth, Warlords and Holy Men: Scotland AD 80 – 1000 (Edinburgh, 1984), 85. 7

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Northumberland, in 633, claimed he saw an apparition of St Columba, ‘radiant in angelic form, whose lofty height seemed with its head to touch the clouds’. 16 But perhaps the biggest myth about Columba in Scotland was his involvement in converting the Picts to Christianity. In many sources, this has become historical fact: Columba journeyed to the land of the Picts, taking with him the new religion. 17 Adomnan’s Life recounts the journeys of Columba to Pictland and the miracles he performed in front of the heathen Pictish king.18 Bede records a similar account in his work Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731), even naming the Pictish king he converted as Bridius.19 But is this true? Recent research has suggested it is not. Fraser claims that Columba only visited a subsidiary Pictish kingdom in Atholl,20 and as attested to by Bede, these southern Picts were already practising the Christian faith in Columba’s time.21 Written historical evidence alone cannot provide an accurate picture of Columba’s life, so additional approaches must be explored. Archaeological evidence is an ideal means of testing the validity of historical evidence. To test and explore every myth about Columba’s life would fill volumes of books, so one particular myth has been chosen for presentation as a case study. KEIL: THE AREA AND THE MYTH The focus of enquiry is the stretch of coastline between Keil Point and Dunaverty on the southern tip of the Kintyre Peninsula in Argyll and Bute. The hills extend to the shoreline, along which are several caves. A ruined church set within a modern cemetery sits at the headland, adjacent to a holy well; both are heavily overgrown (Figure 2). Columba is said to have landed here when he left Ireland in 563. Only twelve miles separate the two pieces of land, and Argyll has a long history of interconnections with Ireland. It may seem logical, therefore, for Keil to be Columba’s first stop on Scottish shores, but Adomnan’s Life makes it clear that fourteen days at sea was not unusual at this time.22 If Iona were Columba’s final destination, then there 16

Ibid., 84. C. MacDonald, The History of Argyll (Glasgow, 1950), 27; and G. A. F. Knight, Archaeological Light on the Early Christianizing of Scotland (London, 1933), 7. 18 Fraser, From Caledonia to Pictland, 96. 19 Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum translated by L. Sherley-Price (London, 1990), 100. 20 Fraser, From Caledonia to Pictland, 105. 21 Bede, Historia ecclesiastica, 99. 22 Sharpe, ‘Introduction’, 197. 17

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would have been no need for him to stop first at Keil, although this remains a possibility.

Figure 2. Image of the archaeology at Keil Point, showing the remains of the church and the location of the well and the carved footprints. Authors’ own.

This myth is supported by various physical artefacts: two carved stone footprints are said to represent the exact spot he first touched Scottish soil. He and his companions are then said to have sought shelter in Keil Caves and blessed a local well before moving on to Iona.23 This story has been taken at face value, to the extent that some tour operators include Keil Point as part of Columban pilgrimage routes 24 The archaeological remains of the area are included in this story, with some of the remains integral to it. ANALYSING THE ARCHAEOLOGY Using data from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), sixteen archaeological sites were identified between Dunaverty Bay and Keil Point. Four of these are associated with the Columba myth: St Columba’s Footprints (two carved footprints set into a stone at the entrance to a ruined building), Keil Caves (a number of caves where Columba and his companions are said to have

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Capt. T. P. White, ‘The ecclesiastical antiquities of the district of Kintyre in Argyllshire’ (1871) 9 Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 227-8. 24 See for example: ‘Campbeltown To Tarbert, Loch Fyne: St Columba Journey’ in Scotlandspilgrimjourneys. Available: [Accessed: 10.02.15]; and ‘Keil Caves, St Columba's Steps and Dunaverty’ in Walkhighlands. Available: [Accessed: 10.02.15].

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stayed after landing at Keil),25 St Columba’s Church (the ruin of a chapel named after the saint), and St Columba’s Well (a natural spring said to have been blessed by Columba).26

Figure 3: St Columba’s Footprints. Authors’ own.

SITE 1: ST COLUMBA’S FOOTPRINTS Two carved footprints are named locally as St Columba’s Footprints and are advertised as such (Figure 3). Of the two footprints, one is a genuine historical monument, while the second is a much more recent addition. The lower, southernmost of the two footprints (on the right of the photograph) has been identified as a Dark Age inauguration stone, linked to Dunaverty, a nearby fort. 27 This ceremonial artefact was used in the ritual inauguration of a local chief or royal leader who would place his foot in the carved footprint, symbolically linking him with the land.28 This was a common ritual practice in Ireland and Gaelic Scotland. 29 A more famous example of an inauguration stone can be found at Dunadd Hillfort near Kilmartin in Argyll. There, a

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Capt. T. P. White, ‘Ecclesiastical antiquities’, 228. Ibid. 27 Fraser, From Caledonia to Pictland, 156. 28 M. R. Nieke & H. B. Duncan, ‘Dalriada: the establishment and maintenance of an early historic kingdom in northern Britain’ in S. Driscoll & M. R. Nieke (eds.), Power and Politics in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland (Edinburgh, 1988), 16. 29 E. Fitzpatrick, Royal Inauguration of Gaelic Ireland 1100-1600: a Cultural Landscape Study (Woodbridge, 2004), 125. 26

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foot has been carved into the rock at the summit of the fort.30 This footprint was used to inaugurate the kings of the early Scottish Kingdom of Dalriada, 31 and employs the same symbolism as the stone footprint at Keil. However, when drawing parallels between Keil and Dunadd, what immediately becomes apparent is that at Keil there is no royal centre and no great hill fort. This is where the archaeologist’s insistence upon looking at sites within the wider landscape is informative. Far east from Keil, across Dunaverty Bay, is an impressive headland: once the location of an early medieval fortress tentatively identified as Aberte. This was the power-base of the powerful Cenel nGabrain kingroup. 32 If Dunaverty was an important power-base, then the footprint carved into the rock at Keil would likely have been the location for the ceremonial inauguration of Cenel nGabrain leaders. The footprint is directly facing the spot where the fortress would have been, enabling the new leader to view his kingdom as he was being inaugurated. The second footprint, on the other hand, enjoys no such provenance. It was carved by a local stonemason in 1856,33 according to a later visitor to the area who heard the story from the perpetrator’s grandson.34 The number 564 that has been carved into the stone beside the footprints was likely carved at the same time. Therefore, neither footprint is associated with Columba and, as such, cannot be used to indicate Columba’s presence at Keil.

Knight, Archaeological Light, 259. Nieke & Duncan, ‘Dalriada’, 15-16. 32 Ibid., 11-16. 33 Fitzpatrick, Royal Inauguration, 119. 34 A. MacVicar, ‘Irish Heritage’ (1987) 21 The Kintyre Antiquarian and Natural History Society Magazine online. Available: [Accessed 04.02.2015]. 30 31

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SITE 2: KEIL CAVES

Figure 4. Largest of the caves at Keil Point. Authors’ own.

The largest of the nine caves was excavated between 1933 and 1935 (Figure 4), uncovering artefacts dating from as early as the third-century AD, when the cave is thought to have first been occupied. Its last occupation was recorded in the 1881 Census, when the cave was home to a tinsmith, his wife, and child, as well as his cousin, a basket-maker, and his wife.35 Another cave is thought to have contained a Druid’s altar stone with cup marks, and was also believed to have been occupied from the third-century.36 The evidence from the excavations gives no indication of any link with Columba or any other Christian figure. However, another legend attached to the site is that St Kiaran of Clonmacnois, a contemporary of Columba who came to Kintyre from Ireland, was thought to have lived in the area as a hermit.37 It is possible that St Kiaran became associated with Columba and began to embellish the story of the latter’s arrival in 563.

C. Tolan-Smith, The Caves of Mid Argyll: An Archaeology of Human Use (Edinburgh, 2001), 5. Ruth Morris & Frank Morris, Scottish Healing Wells: Healing, Holy, Wishing and Fairy Wells of the Mainland of Scotland (Sandy, 1982), 34. 37 Capt. T. P. White, Archaeological Sketches in Scotland: District of Kintyre (Edinburgh, 1873), 40. 35 36

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SITE 3: ST COLUMBA’S CHURCH The ruinous and roofless remains of the former parish church measure 22 metres long by 5.6-5.8 metres wide (Figure 4). The dedication of the building to St Columba would seem to provide an obvious link to the monk’s presence at Keil. Indeed, the dedication of a site to a particular person was once seen as evidence that that person had been there.38 However, there is no evidence to support this theory and no records to show how the church received its dedication, which is a common problem in Argyll for sites named after saints.39

Figure 5. St Columba’s Church (covered in ivy top left) and graveyard. Authors’ own.

The eastern portion of the building is the oldest and dates roughly to the thirteenthcentury. The western portion of the building was probably added in the late medieval period. Moreover, the church first appears in written records only in the early 1300s, when it was granted to the priory of Whithorn and remained in use until the late 1600s. 40 The church was therefore established far too late to have had any contemporary association with Columba, so the fact that the church bears the name of Columba cannot be taken as evidence that Columba was at Keil. R. Butter, Cill-names and Saints in Argyll: a Way Towards Understanding the Early Church in Dal Riata? (PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2007), 13. 39 A. MacDonald, ‘Gaelic Cill (Kil(l)-) in Scottish place names’ (1979) 2 Bulletin of the Ulster Place Name Society 15. 40 RCAHMS, Argyll: An Inventory of the Ancient Monuments, Vol.1 (Edinburgh, 1971), 147-51. 38

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SITE 4: ST COLUMBA’S WELL Just north of the ruined church is St Columba’s Well. This is a natural spring which bubbles from the rocky hillside, with the water collecting in a stone-lined pool (Figure 6). On the rock face that overhangs the well is an incised Latin cross measuring 20 centimetres by 15 centimetres. This is by far the most ambiguous of the sites, as there is no written history and there are no features that can be accurately dated. The cross could have been carved at any time; there is simply no way of knowing. Old maps of the area do not associate Columba’s name with the well. The earliest Ordnance Survey map to include Keil, published in 1866, records it as ‘Priest’s Well,’ whilst in later maps the well is marked simply as ‘Well.’ Yet again, there is no archaeological evidence, except its recent renaming, to link this feature with Columba.

Figure 6. St Columba’s Well. Authors’ own.

In summary, these four sites are neither connected nor contemporary with one another. Detailed analysis of the archaeology provides no evidence to support the claim that Columba was ever at Keil, although there is evidence that people attempted to associate Columba with the area, through the naming of the Church and the later carving of the second footprint. The evidence, therefore, points away from Columba’s historical presence and in favour of deliberate myth-making.

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CONSTRUCTING A MYTH A close examination of the archaeological evidence, allied with existing documentary evidence, demonstrates that there is nothing to suggest Columba was ever at Keil. The evidence does not absolutely exclude this possibility but strongly suggests that Columba’s landing at Keil in 563 is a locally constructed myth. The parties and reasons behind this myth then become interesting in their own right. One possible explanation is that the area around Keil became involved in the politicisation of Columba long after his death. The cult of St Columba was well established by the time Adomnán wrote on Columba’s life in the 680s,41 and Keil likely became associated with Columba due to the strength of the cult in the local area in the later medieval period. The strength of the cult can partly be ascribed to the deliberate promotion and exaggeration of the life and deeds of Columba by the Scottish kingdom, in what amounted to an early form of state propaganda. 42 In the medieval period, numerous histories were endorsed in order to provide Scotland with a form of provenance, so as to assert it as a modern, centralised, and independent kingdom.43 Part of this effort involved the promotion of specific saints to establish the uniqueness of Scotland’s Christian identity and past, particularly as being independent from England.44 Columba was one of the saints chosen, and he was subsequently featured prominently in one of the first official histories of Scotland, the Chronica Gentus Scotorum, compiled in the late thirteenth-century.45 Columba was therefore politically endorsed on a national level. Yet this was also likely to have had local impact, particularly amongst followers of the cult of Columba. The lack of historical evidence for the myth could imply that it survived as an oral folktale and, like many written accounts, could have its own political agenda. 46 While it was

Smyth, Warlords and Holy Men, 85. A. Lane, ‘Citadel of the first Scots’ (2001) 62 British Archaeology. Available: [Accessed 05.02.2015]. 43 A. Grant, ‘The Middle Ages: the defence of independence’ in R. Mitchison (ed.), Why Scottish History Matters (Edinburgh, 1991), 29. 44 T. Turpie, Scottish Saints, Cults and Pilgrimage from the Black Death to the Reformation, c.13491560 (PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2011), 26. 45 D. Broun, Scottish Independence and the Idea of Britain from the Picts to Alexander III (Edinburgh, 2007), 261-2. 46 R. Layton, ‘Folklore and world view’ in A. Gazin-Schwartz & C. J. Holtorf (eds.), Archaeology and Folklore (London, 1999), 28. 41 42

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once thought that place-names showed where a saint had physically been, it was subsequently believed that an area with many sites named after a particular saint actually reflected the strength of that saint’s cult in later times. 47 If this is indeed the case, then the popularity of Columba in Kintyre in the later medieval period may explain why the church at Keil was named after him. Even so, this does not explain why the archaeology of the area was deliberately manipulated to imply a connection with Columba. This was a separate development unrelated to medieval politics and occurred much later, during the Victorian era. As previously mentioned, the northern footprint was carved by a local stonemason in 1856. One implication is that this enterprising local was making alterations to the archaeology at Keil, in order to link it with the Columba myth. At the time, the site would not have been known as an inauguration site for early kings. It would have made sense to repackage the site as a whole, representing just one narrative, including the footprints alongside the caves and the church. The inclusion of the well, renamed as ‘St Columba’s Well’ in the nineteenth-century, would have further strengthened the myth and completed Keil Point’s rebranding. The cross may have been added to the well at the same time as it was renamed but, as there is no evidence as to its dating, the provenance of the cross remains a mystery. Therefore, there is a strong argument that at some point during the nineteenth-century, the loose assemblage of archaeological sites at Keil Point were brought together under a single ‘Columban’ umbrella, with alterations made to some of the archaeology to better place the site within the Columba myth. It is likely that someone in the local community was attempting to create a tourist attraction to market to the Victorian public. This practice was not uncommon: the development of railways and the MacBrayne steamship company opened up Scotland’s rural communities to urban-dwelling Victorians, 48 providing many remote rural communities with lucrative new opportunities. The archaeological record contains other instances of locals selling a myth to tourists in the Victorian era, such as Hebridean ‘Barvas Ware’. Like Keil Point, the Hebridean Islands became more accessible after 1851, facilitating the development of tourism in the area. The Victorian middle-class tourists viewed the Hebridean people as primitive, speaking a different language (Gaelic) and living a life 47 48

Butter, Cill-names and Saints, 13. H. Cheape, ‘Food and liquid containers in the Hebrides: a window on the Iron Age’ in A. Fenton (ed.), Food and Drink and Travelling Accessories: Essays in Honour of Gösta Berg (Edinburgh, 1988), 7-10.

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far removed from their own. Folklore and anthropology were emerging disciplines at the time and, alongside archaeologists, scholars were attracted to the islands. ‘Crogan Ware,’ a low-fired and hand-thrown pottery, was of particular interest to archaeologists, as this prehistoric-type ceramic was still being made and used even although potter’s wheels were common. 49 Tourism inspired new commodities, including ceramics and glassware, and new shops were opened to sell imported goods. Seeing an opportunity to make money, an enterprising, ‘backward’ group of locals from Barvas on the Isle of Lewis decided to make and sell ceramics that imitated the modern nineteenth-century style to tourists. These ceramics, known as ‘Barvas Ware’ (Figure 7), were in the shape of contemporary tea sets and included teapots, cups, and saucers. ‘Barvas Ware’ was never used by the locals, who favoured modern pottery and their own ‘Crogan Ware’ vessels, but was of interest to tourists and collectors. These handmade clay teapots were created entirely to perpetuate the myth of the Barvas’ ‘primitive’ lifestyle; they were never designed to be functional.50 They did not reflect the reality of how people lived on the islands but represented what visitors wanted to see. Visitors were attracted to the myth of people still living in the past, with their quaint customs and artefacts.

Figure 7. Example of Barvas Ware. Courtesy of the Hunterian Museum.

To draw a parallel between Hebridean ‘Barvas Ware’ and the Columban site at Keil, in both instances, locals constructed a myth about the local area in order to increase its appeal to tourists. Victorians liked quaint and romanticised portrayals of the past, and these myths were tailored to suit that market. One distinction is that in Barvas, locals made use of material culture, as opposed to the physical sites used at Keil. Additionally,

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Ibid., 7-12. Ibid., 14.

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‘Barvas Ware’ is a deliberately constructed myth that fed Victorian fantasy, while the artefacts at Keil are far more subtle. This subtlety, combined with a well-known historical figure, made the myth of Columba at Keil believable. It gave a new and powerful meaning to the archaeology of the site, and it is this meaning, rather than historical accuracy, that grabs the imagination and perpetuates a story.51 CONCLUSIONS Whatever his true achievements were in life, Columba became a political and cultural construct after his death, with many people seeking to benefit from his posthumously enhanced reputation. This was partly political, as a more mythical Columba was useful to the leaders of medieval Scotland. The effect at a local level was that it empowered the cult of Columba in some rural areas. This power was reflected in names and dedications, such as the church at Keil. Columba later became something of a cultural construct, both in how his life was presented by locals and accepted by outsiders. This is evident in the legend of Columba’s landing at Keil, which was deliberately exaggerated by locals with unsubstantiated (and partially fabricated) evidence, but nevertheless eagerly consumed by the Victorian tourists who visited the site. Their shared belief in this story created a myth that may not reflect the truth about Columba’s life. This investigation has in part been very illuminating of the politics of medieval Scotland, the aspects of the lives of ordinary people at Keil at various points in time, and the entrepreneurial spirit of the Victorian era. But the Columba myth at Keil is also greatly damaging. This area is home to an important and historic royal site where local chiefs were inaugurated into power, but the dominance of the Columba myth is arguably overshadowing other histories which deserve to be known. This is illustrated perfectly by the two footprints that are still called ‘Columba’s Footprints’. Furthermore, this case study also demonstrates the key role that archaeology plays in questioning any accepted history, whether at Keil or elsewhere. It is important that questions are asked and histories challenged, as this enables a more critical engagement of Columba’s life and the stories that surround him.

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P. Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History, 2nd Edition (Oxford, 1988), 113.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY B. Allen & L. Montell, From Memory to History: Using Oral Sources in Local Historical Research (Nashville, 1981). Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum translated by L. Sherley-Price (London, 1990). Originally published in 731. D. Broun, Scottish Independence and the Idea of Britain from the Picts to Alexander III (Edinburgh, 2007). R. Bultman, ‘New Testament mythology’ in H. W. Bartsch (ed.), Kerygma and Myth translated by R. H. Fuller (New York, 1972), 1-44. Originally published in 1961. R. Butter, Cill-names and Saints in Argyll: a Way Towards Understanding the Early Church in Dal Riata? (PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2007). H. Cheape, ‘Food and liquid containers in the Hebrides: a window on the Iron Age’ in A. Fenton (ed.), Food and Drink and Travelling Accessories: Essays in Honour of Gösta Berg (Edinburgh, 1988), 111-121. T. O. Clancy, ‘Scottish saints and national identities in the early middle ages’ in A. Thacker & R. Sharpe (eds.), Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West (Oxford, 2002), 397-420. E. Deutsch, ‘Truth and mythology’ in S. Biderman & B-A. Scharfstein (eds.), Myths and Fictions (Leiden, 1993), 41-50. I. Fisher, ‘The early Christian period’ in D. Omand (ed.), The Argyll Book (Edinburgh, 2004), 71-84. E. Fitzpatrick, Royal Inauguration of Gaelic Ireland 1100-1600: a Cultural Landscape Study (Woodbridge, 2004). K. Flannery & J. Marcus, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery and Empire (Cambridge, 2012). J. E. Fraser, From Caledonia to Pictland: Scotland to 795 (Edinburgh, 2012). A. Gazin-Schwartz & C. J. Holtorf, Archaeology and Folklore (London, 1999). A. Grant, ‘The Middle Ages: the defence of independence’ in R. Mitchison (ed.), Why Scottish History Matters (Edinburgh, 1991), 29-39. R. Graves, ‘Introduction’ in F. Guirand (ed.), New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, new Edition (London, 1989), v-xiii. W. M. Hennessy, The Annals of Ulster: a Chronicle of Irish Affairs from A.D. 451 to A.D. 1540 (Dublin, 1871).

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G. A. F. Knight, Archaeological Light on the Early Christianizing of Scotland (London, 1933). B. Lacey, Colum Cille and the Columban Tradition (Dublin, 1997). A. Lane, ‘Citadel of the first Scots’ (2001) 62 British Archaeology. Available: [Accessed 05.02.2015]. R. Layton, ‘Folklore and world view’ in A. Gazin-Schwartz & C. J. Holtorf (eds.), Archaeology and Folklore (London, 1999), 26-34. A. MacDonald, ‘Gaelic Cill (Kil(l)-) in Scottish Place Names’ (1979) 2 Bulletin of the Ulster Place Name Society, 9-19. C. MacDonald, The History of Argyll (Glasgow, 1950). A. MacVicar, ‘Irish Heritage’ (1987) 21 The Kintyre Antiquarian and Natural History Society Magazine online. Available: [Accessed 04.02.2015]. R. Morris & F. Morris, Scottish Healing Wells: Healing, Holy, Wishing and Fairy Wells of the Mainland of Scotland (Sandy, 1982). M. R. Nieke & H. B. Duncan, ‘Dalriada: the establishment and maintenance of an early historic kingdom in northern Britain’ in S. Driscoll & M. R. Nieke (eds.), Power and Politics in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland (Edinburgh, 1988), 6-21. Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), Argyll: An Inventory of the Ancient Monuments, Vol.1 (Edinburgh, 1971). ‘Campbeltown

To

Tarbert,

Loch

Fyne:

St

Columba

Journey’

in

Scotlandspilgrimjourneys. Available: [Accessed: 10.02.15]. R. Sharpe, ‘Introduction’ in Adomnan, Life of St Columba (London, 1995), 1-99. A. P. Smyth, Warlords and Holy Men: Scotland AD 80 – 1000 (Edinburgh, 1984). P. Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History, 2nd Edition (Oxford, 1988). C. Tolan-Smith, The Caves of Mid Argyll: An Archaeology of Human Use (Edinburgh, 2001). T. Turpie, Scottish Saints, Cults and Pilgrimage from the Black Death to the Reformation, c.1349-1560 (PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2011).

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‘Keil Caves, St Columba's Steps and Dunaverty’ in Walkhighlands. Available: [Accessed: 10.02.15]. Capt. T. P. White, ‘The ecclesiastical antiquities of the district of Kintyre in Argyllshire’ (1871) 9 Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 22730. Capt. T. P. White, Archaeological Sketches in Scotland: District of Kintyre (Edinburgh, 1873).

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An Anthropology of American Gun Culture: the Productive Tension between Ideology and Embodiment Joseph Anderson. This article will argue that guns carry material and symbolic meanings that together act as markers of identity for both individuals and a collective American culture. Guns are powerful sensory objects that allow an embodied, physical participation in abstract ideologies and particular conceptions of history. This lends the weight of the past to contemporary formulations of American identity and to what it means to be part of a ‘gun culture’. Building on anthropological literature on embodiment, this analysis will focus on the tension between the reified gun, as contained within cultural institutions such as the Constitution, and the subjective, perceptual experience of shooting. These two factors form a self-fulfilling prophecy that perpetuates and renegotiates the central importance of the gun to American society.

The number of American lives lost to domestic gun violence each year consistently totals thirty thousand, a number greater than those killed in the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan over a period of twelve years. 1 As recent events in Ferguson, Missouri have shown, violence and guns are topics that crosscut a number of social problems in America; encompassing race, socio-economic inequality, identity, and politics. The United States may have eradicated the major pathogenic diseases of malaria and tuberculosis, but gun violence has become the twenty-first century American epidemic.2 In this article, I aim to explain why guns are so central to the notion of identity in America, and will argue that it is in the tension between the embodied aspects of shooting a gun and the accompanying ideological or historical justifications for ownership that American gun culture is reformed and reproduced. Over a period of nine months, I spent time with and interviewed gun enthusiasts in Southern California. Through an account of this experience, I will detail how guns and the

JOSEPH ANDERSON is a fourth-year Social Anthropology student at the University of Edinburgh. While on his year abroad in San Diego, he carried out ethnographic research on American gun ownership for his honours dissertation. The following article is based on this experience. Joseph believes that successful solutions to gun violence in America depend on a thorough interdisciplinary understanding of this complex social issue. 1

D. Mosaffarian, D. Hemenway & D. Ludwig, ‘Curbing Gun Violence: Lessons From Public Health Success’ (2013) 6 The Journal of the American Medical Associated 551-552. 2 G. Slutkin, ‘Let's Treat Violence Like a Contagious Disease’ TED (April 2013). Available: [Accessed: 15.03.2015].

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implicit ideological belief system that accompanies them produce a certain kind of person, and vice versa, how individuals interpret and renegotiate the cultural connotations carried by the symbol of the ‘gun’. WRITING GUN CULTURE There has been relatively little ethnographic work on American gun culture within anthropology. One exception is Abigail Kohn’s examination of gun ownership in the Northern California Bay Area. 3 .The main theoretical point of use here is Kohn's definition of gun culture as a group of people that ‘places enormous social, historical and political emphasis on guns (both positive and negative and every shade of grey in between)’, while utilising a ‘common language about guns and sharing a set of symbols pertaining to guns in everyday life’4. This is a skilfully crafted definition that takes into account the immaterial aspects of the ‘reified’ gun, the positive and negative connotations of guns in the United States, as well as hints at the idea that social groups are often formed around pro-gun belief systems. However, one might question her suggestion that such a culture constitutes a bounded object of analysis. My portrayal of gun culture does not exist in some objective sense. In drawing an image of a dynamic cultural field and by attempting to textualise it, the temporally contingent has been rendered timeless. As Clifford poetically asserts in the introduction to Writing Culture, ‘cultures do not hold still for their portraits’. 5 Kohn's definition of gun culture is a useful methodological device rather than a concrete reification of her subject's worldviews. Such a definition is used in this article as a heuristic to help clarify the reader's interpretation of my data. In representing a ‘gun culture’, I wish to emphasise that it was constructed in dialogue with my informants, who would not have given voice or form to such a culture if they had not been compelled to do so by a researcher. It is the collective picture that emerges from this that I am interested in portraying. While the focus of this article is predominantly white, Libertarian gun owners, it must be noted that conceptions of what the gun means will vary based on age, gender, class and race. Due to restrictions of length, these factors will not be discussed here.

A. Kohn, Shooters: Myths and Realities of America's Gun Cultures (New York, 2004). Ibid., 4. 5 J. Clifford & G. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (London, 1986), 10. 3 4

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DEFINING AN AMERICAN ‘GUN ETHOS’ It is difficult to over-emphasise how pervasive guns are in the United States. Culturally, Britain is inundated with many of the same images in films, television, and news coverage, but one of the key factors that leads to a greater overall presence in America is the everyday banality of guns in the lives of their owners. In the process of absorbing the nuances of this context, I was able to look outside of the culturally conditioned anti-gun bias with which I approached my topic. To prop up this belief was a defence mechanism that kept me grounded, but also apart. Instead of feeling like an outsider looking in, I began to work out the rationale behind gun ownership, seeing for the first time the positive symbolic connotations that firearms could carry. In explaining these connotations, it is helpful to utilise the concept of ‘ethos’. Gregory Bateson suggests that any group may establish among themselves an ethos, which can become an actor in determining their behaviour and the beliefs they share. 6 Such an ethos can be temporary and small-scale, like in the shared understanding of a particular conversational style that indicates sarcasm, or it can exist more permanently, like within an institution such as a university. Longer-lasting conceptions of ethos rely on their own history to sustain themselves. The actions and beliefs of individuals are influenced by how others have behaved before them within its parameters, with each new action producing even newer interpretations. Thus the maintenance of an ethos is an inherently reciprocal and creative process. This idea can be extended to include countries that have established a ‘political ethos’, defined by Janis Jenkins as ‘a culturally standardised organisation of feeling and sentiment pertaining to the social domains of power and interest'. 7 If we say that there is a gun ethos in America, then we can define such a concept as a culturally standardised organisation of feeling and sentiment pertaining to the social domains of gun ownership, which in turn can define what political actions are possible in relation to firearms legislation. No ethos exists in isolation: it feeds on other established concepts and is, in this case, clearly related to a Libertarian ethos as well as a broader Constitutional ethos. In the following section, I describe how an embodied participation in shooting reinforces these ideological standpoints and, in the process, constitutes an American gun ethos. G. Bateson, Naven; The Culture of the Latmul People of New Guinea as Revealed Through a Study of the Naven Ceremonial (Stanford, 1958). 7 J. Jenkins, ‘The State Construction of Affect: Political Ethos and Mental Health Among Salvadoran Refugees’ (1991) 15 Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 140. 6

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EMBODYING GUN CULTURE The idea that ritual practices allow an embodiment of belief systems can be traced to figures such as Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner, who claim that symbols contain important information about a people's moral and social orders. 8,9,10 Symbols give an empirical reality to abstract notions of shared culture, while rituals reinforce and lend sensory support to interpretations of such symbolic meanings. In his analysis of Songhay spirit possession rituals, Paul Stoller argues that this practice acts as a sensory participation that allows an individual to feel a connection to a collective notion of culture and shared history. 11 , 12 The act of shooting makes tangible the abstract ideologies that connote the gun in American society. Much like Stoller claims that ‘spirit possession constitutes a discourse on history’, shooting a gun provides an embodied, personal participation in the past.13 In his work on embodiment and attention, Thomas Csordas conceptualises the different ways that the body interacts with its surroundings. 14 , 15 Perception and practice are central to this process. By taking part in physical manifestations or rituals, cultural norms and beliefs are reinforced, reinterpreted, and personalised into the bodies of individuals. This provides a link between collective, abstract symbols and the tangible day-to-day experience of culture as it is lived. Religious systems – from the healing rituals of Charismatic Christians as described by Csordas, to the Tibetan Buddhists who make their religion part of their personal experience by undertaking vast pilgrimages through the Himalayas, often ending their journey proudly displaying scars and calluses16 – utilise this method of reinforcing theoretical ideas. The memory of bodily sensations remains long after the experience ends, providing compelling physical evidence for belief systems.

A. Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago, 1960). V. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Cornell, 1969). 10 V. Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (New York, 1975). 11 P. Stoller, The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. (Philadelphia, 1989). 12 P. Stoller, Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power and the Hauka in West Africa. (London, 1995). 13 Ibid., 33. 14 T. Csordas, ‘Embodiment as a Paradigm For Anthropology’ (1990) 18 Ethos 5-47. 15 T. Csordas, ‘Somatic Modes of Attention’ (1993) 8 Cultural Anthropology 135-156. 16 W. Herzog, Wheel of Time (2003) Werner Herzog Filmproduktion [Film]. 8 9

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The dialogue between the perceptual experience and collective representation of culture in symbols is the key to understanding how the gun has remained so central to American society. In the following paragraphs, I aim to capture the pure bodily sensations of shooting that, as Csordas suggests, are never free from the cultural biases embedded within us. As such, I describe two very different experiences that I believe provide evidence for the idea that the maintenance of the ideological aspects of gun culture relies on the embodied activity of participation, and that vice versa, each abstract notion reinforces the physical ritual to which it pertains. The first time I shot a gun was at a range in suburban San Diego. My flatmate Mark McDougall, an Anarcho-Libertarian gun owner whom I interviewed on several occasions, offered to give me two guns to take to the range and to teach me correct stance and gun etiquette. As he explained the process of loading bullets, checking the safety, and gripping the weapon, I could see that he was enjoying teaching me. Guns are his passion and he strongly believed that by instructing me about responsible gun ownership, he could convince me of their inherent worth. He described his entry into gun culture during one of our interviews as something revelatory to him, almost like an addiction: Yeah I bought a pocket pistol, stainless steel. Beautiful. I liken it to looking through a peephole and seeing a new world. It was my entry into the world of guns and shooting . . . I think my total gun stock right now is around 8 or 10, I don't recall.17 There is something strangely clinical about the entrance and shop at a gun range. It looks like an airport or pharmacy, its whitewashed walls lined with shelves containing various interesting-looking and unfamiliar accessories. I noticed a wall displaying a rack of rifles: from wooden models on one end that faded into a spectrum of barrels and triggers, to the more lethal-looking black metal weapons. These looked like they had been designed to inspire terror and made me feel slightly uncomfortable. Our group had to sign a shockingly lax security waiver that stated that the range would not be liable for any accidents that may occur during shooting. The most troubling part of this process was that when I said I had two guns in my bag, they did not question what type of guns they were, or how a British national on a non-immigrant visa had obtained them. They were instead more interested in what kind of ammunition I wanted to buy and in ushering me towards the range. 17

Source: Mark McDougall, an Anarcho-Libertarian gun owner.

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Upon entering the shooting area, my senses are immediately overwhelmed. There are deafening explosions as each gun discharged, some low in pitch, others piercingly high. The sound has a wooden, dull quality despite its volume. Gun powder fills my nostrils and almost makes me gag, making it difficult to breathe. The tension prior to being handed a gun is palpable. This is the first time I have ever held a loaded weapon and the full potential of its power strikes me viscerally. I am aware that I have in my hand something dangerous; a feeling that instantly ties itself into the schema of what I conceive as gun culture. I bring the gun into my eye-line and turn my stance slightly in the way I have been taught, hands pushing on the grip in one direction and pulling in the other for stability. As I feel my body shift into the clichéd yet appropriate stance of the shooter, images from films, television shows, and literature spring to mind, adding to the surreal feeling of the whole event. With one eye closed, I line up the sights, exhale, and slowly start to squeeze the trigger. For an inexperienced shooter, there is no indication of when the hammer will drop, slam into the bullet, and release the energy within as the gunpowder explodes, propelling the small cylinder at over three thousand feet per second towards its target. Eventually the trigger lets loose, my arm stiffens, and the barrel rises violently. The sound that emanates from the gun is shocking and seems to remain rattling inside of me long after the noise has dissipated, with what feels like heart palpitations slowly diffusing as I ready myself for the next onslaught. The embodied experience of loading a gun, preparing to shoot, and actually firing becomes a ritual of almost religious importance. For in this process, the belief system that comes with belonging in a community or group that adheres dogmatically to the scripture of the Constitution is physically performed. I did not enjoy my first time shooting, which at the time reassured me that I was still safely grounded in my own notions of gun ethos. In revisiting this event, I believe that this was because I had not yet fully accessed the mindset that surrounds guns in America. However, my second experience made me reconsider this assumption because, much to my dismay, I rather enjoyed myself. At this point I had lived in the United States and among gun owners for eight months, and had begun the process of linking the abstract notions of gun culture to the embodied experience. I had accessed and absorbed the Libertarian and Constitutionalist outlook of my hosts, and could now link these ideological standpoints to the embodied act of shooting, finding that they were supportive of each other. My second shooting experience took place at a police range two hours from San Diego, set against the backdrop of rugged desert mountains, where we were instructed by a

23

local sheriff on gun safety and the technicalities of gun laws. Soon we were outside and preparing to shoot. This time I felt far more comfortable with the accompanying rituals: the loading, the stance, and the recoil. Rather than erratically aiming in the direction of the target, the sheriff encouraged me to pick out marked points on the sheet of paper twenty feet in front of me. The competitive, sporting element to this experience drew me in and made me forget my initial hyper-awareness of the weapon; I was aware that the gun no longer felt alien in my hand. Without the extended immersion around others who felt the same familiarity towards guns, I would not have been able to appreciate that one must have access to both the abstract ideological understandings of guns as well as the embodied experience of shooting to understand what the gun means to its owner. As my different experiences of shooting show, this physical participation is integral to understanding gun owners. CONSTITUTIONAL FETISHISM Having described the physical aspects involved in belonging to a gun culture, I now turn to explaining the role of ideology in its productive tension with embodiment. The Constitution takes a central place in the ideology of and arguments for gun ownership. One informant, a gun safety officer called William Davis, suggested that there could be no alternative interpretations of the Constitution other than his: I'm sort of a strict Constitutionalist. I don't believe that it's subject to interpretation . . . but if you want to go back to the original interpretation, I tend to read the second amendment to mean exactly what is says – that each individual in this country has the right to keep and bear arms.18 I want to argue that the perceived truths in the Constitution are indeed open to interpretation, and dynamic within each gun owner's philosophy of life. In attending one of the monthly gun shows that visit San Diego's North County, I was able to witness hardline Constitutionalism first-hand. Upon entering the large hangar-like building that hosted the show, I was surrounded by a variety of stalls selling handguns, rifles, and historically meaningful firearms, as well as stands displaying steel weaponry, from machetes to medieval swords. The political activists lining the perimeter of the venue shouted the loudest and worked the hardest for their punters. Brightly coloured banners with phrases such as ‘Protect Your 2nd Amendment Rights from Socialism’ 18

Source: William Davis, gun safety officer.

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and ‘Obama Care is Unconstitutional’ stood out among the dull pewter and steel tones of the weaponry. A couple was selling a self-conceived board game called ‘The Constitution Quest’, a Trivial Pursuit-style game with each question pertaining to a different article of the Constitution. Walking around this explicit representation of American gun culture, I was struck by the ubiquitous presence of the Constitution, as well as the distrustful atmosphere and reception I received from many stall owners. At one point I was accused of working with the government because the owner thought my questioning was being reported back to ‘the feds’. I had considered that my accent might be a source of suspicion, although most would think that a totalitarian government would have more foresight than to send a British citizen to put an end to gun culture. Another interesting part of this experience was that the nuances of the intellectual and practical defences of gun ownership fell away in submission to the crass stereotypes that many associate with gun culture. However, the fact that I found such dimensions to gun ownership means that I must account for them in terms of my theoretical understanding. Read from a Libertarian perspective, the Constitution can be interpreted as the protector of a limited concept of government that ideally stays out of the lives of individuals while guaranteeing them human rights, one of which is the right to bear arms. In asking whether the American government has the interests of the people at heart, I received heated refutations: Absolutely not! What are you, nuts?19 What government should do, it should protect freedom. Once it goes beyond into benevolence and good works, it undoes freedom. . . I want to live in a Constitutionally limited republic.20 There is a perception that it is the government's very disregard of the Constitution that has created a state no longer fettered by the chains that were conceived to limit its power. These assertions are also linked to the strong Libertarian undercurrents in American society that have acquired a renewed saliency during Barack Obama's term of office, with the rise of the conservative Tea Party. Adherents to this ideology see its

19 20

Source: Alex Ponty, Libertarian gun owner. Source: Mark McDougall, Anarcho-Libertarian gun owner.

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central tenets — a small government and unfettered free markets — as almost synonymous with what the founders of the Constitution intended. I would argue that in the same way that Marxism provides a language of dissent in Europe, so too does Libertarianism give a culturally salient voice to those unhappy with the status quo: a historically significant method of wading against the mainstream. Many believe that by forming a state around Libertarian principles, an ideal and free society that counters modern ‘crony Capitalism’ and socialist welfare programmes can be achieved. Guns, as the tools by which individuals can protect their way of life against the state and against criminals, are central to this philosophy. INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE MEMORIES OF HISTORY ‘Memory is not possible where there lies an absence of meaning’,21 and history is central to an explanation of gun ownership. It forms the bedrock for ideologies that give a mythological status to the gun as an actor in liberating America from tyranny. This is not, however, an objective, positivist account of history (if such a thing exists), but a meaningful selection of details that back up an understanding of what it means to be American. As argued by Argenti and Schramm, memory is a selective recreation of the past that depends on an individual's or community's contemporary social context. 22 To survive, memories must be shared; in isolation, they quickly fade. 23 Gun owners hold the collective memory of a Revolutionary era that sees the gun as central to its success. Shooting embodies these memories and reduces the historical time between past and present, placing the individual into the experiential field of the original participants. These conceptions of guns are created in dialogue with a knowledge of American history that has been highly politicised. As such, it is interesting to analyse how these myths manifest themselves in the lives of my informants. One informant suggested that firing a gun was ‘bodily participation in the past’, while another detailed the role that history plays in her engagement with firearms: I like using guns that have been used in wars . . . the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Vietnam, and kind of finding out the stories that 21

N. Argenti & K. Schramm, Remembering Violence: Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmission (Oxford, 2010), 19.

22

Ibid., 1-19. M. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago, 1992).

23

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go with it. Like this is part of our history and this was used towards something that was bad, but it's kind of like being able to touch history and feel what they felt. Like that kickback, they felt that exact same feeling when they fired it.24 These rituals are participatory acts that lend contemporary conceptions the weight of history.25 A connection to the past like this can also be highly personal, evoking images of lost loved ones that provide a method of paying tribute to them. One of my godfather’s guns has blood stains . . . he was out in the bush in Vietnam and he was shot at. Vietcong came after him; he ended up getting into hand-to-hand combat and killing the guy, and that [gun] got passed on to me.26 The gun they have in their closet might have been their grandfather's, you know, the deer on the wall he shot in 1922 and he's gone now, but the memory of that and knowing who that person was [remains].27 These assertions tie themselves into my discussion of the embodied aspects of gun culture. Elements of material culture, like guns, that memorialise the past are central in maintaining a meaningful connection to a nation or to family members. 28 In shooting a firearm, the owner physically rejects an imagined future in which guns are taken away by new legislations, making tangible an explicit symbol of individual strength that ties into personal interpretations of family and national history. Similarly, shooting guns that retain relevance to that person or era, whether personal or collective, solidifies conceptions of the past. In analysing these person-centred takes on history, it seems clear that gun culture draws on historical interpretations that support its contemporary face.

24

Source: Chloe Fielding, gun owner. P. Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, 1989). 26 Source: Chloe Fielding. 27 Source: Mark McDougall. 28 Argenti & Schramm, Remembering Violence, 4. 25

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CONCLUSION In this article, I have tried to convey the tensions between ideology and embodiment; culture and individual; history and present. I aim to represent the real human complexity of this cultural context by breaking down dichotomies that restrict our appreciation of lived experience. In the account of my research, I have attempted to demonstrate the central place of the gun as both a material object and reified symbol among my informants. The ways that the embodied experience of shooting and the rituals associated with gun ownership tie into the abstract ideological currents of Libertarianism and Constitutionalism play a large part in maintaining and renegotiating this position. Mythical interpretations of American history are employed in order to justify gun ownership by lending contemporary arguments the weight of a perceived ‘objective’ history. The tension between ideology and embodiment is instrumental in maintaining the place of the gun in narratives of American identity, as both a physical and symbolically meaningful object. It also shows the inadequacy of arguing for solutions to gun violence that do not take into account the perspective of gun owners. The violence associated with guns in America has to be dealt with in culturally appropriate ways. The ideologies that gun owners subscribe to cannot be dismissed, as they form a backbone of American culture. By acknowledging this, relevant solutions to gun violence that bypass the vitriolic and impotent character of the current gun control debate can be found.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY N. Argenti & K. Schramm, Remembering Violence: Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmission (Oxford, 2010). G. Bateson, Naven; The Culture of the Latmul People of New Guinea as Revealed Through a Study of the Naven Ceremonial (Stanford, 1958). J. Clifford & G. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (London, 1986). P. Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, 1989). T. Csordas, ‘Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology’ (1990) 18:1 Ethos 5-47. T. Csordas, ‘Somatic Modes of Attention’ (1993) 8:2 Cultural Anthropology 135-156. M. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago, 1992). W. Herzog, Wheel of Time (2003) Werner Herzog Filmproduktion [Film]. J. Jenkins, ‘The State Construction of Affect: Political Ethos and Mental Health Among Salvadoran Refugees’ (1991) 15 Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 139-165. J. Jenkins, ‘The Impress of Extremity: Women's Experience of Trauma and Political Violence’ in C. Sargent & C. Brettell (eds.), Gender and Health: An International Perspective (New Jersey, 1996). J. Jenkins, & M. Valiente, ‘Bodily Transactions of the Passions: el calor among Salvadoran women refugees’ in T. Csordas (ed.), Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self (Cambridge, 1994). A. Kohn, Shooters: Myths and Realities of America's Gun Cultures (New York, 2004). D. Mosaffarian, D. Hemenway & D. Ludwig, ‘Curbing Gun Violence: Lessons From Public Health Success’ (2013) 6 The Journal of the American Medical Associated 551-552. G. Slutkin, ‘Let's Treat Violence Like a Contagious Disease’ TED (April 2013). Available: [Accessed: 15.03.2015]. P. Stoller, The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology (Philadelphia, 1989). P. Stoller, Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power and the Hauka in West Africa (London, 1995).

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P. Stoller, ‘Finding Your Way’ (2014) Savage Minds. Available: [Accessed: 15.03.2015]. V. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Cornell, 1969). V. Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (New York, 1975). A. Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago, 1960).

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Oppressive Realities: Reconstructing through the School Experience

Children’s

Agency

Walt Andrews. This article argues that, despite claims to the contrary, children have agency. Society constructs a concept of youth that diminishes children’s agency and implements social controls to dominate children. However, the denigration of or refusal to acknowledge children’s agency ignores their experiences of reality, which creates and perpetuates the oppression of children. Under examination, these attempts to control children and discipline them into accepting mainstream reality, as understood and constructed by the powerful in society, actually prove that children’s agency exists. Children’s own actions against their oppression not only provide further evidence of their agency, but also construct avenues for resisting subordination.

INTRODUCTION Agency is the ability to observe, contextualise, think about, and act in reality. However, some social and political actors seek to deny agency to others as a means of exerting power over them. One way this is accomplished is by questioning people’s abilities to experience reality ‘correctly,’ to form accurate thoughts about reality, and to act within it. In short, questioning the rationality of oppressed people further facilitates their oppression. Such an approach attempts to strip those rhetorically denied agency of even the opportunity to argue against their own repression, since it supposes that they are incapable of understanding how and why they are repressed. One powerful example of domination by diminishment is the system of childhood education. Young people, like many disempowered groups, are considered unfit to act independently in society. They are thought of as irrational and therefore incapable of agency; according to society, they must be educated under the authority of adults because they do not have the knowledge to act in the world on their own. This perception of incapability serves as a useful excuse for creating a system where children are subject to the power of their elders, especially their parents and teachers, and conditioned to obey the power of bosses, the state, and powerful people in general. WALT ANDREWS is from Natick, Massachusetts. He studies International Relations at the University of St Andrews, focusing in particular on the politics of youth and education. After graduation, he hopes to continue this work from the perspective of a teacher.

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The education system’s foundation upon teacher-student relationships of dominance and obedience, respectively, is justified by young people’s supposed lack of agency. However, this structure’s very existence makes it clear that although children do have the necessary capacity for action that constitutes agency, the system wants to suppress and remould them. By focusing on the behaviour of schools towards students – particularly as exemplified by disciplinary regimes and teacher behaviour – this article will examine the school as a structure where children are socialised by, among other things, a state-directed curriculum and disciplinary policies. Primarily framed through a discussion of education in the United States and through understandings of childhood widely held there, this article will connect major theoretical stances pertaining to children’s agency with those that assess the ways society moves against it. First, it will discuss concepts of agency with a particular focus on the history and politics of children’s agency, followed by an examination of some of the most overtly oppressive acts that society commits against children. Then, with an understanding of society’s goals for domination established, this article will explore these goals and further examine how they are carried out by society and the state. Finally, the article will conclude by positing a more positive conception of children’s agency; if the state’s desire to control the agency of children is not enough proof that agency exists, examining the actions of children will provide clear evidence. Recognising this agency and young people’s experience of reality should illuminate a path for deconstructing the oppression faced by children, as well as other dominated groups in society. THE AGENCY OF CHILDREN Though a slippery concept to define, agency ‘connects the physical capacity to change with either an analytical or an evaluative dimension’.1 While this broad definition can be narrowed in several ways, an understanding that agency entails capacity for some kind of informed action that stimulates change lies at its heart. This action may produce either social or physical change, but it must be attributable to the agent in order for it to be considered agency. Purposeful control over one’s actions is central to agency, but this control is two-sided. An agent must understand their actions and their context in order for them to be purposeful. Furthermore, the agent’s actions must also be a result of their own decisions, not of an exterior structure channelling its choices 1

A. F. Lang, Punishment, Justice and International Relations: Ethics and Order after the Cold War (London, 2008), 47.

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through them or restricting paths of action. However, neither of these conditions is clearly delineated, since decision and control are hard to examine. Common arguments against the agency of children typically include claims about the ‘informed’ part of ‘informed action’ on the grounds that children cannot fully understand their actions or the world in which their actions take place. Archard lays out the basis of such an ‘incompetence thesis,’ mainly the biological fact that children are typically not as mentally developed as adults. 2 This observation provides a convenient segue for discussing what ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’ entail. Throughout this article, ‘child’ and derivative words will refer to anyone under the legal age of majority, from small children to those who might be considered young adults. ‘Youths’ will refer to a broader concept that encompasses some individuals over the age of majority, like university students. Both terms combine groups at widely different stages of biological and mental development, so it is worth noting that this article will not make the case that children have the same competency as adults, but rather, that they are competent enough to have agency, and that denial of this agency is oppressive. Childhood – like much else in the world – is a socially constructed concept. This constructed nature is one of the most important issues in dissecting the question of children’s agency, and it also forces the consideration of debates pertaining to agency that affect other groups embodying socially constructed concepts. The denial of rationality has been and continues to be used against people with disabilities, trans people, people of colour, working-class people, queer people, and women, to name a few, and this practice is especially oppressive upon those who fit within several of these categories. Arguments for allowing or even encouraging invasive and unsafe medical procedures, and against granting voting rights or reproductive justice to some members of these groups, have been made because the powerful in society deem(ed) them unfit to understand and express reality, even when that reality involves their own bodies. Systems of domination, such as sexism, racism, classism, transphobia, and ableism, exist to tell people that their experience of reality is illegitimate, that only wealthy, white, straight, cis, able-bodied men have an ‘unbiased’ experience of reality and the ability to reasonably express or act on their rational ideas. These systems perpetuate the idea that hierarchy is natural; that society can only exist when some

2

D. Archard, Children: Rights and Childhood (London, 1993) 45-57.

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people have more power than others and use it to dominate the disempowered. They allow a controlling segment of society to construct a minority and then deny it agency. It is worth noting that childhood and the incompetence associated with it are used as methods of social control against young adults and even against adults, similar to how in a sexist society, ‘feminine’ traits can be invoked to denigrate men. DeGroot notes that university student protest is often seen as childish, irrational, and idealistic.3 These are traits of incompetence associated with children. In the political disciplines, where the ‘rational actor’ is regarded as a common ideal, irrationality is synonymous with incompetence. Similarly, idealism – a way of understanding the world and holding it to a high standard – is tied to innocence. As Hutchby and Moran-Ellis demonstrate through an anecdote about Hutchby’s daughter’s encounter with a dirty joke, children are constructed as innocent in a way that shuts them out of adult discourse, an exclusion that children themselves resist.4 If idealism is tied to innocence and, in turn, to an implicit lack of understanding about the world, then idealists have already lost. Idealism need not be out of touch with reality, but it is often construed as disconnected from the ‘reality’ that the powerful construct as the correct understanding of the world. In addition to students, mature adults also fall prey to the delegitimising conflation of idealism and childishness. When confronted with an idealistic opposition using radical tactics to achieve its agenda, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called on Republicans to ‘grow up’. 5 It may seem odd that both pettiness and idealism/innocence are mobilised in claims of childishness, but this is just another way that society uses conceptions of childhood to keep others, especially young people, in line. These varying constructions of childhood as a period of incompetence frame children as incapable of analysing reality, thinking logically about that analysis, or turning it into action. As Marsh, Rosser, and Harré explain, the assumption that a certain group is incapable of forming complex ideas is often based on society’s own failure to understand the communication and ideas of that group.6 In The School I’d Like, Burke and Grosvenor convincingly demonstrate that children do want a say in the structure G. DeGroot & B. Gordon, Student Protest: The Sixties and after (New York, 1998), 3-11. I. Hutchby & J. Moran-Ellis, Children and Social Competence: Arenas of Action (London, 1998), 7-8. 5 ‘Sen. Harry Reid: Obstructionist Republicans Need to “Grow Up” on Health Law Issue’, T. Howell Jr. in The Washington Times (17 Sept. 2013). Available: [Accessed 17.09.2013]. 6 P. E. Marsh, E. Rosser & R. Harré, The Rules of Disorder (London, 1978), 1-30. 3 4

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of education by laying out many children’s suggestions for improving their schools.7 Some, such as schools made of candy, are quite fanciful. However, most of these suggestions present compelling alternatives to current models, and some may even give adults pause; an adult’s perception of schooling is vastly different from that of a child. However, children’s alternative suggestions about schooling rarely map with adult assumptions about how education should take place, and this overall lack of two-way communication reveals an inadequate understanding of education on the part of adults. Adults who assume that children do not have real agency seek to make children comply with adult directives. Lang asserts that for political actors, the benefit of complying with authority ‘is the simple existence of an ordered system in which agents can pursue their own individual wants and plans’, and that ‘the primary means of enforcing compliance with a particular order is through punitive measures’. 8 Children are political agents with desires about how to structure their social world. Whether weighing in on what books to read in class or whether their town should have a curfew, children who are interested in contributing to these facets of public policy demonstrate political agency. Yet they spend considerable hours within the classroom without being given permission to contribute input on how their education is carried out. Because the system of order in the classroom does not allow children to express their needs or pursue their goals, they have very little interest in complying with teachers. The natural result of a political system whose agents are at such odds is that the more powerful agents attempt to dominate the less powerful. In the context of the education system, this domination is legitimised by the argument that schools exist to better children. However, because school is constructed without acknowledgement of children’s agency – often, in fact, constructed in opposition to it – the power relations that structure the schooling experience are hidden, making them stronger. As noted by Lang above, schools, as compliance-seeking institutions, primarily enforce order (i.e. their dominance) through punishment. Before moving on to a discussion of punishment and other tools of dominance in the next section, it should be noted that it is possible to refute the concept of children’s agency by denying the claims made here

C. Burke & I. Grosvenor, The School I'd Like: Children and Young People's Reflections on an Education for the 21st Century (London, 2003), passim. 8 Lang, Punishment, Justice and International Relations, 17. 7

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and positing that children are merely pieces of a system, and not actors in their own right. The clear response to this, which will be discussed later in this article, is that children frequently act in resistance to the system in which they are placed, and thus are obviously not simply cogs in the machine. Before analysing resistance, however, it is important to detail the oppression that children fight back against. SOCIETAL OPPRESSION The oppression of children, often enforced through disciplinary measures, strongly indicates society’s desire to control the agency of children, which in turn affirms the existence of their agency. As Lang argues, punishment implies agency because it is either retribution for an intentional act, or deterrence to actors who are capable of learning from punishment and avoiding future deviance.9 It is important to recognise that while punishment implies agency, it simultaneously works to diminish agency, sometimes by limiting physical capabilities through restrictions like imprisonment, and usually by mentally oppressing the punished person, partially through shame. The societal conception of childhood as an irrational time in a person’s life when he or she requires subordination to authority has had a worryingly strong influence on schooling, particularly in the United States. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has criticised a phenomenon that they refer to as the ‘School-to-Prison Pipeline’, where children, especially children of colour and/or with mental health issues, are removed from schools through suspension, expulsion, and ‘zero tolerance’ policies.10 Students are more likely to enter the juvenile court system when they are not in school, when ‘zero tolerance’ policies deny pardon for certain types of incidents (like fights and drug issues), or when schools increase police presence.11 The Dignity in Schools Campaign refers to this as ‘school pushout’ and notes its specific effects on children affected by additional systems of oppression, like racism and ableism. 12

Lang, Punishment, Justice and International Relations, 46-57. ‘What is the School-to-Prison Pipeline?’ American Civil Liberties Union. ACLU, (06 June 2008). Available: [Accessed 08.03.2015]. 11 Ibid. 12 ‘Dignity in Schools Campaign. Massachusetts Pushout Fact Sheet’ in Dignity in Schools Campaign. Available: [Accessed 10.09.2013]. 9

10

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What makes this form of discipline particularly regrettable is that there are better methods of dealing with rule-breaking in school. Morrison presents restorative justice, a disciplinary method that seeks to directly address the harm caused by specific instances of rule-breaking without focusing on punishment, as an alternative to extremely punitive options like the ‘zero tolerance’ in use at schools today. 13 There is already some evidence that restorative justice can be hugely effective in an educational context. The Dignity in Schools Campaign notes that in schools where restorative justice has been adopted, suspensions and arrests of students have fallen dramatically.14 Considering the link between students staying in school (which is difficult when they are suspended, and impossible when they have been arrested) and lower overall crime rates, 15 restorative justice seems to be a more natural and productive disciplinary system. However, by instead maintaining the punishment-focused methods widespread today, society opts to oppressively restrict the agency of young people for their supposedly flawed and underdeveloped character. In order to understand how a different experience of reality should not invalidate agency, it is worth examining some areas that young people and adults disagree on, and acknowledging what exactly about children adults wish to change and control. Sexting is a common youth practice widely disapproved of by adults, many of whom consider it ‘unhealthy and disruptive’.16 There may be some truth in this view, but it is rooted in an adult misunderstanding of youth activities and of technology. Adults might regard sexting as something to be punished, but teenagers may not even understand what is wrong with it. This discrepancy is not due to a lack of capacity on the part of young people, but rather the result of their existing in a wholly different social reality. To the teenager, sexting is typical and thus normalised; a practice that could involve healthy or unhealthy behaviour, but is not inherently bad. The disparate social worlds of adults and children lead to miscommunication, which in turn breeds distrust and fear. Marsh, Rosser, and Harré give an example of a group of unclearly aged ‘kids’ shouting and playing outside a terrified man’s house in a manner B. Morrison, Handbook of Restorative Justice (Cullompton, 2007), 325-350. ‘Dignity in Schools Campaign. Massachusetts Pushout Fact Sheet’ in Dignity in Schools Campaign. 15 W.W. McMahon, Education and Development: Measuring the Social Benefits (Oxford, 1999), 141154. 16 A. Harris, J. Davidson, E. LeTourneau, C. Paternite & K. Miofsky, Building a Prevention Framework to Address Teen ‘Sexting’ Behaviors, U.S. Department of Justice (30 Oct. 2013). Available: [Accessed 17.09.2013]. 13 14

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that an adult might construe as aggressive. Confrontation without mutual understanding led to the escalation of violent words between the parties. 17 Neither party was entirely in the wrong, but the misunderstanding between them was selfaggravating. In the end, the media took the side of the homeowner, without even considering the perspective of the children. In both situations — sexting and the narrative of misconstrued playing — children and adults experience reality differently. Adults present this difference as an example of young people ‘misbehaving’, and as a reason to punish them. In an oppressive society, ‘misbehaviour’ has a broad definition, possibly including any sort of deviancy from societal norms. This deviancy may be ideological: as discussed previously, idealism and utopianism are considered facets of the irrationality of young people. Their goals are supposedly too difficult to achieve, or they adhere to ideals inconsistent with the way things work in the real world. The classic quote apocryphally attributed to Churchill remarks, ‘show me a young Conservative and I’ll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I’ll show you someone with no brains.’ A youth is expected to be an idealistic Liberal, in contrast to an older, more rational Conservative. The normalisation of adults’ ideals against diminished realities of childhood shuts out the ideas of young people, often to the benefit of those in power. THE DOMINANCE OF SCHOOLING Because children grow into adults, society works to indoctrinate them into its systems of dominance. Foucault argues that education can function as social control, and examines the techniques used to supervise and dominate children.18 He analyses the idea that these disciplinary techniques normalise hierarchy for those subjected to them.19 The hierarchies created by society must be taught in order for them to appear natural, since they are in fact constructed. Lynch and Michalowski discuss how crime is a constructed concept, and how, when constructed by an oppressive society, is used to oppress.20 Misbehaviour in school is similarly constructed and oppressive, as shown by its disparate effect on students of colour and with disabilities, as documented by the

P.E. Marsh, et al., The Rules of Disorder, 7-8. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1977), 146. 19 Ibid., 170-194. 20 M.J. Lynch & R.J. Michalowski, Primer in Radical Criminology: Critical Perspectives on Crime, Power and Identity (New York, 2006), passim. 17 18

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ACLU.21 Society builds a reality that views children as irrational and incompetent. Accordingly, systems like juvenile courts and schools are created to control children, especially children who are also dominated because of their race, gender, and disability. The school system seeks to socialise children into a particular set of norms. Hopkins argues that ‘the value of practices of teachers and pupils [creates] school environments that are gendered and sexualised in ways that are homophobic, sexist, and dominated by specific forms of masculine behaviour’. 22 Indeed the oppression goes beyond these lines to reinforce a system of power and the dominance of those with power over those denied it. Martino and Pallota-Chiarolli examine how schools regulate behaviour and how students resist these regulations. 23 The boys they interview discuss their frustration with rules that seem to exist purely to reinforce authority and power, as well as with practices like assemblies and dress codes that normalise specific behaviours of dress and extracurricular activities, like sports, at the expense of individuality.24 Concerned that children may exercise their agency in ways that society sees as deviant, like wearing casual clothes or participating in plays 25, schools reinforce ‘normal’ practices at the expense of ‘deviant’ ones. In addition to constraining the agency of children by limiting their ideas and behaviours, disciplinary systems weaken agency by devaluing the individual. Children feel at best ignored by school systems,26 and at worst actively disrespected. 27 This is not an accident, but rather an intentional part of a system seeking to restrict agency. Society fears the potential for difference, change, and upsets of power structures that children present, and so it works to mould them into its own system and dominance.

21

‘What is the School-to-Prison Pipeline?’ American Civil Liberties Union. ACLU, (06 June 2008). P. Hopkins, Young People, Place and Identity (Abingdon, 2010), 297. 23 W. Martino & M. Pallotta-Chiarolli, So What's a Boy? Addressing Issues of Masculinity and Schooling, (Berkshire, 2003), 207-238. 24 Ibid., passim. 25 Ibid., 207-238. 26 C. Burke, & I. Grosvenor, The School I'd Like: Children and Young People's Reflections on an Education for the 21st Century, 1-14. 27 P.E. Marsh, et al., The Rules of Disorder, 30-57. 22

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THE AGENCY OF RESISTANCE Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the primary ways children most clearly express their agency is by directly resisting the dominance that oppresses them. If it is to be successful, children’s resistance requires them to possess and act on knowledge and understanding of their circumstances. Acts of resistance may be caused by oppression, but specific forms of resistance are only created through the oppressed group’s own agency and understanding of the world. In terms of children’s opposition to repressive educational institutions, Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli not only describe how small acts of deviancy can be forms of resistance, but also tell stories of boys forcing their schools to change policy through resistant action. 28 A more intentional expression of resistance is organised action, which students have proven eminently capable of. Burns describes a meeting of the Chicago Students Union (CSU) as involving public speaking, brainstorming changes to their schools, and thinking of ways to implement these reforms.29 Furthermore, the CSU has succeeded previously, organising 5,000-student walkouts as well as achieving some of their policy goals: a reformed discipline code, fewer cuts to art, music, and counselling, and teacher performance reviews based on student evaluations instead of standardised testing. 30 The Philadelphia Student Union (PSU) has also spoken against and worked to end the School-to-Prison Pipeline.31 Harsh punishment, a lack of creative courses, a shortage of counsellors, and the regimentation of standardised testing all allow for domination of students by the school system. As such, the projects undertaken by these student unions all represent ways young people fight back against hegemony. Student unions are a powerful form of organised political action. The CSU and PSU are democratically organised, and one of their major campaigns is demanding a vote for students in education policy. 32 As far as organisational structures are concerned, W. Martino & M. Pallotta-Chiarolli. So What's a Boy?, 207-238. R. Burns, ‘Schoolyard Syndicalists’, In These Times (23 Oct. 2013). Available: [Accessed 17.09.2013]. 30 Ibid. 31‘City Wide Campaigns’, Philadelphia Student Union. Available: [Accessed 18.09.2013]. 32 ‘CPS Students Launch 'Union', Demand Voice In District's Decision-Making Process (VIDEO).’, A. Rezin, in Progress Illinois, (8 Aug. 2013). Available: [Accessed 17.9.2013]. 28 29

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democratic groups effectively acknowledge members’ agency, and they strengthen the argument for the existence of agency. Within oppressive systems, demanding democracy is demanding more power, but it is also a claim for the recognition of agency. That student activists prefer to work in student organisations functioning independently of school structures is not a surprise. According to Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli, marginalised students view school-approved ‘student leaders’ as coopted by the same hierarchy that oppresses students;33 real student resistance is not part of school systems, but fights against them. Listening to student self-expression affirms a belief in the inherent justice and effectiveness of self-determination. In many political situations, elites and other power-holders construct individuals as incapable of self-governance. In New Jersey, a primarily white state, the state has taken control of the Newark school system, which was previously run by the primarily black local population. The Newark Students Union, with support from the mayor, has agitated for the firing of the governorappointed superintendent and a return to local control. 34 Students and local politicians work together because the same rhetoric is used to deprive both locals in general, and students in particular, of self-determination. This external control is only justifiable through the oppressive societal constructions that say that children, Black people, and other delegitimised groups are irrational and therefore incapable of self-governance. CONCLUSION Children act in and on reality despite extensive societal efforts to render their agency invisible and incompetent. The conception of childhood that exists today, with its various inherent incompetencies such as naïvety and irrationality, is a societal construction used to diminish the idea that children have agency. Societal structures like the United States educational system that ignore and restrict youth agency are oppressive, and this oppression primarily manifests in harsh discipline that suppresses the agency of children and forces them to act in accordance with societal norms. More subtle systems of oppression, like schools’ recognition of some activities but not others, also serve to normalise behaviour. This multifaceted oppression gets the behaviour it 33 34

W. Martino and M. Pallotta-Chiarolli. So What's a Boy?, 234-236. ‘Students Stage Sit-In at Newark Public School Board Meeting’. NBC, New York, (21 May 2014). Available: [Accessed 8. 3.2015].

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desires from some children at the expense of marginalising others, in many cases actually forcing them out of school and into the criminal justice system. However, children do in fact have agency, which allows them to fight back against oppression. With tactics and goals specifically designed to gain recognition of agency and reinforce it, student unions resist the ways in which their agency is rendered invisible by society. Rejecting the agency of children should be more difficult than affirming it. Children certainly have something similar to the common conceptualisations of agency, and the outright rejection of children’s agency leads to oppression and depends upon specific constructions of childhood that ignore children’s experience of reality. This domination focuses acutely on child members of already oppressed groups. Oppression itself proves the existence of children’s agency because it exists in reaction to it. Furthermore, children demonstrate their own agency through resistance to oppression. In order to assert that children have agency, one must grapple with the systemic injustices that seek to deny it. Children provide a new path to understanding oppression and power, but their contributions cannot be taken as a panacea. Ironically, the relaxation of disciplinary power in schools, like allowing students to choose their own clothes instead of wearing uniforms, actually leads to peer pressure, 35 which is based on oppressive societal constructions such as gender, sexuality, race, and class; in other words, one form of oppression can take the place of another if not all oppression is addressed. However, active recognition and problematisation of these various oppressive norms and the cultivation of women’s power, queer power, trans power, power for people of colour, and worker power, for example, can help to legitimise the reality that these groups experience. Building youth power is an important but insufficient piece of attaining liberation, by ending oppression in all realities.

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‘What’s the point of school uniform?’, C. Spencer in The Guardian (3 Oct. 2013). Available: [Accessed 8.3.2015].

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BIBLIOGRAPHY D. Archard, Children: Rights and Childhood (London, 1993). C. Burke, & I. Grosvenor, The School I'd Like: Children and Young People's Reflections on an Education for the 21st Century (London, 2003). R. Burns, ‘Schoolyard Syndicalists’, In These Times (23 Oct. 2013). Available: [Accessed 17.09.2013]. M. S. Cladis, Durkheim and Foucault: Perspectives on Education and Punishment (Oxford, 1999). S. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London, 1972). G. DeGroot, & B. Gordon, Student Protest: The Sixties and after (New York, 1998) . P. E. Erickson & S. K. Erickson, Crime, Punishment, and Mental Illness: Law and the Behavioral Sciences in Conflict (New Jersey, 2008). M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1977). A. Harris, J. Davidson, E. LeTourneau, C. Paternite & K. Miofsky, Building a Prevention Framework to Address Teen ‘Sexting’ Behaviors , U.S. Department of Justice (30 Oct. 2013). Available: < https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/grants/244001.pdf> [Accessed 17.09.2013]. P. Hopkins, Young People, Place and Identity (Abingdon, 2010). I. Hutchby & J. Moran-Ellis, Children and Social Competence: Arenas of Action (London, 1998). A. F. Lang, Punishment, Justice and International Relations: Ethics and Order after the Cold War (London, 2008). J. Leatherman, Discipline and Punishment in Global Politics: Illusions of Control (New York, 2008). M. J. Lynch & R. J. Michalowski, Primer in Radical Criminology: Critical Perspectives on Crime, Power and Identity (New York, 2006). P. E. Marsh, E. Rosser & R. Harré, The Rules of Disorder (London, 1978). W. Martino, & M. Pallotta-Chiarolli, So What's a Boy?: Addressing Issues of Masculinity and Schooling (Berkshire, 2003). K. D. McBride, Punishment and Political Order (Michigan, 2007).

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W. W. McMahon, Education and Development: Measuring the Social Benefits (Oxford, 1999). B. Morrison, Handbook of Restorative Justice, G. Johnstone (ed.) (Cullompton, 2007). INTERNET SOURCES ‘City

Wide Campaigns’, Philadelphia Student Union. Available: < http://phillystudentunion.org/index.php/component/k2/item/59> [Accessed 18.09.2013].

‘CPS Students Launch 'Union', Demand Voice In District's Decision-Making Process (VIDEO).’, A. Rezin, in Progress Illinois, (8 Aug. 2013). Available: [Accessed 17.9.2013]. ‘Dignity in Schools Campaign. Massachusetts Pushout Fact Sheet’ in Dignity in Schools Campaign. Available: [Accessed 10.09.2013]. ‘Sen. Harry Reid: Obstructionist Republicans Need to “Grow Up” on Health Law Issue’, T. Howell Jr. in The Washington Times (17 Sept. 2013). Available: [Accessed 17.09.2013]. ‘Students Stage Sit-In at Newark Public School Board Meeting’. NBC, New York, (21 May 2014). Available: [Accessed 8. 3.2015]. ‘What is the School-to-Prison Pipeline?’ American Civil Liberties Union. ACLU, (06 June 2008). Available: [Accessed 08.03.2015]. ‘What’s the point of school uniform?’, C. Spencer in The Guardian (3 Oct. 2013). Available: [Accessed 8.3.2015].

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The Construction of the (Convincing) Child Subject in Victorian Literature Katie Arthur. Drawing on genre theory and especially Shklovsky’s definition of ostranenie, or defamiliarisation, this article investigates the evolution of the construction and understanding of the child subject in Victorian literature. Engaging not only with the role of literature in shaping representations of the child, but also how the child's knowledge is furthered or tested through the genre of ‘children’s literature’, this article offers close readings of several key novels. From the ‘plastic children’ of Dickens to Carroll’s empowered Alice, this article fuses a discussion of the technique of defamiliarisation in creating a convincing child voice with an emphasis on the implications of doing so. Moreover, it traces the roots of the contemporary child’s agency as well as the linguistic formulations of childhood, language, and civil society. In weighing the distinctions between nineteenthcentury realism and non-sense, this article ultimately proposes that the ostranenie synonymous with the technique of the child’s standpoint evokes a coded social commentary, shifting the child from an affective to a political narrative device.

To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; … this is the character and privilege of genius1 There seems a transcendental connection between the thrill of novel experience to the child and that of aesthetic ecstasy to the beholder of art. To encounter something for the first time inspires in the human condition a different understanding, beyond the tedium of the everyday signified. To recover this childlike fascination is art’s aim, the aesthete’s opiate, the character of genius. Marking Shklovsky’s understanding of this phenomenon of defamiliarisation, this article hopes to illuminate the success and effect to which it is used in evolving Victorian literary constructs of the child.

KATIE ARTHUR is a fourth-year undergraduate student studying English Literature and Politics at the University of Glasgow. This article was written as part of her ‘Victorian Literature’ module, and marked the beginning of her pursuit of critical theory throughout her academic studies. She has engaged with a broad range of topics whilst at university, from Shakespeare to conflict resolution, and has received recognition in the form of two ‘Highly Commended’ certificates for essays submitted to the 2014 Undergraduate Awards. 1

S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria in J. Shawcross (ed.) (London, 1939), Vi, 59.

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Ostranenie, or defamiliarisation, is the literary device employed to portray the ordinary and the known with fresh eyes, free of the associations bound within our socialisation that alters our understanding. In his essay Art as Technique, Shklovsky outlines perception as an ‘aesthetic end’ in and of its own, declaring: The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception…2 In Shklovsky’s view, the aim of art is to defamiliarise the reader, its beauty arising from making the known unknown, by asking us to look again and see differently. He differentiates between the ‘known’ and the ‘perceived’: the known as laden with the normative inflections of tacit social discourse, and the perceived as the defamiliarised object free of normative connotations. He describes the ‘attenuated’ and ‘tortuous’ form of poetic speech as the mode best to achieve perception. Wonderful and strange, almost ‘foreign’ in its reduction to evocation and musicality, Shklovsky understands its qualities as most adequate to simultaneously distance the reader from the ‘known’. Antithetic to poetic speech is prose, which Shklovsky argues is automatising and habitualising, rendering its object as known by tacit social discourse. Shklovsky offers as an example the ‘“direct” expression of the child’ 3 , whose portrayal is plain and reductive. Yet, Shklovsky overlooks how the child’s abruptness offers perception and not knowledge, with their expression of thought still deeply embedded in an attempt to grasp what is new to them and not overloaded in socialised codes of language. Jakobson’s work highlights this ostranenie within the child’s perception and elocution. He analyses how the development of semantic understanding and linguistic conventions often leads to curious, substitutive misuses in children’s vocabulary. 4 Indeed, the confusion and displacement of words and meaning, based on the individual’s own cognitive understanding, are deemed a necessary phase in children’s linguistic development before they conform to conventional understandings and usages that shape their perception of the world. This discrepancy in perception, language use, and meaning provides defamiliarisation through the child’s perspective. V. Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’ in J. Rivkin & M. Ryan (eds.), Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd Edition (Oxford, 2004), 16. 3 Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, 20. 4 R. Jakobson, Studies on Child Language and Aphasia (Paris, 1971). 2

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The combination of Shklovsky and Jakobson thus provides an analytical framework to measure the success of creating convincing literary constructs of the child, and the effects to which defamiliarisation is utilised by the authors. Interestingly, Jakobson divides aphasic disturbances into two broad categories: metonyms regarding contiguity, and metaphors in relation to substitution. He argues that the ‘“realistic” trend’ is underpinned and even pre-determined by metonymy 5 , an idea that will ground the later part of this essay as it attempts to expose and distinguish between the political and semantic implications of the child in realism and literary non-sense. The child received unprecedented attention during the Victorian era. Although the cult of the innocent child prevailed in the days of the Romantics, their poetic fascination further transpired into anthropological and psychiatric study. Amidst the days of empire and codes of civilised conduct, the figure of the child was constructed alongside Darwinian anxieties and concerns of sexual transgression 6 As the cornerstone of British civility and social order amidst the fears and tensions of an expanding world, the discursive figure of the child became ‘the site for the exploration of the self, the measure of morality, and human perfection and the standard for the evaluation of Victorian society.’ 7 The adult fascination with innocence wrote of the child with idealised sentimentality, whilst the cultural dictums rendered it the signifier of primitivism and hegemonic masculine paranoia on the warm hearths of genteel English homes. As the Victorians struggled in their brave new world to reconsolidate the bourgeois order, the child became a focal lens through which the future of society was seen and contested. As such, the literary and scientific space of the child in the Victorian era expanded to play out the tensions of an increasingly fragmented society in its newly designated role as the ‘father of man’ as bequeathed by the Romantic vision8. Shuttleworth argues the newfound social space brought the child a ‘complex subjectivity’ 9 , with novels by Dickens, Eliot, and the Brontës locating the child’s interiority within a growing

R. Jakobson, ‘Two Aspects of Language’ in J. Rivkin & M. Ryan (eds.), Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd Edition (Oxford, 2004), 77. 6 S. Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science and Medicine, 1840-1900 (New York, 2010), 4. 7 L. C. Roberts, ‘Children’s Fiction’, in P. Brantlinger & W. B. Thesling (eds.), A Companion to the Victorian Novel (Oxford, 2002), 355. 8 Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child, 3. 9 Ibid., 359. 5

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paradigm of psychoanalytical understanding. Beginning with Dickens, this article will examine the evolution of the construction and understanding of literary representations of the child. By contrasting Pip in Great Expectations with the ‘plastic’10 Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, this article will argue that ostranenie creates a convincing child voice. Proceeding down the rabbit hole into Carroll’s Alice narratives, this article will assert that a defamiliarised perspective overturns naturalised ideological apparatus through a fierce and uncivilised sense of injustice. The child subject thus becomes the site of transgressive potential to unpick the very bourgeois moral ideals it had come to represent. Tracing the child to the end of the century, we mark the progression in the epistemological understanding of the child, and the literary representations which founded the basis of the contemporary child. Critics often cite Dickens as one of the central propagators of the myth of childhood and one of the worst offenders for wielding the sentimentalised child as a rhetorical mechanism11. His 1841 novel The Old Curiosity Shop serves as a useful starting point of enquiry into contemporary considerations of the literary innocent as a fictitious construction drawn from the need to gratify adult ideals. Little Nell certainly cannot withstand accusations of conforming to Carey’s notion of Dickens’ ‘manufactured children’12, with Oscar Wilde infamously purporting that ‘[o]ne must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without dissolving into tears… of laughter.’13 Pattinson evokes that her innocence is ‘somehow fatal’14, and her obliging and pliable character bend her to inevitable annihilation as she is finally symbolised as the adult potential for redemption, bowing to the adult necessity to write children in gratification of their own pursuits. The opening chapter sees Nell first addressed as ‘my child’ 15 , the possessive pronoun oddly indicative of Nell’s one-dimensional malleability. Described as earnest, helpful, and infallibly angelic, Nell — although exceedingly competent — is restricted as an emotive device.

J. Carey, The Violent Effigy: A Study of the Dickens’ Imagination (London, 1973), 136. L. Langbauer, ‘Ethics and Theory: Suffering Children in Dickens, Dostoyevsky and Le Quin’ (2008) 75:1 English Literary History 104; R. Pattinson, The Child Figure in English Literature (Georgia, University of Georgia Press: 2008), 78; J. Kincaid, ‘Dickens and the Construction of the Child’ in W. Jacobson (ed.), Dickens and the Children of Empire (Hampshire, 2000), 37. 12 Carey, The Violent Effigy, 131. 13 R. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London, 1987), 441. 14 Pattinson, The Child Figure, 80. 15 C. Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (London, 1985), 44. 10 11

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It is ironic then, when the first-person narrator speaks of his shame in considering taking advantage of the child ‘for the purpose of gratifying my curiosity’ 16 when the reader is not encouraged to reflexively appreciate a shame in their exploitation of Nell’s sentimentalised construction. As her death is revealed at the end of the narrative, Dickens’ narrator explains ‘[s]he was dead. Dear, gentle, patient, noble Nell, was dead.’17 This roll of adjectives, in addition to the comparison of her to her tiny bird, renders Nell preposterous — a shell of an imagined idealised child, the adultreader’s child, Dickens’ glib means to ensure sympathy. It can thus be deduced that the adult author’s rendition of the child often inscribes the fictitious qualities of the innocent, decimating child agency and imposing conventions of emotive conditioning in relation to the reader’s conception of the child. But it would be brash to assume that Dickens offers no recompense for Nell, and it is indeed found in the intuitive voice of Pip, published twenty years later. Here Dickens employs the technique of ostranenie to create a convincing child subject. Defamiliarisation is inherent within the narrative tone of child Pip in the ‘first stage’, where Dickens constructs a fine balance between self-vindication and retrospective rebuttal. The device of a first-person retrospective narrator at the end of his Bildungsroman journey, and thus moral teleology, allows for careful comic consideration of Pip’s childish thoughts. The disparity between child and adult understanding, and the gentle reproving tone with which Dickens has Pip comment on his former self creates a convincing child and moreover, a convincing character. The first page of Great Expectations entertains the ‘childish conclusion’ Pip ‘unreasonably derived’ regarding the gravestones of his family, creating a vibrant conception of the child’s perspective, or as Pip notes, his ‘vivid and broad impression of the identity of things.’18 It is important here to note that adult Pip recognises that his acquisition of knowledge at that stage was merely an ‘impression’, as opposed to a grasping of substantive reality. The child’s voice is marked by a dislocation from understanding and an imperative curiosity filled with internally constituted comprehensions. Tied into the trajectory of the coming-of-age narrative, the reader is initially presented with a child inept in conditioned ideas: Pip recollects his light-hearted childish fantasies regarding his

Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, 46. Ibid., 654 18 C. Dickens, Great Expectations (London, 2003), 3. 16 17

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family’s gravestones, as opposed to a deep mourning that would characterise the sentimentalised child. These discrepancies often allow descriptions of sympathetic circumstances that avoid self-pitying. For example, young Pip fathoms a parallel meaning to the notion of his being raised ‘by hand’, ‘having at that time to find out for myself what the expression meant’, 19 and notes Pumblechook at ease whilst smothering Pip with sums.20 While the first example uses comic ostranenie to code a sympathetic characterisation without deploring for pity, the latter sees Pip appropriate his adult register to describe and undermine the ‘gorging and gormandising’ 21 Pumblechook. This balance between redeemed retrospective narrator and unjustly treated child creates an incongruity of meaning that not only allows comic lightness, but also encodes Dickens’ realist moral intent. Thus, the biggest tragedy to child Pip is his premature enlightenment. The twisted revelation of his being ‘ignorant and backward’ 22 after meeting Miss Havisham and Estella thrusts him unkindly out of ignorance. The irony of course, which the narration instils, is that his newfound knowledge only serves to breed his ignorance. The sense of being coarse and common haunts young Pip, but leads his retrospective narration to admit that it ‘is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home.’ 23 The reader is then led not to agree with Pip’s ‘black ingratitude’ but the contrived adult world that brings this perception to him. Furthermore, the reader is pushed to acknowledge the keener insight of the child Pip, who is not engulfed by morally senseless adult convictions. His observation that moving from kitchen to parlour for Christmas dinner ‘was a change very like Joe’s change from his working clothes to his Sunday dress’24 (from ‘well-knit characteristic-looking blacksmith’ to a ‘scarecrow in good circumstances’ 25 ) highlights the keen perceptiveness of Pip outside the acculturation of conduct. Not taken in by adult habitualisation, the ostranenie allows Dickens to have him to comment most freely and accurately in his position of the other. It is precisely this misapprehension of adult codes through the defamiliarisation of the child’s perspective that successfully translates into a social commentary with an acute Dickens, Great Expectations, 7-8. Ibid., 54. 21 Ibid., 55 22 Ibid., 71. 23 Ibid., 106. 24 Ibid., 25. 25 Ibid., 23. 19 20

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sense of (in) justice. As G. K. Chesterton commented, ‘[b]y [Dickens’] solemnity he commands us to love our neighbours. By his caricature he makes us love them.’ 26 Great Expectations then confronts the didactic realist use of the child as emotive device. The narration gently nods towards the keener insight of child Pip, his defamiliarised perspective proving more rational than the erratic adult moral codes that eventually corrupt it. Unlike Nell, who is so good that there is nothing more to her, Pip has agency, and a specific child’s agency. This agency prevents Pip from becoming the symbol of childhood which gratifies the adult reader. Dickens avoids the pitfall of characterising him as innocent; rather, the child is seen as the vehicle for denaturalising ideological apparatuses against the autonomy of adult codes. This brings us neatly to Alice, whom Carroll too, imbues with a specific child agency. Alice’s adventures are marked by her attempts to fix meaning or understand the conventions presented to her. Her futile attempts to discern rationality within her nonsensical settings are combined with the child’s prerogative of fearless curiosity: the story begins with Alice carelessly chasing the rabbit down the hole, ‘never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.’ 27 Unlike Pip, Alice has a twotrack defamiliarisation of perspective, that of the child and that of non-sense. Lerer propounds that literary non-sense derives its foundations from the nineteenth-century novel, as each explores ‘the limits of social expectation through linguistic experiment.’28 He notes the fairy-tale quality to Dickensian names and caricature as well as the estrangement evoked by his use of dialect, going so far as to argue that the key proponent in such defamiliarisation is to see the world through the child’s eyes. The child as the ‘other’, outside automatism adds colour to the author’s lines, allowing gothic melodrama and wild chremamorphisms, with Pip describing characters through object-like attributes. Whereas in realism, the ostranenie of the convincing child affords satire, in non-sense the meanings are a lot more obscure. So though both Pip and Alice are staples of the transformative energies 29 of the child subject who do not conform to the gratification of the adult reader, Alice’s endeavours into the symbolic allow Carroll to exercise ostranenie on a further level.

G. K. Chesterton, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (London, 1911), 59. L. Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (London, 2012), 6. 28 S. Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History, from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago, 2008), 191. 29 K. Reynolds, Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction (Hampshire, 2007), 1. 26 27

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Wonderland and the world of the Looking Glass do not only satirise adult codes, but also the linguistic and semantic conventions that they arise from. If Great Expectations illuminates the child’s rejection of adult rationality, the Alice narratives call forth a dissection of the child’s linguistic development and acculturation. Returning to Jakobson’s emphasis that realism relies on metonymy, we can see non-sense disrupting this contiguity and thus providing no hierarchy of discourse; no final signified. The poetic use of metaphor is also unsettled by Alice’s constant displacement, uneasiness, and inability to construe meaning, resulting in an absence of entrenched semantic proposals from the text. In this sense the genre resonates with the power of language by torturing the reader’s need to find coherent meaning. Lecercle advocates an inherent tension within non-sense, as it ‘both supports the myth of an informative and communicative language and deeply subverts it’30. To achieve its purpose, non-sense strictly adheres to certain rules, like syntax, yet it is from this that the reader recognises the signs as empty31, conforming to Shklovsky’s notion of poetic speech – wondrous, strange, and foreign. Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ 32 poem is the quintessential example of this: seemingly meaningless yet actually imitating the rules of the English language. Thus, when Humpty Dumpty begins to interpret the poem to Alice, she is able to understand which words are verbs from their syntax as she asks ‘And what’s to “gyre” and to “gimble”?’33 The importance here is that Alice can deduce enough to ask ‘what’s to’, implying her understanding of the word as a verb that conveys an action. Humpty Dumpty also defines “outgrabe” to Alice using its present tense “outgribing”, tracing the word’s morphological markers in accordance with the logic of English conventions. The signifier then has no fixed meaning — it merely derives it from the signifying rules which it follows. Yet, Carroll has Alice constantly meet characters who do attempt to deliver meaning. From Humpty’s reading of ‘Jabberwocky’ to the pun-based explanations of the Gryphon and Mock Turtle, the creatures of the dream-world present themselves as custodians of knowledge, a knowledge Alice must adapt to and make sense of. The

J-j Lecercle, The Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature (New York, 2002), 3. 31 M. Yaguello, Language Through the Looking Glass: Exploring Language and Linguistics (Oxford, 1998), 95. 32 Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 131. 33 Ibid., 191. 30

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corruptions of etymology and semantics used by the monsters can be seen as undermining adult didacticism; as Silverstone notes, although ‘the tone of these utterances is frequently pedagogic and belittling, the content is ridiculous.’ 34 The arbitrary morals of the Duchess represent the futility in trying to wrestle meaning from meaninglessness — ‘everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.’35 The vulgar repetition, ‘And the moral of that is…’, only serves to render them more nonsensical and so reflect the absurdity of the adult code to the child. Where before the child subject was posited as the passive receptacle and unwitting upholder of bourgeois values, Carroll uses Alice’s innocence to afford her the ability to reject and transgress social codes and cultural dictums. Rather than being bowled over by the preposterousness she is greeted by throughout her journey, Carroll writes of Alice as engaging with and rebelling against the codes and conventions presented to her. This agency is vital in preventing Alice from becoming a submissive, sentimentalised subject, and instead ensures that she is inquisitive, active, and consequently subversive of the Victorian construction of the child as a projection of the ideals and anxieties of the adult world. And so the twofold employment of ostranenie, both within the child’s perspective and the genre of nonsense, propels Carroll’s Alice narratives to a new capacity to deconstruct and denaturalise ideological apparatuses, from adult codes to the structure of language. Both Carroll’s Alice and Dickens’ Pip are child subjects written convincingly and with vigour through the author’s use of defamiliarisation, which in turn allows them to denaturalise and reflect upon the constructs the character is restrained by: from class to language to adult conventions. It is Dickens’ device of a first-person retrospective narrator, and Carroll’s careful use of an unobtrusive third-person narrator, which allows their child subjects to be children. Indeed, Carroll, whose narrator offers no enlightened vision through carefully measured interjections such as ‘I hope you understand what thinking in chorus means — for I must confess that I don't’36, places meaning with the reader in a profoundly distinctive way for his time. He thus

34

B. Silverstone, ‘Children, Monsters and Words in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass’ (2001) 30:4 Cambridge Quarterly 325. 35 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 77. 36 Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 146.

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empowers his child reader alongside his child subject, the transition of meaning from author to reader since becoming ‘a central tenet of modern critical theory.’ 37 This epistemological shift in the understanding of the child and its literary representations paved the way for modern child subject. The end of the century was marked by works like Morrison’s A Child of the Jago, turning to the child subject but embracing a new subjectivity. Away from the sentimentalised innocent of the Romantics, Morrison portrays the protagonist Dicky Perrott as fierce and resourceful, ambiguously sympathetic and doomed to corruption. His two-year-old sister’s death is met by his mother’s ‘listless relief’38 — a far cry from the tears shed for Little Nell. Sparing neither the adult-readers’ need for idealised innocence nor the characters that litter his plot, Morrison’s tragic naturalist trajectory offers no recompense of meaning. Dicky still misunderstands the adult world, with his redemptive gift to the Ropers being perceived as ‘spite’ 39 and his first encounter with Weech leaving him feeling ‘guilty without in the least understanding the offence’ 40 . However, he also ‘clicks’, fights, and lies. Morrison states he killed Dicky because he could not escape, and ‘would have become perforce, as bad as his surroundings’, 41 reinforcing the idea of moving away from the conventional affective use of the child as an emotive rhetoric device. The child subject and its literary representations are still subject to contemporary debate, yet we can conclude that it was through the Victorian era that the child found its agency and its subversive voice. From the constraints of the plastic child as an emotive device, to the empowered modern child subject and reader, we have seen how Dickens and Carroll rewrote the epistemological category of childhood as well as our understandings of it. Shklovsky’s definition of ostranenie and Jakobson’s appreciation of it within the child’s linguistic development pave the way for an analysis of how it has subsequently been employed by authors to create a convincing child subject. The defamiliarisation of children’s eyes also allows them to see what the habitualised adult’s cannot, and thus is a technique used by authors to evoke social commentary, J. Dunisbere, Alice to the Lighthouse: Children’s Book and Radical Experiments in Art (Hampshire, 1987), 42. 38 A. Morrison, A Child of the Jago (1896; London, 1969), 102. 39 Ibid., 89. 40 Ibid., 70. 41 A. Hunter, ‘Arthur Morrison and the Tyranny of Sentimental Charity’ (2013) 56:3 English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 293. Citing: A. Morrison, ‘The Children of the Jago: Slum-life at Close Quarters: A Talk with Mr Arthur Morrison’, Daily News, 12th December 1896, 6. 37

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whether coding realist concerns of justice or the satire of language in non-sense. The child shifted from an affective to a political narrative device, empowered by a consideration of his or her keen perceptiveness. In her adventures, Alice is constantly pestered to ‘say what [she] mean[s]’42, but in truth the child does so — and usually captures meaning better than the most eloquent logophile, as the stories do not fail to remind us.

42

Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, 59.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY J. Carey, The Violent Effigy: A Study of the Dickens’ Imagination (London, 1973). L. Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (London, 2012). G. K. Chesterton, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (London, 1911). S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria in J. Shawcross (ed.) (London, 1939), Vi. C. Dickens, Great Expectations (1860-1; London, 2003). C. Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841; London, 1985). J. Dunisbere, Alice to the Lighthouse: Children’s Book and Radical Experiments in Art (Hampshire, 1987). R. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London, 1987). A. Hunter, ‘Arthur Morrison and the Tyranny of Sentimental Charity’ (2013) 56:3 English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 292-312. R. Jakobson, ‘Two Aspects of Language’ in J. Rivkin & M. Ryan (eds.), Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd Edition (Oxford, 2004), 76-80. R. Jakobson, Studies on Child Language and Aphasia (Paris, 1971). J. Kincaid, ‘Dickens and the Construction of the Child’ in W. Jacobson (ed.), Dickens and the Children of Empire (Hampshire, 2000), 29-42. L. Langbauer, ‘Ethics and Theory: Suffering Children in Dickens, Dostoyevsky and Le Quin’ (2008) 75:1 English Literary History 89-108. J-J. Lecercle, The Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature (New York, 2002). S. Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History, from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago, 2008). A. Morrison, A Child of the Jago (1896; London, 1969). R. Pattinson, The Child Figure in English Literature (Georgia, 2008). K.

Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction (Hampshire, 2007).

Reynolds,

V. Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’ in J. Rivkin & M. Ryan (eds.), Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd Edition (Oxford, 2004), 15-21.

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L. C. Roberts, ‘Children’s Fiction’, in P. Brantlinger & W. B. Thesling (eds.), A Companion to the Victorian Novel (Oxford, 2002), 353-369. S. Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science and Medicine, 1840-1900 (New York, 2010). B. Silverstone, ‘Children, Monsters and Words in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass’ (2001) 30:4 Cambridge Quarterly 319-336. M. Yaguello, Language Through the Looking Glass: Exploring Language and Linguistics (Oxford, 1998).

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Thinking at the Limits of Humanity: Humanism, Otherness, and Queer Materialisms Michael Awdankiewicz. The importance and centrality of the Vitruvian Man of humanism have often been called into question. Michel Foucault’s analysis reveals the figure of Man as contingent and inseparably bound to Kantian epistemology. This modern épistème, according to Foucault, occasioned the emergence of an empirico-transcendental doublet: Man as a knowing subject, and Man as a known object. By invoking various feminist, post-colonial and race theories of the figure of Man, this article offers a critical look at the exclusionary qualities of humanism. Rosi Braidotti attempts to overcome the dialectic of difference and otherness that drives the humanist oppositions of the Same and the Other, by proposing a multi-relational, nomadic account of subjectivity positioned within an eco-philosophy of nonhuman others. Braidotti’s posthumanism offers an alternative to the outmoded anthropocentrism of the humanist paradigm. Finally, the argument culminates in suggesting new materialisms and object-oriented ontology as more suitable theoretical frameworks for elaborating non-anthropocentric, democratic, and unbiased ontologies. The radical openness and inclusivity of object-oriented ontologies makes them a fertile ground for staging further work to be done in queer theory and other critical social theories.

How wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist, and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. [...] It floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying centre of the world.1 ***

MICHAEL AWDANKIEWICZ is a third-year Philosophy student at the University of Edinburgh and an exchange student at University College Dublin. He is interested in continental philosophy, particularly in phenomenology, contemporary movements such as speculative realism and objectoriented ontology, as well as psychoanalysis. Michael’s current work focuses on the influence of contemporary materialist ontologies on notions of embodiment, agency, freedom, and politics. He hopes to develop these interests further at postgraduate level. 1

F. Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense’ in Portable Nietzsche (New York, 1982), 42.

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It has become increasingly noticeable that the humanist framework is not the most appropriate setup for discussions of agency, freedom, and responsibility. The limits of the concept of ‘human’, central to the humanist framework, have often been called into question. Examples abound: from the machinic 2 enhancements of the organic body that bear a peculiar uncanniness to prosthesis, as invoked by cyberpunk fictions and current medical developments alike, and through critiques of the exclusionary normativity of the concept of ‘man’ that have been formulated by feminism, gender and sexuality studies, race studies, and queer theories. We are now entangled in bonds of vulnerability, precarity, and inter-connected responsibility, which are beyond panhuman and span unfamiliar, nonhuman others. Our conceptions of agency are being questioned by the current necro-politics of drone warfare, the accelerating development of robotics, and the everyday recalcitrance and efficacy of things. 3 In response to these limits of humanism, I investigate how to best stage discussions of human, gender, sex, and race in the midst of intricate ecological networks and capitalist profit-relations. For my discussion of the workings and failings of humanist anthropocentrism, the starting point will be Michel Foucault’s critique of the concept of ‘man’ as it emerged in modernity. I argue that Foucault’s exposure of the contingency of the humanist figure and elaboration of the power relations through which it became established paved the way to further feminist, queer, post-colonial, and race theorists’ critiques of the model. Further, I discuss Rosi Braidotti’s post-humanism and her attempts to arrive at new approaches to subjectivity, which circumvent the negative dialectic of Same and Other, and situate the posthuman in the midst of nonhuman others. Next, I set Braidotti’s eco-philosophy side-by-side with speculative realist movements, suggesting that the two share a similar agenda. Finally, I will gesture at the possibilities of a fertile alliance between object-oriented ontology and queer theory, as radical otherness, to offer an alternative to the stagnant, ossified humanist paradigm. The

2

The distinction between ‘machinic’ and ‘technological’ is the one foreshadowed by Martin Heidegger in his own distinction between technological machines and techne, i.e. a skill or craft as a mode of doing or making, (M. Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York, 1997). Slavoj Žižek thus writes: ‘What we get here is not the relationship of metaphor (the old boring topic of ‘machine replacing humans’) but that of metamorphosis, of the ‘becoming-machine’ of man’ in S. Žižek, Organs Without Bodies (New York, 2004), 16. 3 This last point is particularly stressed by Jane Bennett, and I will briefly mention her exposition of the 2003 Northeast blackout later on in the essay.

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discussion I propose to put forward can only be cursory and inexhaustive; my aim in this article is cartographic, that is to draw various lines of flight for further exploration. CRITIQUE AND DECONSTRUCTION For Foucault, the humanist Man is a ‘recent invention’, ‘nearing its end’ like a ‘face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea’.4 Perhaps the main impulse behind these promises of the imminent death of Man was Foucault’s disenchantment with humanism as thoroughly entangled in western subject-oriented metaphysics. Foucault’s analysis of the historical a priori grounding of knowledge, the épistème of the classical age, finds representation as the privileged medium of and grounds for knowledge – to be known means to be represented. The birth of Man is the outcome of the Copernican revolution engendered by Immanuel Kant: the notorious shift of focus from representation to the representing subject. 5 Kant asserts that to answer the sceptical challenge posed by David Hume’s critique of metaphysics and to secure the certainty of knowledge, we need to look into the activity of representation itself to find the a priori conditions of the possibility of knowledge. He thus relocates the origin of necessary concepts to the a priori structures of the mind and frees them from their previous derivation from sense experience. It is those a priori structures — the universal and necessary constraints on representation — that properly ground the universality and necessity of science. ‘Modernity,’ claims Foucault, inaugurated ‘the constitution of an empirico-transcendental doublet [...] called man’6 with its inherent tensions. Hence, the Kantian man is endowed with almost divine powers of intellect that are capable of systematising the world of experience. Paradoxically, this power emerges from its very delineation in the universal conditions of possibility, our human finitude.7 Foucault recapitulates: ‘the limits of knowledge provide a positive foundation

M. Foucault, The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London, 2001), 386-7. Or the ‘Ptolemaic revolution’, as Quentin Meillassoux labels it. The decisive moment in the history of philosophy, says Meillassoux, was ‘the Copernico-Galilean decentering carried out by modern science [which] gave rise to a Ptolemaic counter-revolution in philosophy’, (Q. Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London, 2008), 118). Decentring occurs in thought, which is an unprecedented centrality relative to the world, wherein the subject becomes central to the process of knowledge (cf. I. Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge, 1999), Bxxiii). 6 Foucault, The Order of Things, 347. 7 Therefore, this all-organising, all-systematising, synthetic power of Reason emerges from its limitations in the form of the universal and necessary conditions of the possibility of knowing, which ensure that Reason does not run riot. 4 5

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for the possibility of knowing’ 8 ; Man therefore becomes sovereign only through shackling himself to the fetters of finitude. The dualism of the Man of modernity is nearly schizophrenic — on the one hand, he is the universal and unconditioned transcendental ego, which transcends body and personhood, and on the other hand, the empirical, embodied, and desire-driven person conditioned by the transcendental ego. This ontological schism has shaped the epistemology of man and given rise to a new understanding of Man as the empirico-transcendental doublet: Man as empirical is a possible object of knowledge; Man as transcendental subject is the originator of all empirical knowledge and the organiser of the reality in which he partakes. Modernity comes with this Kantian paradigm of knowledge, accompanied by the concept of Man with which to secure this new épistème. Human nature is, therefore, a construct of the eighteenth-century, as Foucault asserts when he writes that ‘the existence of Man is contingent on the rules of regulation and systematic relations that constitute the modern épistème.’9 When Foucault speaks of the impending extinction of Man, he means the death of Kant’s self-present, self-creative, transcendental self. Humanism assumes Man to be its foundation and origin, when he is merely its endproduct. For Foucault, the subject needs to be defined as a constituent within a discursive field:10 the subject is far from the ideal of self-constitution as envisioned by Kant; rather, it is formed and moulded by numerous operations of power exerted upon it. Further, as Nancy Fraser remarks, appeals to humanist values often serve to obscure strategies of domination, 11 and humanism itself is intrinsically objectionable since subjection is a form of subjugation.12 More explicitly, Foucault defines ‘subjectivation’ as ‘the process by which one obtains the constitution of a subject, or more exactly, of a subjectivity, which is obviously only one of the given possibilities for organising selfconsciousness.’13 He plays on the equivocation between two French words: sujétion, derived from the noun sujet, ‘subject’, and assujettissement, which stems from the verb assujettir, ‘to subject’. Accordingly, the constitution as subject exhibits strong connotations to subjection and subjugation. ‘Subjection’ signifies ‘the process of

Foucault, The Order of Things, 317. J. Simmons, Foucault and the Political (London, 1995), 25. 10 M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York, 1972), 205. 11 Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre’s introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, quoted below. 12 Cf. N. Fraser, ‘M. Foucault, ‘A “Young Conservative”?’ in M. Kelly (ed.), Critique and Power (Cambridge, 1994). 13 M. Foucault, Dits et écrits. II. 1976-1988, 1525 as quoted in M. G.E. Kelly, The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault, (New York, 2009), 87. 8 9

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becoming subordinated by power as well as the process of becoming a subject’.14 As Judith Butler puts it, ‘by discursive productivity [...] the subject is initiated through a primary submission to power.’15 Foucault’s insights into the power structures at play in the construction of the humanist ideal of Man expose its contingent nature and open new pathways for the criticism of the idealised transcendental subject. Foucault’s critique runs somewhat parallel with Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor Adorno’s explication of the mechanisms of Enlightenment based on progressive disenchantment: ‘What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order to dominate it and other men.’ 16 Difference, perceived as a possible threat, needs to be incorporated within, and made intelligible. The enlightened drive towards singularity becomes the principle of equivalence of the ‘bourgeois society’, which subsumes everything under one category. 17 Against the Enlightenment reliance on the emancipatory quality of reason, Foucault argues that any exercises of knowledge or power mutually provoke each other. If conceptual subsumption is inherently oppressive, then the normativity that the concept carries is palpably violent.18 The normativity of the Enlightenment ideal has been robustly critiqued by feminist thinkers. The Vitruvian Man of Leonardo da Vinci, a symbol of classical humanism, is exactly this: ‘a He’, remarks Luce Irigaray. Anti-humanist feminist movements reject the unitary identity stemming from the normative ideal of Man. 19 Theorists such as Irigaray and Braidotti stress the importance of diversity and multiplicity: against the universalising tendencies of humanism, there emerged a brand of embodied and embedded materialism with its situated politics of location — ‘to reconnect our thinking and speaking with the body of this particular living human individual, a woman.’20 It borders on the impossible to speak in unison on behalf of women, or any

J. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, 1997), 2. Ibid. 16 M. Horkheimer & T. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Norfolk, 1973), 4. 17 In mediaevalist terms, this is a movement from haecceity to quiddity. 18 Foucault warns that ‘we must conceive discourse as a violence that we do to things, or, at all events, as a practice we impose upon them.’ (Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 229). Humanist discourse of the Enlightenment might be especially dangerous, given its rigid irrevisability and progressivist ambitions. 19 R. Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge, 2013), 27. 20 A. Rich, ‘Notes in a Politics of Location’ in Blood, Bread, and Poetry (New York, 1989), 213. 14 15

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marginalised group, for that matter. Other ‘exilic voices’ filled with haunting accusations raise from the corners of black and post-colonial theories: look at His triumphant whiteness. Humanist racism ‘reduces non-whites to a subhuman ontological category that exposes them to murderous violence,’ at once ‘disengag[ing] whites from any ethical sensibility.’21 Thus, Jean-Paul Sartre writes, ‘yellow and black voices still spoke [speak] of our Humanism, but only to reproach us with our inhumanity.’ 22 The humanistic ideal is then unacceptable for ethical and political reasons. From across various disciplines comes a demand for new, multi-faceted ways of looking. The repercussions of colonialism, the atrocities of Auschwitz, and the centuries-long history of enslavement all indicate that the Vitruvian Man, the emblem of humanism, needs to subject His delusion of grandeur to a critical treatment. Humanism, which we have known and which has excluded so many from its embrace, is not the philosophy it purports to be. Edward Said notes the blindingly contemporary urgency to ‘remain attuned to the emergent voices and currents of the present, many of them exilic, extraterritorial and unhoused.’ 23 The oppressive force of humanism is perhaps most evident in the mechanisms of humanist colonialism, which has rendered entire geopolitical groups subaltern. Subalternity goes beyond oppression; it is a state of utter vulnerability. By producing a discourse of difference, the coloniser appropriates familiar European idioms and cultural categories to form a representation of the Other. Manufacturing a binary relation between Europe and the Other, the coloniser establishes the subaltern and maintains dominance over the Other by denying its agency and excluding it from contributing to discourse. As a group geopolitically situated beyond the hegemony and power structures of its colony, the subaltern is rendered passive and loses its ability to speak, or rather, the colony silences the subaltern’s active voice. The colony speaks; the subaltern is spoken of.24 This relation of passivity is seen throughout the categories excluded by humanism. The critiques offered by feminism, race theorists, queer theory, and subaltern and post-colonial studies, all show that these excluded categories have been given no place and no say within the current humanist paradigm. A quest

Braidotti, The Posthuman, 47. Jean-Paul Sartre in the preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (London, 2001), 7. 23 E. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York, 2004), 11. 24 G. C. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, 1988), passim. 21 22

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for ‘subaltern secular spaces’ of speech and resistance is recognised by Braidotti as a ‘global ethic’ of the posthuman.25 RECONSTRUCTION The classical ideal of Man — the emblem of humanism, the paragon of bodily perfection: white, European, heterosexual, able-bodied, male — doubles as a set of mental, discursive and spiritual perfections.26 This paradigm implies a dialectic of Self and Other, and a dichotomous logic of identity and otherness, in which difference is pejorative. ‘Difference spells inferiority’, Braidotti proclaims, and as oppositional to the humanist ideal, it acquires ‘lethal connotations’ for the sexualised, racialised, and naturalised others, who become reduced to an infrahuman status. 27 Because of humanism’s restrictive notion of what passes as ‘human’, ‘all humanisms, until now, have been imperial [...] Their embrace suffocates those whom it does not ignore.’28 Braidotti writes: The human of Humanism is neither an ideal nor an objective statistical average or middle ground. It rather spells out a systematised standard of recognisability – of Sameness – by which all others can be assessed.29 In its normativity, ‘human’ becomes a regulatory notion instrumental to practices of discrimination and exclusion; it stands for ‘normality, normalcy and normativity.’ 30 In ‘human’, a particular mode of being human becomes generalised and universalised as the human. The concept itself enters a Foucauldian play of power relations: [Man] is expected to inhabit a perfectly functional physical body, implicitly modelled upon ideals of white masculinity, normality, youth and health. The dialectics of otherness is the inner engine of humanist Man’s power, who assigns difference on a hierarchical scale as a tool of governance. All other modes of embodiment are cast out of the subject position and they include anthropomorphic

R. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 47. Ibid., 13. 27 Ibid., 15. 28 T. Davies, Humanism (London, 1997), 141. 29 R. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 26. 30 Ibid., 26. 25 26

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others: non-white, non-masculine, non-normal, non-young, nonhealthy, disabled, malformed or enhanced peoples. They also cover more ontological categorical divides between Man and zoo-morphic, organic or earth others. All these “others” are rendered as pejoration, pathologised and cast out of normality, on the side of anomaly, deviance, monstrosity and bestiality.31 Hence, difference plays a constitutive role in the sustenance of Man. The woman, the native, and the animal – collectively, the Other – confirm the Same in His aggrandised superiority. ‘The dominant norm of the subject was positioned at the pinnacle of a hierarchical scale that rewarded the ideal of zero-degree of difference,’32 thus marking Deleuze’s and Guattari’s ‘majority subject’, or Irigaray’s hyper-inflated ‘He’. In accord with Foucault, Braidotti jettisons the idea of ‘the progress of mankind through a selfregulatory and teleological ordained use of reason.’33 In opposition to the dialectic of negative difference, she proposes a relational subject framed by ‘embodiment, sexuality, affectivity, empathy and desire’. 34 Therefore, posthumanism goes beyond systematic binaries of self/other, master/slave, looking instead for new affirmative, polycentric cartographies to draw out numerous relations, in which we find ourselves entangled. The posthuman subject is ‘a subject that works across differences and is also internally differentiated, but still grounded and accountable.’ 35 This is what Braidotti terms a shift from unitary to nomadic subjectivity, inscribed within an ‘ecophilosophy’ and located in the flux of relations with various nonhuman others. These nonhuman others include animals and emergent forms of machinic intentionality, which bypass human decision-making on operational and moral levels; in assuming agency, machines come alive. The most glaring example is, perhaps, the current necro-political use of drone-machines in warfare, which complicates and calls for an urgent revision of our conception of agency and our methods of distributing moral responsibility. 36 These are also what Timothy Morton calls ‘hyperobjects’ — things distributed in massive amounts in space-time to the extent that they are incapable of any local manifestation, and in which we become inextricably inscribed.

31

Ibid., 68. Ibid., 28. 33 Ibid., 37. 34 Ibid., 26. 35 Ibid., 49. 36 Ibid., 125-7. 32

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The ‘thin layer of radioactive materials deposited since 1945,’37 the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and its global effects, 38 the ubiquitous Styrofoam and plastic bags littering motorway shoulders,39 and global warming are all examples, and all resurface as quasipolitical agents of their own. Hyperobjects are nonhuman things that embrace us in our everydayness and somehow appear to have efficacy of their own, affecting our lives and choices. Advanced capitalism creates a ‘global form of reactive mutual inter-dependence’. 40 According to Braidotti, ‘the opportunistic political economy of bio-genetic capitalism induces, if not the actual erasure, at least the blurring of the distinction between the human and other species when it comes to profiting from them.’ 41 Capitalism decentres the exceptionalism of anthropos, the humanist Man, but its opportunism does not allow for a thorough shift to zoe, ‘the wider scope of animal and nonhuman life’.42 It is clear that there is a political agenda in Braidotti’s thought: by producing a cartography of advanced capitalism and its web of relations, she wants to allow the subject to ‘work from within the belly of the beast, opening up spaces for alternatives’ 43 in a manner reminiscent of José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentificatory practices. 44 NEW MATERIALISMS AND QUEER MATERIALISMS I believe that Braidotti’s programme runs parallel with the speculative realist movement, and its subset of object-oriented ontology (OOO). Speculative realism (SR) is a movement of many movements, which makes it difficult to define and isolate. The T. Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis, 2013), 4 (cf. pp.129-30). Here, Morton alludes to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. 38 Ibid., 32-3. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill began on 20 April 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. The seafloor oil gusher flowed for 87 days and was capped on 15 July 2010, after discharging an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil. 39 Ibid., 1, 60. 40 R. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 50. 41 Ibid., 63. 42 Ibid., 60. See also: ‘Zoe-centred egalitarianism is, for me, the core of the post-anthropocentric turn: it is a materialist, secular, grounded and unsentimental response to the opportunistic trans-species commodification of Life that is the logic of advanced capitalism’ (Ibid.). 43 R. Braidotti, Borrowed Energy, interviewed by T. Vermeulen for Frieze (2014). Available: [Accessed: 12.02.2015]. 44 Cf. J.E. Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis, 1999). 37

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main tenet of SR is its hostility towards privileging human existence over other modes of existence, and the anthropocentric epistemology which comes with such metaphysical hierarchy. Epistemology centred on the figure of Man sees all objects as conforming to human consciousness, and ultimately, as products of human cognition. SR/OOO considers post-Kantian theory as effectively reducing philosophical inquiry to the examination of the correlation between thought and being; objective reality is construed as supervening on the transcendental constitution of human activity, and anything outside of human correlation is deemed unknowable. Levi Bryant remarks: [...] the Copernican Revolution [has reduced] philosophical investigation to the interrogation of a single relation: the humanworld gap. [...] This interrogation will be profoundly asymmetrical. For the world or the object related to [the world] through the agency of the human will becomes a mere prop or vehicle for human cognition, language, and intentions without contributing anything of its own.45 Against this correlationism, SR/OOO asserts that objects are not exhausted by their corelation to humans. Meillassoux’s discussion of the arche-fossil,46 which hints at the existence of a time before humans and humanity (and at the quasi-apocalyptic possibility of a time after the human), casts this post-Kantian correlationist philosophy into aporia, a state of puzzlement, and encourages taking up the question of a world without humans, or rather — a world beyond human correlation. In a world shaped by forces such as digital and biotechnologies, global warming, and global capital, there emerges a need to abandon modes of enquiry that focus on human consciousness and subjectivity. In a Hobbesian manner, OOO exercises a democratising movement of equality between object and subject, and proposes a flat ontology wherein objects of all sorts exist on equal footing, without being reducible to other objects and without positing any transcendent entities outside of the dynamic of relational interactions amongst objects. This equal treatment of humans as well as non-humans is vastly reminiscent of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, in which objects as well as subjects are seen as 45

‘Onticology – A Manifesto for Object-Oriented Ontology Part I’, L. R. Bryant (2010). Available: [Accessed: 07.03.2015]. 46 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 1-28.

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actors, actants, in social networks; or Jane Bennett’s theory of ‘vital materiality’, in which bodies with agency emerge ad hoc from specific assemblages of human/nonhuman actants. 47 She twists the ‘figures of ‘life’ and ‘matter’ around and around, worrying them until they start to seem strange,’48 and until a weird ‘enchanted materialism’ transpires in this space of estrangement, bestowing the inorganic – electric grids, food, rubbish – with an agency that defies human will. For example, she analyses the 2003 Northeast blackout to identify multiple agential loci, ranging from electric currents to power plants, to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the ‘slight surprise of action.’ 49 Here, Bennett’s thought resonates with Braidotti’s monistic philosophy of becoming, wherein matter is seen as intelligent and selforganising. 50 In accord with Bennett, Braidotti is adamant to resist the dialectical opposition to techno-cultural mediation, and instead sees it as continuous with nature – ‘our new milieu,’51 thus expanding our hermeneutic of tools and prostheses.52 Materiality, in both Bennett and Braidotti, emerges from the background and comes to the fore. Hence, what unifies various strands of OOO is their recalcitrance to define objects through the lens of the subject — as that which the subject posits, or as the correlate of the ego’s intention; as thinking beings apart from discourse, language, or a correlation to a human subject. The object is, one could say, considered apart from the subject, not in the subject’s shadow but in its own radiance. If SR/OOO goes against Kantian epistemology, they must do away with the Kantian Man, too. Michael O’Rourke sees the marriage of OOO and queer theory as a fertile ground for collaboration due to ‘their very undefinability, their provisionality, and, most importantly, their openness.’53 Bryant explains this openness and promissory nature of speculative thinking as follows:

47

Bennett’s materialism is vibrant, fluid, and lively; one could say that, for Bennett, matter never ‘is’, but rather matter constantly ‘becomes’. 48 J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (London, 2010), vii. 49 Ibid., 27. The phrase is, as Bennett notes, Latour’s and describes effectivity proper to the action itself. ‘I never act; I am always slightly surprised by what I do.’ [B. Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, 1999), 281.] 50 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 35. 51 Ibid., 83. 52 Akin to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s becoming-orchid of the wasp / becoming-wasp of the orchid. 53 M. O’Rourke, ‘”Girls Welcome!!!” Speculative Realism, Object Oriented Ontology and Queer Theory’, Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism (2011), 276.

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What we abhor, to use John Law’s apt term, is a mess. Everywhere we think in terms of relations between form and content, form and matter, where one key term functions as the ultimate form (which for Aristotle was the active principle and associated with masculinity) and where all else is treated as matter awaiting form (which for Aristotle was the passive term and was associated with femininity).54 The active form, argues Bryant, can be the signifier, the social, a category, or reason, as long as it is one — the same final-explanatory ‘one’ that figures in the Enlightenment’s drive towards singularity, ‘an active form inseminating a passive matter’55: What the masculinist passion for ground abhors, however, is the idea of a multiplicity of heterogeneous actors acting in relation together. [...] What we have here is a mesh of non-linearities without ground. What we have here are all sorts of agencies and objects feeding back on one another, modifying one another, perturbing one another, translating one another.56 This is ‘ontology without phallus in the Lacanian sense of the term,’ which designates the phallus as whatever the paternal figure possesses and makes him the focus of the desire of the mother, thus permitting the domestication and control of maternal desires. Bryant continues: The point is not that the signifier and fantasy do not play a role, but rather that we must see the role that these things play as a role among other actors in a complex network of feedback relations. An ontology without phallus is an ontology where there is no fundamental interpretant, no ground of all else, no final explanatory term.57

L.R. Bryant, Unit Operations. Available: [Accessed: 07.03.2015]. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. (emphasis added). 57 Ibid. (emphasis added). 54

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Ian Bogost explicates the idiom of ‘objects’ of OOO in terms of unit operations, i.e. ‘modes of meaning-making that privilege discrete, disconnected actions over deterministic, progressive systems [...] unit operations represent a shift away from system operations.’ 58 He pictures the unit-system relationship with an example: ‘In literary theory, unit operations interpret networks of discrete readings; system operations interpret singular literary authority [...] In human biology, DNA nucleotide bonding displays unit operations; the Darwinian idea of acquired characteristics illustrates system operations.’ 59 Unit operations are idiosyncratic, unbound; systemic operations are authoritative and teleological. Bryant aptly notes the subversive connotations involved when he observes that ‘the unit can always explode the constraints of system, or that systems are always occasional, local stabilities from which units can escape to create a new surprise.’60 If we see queerness as an attitude of ‘disintrication from heteronormative and hegemonic regimes’ of identity, 61 the possibilities of liaison between OOO and queer theory – the liaison ‘exploding the constraints of the system’ – become blatant, and its political significance even more so. Indeed, Bryant acknowledges queer theory, feminist philosophy, ecology, media studies, inter alia, as: [...] privileged sites for the development of significant conceptual innovations in the field of realist ontology, [...] all of these sites of investigation force encounters with real and nonhuman objects and actors that cannot be reduced to correlates of human thought, language, perception, or use but that have to be approached in their own autonomous being to properly be thought.62 Conversely, theoretical advancements in realist ontologies can contribute to queer studies: O’Rourke observes that Meillassoux’s hyperchaos – the absolute necessity of contingency working against Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason and the necessary modality of Kantian categories – can find application in mapping the absolute I. Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach to Video Game Criticism (Cambridge, 2006), 3. Ibid. 60 L.R. Bryant, Unit Operations (emphasis added). 61 M. O’Rourke, ‘”Girls Welcome!!!” Speculative Realism, Object Oriented Ontology and Queer Theory’ (2011) 2 Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism. 62 ‘Feminist Metaphysics as Object-Oriented Ontology– OOO/OOP Round-Up’, L. R. Bryant (2010). Available: [Accessed: 11.02.2015]. 58 59

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contingency of gender. 63 Object-oriented feminism, itself even more elusive a term than SR/OOO, might become a fertile ground of collaboration between object-oriented philosophy and social criticism of the humanist paradigm because the ‘objects’ of OOO, asserts Graham Harman, ‘resist all objectification.’ 64 OOO is inherently antireductionist, and holds that ‘all things must be taken on their own terms,’ 65 a point stressed by Bryant and Bogost. This anti-reductionism is what makes OOO so appealing to the whole plethora of ‘objects’ previously rejected by the humanist programme. If Foucault’s criticism exposes the contingency of the humanist approach, tying it inextricably to a modernist epistemology centred on the primacy of Man, then various strands of critical social theory have hit the nail on the head, making the exclusionary nature of humanism explicit. Those critical studies already find themselves separate from the Kantian paradigm, dealing with objects that oppose any domestication and any subsumption under a concept; objects which shine through their autonomous and ownmost materiality. Braidotti’s programme of mapping a multi-verse of relations shaping the subjectivities of human and nonhuman others, I believe, converges with such object-orientedness. Whilst an anthropocentric ontology begins by postulating Man in a vertical position of height, as the one positing objects and the one for which objects are, OOO starts from a plateau, devoid of heights — from a horizontal plane of co-existence in a democracy of objects, to use Bryant’s phrase. That some objects/units develop into human subjectivities, and some others into earthly hyperobjects/things is a matter of contingency; authority is not inscribed in the ontology itself. O’Rourke writes that ‘speculative realism and queer theory are in a dance of relation with each other, are enmeshed and mutually perturb each other.’ 66 Queer theory is already doing new materialisms, and new materialisms are already caught up in queer theory. Social criticism, which ‘explode[s] the constraints of the system’ 67, naturally goes hand in hand with ontologies set up specifically to do the same68. 63

O’Rourke, ‘”Girls Welcome!!!” Speculative Realism, Object Oriented Ontology and Queer Theory’, 311. 64 ‘Levi on Reid-Bowen on feminism and OOO’, G Harman (2010). Available: [Accessed: 12.02.2015]. 65 Ibid. 66 O’Rourke, ‘”Girls Welcome!!!” Speculative Realism, Object Oriented Ontology and Queer Theory’, 294-5. 67 Bryant, Unit Operations. 68 Ibid.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (London, 2010). I. Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach to Video Game Criticism (Cambridge, 2006). R. Braidotti, Borrowed Energy, interviewed by T. Vermeulen for Frieze (2014). Available: [Accessed: 12.02.2015]. R. Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge, 2013). ‘Feminist Metaphysics as Object-Oriented Ontology– OOO/OOP Round-Up’, L. R. Bryant (2010). Available: [Accessed: 11.02.2015]. ‘Onticology – A Manifesto for Object-Oriented Ontology Part I’, L. R. Bryant (2010). Available: [Accessed: 07.03.2015]. ‘Unit Operations’, L. R. Bryant (2010). Available: 11.02.2015].

[Accessed:

J. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, 1997). T. Davies, Humanism (London, 1997). F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth translated by C. Farrington (London, 2001). M. Foucault, Dits et écrits : Vol. 2, D. Defert and F. Ewald (eds.) (Paris, 2001). M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1972). M. Foucault, The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London, 2001). Fraser, N., ‘Michel Foucault: A “Young Conservative”?’ in M. Kelly (ed.), Critique and Power (Cambridge, 1994). ‘Levi on Reid-Bowen on feminism and OOO’, G Harman (2010). Available: [Accessed: 12.02.2015]. M. Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York, 1997). M. Horkheimer & T. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments translated by J. Cumming (Norfolk, 1973).

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I. Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason translated by P. Guyer & A.W. Wood (eds.) (Cambridge, 1999). B. Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, 1999). Q. Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency translated by R. Brassier (London, 2008). T. Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis, 2013). J. E. Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers Of Color And The Performance Of Politics (Minneapolis, 1999). F. Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense’ in W. Kaufmann (ed.), Portable Nietzsche (New York, 1982). M. O’Rourke, ‘”Girls Welcome!!!” Speculative Realism, Object Oriented Ontology and Queer Theory’ (2011) 2 Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism. A. Rich, ‘Notes on a Politics of Location’ in Blood, Bread, and Poetry (New York, 1989). E. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York, 2004). J. Simmons, Foucault and the Political (London, 1995). G. C. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, 1988). S. Žižek, Organs Without Bodies (New York, 2004).

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Expressions of Violence as Determining Reality in Archilochus Maxwell Fabiszewski. Archilochus’ poetry differs much from that of his great predecessors, Homer and Hesiod, whose epic tradition was defined by heroism and a certain set of values and customs. While violence is also a prevalent theme for Archilochus, his successive lyric poetry introduces his reader to a world of common people rather than Homeric heroes. This article explores how in his verse, Archilochus, through pathetic, serious, and complex expressions of violence, defines and introduces his reader to his own reality and to the precariousness of the human condition as a Greek in seventh-century B.C.

In his Archaic Age, ‘Archilochus introduces the reader to a new world’ 1 that is neither Homeric nor Hesiodic, as Kenneth Dover has convincingly argued. The salient distinction is that Archilochus’ Greek world in seventh-century B.C. is one of realistic people, rather than epic, Homeric heroes. The geography does not change from the earlier works of Homer and Hesiod to Archilochus’ poetry, but its mode of representation changes from the epic of Homer and Hesiod to the lyric of Archilochus. What is interesting in this succession is that while violence remains a prominent theme, Archilochus explores it in new ways that define his world as different from its Homeric past. In his poetry, Archilochus depicts divine, natural, and human violence in ways that reveal complex concerns with the human experience in his post-Homeric world. Scholarship has examined the relationship between Archilochean and Homeric language and the aggressive aspects of Archilochus’ iambic poetry, but has yet to examine how the pervasive theme of violence overall defines his work and world. Consequently, this inquiry will explore the dimensions of Archilochus’ different expressions of violence, what these expressions say about his world, and how they encourage the reader to appreciate his reality.

MAXWELL FABISZEWSKI is a fourth-year Classics student at the University of St Andrews. His research interests are Greek and Latin poetry and poetic tradition, and this article is a foundational study for his dissertation on violence in Horace’s Epodes. He has also published papers on Latin poetry and epistolary, and plans to pursue postgraduate studies next year. 1

K. Dover, ‘The Poetry of Archilochus’ in K. Dover (ed.), Greek and the Greeks: Collected Papers, Vol. 1: Language Poetry, Drama (Oxford, 1987), 105-6. Nevertheless, Archilochus is certainly interacting with an epic tradition, and while this may or may not be the Homeric one with which we are familiar today, we can still ‘use Homer as a guide to the epic values with which Archilochus engages. L .Swift, ‘Archilochus, the “anti-hero”? Heroism, flight, and values in Homer and the new Archilochus fragment (P.Oxy LXIX 4708)’ (2012) 132 Journal of Hellenic Studies 139-155.

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The gods strongly colour Archilochean dimensions of violence as they are directly involved in man’s affairs. In fragment (fr.) 25.5-6 W., Apollo is called upon to destroy men.2 Specifically, Apollo is invoked to kill those deserving of punishment (τοὺς μὲν αἰτίους), which, as ‘destroy them as you do’ (ὄλλυ' ὥσπερ ολλύεις) implies, is a role he plays frequently. 3 Zeus sends an ‘evil drought’ (κακήν... αὐονήν) that most likely implies divine punishment, but its provocation is not as clear.4 The god of war, Ares, too in fr. 18 W. appears as a violent character with his Iliadic epithet ‘μιηφόνου’, 5 an extremely visual adjective meaning ‘bloodthirsty’. 6 While men pray to the gods for good things, such as praying to Apollo for a safe return home in fr. 8 W., they receive only harm from the gods in Archilochus’ poetry. In fr. 12 W., Poseidon dispenses ‘dreadful gifts’ (ἀνιηρὰ... / δῶρα) of bad fortunes, and Ares dispenses slaughterings or ‘woesome guest-gifts’ (ξείνια λυγρὰ) to enemies (δυσμενέσιν). These terms imply the meting of violent, divine justice onto ‘the guilty’ (τοὺς μὲν αἰτίους), whom Apollo is meant to destroy. Consequently, divine violence appears either retributive or random, although this is not necessarily the case. 7 The following fragment, fr. 130 W., illustrates that Archilochus’ portrayal of divine violence is more than simply inconsistent. Here, in a masterfully oblique fashion,8 Archilochus explores the gods’ violent role in human life: τοῖς θεοῖς τ' εἰθεῖάπαντα· πολλάκις μὲν ἐκ κακῶν ἄνδρας ὀρθοῦσιν μελαίνηι κειμένους ἐπὶ χθονί, πολλάκις δ' ἀνατρέπουσι καὶ μάλ' εὖ βεβηκότας ὑπτίους, κείνους