The paradox of transcendent machines in the demystification of the Boxley Christ

The discourse of posthumanism considers the body a site of negotiation between the material and the transcendent, and medievalists have noted the resemblance between this posthuman body-as-nexus and the medieval notion of the body of Christ as a material pathway to transcendence. The physical incarnation of Christ, in elevating the standing of humanity through a synecdochic association between the embodied divine and the body of the faithful, provided a material means to salvation. But whereas posthumanism imagines a body readied for a literal transcendence through machinic interventions, the late medieval relationship to the divine body was largely affective. These discourses therefore mostly run parallel, but may be bridged through an interesting if little-known incident in the representational history of the embodied divine, in the story of the Boxley Christ. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2010) 1, 99–107. doi:10.1057/pmed.2010.14 On a market stage in Paul’s Cross, London, on Sunday, 24 February 1538, agents of the Bishop of Rochester tore an effigy of Jesus from the cross and ripped it to shreds upon the ground, exposing the dark machinic interior of the body to the light of day. No awe for the majesty of Crashaw’s ‘purple wardrobe of thy side’ here: this Jesus was an automaton, the so-called Boxley Rood of Grace, and was destroyed as an object-lesson in gullible papist idolatry. The device in question was an effigy of Christ on the cross, operated by force of a series of wires and slender wooden levers that allowed the articulated body r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 99–107 www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/ to move, and especially to appear to make facial expressions. Geoffrey Chamber, Thomas Cromwell’s commissioner and the first to report on the device, described it as containing, certen ingynes and olde wyer, with olde roton stykkes in the backe of the same, that dyd cause the eeyes of the same to move and stere in the hede thereof lyke unto a lyvelye thing. (quoted in Ellis, 1970, 168) It was built, then, to gesture as though with emotion, deriving an emotive response from the faithful in a small rural locality. The Bishop, seeking an opportunity to employ the device as an event for anti-Catholic propaganda, staged the destruction of the putative deception as a public spectacle at Pauls’ Cross, the destruction of the body paradoxically spurring the object’s transcendence from little-known medieval wonder and into a much-remarked-upon mechanical marvel. The nature of the so-called deceit was magnified over subsequent months and years, as evidenced by a wealth of reformist epistolary description (Bridgett, 1888; Groeneveld, 2007), as the automaton, now transferred by the event into a strictly textual entity, transcended the affect its material body made possible. Here, lost in the middle of a familiar narrative of iconoclasm that broke open the Rood, is an effaced crux, a moment when an object is deterritorialized from its long-established social matrices and an attempt is made to translate it into the new idiom of story, propaganda, narrativized argument. This incident, one of those passing moments in early Reformation history when reformers imagined the rituals and forms of Catholic practice, purportedly shed light on the false core of ritual. That core is often material, but in this case, for all its exposed materiality, the effigy is a very ambiguous object indeed, for it was an automaton. The automaton is a form of presence that de-essentializes human effort, performing its duties with a disquieting autonomy that only breaks the representational surface to reveal itself in a state of relapse necessitating recourse to the parts that make it whole. In other words, you only find out how it works if it breaks – and in our story, more than the body of the automaton breaks; instead the reformers initiate a series of ruptures, breaking open more than they bargained for. Because we often know of such wonder-inspiring premodern devices only through texts that come down to us through the discourses of power, these marvelous things often appear as a material corollary to the articulation of power through language. So it is with the Boxley Rood, accounts of which circulated in anti-Catholic writing. However, the Rood was only later harnessed to the ideological technologies of written propaganda, and its prior material existence as a freestanding technology harboring complex relationships with bodies and texts merits attention, especially when its social function was Lightsey 100 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 99–107 revealed in a moment of material failure and public exposure, a kink in the discourses plotted by human agency. The Rood was built by a carpenter and delivered to Boxley Abbey in Kent by horse, and there it performed for many years, heightening the feelings of religious immanence for visiting pilgrims who stood in line to interact with the marvelous device in ceremonies overseen by the abbey priests (Bridgett, 1888; Groenveld, 2007). Despite their purpose of exposing the machine and ending the supposed manufacture of wonder at Boxley, the destroyers paradoxically spread the effect of the machine by releasing it from the contingencies of its siting and manufacture. I would like to push back against the tendency ingrained by years of New Historicist practice, to take this vignette for an emblem of the larger reformist iconoclasm and nascent political capital, and instead, trace the networks through which this device moved from life-like to afterlife. The problem is that so often things like the Boxley Christ are presented to us as products of our interest and therefore our agency, and no amount of Geertzian thick description can allay the sense that we are taking these things out of texts and just making more texts of them, not allowing ourselves to hear their voices, so to speak, and to acknowledge their role in moving us, in reconstituting human collectives. We need to ask what they can tell us, or to use a formulation put forward by Lorraine Daston (2004), how these things talk. What lessons can be learned from them, not by making them talk – for that would be an imposition – but by taking a reflexive attitude toward the turns and paces things put us through, to better find out, through the stories they make us tell about them, what they can tell us about themselves. Julian Yates has suggested that New Historicism had been an effective machine, an exquisite metaphor that used the mobile tension of its far-flung analogies to bring to us volumes of objects, things from the past, but that we have somehow become drowned in the details, the sheer numbers of them, immobilized by the concrete fragments of what was once believed an ideological whole (Yates, 2006, 993). Dissatisfaction with the yoking of part to whole, the easy synecdoche of the New Historicism, was the origin of our renewed attention to things, the actual bits and pieces of material culture. If Yates’s assertion that New Historicism has drowned us in an avalanche of objects speaks to the objects themselves, Michael Uebel points to a more ambiguous aspect of our encounter with those same objects in texts, claiming the past as a site of erasure, not packed with things but rather ‘an evacuated space ready to be filled with wonders, ghosts, and other signs of the counterfactual and pathological’ in which the historian is irretrievably alienated from the historical other (Uebel, 2002, 48). This historical understanding leaves us suspended in what Uebel terms ‘the infectious rhythm of appropriation and disappointment with respect to the real, a field of realities often paradoxically encountered in the shape of the The paradox of transcendent machines 101 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 99–107 unreal, the false, and the fantastic’ that exposes the thing at the core of everyday experience (Uebel, 2002, 60, fn.2), a situation in which the self-reflexive reader realizes his or her role in producing a past that can never be reached. This awareness of human agency in the production of historicity is a step toward perhaps the most salutary way in which recent theory has enabled us to explain the agency of things without imposing anthropocentric biases on them. That centrism, focused through the lens of the body, has been co-opted, subverted and re-plotted by things whose trajectories exceed the limits of human agency. As Carolyn Walker Bynum has noted, the fantastic things recorded in texts were indeed objects, for medievals ‘can marvel only at something that is, at least in some sense, there. Marveling responds to the there-ness of the event, to its concreteness and specificity’ (Bynum, 1997, 24). Sometimes merely to demonstrate the ‘thereness’ of the objects themselves has been quite a task. The wonder they engender, however, derives not from their objecthood per se, but from the composite experience of the events in which the objects are embedded, confirming the nodal rather than singular nature of these things. So while, indeed, marvels such as the Boxley Christ were there as things, they also served as alternate narrative pathways through events, transitory material objects and concatenations of agency, allowing us to move beyond thereness to a fuller understanding of them as agentive players in ongoing events. Neither entirely material nor entirely semiotic, they could originate in historical narratives as well-known as the Bible, become objects of court or church ritual rendered through a variety of arts and crafts, participate in social networks across a range of associational forms, and then make their way back into texts. They could be described using the ‘quasi-object’ developed as part of Actor-Network theory, from the sociology of science. Bruno Latour is perhaps the best known proponent of this way of reading, in which all actors or ‘actants’ are distributed in networks, human and nonhuman understood alike as constituted within a network-event throughout which agency is distributed. This network of relations among things and people, rather than following a linear narrative through the myriad parts and relays in the network, shows the multiplicity of agency at play across the nodes in a given social system. Latour’s quasi-object is real and natural in the sense of being a product of material processes, a thing in itself; but it is also discursive, signifying in the sense of carrying meaning; thus the identification of its referents is dependent upon local knowledge. The quasi-object is therefore social, collaborative and a full participant in specific semiotic collectivites (Latour, 1993; see also Law, 1991; Yates 2002). In what has come to sound like a paraphrase of Latour, Bill Brown later characterized ‘thingness’ as what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects y the magic by which objects Lightsey 102 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 99–107 become values, fetishes, idols, and totems y thingness amounts to a latency (the not yet formed or the not yet formable) and to an excess (what remains physically or metaphysically irreducible to objects). (Brown, 2001, 5) Brown’s conception also echoes Michael Camille’s description of animated artworks in medieval culture as embodying the potentiality of things. As things, manmade marvels vacillate between objectified instrumentality and a more ambiguously agentive potentiality. He noted that the animated marvel ‘breaks the bounds of representation and enters into life itself,’ infusing other representational art with a certain immanence, for ‘[i]n a world where rare and artificially constructed images moved and seemed to speak, any static representation held possibilities that for [modernity], with our aesthetic and historical distance, seem unimaginable’ (Camille, 1989, 252). We can therefore describe the experience presented by the Boxley Christ as a kind of immanence of experiential relation in which the effigy, understood as a static object, thrust itself into the lived experience of viewers, whose psychological distance from the static sign collapses into a participatory role, forcing their acknowledgement of a relationship with the marvelous object whose very immanence belies the notion of a viewer-controlled experience. These devices were actors, coalescing into embodiment from an assemblage of narratives or networked patterns of knowing, and were capable of reconfiguring social relations outside the contingencies imagined by their creators, users or destroyers: channeling desire, redistributing power, subverting expectations. Human instrumentality is ironically destabilized by their very embodiment: no longer idealities, they are capable of failure, slippage and misperception, unexpected forms of success, post-disembodiment survival. Representation is intimately involved with the business of organizing matter, but it is also about masking the means of representation, bleeding the world from the matter and leaving the object intelligible while ‘suspending that same object in immateriality’ (Sadek, 2007, 35). Caught up in one such transfer between states were Commissioners like Geoffrey Chamber, sent forth by Cromwell to identify the so-called ‘deceit’ of the Boxley Rood. But rather than purifying the narrative stream through iconoclasm, he ended up becoming part of the noise in the Rood’s system, an unwilling parasite compelled to join in proliferating miracles, making the reviled thing more marvelous – or even miraculous – in the transfer from materiality by enhancing the supra-mundane aspects of a simple machine until it became human and more than human, like the being it figured; until the simulacrum exceeded its material contingencies in the transfer to a narrative afterlife where the simple mechanical device became an emoting, feeling, interactive body – this delicate body whose penetration was imagined more often and more intimately than any other in the history of the West. The paradox of transcendent machines 103 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 99–107 By the 1570s, William Lamberd, in reporting the story of the Rood based on his having heard of it from the monks of Boxley Abbey themselves, could describe the rood thus – the description has gained length here, but the excess growth of narrative is the point: [It was] of wood, wyer, paste and paper a Roode of such exquisite art and excellencie, that it not only matched in comlynesse and due proportion of the parts, the best of the common sort; but in strange motion, varietie of gesture, and nimbleness of joints, passed all other that before had been seen: the same being able to bow down and lift up it self, to shake and stirre the hands and feet, to nod the head, to rolle the eyes, to wag the chaps, to bend the brows, and finally to represent to the eye both the proper motion of each member of the body, and also a lively, express, and significant shew of a well contented or displeased minde; byting the lipp, and gathering a frowning froward, and disdainfull face, when it would pretend offence; and shewing a most milde, amiable, and smiling cheere and countenance, when it would seem to be well pleased. (Lamberd, 1576) But while it seems the Rood was not intended by the monks of Boxley merely to awe the gullible (Berliner, 1953, 146), in the hands of those who would make counter-claims about idolatria-inducing deception, the destruction of this body occasioned a new kind of wonder, networked out of the ruined body of a mechanical Christ and into the textual associations of a reform-minded collective that would build the affective power of the device into something far greater than it ever had been while hanging on the walls of Boxley Abbey in rural Kent. In this transfer from thing to event, from material to disembodiment, the otherwise predictable narrative of Christ’s corpse oscillates out of its material status into a frequency unattainable without the assistance – through resistance – provided by Cromwell’s commissioners and the spectacle-based public and textual networks into which they transferred the machinic body of the Rood. What was thought an example of base duplicity was transformed by its interrogators into a sublime machine whose enhanced travel as an immaterial textual object extended its reach far beyond the quiet locality of Boxley Abbey, occasioning a series of wonder-narratives in which a simple mechanical doll became an emoting, agentive thing. Their attempt to suspend the meaning of the automaton, subverting it to the purpose of a narrow band of anti-Catholic discourse, instead disrupted the integrity of a limited historical narrative, dispersing an enhanced and dilating representation far more mobile than that intended by its effaced creator, monastic overseers, or even through the event of its material dissolution at the hands of the Bishop of Rochester at Paul’s Cross. Lightsey 104 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 99–107 This thing then, the Boxley Rood, could not serve Cromwell’s purpose without failing as an object, dissolving into a textually mediated state that extended the reach of the device. The Rood was built within the circumstances of one human collective and operated within the parameters of another, and it then was removed by still another collective that failed to understand the agentive force of the object, the thingness it could acquire in its travels (Yates, 2002, 50). The fantasy of instrumentality, the narrative of human agency the reformers were following, imagined a clean, closed system of exclusion, free of parasitic offshoots, digressions and bleed-outs. The Boxley Rood, however, was not following the script, and escaped while in transit, plotting its own route through the network to flourish in the popular mind as a wonder on a greater scale than the conditions of its material existence ever could have produced. The Rood of Grace had been a bit of self-conscious theatricality in a local abbey church, overseen by practitioners of doctrine in partnership with parishioners, for the reinforcement of faith. Through its transit of the market stage in London in the event of its destruction, it was handed off to another collective, becoming a kind of transcendent textual automaton, let loose in the networks of a reformist mentality outside the rigidly controlled framework of reading and response provided by the monks at Boxley, where it might have remained a quiet adjunct to the limited relay of priest and parishioner, had not the reformers broken it open to reveal the secrets they were not able to contain, and became subsumed in the network of the automaton. So what can we see in these cases, what lessons are offered by these objects? One thing that seems clear is that they are hardly objects, in the material sense, at all. While they may have had some minimal or even significant complement of material components, they are a great deal less and more – less because we often cannot ‘check’ them against archeological fact, and more because of the ways they get turned loose, and in turn twist us about in their networks. And in the end, any facticity established about a thing, any valence of truth that can be wrapped around it, is simply a snapshot, a moment or phase in an ongoing cycle of functions-in-relation to human culture, the collectives with whose fantasies these things intersect. Lorraine Daston has characterized a world devoid of things as a critical stasis, ‘not so much an empty world as a blurry, frictionless one: no sharp outlines would separate one part of the uniform plenum from another; there would be no resistance against which to stub a toe or test a theory or struggle stalwartly. Nor would there be anything to describe, or to explain, remark on, interpret, or complain about – just a kind of porridgy oneness. Without things, we would stop talking’ (Daston, 2004, 9). You can hear her horror vacui – she clearly is a person who loves things. But while an incautious critic might level a charge of figurative paraphilia, I hope she would delight in recognition of her natural fetishism for things, and the idea that they move us. Her hypothetical vision is The paradox of transcendent machines 105 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 99–107 the obverse of cenophobia, the fear of open space in art; hers is an appreciation of the real and vibrant complexity of things. Each spawns so many outlines, edges, frictions and threads that the network comes to seem to us – though it has always truly been – resistant to efforts at compartmentalization, simplification, linearity of narrative and the easy synechdoches of the New Historicism as observed by Yates and Uebel. Instead we should observe the moments of exchange as these things pass through the world, generating a multiplicity of narrative perspectives that allow us a closer witness to a past that can never be penetrated except through its surviving objects, their papery representations and the things they put us through. The Boxley Rood, an embodiment whose vulnerability was made explicit as its interior workings spilled into view, in effect transcended the fate planned by Cromwell’s agents to enjoy a textual afterlife as a marvelous automaton. Instead of being reduced to utter materiality, the Boxley Christ, a thing hovering between symbol and object, escaped embodiment through its destruction to become a wonder-narrative, an early modern miracle story promulgated by the very forces that sought to subdue its power by ending its corporeal existence in a macabre mimicry of the final torments visited upon the embodied Christ of the apostles.