Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child

The Mess

T h e M e s s 117 Tables can appear to be no more than convenient, receptive household objects, entirely correlated to human use. Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s On the Properties of Things, translated into Middle English by John Trevisa late in the 1390s, offers a relevant generic definition: “A borde hatte [is called] tabula and hath þat name of teneo, tenes ‘to holde.’” In the practical manner of everyday things, tables carry different senses and sentiments depending on context. They are like so many empty placeholders. So we go on to read: “tabula is in oon significacioun a mete bord and nameliche of riche men, as it were tenebula ‘holdynge morsellis ,’ for þey holdeþ morsellis and vessellis þat ben sette þerupon, and is arrered [raised] and sette upon feete and yclipped wiþ a lyste aboute [surrounded by a border].” Other significations include the game board, writing tablet, and building materials, but in any case, all of these things are liable to be seen as accommodating and impressionable surfaces or slabs that uphold the culture.1 A writing tablet is not the only board rendered a tabula rasa on this fairly commonsensical understanding, obtaining value when assigned social forms and functions. Relatively featureless and tractable, a given table is ready to be covered, arranged, filled, imprinted, and occupied, fully absorbed within a social milieu. The thing exists in what is often perceived to be a state of indetermination that is eminently useful. On that view, a table is nothing if not an index of human practices and norms, becoming a table in a further sense (concordance, register, list), which is to say an encyclopedic tabulation. It would seem to be a discursive object. 118 THE MESS It is easy enough to identify such things as tables with human conceits and the culture at large, just as we may see toys as vessels of ideology or poems as vehicles of ideas. Any object is readily construed as the bearer of social signs or schemes, and none so easily as crafted objects deliberately made for commerce and consumption. But while the assigned significaciouns must remain part of any analysis of tables, we must avoid rendering them into vacant and passive receptacles, as though they do not have or express other designs. It would be a mistake to think that, because such household goods do not obtain value naturally, they are wholly artifacts of culture, ideology, or language. To treat objects of any kind in this way is to forget about their affordances, as we discussed earlier in this book. Objects lend themselves to different uses. If a table is called “tabula and hath þat name of teneo, tenes ‘to holde,’” it is because such a thing is not actually a simple placeholder, empty until filled, but an object that actively holds others in place, and may exhibit a certain kind of tenacity in doing so. Things are not just immaterial effects; they are effective materials that join up with others in the collective. Things are not just consumed but produce and reproduce the conditions in which consumption happens. Objects themselves may assist or resist subjects; some practically enlist subjects, it seems, to carry out their plans. It is almost as if objects have their objects. In virtue of such radiant energies, we must, and do, routinely ask, what are the physical capabilities, tendencies, or tolerances of a thing? How does it work? Broadly speaking, if the attributed content of the table is contingent on historical forms of life, those same cultural formations are contingent on lively materials. Graham Harman’s description of how the table tends to be treated is apropos: Everyone wants to demolish the object, as if it were some naïve remainder that no philosopher could allow on earth unchallenged. On one side the object dissolves downward into its physical subcomponents , so that what we call a “table” is just a set of subatomic particles or an underlying mathematical structure. This strategy can be called undermining. On the other side the object can be dissolved upward into its effects on human consciousness, so that what we call a “table” is nothing in its own right, but only a functional table-effect for someone or a table-event for other entities. By analogy, I have called this strategy “overmining.”2 THE MESS 119 As we will see, there is a long philosophical tradition of treating the table as...