Three Things Thursday: Media, the Wild Built, and Stoner

I had a fitful week of reading last week, but I managed to read a bit on flights and between classes, talks, concerts, and brilliant architectural tours. 

Thing the First

Glenn Peers’ relative new book Byzantine Media Subjects(2024) is really good and there is a lot to unpack in the potential of applying media theory (and media archaeology) to Byzantine art. The book explored how understanding media qua media (particularly in the context of 20th century German media theory) can help us come to terms with the foundations of Byzantine practices of representation. For Peers, understanding Byzantine media not only has the opportunity to inform media theory more broadly, but also shine light on the creation of the Byzantine individual. 

The obvious reference here is the incarnation which in some ways was central to Byzantine theology and at its core a matter of media: word become flesh. In other words, mediation is fundamental to the Byzantine religious experience and that demands our focus on the media itself. It makes sense that the first chapter focused on Abgar of Edessa’s Mandylion. Of particular interest to me is that role that this object — a cloth imprinted with Jesus’s face — became an important agent of Byzantine military tactics. It not only defended Edessa but ultimately the capital. The media itself — the image imbued cloth — wielded military power that bound the fate of the empire to religious authority. This wasn’t new, of course. The celestial image that ensured Constantine’s victory a Milvian Bridge similarly mediated form of military power. This has me thinking about the Hexamilion Wall and how a Justinianic inscription on the all invoking the Creed (and another evidently on the wall of Corinth invoking the Theotokos) leveraged another media to deploy divine authority. The inscription and the wall itself then represented more than simply practical solutions to the needs of defense but monumentalized expression of Byzantine military theology. In short, the wall is pure media. There is no message lurking beneath it because the wall itself is the message.  

Thing the Second

I’ve been thinking about AI a lot lately (as has everyone in my line of work) and that has drawn me increasingly to books like Becky Chambers’ A Psalm to the Wild Built. I am not particularly familiar with the “Solarpunk” genre, but it turns out that it also feeds into my growing interest in what are sometimes called “energy humanities.”

In any event, the plot of the novella is an encounter between a monk and a robot. Robots had been released from their bondage to humans many generations earlier and had retreated to the wilderness. In the succeeding generations, as the original robots had stopped working and their parts were used to create new robots. These “wild built” robots knew of their origins, but eventually nominated one of their number to visit the human settlements and learn about them. The robot who had volunteered for this task met monk who was on a quest to find crickets in the wilderness (and perhaps to find meaning for himself). The friendship between the wild built robot and the monk forms the plot of the story. In the end, the monk learns that experiencing crickets was less important than coming to understand themself (so some such thing).

It’s a nice novella, elegantly written, and well worth the praise that it has received. At its best, it reminds us of the risks associated with a very limited view of agency and the power of “things” both to make our world better and to shape our lives. 

Thing the Third

After (too) many years, I finally returned to John Williams classic campus novel, Stoner  (1965). Needless to say, it’s brilliant, heart wrenching, and deeply compelling. It tells the story of William Stoner, a college professor who spends his adult life alternately immersed in books and in trying to forge meaningful relationships with those around him. Superficially, he is no more successful as an academic than he is as a husband, father, or friend. Below the surface, however, and in myriad subtle ways, he makes a difference, even as those around him treat him with sometimes cruel disregard. 

As someone who is well and truly in middle age, it is only natural for me to think about what the point of “it all” is. In most ways, I’m not more successful than Stoner. Perhaps my family and friends see me in a more sympathetic light. Perhaps my colleagues hold me in a bit less distain, but I’m hardly a success. In fact, like Stoner, I shuffle through life mostly ignored. 

Reading Stoner game me a strange sense of hope. Maybe “it all” (whatever that means) matters, but it doesn’t matter the way we try to make it matter. It matters in its own way.