The Corporeal Imagination. Patricia Cox Miller

      Introduction

      The relatively recent field of material culture studies has fostered scholarly analysis of the ways in which “things” claim a society’s attention as well as analysis of how perception of things varies from one society to another. In one society, for example, things will be perceived as inhabited and animated, while in another, things will be perceived as insensate utilitarian objects.¹ But whether they are viewed as animate or inanimate, things have increasingly commanded the attention of cultural analysts: whole books have been written on the pencil, the chair, potatoes, and bananas.²

      The field in which the present study is situated, the study of late ancient and early Byzantine Christianity, has participated in this “renaissance of the thing” by producing a number of studies on such objects as amulets and ampullae, relics, statues, shrines, and mosaics, as well as practices such as pilgrimage that celebrate the tangible expressions of religious devotion.³ To this list of things I add the human body, which, as a “thing among things” in the phrase of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, has been much studied as a locus of religious meaning in late antiquity.⁴

      Thing Theory

      The focus of this book is on saintly human bodies in their various “thingly” permutations in ancient Christianity—as relics, as animated icons, as literary performers of the holy in hagiography. To understand these variations on the body as “things” rather than as mere objects, I am relying on cultural critic Bill Brown’s differentiation between the two. In his elaboration of what he calls “thing theory,” Brown writes: “We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily.”⁵ In other words, an object becomes a “thing” when it can no longer be taken for granted as part of the everyday world of the naturalized environment in which objects such as clean windows are so familiar as not to be noticed. When the window is dirty, one can no longer “naturally” see through it; suddenly, it takes on the character of a presence. Brown continues: “the story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.”⁶ For example, take the case of relics in late antiquity. From the perspective of the natural attitude, a relic is simply an object, part of a dead person’s inanimate body. However, when a martyr’s dust, bone, or body becomes the center of cultic activity and reverence, it loses its character as a natural body and begins to function as a site of religious contact. No longer a mere object, it becomes a thing that does indeed signal a new subject-object relation, a relation of the human subject to the sanctifying potential of human physicality as locus and mediator of spiritual presence and power.

      According to Brown’s thing theory, things, as compared with objects, stand out against their environment and, like magnets of attraction (or repulsion), announce a change in habitual perception. They also indicate a locus of surplus value. Brown explains the second part of his theory as follows: “You could imagine things, second, as what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects—their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence, the magic by which objects become values, fetishes, idols, and totems.”⁷ Excess is “what remains physically or metaphysically irreducible to objects.”⁸ As Brown argues, it is also important to bear in mind “the all-at-onceness,