A bit of a jumble

My response to august:

You bring up a lot of points I'd like to address (or richochet off of)... and in addition, I've been plowing through the book at a relatively quick pace (I'm already into Ch. V, somewhere around p. 210).

For clarity of organization, I'll probably discuss my responses here, and open a new sub-thread dealing with Ch. III... though I'm especially eager to get into Kantorowicz' discussion of Bracton...

First, you mentioned in your opening post that you'd provide a few "sidebars" about our author's biography. As a general rule, I find biographies of artists, thinkers and writers to be tedious analytic distractions. (Emerson: "Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of our Fathers. It writes histories, biographies, and criticisms." (spit that last word out with especial contempt)) But, after a close study of the footnotes, I'm beginning to wonder what the deal is with "H. Kantorowicz" - a historian who seems to have trudged through the same subjects as E. Kantorowicz, and of whose work E. has many interesting and critical things to say. Is this work the crowning product of a dynastic endeavor? Are there patria issues lurking in this text that I should be sensitive to? I'm ready to hear your sidebar now... in fact, my curiousity is positively piqued.

Second, I want to focus in on your own language for a moment. You talk about the corporeal nature of the political abstractions discussed by Kantorowicz and frequently use the word "image" to describe his project. It reminds me of a long-ago discussion with TheQuietMan, that took a rather personal turn. Rather than rehash its merits, I was trying to argue that the medieval characteristics of art and imagery pitch towards a very different aesthetic ideal than the post-Renaissance trend of accurate representation. There's a strong work I dimly recall about Medieval Imagism and Memory (Mary Carruthers). I'm also surprised by looking again at the artworks analyzed in the back of Kantorowicz's book, how strikingly good at rendering complex abstractions medieval artwork was. When you compare a modern flow chart to a medieval manuscript, you come away feeling like we're a culture of mental midgets in the realm of balancing abstract thoughts.

Take the drawing of Otto II: in which his sacramental parts, those anointed at his coronation, reach beyond the tabernacle curtain, into the coelum of Godhood, while his mundane parts rest below the curtain, upon the Throne of Earth. In my opinion, the artwork of the medieval period represents a highly developed imagistic vocabulary, whose virtues are regrettably lost to a generation that too-often measures medieval work by its failure to live up to modern aesthetic ideals rather than its success at accomplishing medieval objectives. I can think of several interesting branches related to that observation. To what extent is E.K's authorial achievement (it's palpable imagism) facilitated by his deep study of medieval iconography? In what senses do the Chinese language of symbols and images, with which you're familiar, compare to those of medieval Europe? If medieval thought represented a thoroughly different trajectory from Greco-Roman rationalism (and I suspect it did), might we better be able to comprehend our post-modern world with a self-conscious medievalism? Was the Enlightenment as much a culturally destructive iconoclasm as its predecessor in Late Antiquity?

Third, I'm excited to get the topic of ritual in the modern experience. Just last night I was at a ball game. I was struck by how demeaning some folks feel it can be to engage in "civic liturgy" - the honoring of the flag through a well-defined ritual practice. I, of course, have my own issues about liturgical propriety and flags. You say that the modern age may be experiencing a failure of imagination with regards to sovereignty. You express an interest in identifying "kinks." To build off that, I'd like to throw out three conceptions for looking at the overlapping folds of sovereignty:

1. Conceptual: In the American system, our Constitution lays out a pattern of sovereignty that appears to be a cascade of powers. At the "top" of the system, we find a federal government, imbued with an enumerated list of finite but supreme powers. Below this stratum, we find a system of co-equal "subordinate sovereigns" identified as states. The final locus of constitutional sovereignty is rather vaguely defined - "the people" - both the ultimate source of legitimacy for sovereign institutions, yet a group whose sovereign powers are defined exclusively by negativing state powers. Thus, "the people" have rights, which are mostly defined as an immunity to state powers over certain dimensions of private and public life.
   
   As if this system weren't incoherent enough from it's outset... we also have several unresolved fonts of sovereign authority. Where are we to place "Constitutional sovereignty" - the ultimate authority of a piece of text, from which the sovereign powers of the defined entities emerge?
   
   What are we to make of "The Law of Nations" - an idea which had much greater currency among the founding generation than it does today? Under international law, a system of which our nation was an avid participant until quite recently, certain practices could become proscribed by the development of opinion juris - that is, by the common custom of civilized nations. The Constitution confers power upon Congress to "define and punish ... Offences against the Law of Nations." And it grants the judicial power to "all Cases ... arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority" (a somewhat controversial provision given the current battles over the Geneva Convention's proper scope). What is the relationship of the American system to this international web of sovereignties?
   
   What about the "Natural Law?" For much of Western history, an animating conception of law is that it's merely an earthly instantiation of a more perfect celstial system. Only within the last century has American jurisprudence moved away from such a belief. But, the founding paradigms of our liberal state - especially social contractarian thought and the "right of revolution" - deeply rely the viability of an external measure of righteousness by which law is to be judged.
   
   
2. Space: In the medieval system, spaces divide into three kinds (though all are merely an exalted species of property)... we have the ecclesiastical holdings, the imperial holdings, and private space. The first two are notable by their indefeasibility - they cannot be transferred, for neither the Church nor the Empire is empowered to diminish its own estate.
   
   In the contemporary Anglo-American tradition, there are similar issues of space, though I can't clearly delineate them. What does the odd "sovereignty" of a tribal reservation imply about power over space? What about the sacramental character of a courtroom's interior, with its peculiar rituals? The unique protections of the home as against the pattern of rights controlling within the public realm? Do we have a meaningful spatial comprehension of sovereignty? (doesn't Gitmo suggest we do? Or does it suggest we don't?)
   
   
3. Time: I have less to say on this one, though we should eventually broach E.K's discussion of Nullum tempus currit contra regem ("Time runneth not against the king."), pp. 164-65. American history is often described as a sequence of "constitutional moments" in which sovereignty itself is radically re-defined. The first of these is the founding itself. The Reconstruction Amendments are considered the second such moment. And the New Deal is generally believed to be the third. Obviously, the problem of tradition across time marked by radical breaks is a thorny one. On the one hand, legal fictions like the various "Holy Roman Empires" of Europe suggest a sempiternity to sovereign units which transcends the radical disjunctures of revolutions (contemporary 11th Amendment jurisprudence, likewise). On the other hand, that sempiternity itself is occasionally overthrown and castrated by emergent "new sovereignties" - from France's acquisition of sovereignty "by prescription" against the Roman Empire (p. 183, n. 283... an astonishing passage: "The prescription of 100 years against the empire must have been common knowledge by the end of the 13th century, because the French use it to prove France's independence of the empire by right of prescription") to the constitution of American states which acquire partial sovereignty as a function of "independence" - thus, seemingly impermissibly dividing the prerogatives of traditional sovereignty.
   

I'll call this post to a rest. Hopefully it's responsive and productive? I hope to get more explicitly textual in a subsequent post. I'm pretty impressed by the book's architecture... and though it doesn't get really fun for me until we get to Bracton, his prefatory discussions of High Medieval political theory lay a powerful foundation.