Estrategia analítica

How do Pierre Clergue’s raping Grazide Rives and Pierre Maury’s avowing the hard life of the Pyrenean shepherd fit into Montaillou – or Montaillou? Both are visible, or at least (if one doubts the visibility, quite, of Pierre Maury’s speech acts) manifest, and each is in its own way significant. Yet, neither is exactly a visible beginning for what Redfield called a ‘system’ and, although LeRoy Ladurie sometimes takes Redfield as a guide, he is as concerned to let episodes like the rape of Grazide Rives carry their own weight as he is to put them to work in demonstrating the forcefield of the domus

“system”. Redfield’s system is for LeRoy Ladurie more a context for events, and addressing it separately does something that is perhaps (one would like to say to Weis) more historiographically subtle than Redfield’s ‘analysis’, turning the domus into a

theme of some more particular descriptions of actions and characters. Pierre Maury and Pierre Clergue, as we have seen, are held up as demonstrative, untypical characters, as Diogenēs. Yet, although these individuals certainly have a gravity about them as people and as points in the text of Montaillou neither is an end in himself, for the reader. Through them the reader is placed in their world; one seems almost to look past them, to use them as a vehicle for seeing what they see (such as the physical house of Clergue) in the ethnographical way LeRoy Ladurie aspires to, rather than directly at them. Yet, one grasps them in their specificity, and so necessarily from a combination of proximity and

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distance; and although one hopes to have left behind the wide eyes of the new arrival – the jet-lagged ethnographer’s, Adso’s perhaps, or even Hans Castorp’s244 _{– one}

continues to see them as a ‘product’ (in Hegel’s, later Marx’s, sense) of their time and place. This is a matter for interpretation, not assimilation – as if the particular

personality or action could be predicted through its time and place.

Not even Brother William’s clever trick with the horse – and the name of the horse, Brunellus – was a prediction; he only manages to achieve that impression. What lets him do so, however, is a sensitivity to the significance of particular visible clues; he is able to read them as signs of something more general which lets him think about what is plausibly possible – or likely – in the context of which they are parts. It is as if he comprehends a system, like Redfield, and this gives him a way of getting at what might come next. Yet, the shape of the relevant context is not as regular as the Chan Kom’s annual round of planting, rites, and harvest, of which the sight of a man kneeling in the dust is both part and clue. It is not clear, as William says, whether the fraught events at the Abbey fit into something with sides or which forms a whole – however impressed Adso might be by the geometrical architecture. It is partly William’s ability to

acknowledge its chaos – its human, worldly elements – which makes him seem so wise. Now, Montaillou is never reduced to system; but neither does it terminate in events like the appearance of Brunellus. If anything, it is an attempt to portray Montaillou as an irregular shape (allow the metaphor for now), for which the Pyrenees are probably the best icon245 _{and not the geometry of a church: the latter, of course, is what the Cathars}

244 _{See Mann 1999 [1924]}

245 _{Cf. Merleau-Ponty 1964: 28 and op. cit. fig. 2 (Cézanne’s La Montagne Sainte-Victoire, c.1900). Part} of the reason this study – mine – contains no explicit discussion of the problem of structure (in the Annales tradition or in social theory) is that I take it the problem has been solved. It has been solved partly by Jack Goldstone, who in Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World insists quite rightly that there is no single social level or scale which is to be solely privileged with the term: it is a non-problem; see Goldstone 1991: chp.1. In a similar fashion, Randall Collins says that ‘agency/structure

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were resistant to. Recall Merleau-Ponty’s thought that the visible world is the best diagram of vision itself.246 _{Both he and Brother William are sensitive to the fact that}

visible clues are not put to work by staring at them as closely as possible, trying to read their meaning internally.247 _{Rather, one needs ‘the proper distance’:}

Only when you are at the proper distance will you see that it is Brunellus (or, rather, that horse and not another, however you decide to call it). So an hour ago I could expect all horses, but not because of the vastness of my intellect, but because of the paucity of my deduction. And my intellect’s hunger was sated only when I saw the single horse that the monks were leading by the halter.248

He knows what he does not know. Apprehending Brunellus might need the horse itself to be quite close, visible indeed; but the clues which lead up to this meeting also require a proper distance because they signify a range of possibilities in the wider world, a world which needs to be in view. This is what Merleau-Ponty says about vision itself:

After all, the world is around me, not before me. Light is retrieved as action at a distance, and not reduced to an action of contact. Vision returns to its power of showing more than itself. It does not work anymore to speak of space and light, but instead of the space and the light which is here.249

is a conceptual morass’ to be avoided as a false dilemma; Collins 2004: 5. However, the problem has also received a more technical solution in evolutionary game theory, where all features of an environment are relevant to the development and interaction of individuals. Boyd and Richerson demonstrate the logic of an environment using the contours of an OS map, but they might just have well picked an IGN of the relevant quadrangle of the Pyrenees; see Boyd and Richerson 2005: 287-309; see also Inkpen and Turner 2012 – discussed in more detail below.

246 _{Merleau-Ponty 1964: 28}

247 _{That is to say, without connection to the rest of the world; compare what Cézanne says about a} different sort of internality: Merleau-Ponty 1964: 22.

248 _{Eco 1984: 28, direct speech; quotation marks removed.}

249 _{Merleau-Ponty 1964: 59, some omissions – and I put ‘here’ for là to capture Merleau-Ponty’s} emphasis on the relationship between the observer and the observed.

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Later, Merleau-Ponty illustrates this abstract thought by saying that if we see a tile at the bottom of a swimming pool, through the water, what we see is something like that- tile-at-the-bottom-of-that-pool-in-the-water.250 _{We have encountered something like}

this thought before:

True, that kind of print expressed to me, if you like, the idea of ‘horse,’ the verbum mentis, and would have expressed the same to me wherever I might have found it. But the print in that place and at that hour of the day told me that at least one of all possible horses had passed that way.251

These are not the same thoughts, Merleau-Ponty’s and William’s. The water is immediately visible, unlike the horse; but it may be that we can insist on a continuity between them, given what Merleau-Ponty says elsewhere:

Everything I see is in principle a matter of my inclination [àma portée], at least the inclination of my gaze, marked on the card labelled “I can…”.252

In so far as one views the tile or the hoofmark itself, one views it as a matter for action. (Merleau-Ponty has just been saying that action and vision are part of the same flow, not least because the eyes themselves have to be directed.253_{) Both the hoofmark and}

the tile are visible. The water is visible, if translucent. The context of the Abbey is presently invisible, and perhaps it is disparate, chaotic, and lacking sides, at least in a moral sense. Yet, both the water and the Abbey limit the possibilities for action

250 _{Merleau-Ponty 1964: 70} 251 _{Eco 1980: 27-8}

252 _{Merleau-Ponty 1964: 17, my emphasis; cf. Shütz 2013 [1936-7]: 226.} 253 _{Cf. Merleau-Ponty 1964: 16-17}

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indicated by the tile and the hoofmark. Both, therefore, are grasped through what is invisible and presently unreal in some sense: possibilities. The water is a simple, visible clue about the tile as object of action; painting a water-colour of Mt. Sainte-Victoire on it is ruled-out, for instance. William has a more in-depth, less simple grasp of the context of the Abbey. He also seems to know it better than a Redfieldian

anthropologist, or a young monk, who has grasped it as a whole. Its apparently

systematic elements are only some elements among others. While there is nothing like William’s knowledge of the horse Brunellus in Montaillou, the sort of familiarity he has with the possibilities of the place might capture what LeRoy Ladurie was able to

represent historiographically. It is only one line; but recall LeRoy Ladurie’s casual reference to the domus ‘and its cortege of possible institutions annexed to it’.254 _The

domus here is not a static type because it is run through with the actions which might, plausibly and characteristically, follow from it. Actions too – rapes, the avowal of destiny, having it off in a church – seem to play a similar role in always pointing on to adjacent things, like the water that surrounds the tile in Merleau-Ponty’s swimming pool.

So far, my commentaries have only developed the suspicion that this might be so. The discussions which follow here in parts III and IV address the character of possibilities in social history in more depth. Montaillou itself will disappear from view for a while, as if we have retired to a laboratory to test a vaccine to be used on the peasants later. Each phase in what follows will address a different way that possibilities can be uncovered in what appears to be the directly told but varied reality of Montaillou. We will start by considering Jon Elster’s proposal in Logic and Society that possibilities can play an independent role in explanations.

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