Fixers in the Middle Ages

In the following two lessons, we examined the historical life-and-death experiences of fixers in the Near and Middle East, and explored the ethical and economic aspects of the fixer's work, including the link between ethics and economics.

In the second lesson, "Strategies and ethics (1): fidelity", a composite model of the ideal fixer was proposed, based on missionary accounts and crusade treatises from the ^13th and ^14th centuries: a man born in Christian Europe, speaking the foreign languages of infidel or schismatic nations and familiar with their mores and customs, in full possession of his knowledge and abilities, and therefore autonomous in his ability to act to achieve the goals of conversion and domination of the Near East by the Christian West. At the same time, he was a faithful and devoted man, in total obedience; the fixer would be a pure means, with no will of his own, acting as an invisible intermediary. But this ethic, rooted in the loyalty of fixers, is embedded in power relationships and economic goals that do not grant the fixer the position of subject. Marco Polo, who proposes languages as commodities and convertibility, once again served as a thread running through this lesson and as an introduction to the next.

In the third lesson, "Ethics (2) and economics: gift, courtesy, power", we returned to the notion of the fixer as a device that determines our relationality to the world: - Can I be a subject if I go through an intermediary? - Consequently, can I grant an intermediary the position of subject, can I let him live, or must I give him death (sovereign power)? It was through the life and death of both the client and his fixer, in the stories of preaching and pilgrimage in the Near East, that the notions of gift and contract (does the fixer's work fall within the logic of the market, of the exchange economy? is there reciprocity, imputability, responsibility towards the other?what is the relationship between "courtesy" and saving lives?) and power (having the power to multiply the number of lives saved at the cost of one's own, without having the power to keep one's own: who then has the power? If it's certain that the fixer is an ambivalent character (he's the one who ensures the client's safety, but whom we fear; he's the one who has his life in his hands and can play on this power), how is this ambivalence expressed at the level of a network or a state (sovereign power) in the treatment of fixers?

The final lesson of the seminar, "The government of fixers: the Burgundian Netherlands", was devoted to the seemingly more metaphorical question of "fixer-nations": - What happens when a political regime wants to be a fixer, like ^15th-century Burgundy? - How does a fixer-state become a fixer-state? - Is the empire, rather than the nation-state, the fixers' political entity? First of all, the notion of the network of fixers was broadened: the discourse of cultural production - culturality - was put on an equal footing with governmentality, and treated as effective governmentality. Thus, Burgundian libraries were exploited as an archive of the production of Burgundy's political future, a (historical) archive of (future) possibilities. They paved the way for the great transatlantic empire of the ^16th century, that of Charles V. The seminar ended with a final look at Marco Polo and the example of a cultural network. It was a network, not a single work, that changed the face of the world: Christopher Columbus read Marco Polo, Jean de Mandeville and the crusade treaties to find the western route to Jerusalem. So it's the horizon of a network, of libraries, that makes it possible to write a new connected history, which would be none other than the history of connected literature.