PANDEMONIUM. In his 2009 essay for Céline Condorelli and James Langdon’s (now classic) book Support Structures, the writer and curator Jan Verwoert, contributed a piece on the topic of ‘care’ titled: Personal Support: How to Care?

Throughout the essay Verwoert articulates a somewhat abstract (counterintuitive?) vision of what it means to ‘care’: Care, for him, is construed not as an inherent capability of any particular person, or as an ‘act’ to be reciprocated or economised, but as a ‘power’ derived (but not extracted?) from ‘the other’ (who is in need of care). Here, care is not so much a ‘decision’ or a ‘characteristic’ (as we might assume in the case of a ‘carer’), but rather an ‘answer’ to ‘articulations of need’ within particular material circumstances; what Verwoert might call: ‘the potential situation of care’. He writes:

Once that need is acknowledged, there is no way back: you receive the power to care. This power does not have as its source [...] some talent or potential rooted in the self, an ability to perform that you would have because you are so potent or brave, but is something that arrives to you from the outside.

Such a ‘power’ – Verwoert continues – is ‘risky’ in two distinct ways: it is at once ‘exhausting’ (in the sense that it might require a sacrifice or, he says, ‘surrender’), and also – perhaps more importantly – at risk of being misunderstood. Drawing from Lacan, he writes that what is “expected from the one who cares, is precisely to determine the need of the other for the other, in place of the other as a service to the other.” You can’t always know what you want, and you just might never know what you need!

Verwoert develops this idea through the Christian concept of the ‘Patron Saint’, exemplar carers to whom people pray for assistance in particular matters, and from whom prospective carers may seek to learn. According to Wikipedia there are patron saints for Artists (Luke the Evangelist), Astronauts (Joseph of Cupertino), Fishermen (Andrew the Apostle), Locksmiths (Dunstan) and Motorcyclists (Columbanus) alike. Verwoert’s focus, however, is the patron saint of Encyclopedists, Librarians, Spectacle makers and Translators (the saint, perhaps, of The Intellectual?): Saint Jerome.

Today, Jerome – who has more recently been the subject of a number of artworks by Turner-prize winning artist Jesse Darling – is known primarily for two things: his translation of the Bible from Hebrew into Latin, and befriending a lion. In his piece, Verwoert tells the tale:

...one day a lion walks into Jerome's study with a thorn in his paw. Jerome plucks it, and they live peacefully together ever after. This scene of strange conviviality is beautifully rendered in [a] painting by Antonello de Messina, with the lion resting or roaming around freely while Jerome does his translations. There are two moments of care associated with intellectual labour here, the first one is the labour of taking care of a text, of translating it, and the second one lies in this act of freeing a lion from a thorn in his paw.

Returning to Lacan, one can see how such acts of ‘interpretation’ – of determining the need of the other – can certainly come with risks (!), but what Verwoert also highlights in this ‘situation’ (presaging, in some way, aspects of the 2020 Care Manifesto) is its fundamental ambivalence; that “care lies in the mere fact that, although neither of the two were destined to do what they did because of who they are, they were open for this to happen…” All Jerome offered was an open door, and the promise to ‘deal with what came in’. As Darling said in a 2018 interview with AnOther magazine:

St. Jerome and the lion appeared to me extraordinarily like a love story. [...] That somebody would see you in your woundedness and say this is not dangerous or bad, this is just someone who’s hurting. I mean that’s what everyone wants, right?

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Strangely, in Verwoert’s essay, the ‘situation’ or’ ‘space’ in which this peculiar kind of potentiality can take root is described as a ‘Pandemonium’.

The English term ‘Pandemonium’ was coined by John Milton in his epic C17th poem Paradise Lost, to describe the building which housed Satan (né Lucifer) and his fallen angels, famously illustrated by both John Martin and Gustave Dore in the late C19th. There is no explicit etymological rationale for the construction of this term, given by Milton, in the text – but Verwoert suggests that we might think of it as a kind of inverse ‘pantheon’ (an Ancient Greek term where Pan or παν, meaning ‘all’, combines with theos or θεός, meaning ‘god’): “while the Pan-theon is the house of all gods, the Pan-demonium, consequently, is the house of all demons.”

Amazingly, there is a source in Old English, found in the Martyrology of the ‘Julius’ manuscript (likely composed in the late C8–9th), of the word ‘Pantheon’, describing the consecration of the temple in Rome of the same name – an event which would have occurred only a century or two before – in 609:

Bonefacius se papa on Rome..on ðone dæg gehalgode to cirican Sancta Marian ond eallum Cristes martyrum ðæt deofolgylda hus þæt hy nemnað Pantheon. [Then Pope Boniface in Rome, on that day, consecrated as a church of Saint Mary and all Christ’s martyrs that heathen temple which they call the Pantheon]

So Milton’s term draws from this lineage, and its conceptual architecture, in the coining of his own imagined temple, and yet – as one might expect of a Pandemonium – also complicates it. The history of the term ‘demon’, did not always have the negative associations we draw it with today, and were – in effect – the same as today’s patron saints; the Ancient Greek daímōn meaning ‘dispenser, god, protective spirit’. Perhaps mirroring this semantic shift, many scholars and critics – from William Blake to Lord Byron – have been struck by Milton’s apparent sympathy for Satan throughout Paradise Lost; a sympathy which takes form, as articulated by literary critic John Carey, through Milton’s fundamentally ‘ambivalent’ approach to his characterisation… Perhaps the demons, and their house, are not quite so ‘infernal’ after all?

Mirroring the concept of care as a moment of ‘openness’, or ‘exposed potentiality’ – in which one ‘receives’ the power to care from the ‘outside’ – the Pandemonium, for Verwoert, can be rendered as an architectural space that plays with the boundary of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ space (and perhaps of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ too?). To demonstrate this he returns to the study of Saint Jerome and the Lion, an initially domestic scene that ‘opens up’ under closer examination – the texts which ‘bring news’ of the outside, the open doors and windows present in many artistic renditions of his study – he writes:

The potential of this situation remains exposed: there are no walls that would limit the economy of this oikos, of this house. There is no contract between the lion and the translator that would govern their care and conviviality. Could we say that this exposed potentiality of living together in a space ungoverned by any economy is, in fact, care?

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In finishing the piece Verwoert brings a final aspect of care to his (already rather complex) conceptualisation of the term – the double-edged ‘gift’ of a dedication, he writes:

To dedicate something, yourself even, may be the most beautiful gift, because it is completely unrequested. But precisely because of this, this gift is also poisonous, as it instantly ingratiates yourself to the other and indebts the other to you.

Attempting to circumvent this economisation of care (as a kind of dedication) Verwoert gives the example of Virginia Woolf’s dedication of her essay A Room of One's Own to the ‘ghost of Shakespeare’s sister’ – exploring how she ‘calls up’ (perhaps demonically?) all those engaged in the project of feminist writing to dedicate their own work to the life of a female writer ‘who could and should have lived, but hasn't yet’. Here, ‘dedication’ transforms into ‘invocation’ – an anachronic conjuring trick, linking potential pasts to possible presents (futures?) – which Verwoert hopes can “escape the coercive logic of moralist and economic thinking [... that] inevitably enters when trying to answer the call of the other…”.

This notion of care is a mode of exposed potentiality, embodied through intellectual labour on the threshold of the public or in a situation of conviviality without a contract, in a house that is less an oikos and more of a Pandemonium, and is care as a dedication that does not indebt the other or ingratiate oneself to the other because it is dedicated to the future arrival of a different spirit.¹

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This article was written for a monthly column in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

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Footnotes

1. Support Structures, Gavin Wade & Celine Condorelli, p.177 ↩