Animating Ancestors

Animation

Even though language is material and alive, when words lie on the transcribed page, centuries after they were written, and we are neither the recipient of those words nor can imagine who that recipient might have been, it becomes interesting work to re-animate them. When Matilda received her father’s letter, she would have read it out to her assembled family, bringing to the words on the page not only sound and intonation patterns, but facial expression and bodily posture. The assembled listeners may also have imagined the particular sound of the quill scratching the words onto the page, or the sound of the flap of the tent blowing in the breeze, or the voices of the men in the camp drifting in on that breeze. As well they might have imagined the sight of Thomas’s 15-year-old son, Barrington, asleep beside him. Those members of the listening family might also have had in mind the sight of Thomas’s face, his bodily posture at his writing desk, the detail of his uniform. And he, when he wrote, had them in mind—knowing that his letter would be read out loud and passed from one to another, exclaimed over, and pondered upon. At the time the letter was written, it was already intra-acting with multiple lines of force affecting each other and being affected, creating patterns of interference on the indefinite boundaries of Thomas and his family members.

I will explore, in what follows, how the words on the page of a letter (or it could have been a journal or an interview transcript) invite us (i.e., you as reader and me as writer) into different forms of existence—the intra-active encounters in the letter are not separate from us. The letter is not an entity that must be represented, but diffractive movements, capable of affecting us—of animating us—of working on our own indefinite boundaries.

When I began to think about animating Thomas’s letter, or Thomas himself, I was thinking about how to analyze the work of animation that I would do. But, as I worked my way into the task, it became evident that the letter itself is alive, animating me, affecting me. The boundaries between me and Thomas, and between me and the letter, are blurred. The impact of the letter on me is not just a minor interference, but one that potentially opens up new lines of flight. Just as literature may open up new lines of flight for the reader, or for the audience at the theater, so may a letter:

the writing of literature is to trace new lines, lines that amount to a whole cartography—that in turn becomes a geology. For Deleuze we are able to flee via these new cartographies; we are able to find what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as lines of flight. (Achilles, 2012, p. 6)

Thomas was permeated by the place-time of Dundalk in 1799. The lines of force and the intensities of his letter are the “geology” of this particular place-time, crystallizing themselves in his doing-being. Those geological forces run through him, they constitute him, and, in the performative act of writing the letter, he crystallizes the specificity of himself in that place-time. The performance of letter-writing, as Guattari (1986) observes, enables the “positions of the speaking subject to crystallize” (p. 41).

I have found it helpful to compare the performativity of letter-writing, and my intra-action with the letter, with the performance of a Shakespearian play. In becoming-audience, we come to know the characters, and to know them through the words they utter to other characters, and to us as audience. As audience, we witness the bringing to life of the material specificity of each character on the stage, the actors breathing life into the words on the page, inviting us into the emergent multiplicity and the flow of forces that animate them. Shakespeare’s characters endure because in the specificity and intensity of their passions, as they emerge on the stage, they offer a reading of the human condition, of its struggles, its passions, its divisions, its limitations. In our encounter with them as audience, we expand our experience and our knowledge of what it is to be human in our own material specificity, and also in the multiple contradictory folds of ourselves, of the events we are part of—the emergent multiplicity of ourselves.

The animation is not, however, just through the intensely portrayed specificity that comes to life in the body of the actors, and thence in our imaginations. As specific beings, we exist not only as multiple, emergent individuals, but as multiple intensities made and re-made through language, through our intra-actions with others, through the specificities of our times and our places. Our struggles and our passions are not only our own; they are the struggles and passions of humanity itself. So the act of animation works both with the material specificity of a subject and with the emergent, multiple intensities and flows through which humanity is constituted.

Conventional Cartographies

Before I come to the letter itself, let me elaborate some of the conventional cartographies through which Thomas Blomfield’s life has been mapped out. Such cartographies tend to work within a representationalist framework, where the documented facts represent the found reality of a particular individual, a reality that exists independent of the one who searches the archives and assembles the facts. The assembled facts, as they are written within the striations of the family history genre, depend upon a binary distinction between what will count as facts, and what will be dismissed as “mere supposition.” The documented facts then mirror what is taken to be the truth of an individual’s life. Later in the article, when I move to a diffractive analysis of the letter, it will become evident that I depend on those assembled facts as I explore the lines of force at play on and through the life of Thomas Blomfield. In that diffractive analysis, however, they no longer serve to represent him as an independently existing entity.

Bergson’s (1998) distinction between ascendant and descendant lines of force is helpful in understanding this complex relationship. Descendant lines of force involve repetitions that are almost automatic, creating the familiar order of things. Lines of ascent open up something new—something not-yet-known—a line of flight toward a different way of thinking and being in the world. Bergson’s radical point is that these two lines of force, while contradicting each other and working against each other, depend on each other. In Bergson’s termininology, a representationalist conventional cartography is made up out of lines of descent, whereas a diffractive analysis is searching for possible lines of ascent—a movement into the not-yet-known in all its entangled complexity.

Thomas was born in 1751 in Suffolk in England. In a family history, written by one of his descendants, Thomas’s life is primarily told in terms of his military career, but also as the grandfather of the Australian Blomfield family:

Very little information about the early life of Thomas Blomfield, grandfather of the Australian family, can be found. The “Ipswich Journal” in June 1833 said: “On the 4th inst. Died at Haughley highly respected in his 83rd year, Thomas Blomfield, Esq., many years Captain and Adjutant of the 10th Suffolk regiment of Militia.” He was gazetted lieutenant in 1778, Adjutant 1797 and Captain 1798 of the Western battalion of the 10th Suffolk Militia and served for a few years in Ireland at the end of the century during the rebellion. (Blomfield 1950, p. 14, Chapter 2, Part 3)

The author, E.V. Blomfield, goes on to say he searched in vain for Thomas Blomfield’s birth details in no less than 67 parishes. More recent family searches have located Thomas Blomfield as the illegitimate son of Mary Blomfield, who lived from 1719 to 1784. Mary was the daughter of Barrington Blomfield and Mary (née Wingfield). She didn’t marry until the death of both of her parents. Her mother died in 1757 when Mary was 38 years old and her father in 1762 when she was 43. Mary and her sister Elizabeth inherited substantial property from their parents.

Mary had given birth to Thomas when she was unwed and 32 years old. Shortly after her parents’ deaths she married, in fairly quick succession, three men considerably younger than herself. There was John Edwards, who was 16 years younger; then Charles Aldrick, who was 22 years younger than her; and co-executor with her of her first husband’s will. In 1772, at the age of 53, she married John Stanford, who was 22 years old, only 1 year older than her son Thomas. When Mary died, John Stanford was married a second time to Amy Fowler (née Alexander). His third marriage was to Matilda, Thomas Blomfield’s daughter—the recipient of his letter.

Thomas Blomfield, like his mother, and like his third step-father John Stanford, had three marriages. He first married Martha Jordan (1750-1777), with whom he had his daughter Matilda (b.1774). Matilda had been born when he was 23 years old, and perhaps a little prior to his marriage to her mother. When Martha died 3 years later, he was a widower for 6 years before he married Mary Manning (née Seaman) with whom he had his son Barrington (b. 1784), who he had with him when he wrote the letter from Dundalk. He had named Barrington after his maternal grandfather, Barrington Blomfield, thus securing the link with his family’s heritage that had potentially been broken by his own illegitimacy.

Because the Blomfield lives were unusual, even within the discourses and practices of conventional cartography, I have enjoyed finding those “facts.” They don’t easily fit into the usual patters of conventional cartography. Indeed, one of the things I have loved about opening up this space of my Blomfield ancestors is that they are unpredictable, never quite doing what you might expect of them. They are law-abiding and god-fearing, and recognized as respected members of their communities. Their family network was later to include Charles Blomfield, the Bishop of London who officiated at Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1838, and Sir Reginald Blomfield, the renowned architect whose major architectural works are listed in the book Sir Reginald Blomfield: An Edwardian Architect (Fellows, 1985).

But notwithstanding the forces of normalization at work on and through members of polite society in that place-time, forces depicted in loving detail by Jane Austen, the lives of the Blomfields take very surprising turns—like a step-father becoming a son-in-law, or a great (×4) grandmother having an illegitimate son and then marrying three young men after she came into her inheritance. The Blomfields make my own moments of wildness, or lines of flight, which horrified my respectable family, make a different kind of sense; to be a Blomfield is not necessarily to fit within the normative, striated lines of force that dictate how the lives of gentlemen and gentlewomen should be lived. Their lives beg for a diffractive analysis, which can include the multiple and contradictory lines of force through which lives are constituted—and re-constituted.

Dundalk 1799: The Particular Place-Time in Which the Letter Was Written

To open up a diffractive analysis of Thomas Blomfield’s life, through his letter, I need not only the facts gathered in such conventional cartographies; I also need the facts about the particular place-time in which the letter was written—Dundalk in 1799. The lines of force that run through him/his letter, which I explore in the next section, are specific to that place-time.

For the 100 years before Thomas Blomfield found himself in Ireland as part of the British force quelling the Irish uprising, Ireland was dominated by the Anglican Church of Ireland. The Church was made up of families whose English ancestors had taken up land in Ireland after its conquest. Ireland was nominally an autonomous state, but in practice, it was controlled by the King of Great Britain and supervised by his cabinet in London. It had been thus for 100 years since the defeat of the Catholic Jacobites in the Williamite War in 1691. In 1799, the vast majority of Ireland’s population were Roman Catholics who were excluded from power and from land ownership under the British Penal Laws.

Many of the Irish leaders had converted to Protestantism to avoid the severe economic and political penalties imposed by England on Catholics. The great bulk of land-owners were the Anglo-Irish families who were often absentee landlords, with Catholic peasants carrying out the labor on their farm-lands under conditions of extreme poverty and political powerlessness.

Twenty years earlier, in 1778, the Catholic Relief Act had been passed, partly as a reward to the Irish for not having joined the Scottish uprising, and partly in the vain hope of preventing the Irish from making an alliance with the French in the way Scotland had done. Furthermore, the British army was in need of more soldiers to quell unrest in India; so the Relief Act removed restrictions that had prevented Irish Catholics from joining the British army and from entering the professions. It gave them equal voting rights to Irish Protestants. This Act did not, however, serve to alleviate the extreme poverty of the land-less peasants who struggled to survive on the alienated lands.

Joseph Holt, who appears in Thomas’s letter as the Rebel General Holt, was one of six sons of John Holt, a farmer in County Wicklow. The Holt family was Protestant and loyalist and had come to Ireland under James I. In 1797, Joseph Holt had changed allegiance and become a member of the Society of United Irishmen. In May 1798, his house was burned down by the loyalist Irish Militia of Fermanagh. He fled to the Wicklow Mountains where he gradually assumed a position of prominence with the United Irish, mostly Catholic, rebels. Avoiding pitched battles, he led a fierce campaign of raids and ambushes against loyalist military targets in Wicklow, reducing government influence in the county to urban strongholds.

Meanwhile at Vinegar Hill, on June 21, 1798, over 15,000 British soldiers launched an attack defeating the rebels there. Following their defeat, the surviving rebels headed toward the Wicklow Mountains to link up with Holt’s forces. Holt was given much of the credit for the planning of the ambush and defeat of a pursuing force of 200 British cavalry at Ballyellis on June 30, 1798. Holt and his rebel soldiers then continued the United Irish guerrilla campaign, eluding large-scale sweeps into the mountains by the British army. He had a steady supply of recruits, many of whom were deserters from the British militia.

The news of the British defeat of the French at Ballinamuck in September 1798 meant the United Irishmen could no longer depend on aid from the French army, and Holt negotiated the terms of surrender. Dublin Castle was eager to end the rebellion in Wicklow and allowed him exile in New South Wales without trial. He sailed to New South Wales as a political exile. He did not, however, negotiate safe passage for his men, which brings me to Thomas’s letter.

The Letter From Thomas Blomfield to His Daughter Matilda

Thomas Blomfield’s letter from Ireland was written some months after Holt had capitulated. The first part of his letter tells of the fate of two of the rebels who had been captured after the surrender. Thomas’s words to his daughter tell of his horror and sorrow at their execution. He writes of his melancholy and his emotional entanglement in their deaths, and the burden of responsibility he felt in overseeing those deaths. ² At the same time, as Captain of his troops, he must pull himself together. He must, in literary terms, be both Shakespeare’s weeping Titus Andronicus and his more rational brother, Marcus. Titus Andronicus cries out:

“If any power pities wretched tears, To that I call.” Marcus is the voice of reason, telling his brother to calm down: “do not break into these deep extremes,” “let reason govern thy lament.” (Dixon, 2015, p. 45)

And so to the letter itself:

I am seated, my dear Matilda, with an intention of complying with your request, viz., to give you some account of myself since I last wrote to you, but from the multiplicity of regimental business which passes through my hands, I am so perfectly confined that I have not had one opportunity of examining any part of this country, therefore what information I shall be able to communicate will be dearly purchased by the postage of my letter. First I shall present you with a melancholy event, a sight which in all probability you will never witness a similar one, and I sincerely hope such another will never occur to me.

The 5th, or Royal Regiment of Irish Dragoons were quartered with us in this Garrison and neighbourhood, but from the improper behaviour of a part of the Regiment the General who commands this district has got the whole removed and they are at this moment on their passage to England. Two privates of this Regiment about four months since deserted and joined the Rebels, but since the famous Rebel General Holt surrendered many of his followers have been given up, and information being of these two they were soon apprehended, tried by a general court-martial, and sentenced to be shot at the head of the Regiment. On the 23rd ultimo this sentence was put into execution upon the beach of this Bay.

The Dragoons were drawn up on each side of the two prisoners and our Regiment in line directly in front, at about 20 yards distance. After the proceedings having been read to the regiments and prisoners—they were allowed their own time to pray, confess, etc., etc., to their priests—they were then blinded and, kneeling by their coffins, received the fire from nine of their comrades who were chosen for this occasion. One died instantly, but the other received several single shots before he expired. They were Roman Catholics and brothers, names Patrick and Michael Freeney. Thus ended this duty; though necessary, yet the most awful and painful in which officer or soldier can be employed, and I hope the dreadful example will have the desired effect upon the regiment and point out to those who have had an inclination to swerve from their duty to their King and country, the danger which they have avoided and the disgraceful and untimely death which awaits every traitor.

The deaths of Michael and Patrick Freeney had cast Thomas into a state of deep melancholy. He had been forced to oversee and to witness something he found unbearable. These rebels had thrown in their lot with Joseph Holt to fight for Ireland’s freedom from English domination. Such rebels might have found a place in history as heroic freedom fighters. Instead, with the defeat of the French army, and Holt’s terms of the negotiated peace, which protected him but failed to protect his soldiers, they were “given up,” “apprehended” and shot as traitors and deserters.

In the last six lines of this passage, Thomas recovers himself with military rationality; he hopes their horrible deaths will prevent others from being disloyal to King and country. Patrick and Michael Freeney, in that rationalization of their fate, were reduced to traitors who rightly suffered a disgraceful death. With these few lines, Thomas recovers his positioning as the Captain of his men, and as loyal and dutiful soldier. It is in writing to Matilda that the melancholy of the event could be allowed to emerge in his own body, and tears could perhaps be wept for the deaths of Patrick and Michael Freeney. In recovering himself as Captain of his Battalion, he reiterates the absolute right of the power of the colonizing force, whose terms allow no legitimate loyalty to Ireland, to Holt, or to the Irish people. The “conditions of intelligibility” through which his position as Captain was crystallized were, in Butler’s terms, “formulated in and by power.” Significantly Butler (1997) points out, “this normative exercise of power is rarely acknowledged as an operation of power at all. Indeed we may classify it among the most implicit forms of power, one that works through its illegibility” (p. 134, emphasis added).

Thomas was not necessarily conscious of the way he drew on those conditions of intelligibility to justify his position of power over the lives of these young men. Their deaths, and the justification of them, come from intensities, or lines of force, that secured British dominance, and held it in place. The resistance to, or questioning of, British/Anglican power, which his horror at the deaths might have evoked, is over-ridden by the normative military discourse, a discourse formulated in and by power. The doubleness of his positioning, as one who weeps at senseless deaths, and as one who rationalizes its necessity, is a manifestation of the exteriority-within—the exteriority of Matilda and family, and the exteriority of colonial discourses and practices of power. The letter, then, far from being a static record of what is already past, is “an iterative and mutually constitutive working out, and reworking” (Barad, 2007, p. x) of the deaths, and of himself as integral to, and crystallized within, those deaths.

In the next paragraph of his letter, Thomas changes the subject away from the melancholic deaths of the rebels, and the necessity of duty to King and country, to the polite intercourse of family and society, almost by way of repairing the social fabric that such events might be felt to disturb. In this part of his letter, which could almost have been written by Jane Austen, he re-crystallizes himself as gentleman, with a place in the networks of polite English society.

To change the subject. In this regiment, strange as it may appear, I [nearly] met with a person who is almost a relation. Her maiden name Alexander, a daughter, I believe, of Mr Alexander who lived at “Yarmouth” or “Lowestof.” ³ Her present name Bamford. Her husband is a cornet and acting Adjutant. Unfortunately I never had an opportunity of being introduced to the lady. I had a very distant invitation, or, rather, no invitation from the husband. He said he should be glad if I would take tea with him, but never mentioned time. I saw him every day, but no second offer upon the subject escaped his lips; and their route for England coming very suddenly, away she went, and I know not what sort of person my cousin is, whether tall, handsome or otherwise. Barrington says she has been upon the stage.

So even while he recovers himself within the striations of military/colonial discourse, he admits to an “almost relation” who has been upon the stage, a profession not altogether approved in the polite circles of Suffolk. Even so, with this small story, Thomas brings himself back to Matilda and her husband John Stanford, and to the family networks in which they are mutually embedded.

He then turns to a discussion of John Stanford’s new uniform. He teasingly, and with tongue-in-cheek, disapproves of it on aesthetic grounds. At the same time, he positions himself as one with rank over Mr. Stanford, as the one who will be doing the inspection of his Corps, adding yet another dimension to the complexity of his friendship with John Stanford—his step-father and son-in-law and potential reader of his letter. In animating that space of his relationship with John Stanford, he then falls into an acute longing to be home:

I should be very pleased to have an opportunity of seeing Mr. S. in full uniform. At the same time, with all due deference to his choice of dress, I cannot bring myself to imagine it a becoming one. Blue and black is a very singular and particular uniform, and only worn by engineers. Surely blue with scarlet cuffs and collar, blue lapels, pocket flaps etc., etc., edged with white or scarlet, would have been a much lighter looking dress. But dress is all mere fancy, and a man can fight in one colour as well as another. I hope to have the honour of reviewing the Corps on my return to England, and I doubt not but I shall be highly satisfied with their performance. In April we expect to be recalled. How happy shall I feel myself once more to set foot on my native soil, for the longer I stay in this country the less I like it, and I am wishing away the day and nights with more earnestness than I ever before did. Lord Euston is come to England and will not return, except anything particular occur in this country.

Then, once more he recovers himself from melancholy, this time with a small story that John Stanford will find interesting:

We are very quiet and as well or better situated than any regiment. The barracks are very good, and commanded by Major-General Lord Charles Fitzroy (Lord Euston’s brother), who keeps an excellent table, at which some one or other of us take our beef and claret every day in great comfort. Barrington and myself dined with him on Saturday.

In marked contrast with such luxury was the life of the Irish peasants, who Thomas turns to in the second half of his letter. He takes up the discourse of early anthropological writing, that is, of colonial power documenting (i.e., representing) alien and inferior species in the lands they have conquered. Early anthropology, having emerged from natural history, regarded “human primitives” under the rule of colonial administrations much as if they were part of the natural flora and fauna. As such, parts of their bodies and their artifacts were collectable curiosities for scientific study. Thomas’s account takes up these anthropological modes of intelligibility, thus animating another line of force integral to colonial power at that time and in that place. In this account, it is no longer melancholy that overtakes him, but horror. His account performs in Barad’s (2008) words “the enactment of boundaries—that always entails constitutive exclusions” (p. 122). It is a representationalist account, rather than the kind of diffractive account I am enacting in this article. He treats what he writes about the Catholic Irish peasants as a reality that is independent of himself as observer. It is not visible to him that his horror is instrumental in the constitutive work of separating them out as other to himself.

For want of a better subject I will endeavour to describe an Irish wake, alias funeral. One happened some little time since near the barracks, at a house, or rather cavern. Very few of the houses of the peasants have any chimney. They burn turf and make the fire at one end farthest from the door, out of which issues the smoke, and the family so completely enveloped in it that they cannot be seen. Persons (as you may suppose) unaccustomed to such infernal vapour cannot for a moment stand it, and when by chance any of the inhabitants come to the door they look as brown as any old wainscot table you ever saw. When the smoke is not much and you have an opportunity of looking in, you will see man, wife and children, hogs, cow, cocks and hens all mixed in one room. This I assure you is quite common, and it is also as common to see the hogs, etc., with the children eating boiled potatoes out of the same wooden bowl. More of this some other time, and now I turn to the wake.

The corpse was rapt up in a clean sheet and laid upon a kind of form, a very little distance from the ground, surrounded by men and women. One of the latter—who is hired for the occasion and by custom taught a solemn chant, or, rather, howl—gives the signal, and they all bow themselves down over the corpse and take hold of the sheet or whatever covers it. She begins her howl, in which the rest immediately join and begin clapping their hands, and a more savage, hideous noise cannot well be conceived. This is repeated during the night at short intervals, which intervals are filled up by smoking tobacco and drinking whiskey—a spirit peculiar to Ireland and which is distilled from barley. In fact they make a perfect frolic and sometimes get completely drunk. I have seen in Dublin about 11 o’clock in the morning a funeral procession preceded by a person with a large pitcher of liquor. The bearers were so completely intoxicated as to stagger from one side of the street to the other, and every moment I expected to have seen the corpse dashed upon the pavement. Every person, both bearers and followers, was making as much noise as is heard at a bull-baiting in England. This savage, indecent mode of burying their deceased friends is peculiar to the Roman Catholics. Protestants observe the same decorum and solemnity as in England upon the occasion.

Thomas’s account vividly constitutes impermeable boundaries between himself as English and Protestant and the Irish Catholic peasants. The smoke in their houses is “infernal,” the children eat with animals, the funeral chant becomes a “howl” so “savage” and “hideous” it “cannot well be conceived.” They get “completely drunk” and become both “savage” and “indecent.” He constitutes the boundary through abjecting the other—through a horrified expulsion of whatever it is they are. It is thus a performative account of Englishness, of Protestantism and of gentlemanliness.

In the next passage, he mentions a skull that will become a specimen for science, taken back to England in the same way Aboriginal skulls were later removed from Australia. Yet once again his horror finds expression, not at the appalling poverty that the peasants have been trapped in by British rule and land ownership, and by the British army, of which Thomas is an integral part, and not at their being treated as anthropological specimens, but as if this is what they are, naturally, and what they presumably desire to be. The boundaries that separate them are constituted as impermeable and fixed. Although he may not have intended such a reading, he is mounting an implicit case that justifies the colonial power of which he is part, and that makes sense of his own performance of domination as Captain of his Batallion. He continues this justificatory stance:

As a further proof of their disregard to their dead, in a burying ground about two miles from this place, called Castle Town, are to be seen 40 or 50 skull bones strewn about looking as white as snow, one of which, having some peculiar marks, Dr Freeman intends to secure and bring to England. The remains of the dead strewn about this Romish consecrated ground are not confined to skull bones, but every other bone—and you may absolutely see pieces of flesh adhering to the sides and bottoms of broken coffins. In short, my dear Matilda, they are not the most pleasant of beings to reside amongst, and I shall be very happy to get out of the country. You would be surprised to see in what filthy manner these people live. Even farmers who have land sufficient to employ seven or eight horses take scarcely any other food but potatoes, sour butter milk, and barley and oat bread. Knives and forks are not very common and by most not thought necessary.

His longing to escape from this association with people living in these dreadful conditions, and his position of power, overrides the possibility of questioning the conditions of intelligibility through which he is here making sense of the world (Davies, 2008). In not questioning them, however, he succumbs ever more deeply to the event through which the continuation of the domination of Catholic Ireland by Protestant England is effected; the words that circulate from one to another in letters and in conversation reiterate the conditions of intelligibility; they are a constitutive part of the event, in which exploitation and oppression of a people remains thinkable as legitimate practice.

Thomas concludes his letter with a passage about the dangers of traveling by sea and a sense of his own vulnerability, combined with his dependence on God’s Providence for his survival: ⁴

We have had a great deal of bad weather, high winds and very stormy, since our arrival here. A great number of vessels have been driven on this coast and completely lost. Last week two were totally wrecked within two miles of the town and every person perished; and this afternoon six recruits arrived belonging to the Lancashire Dragoons who sailed last week from Liverpool, in company with four more vessels with troops. Just within two miles off Dublin Bay a sudden storm came on and the other four ran upon a rock and went down with every soul on board. Thank God that we were so far from land at the time we were caught in the storm when coming to Ireland, or we must have shared the same fate, and I pray to God that we may have His gracious protection on our return, and that He will so rule the hearts of our domestic and foreign enemies that we may soon return to the enjoyment of our domestic concerns and comforts.

As I cannot conclude with a subject more interesting to my feelings, nor one in which (I conceive) you can join with me more fervently, I shall lay down my pen, when I have assured you that I am, affectionately yours, T.B.

P.S.—Barrington is fast asleep, but he has desired me to say that he begs his respects, love, etc., to all.

Love to Mr. Stanford and respects to all my friends.

It is to John Stanford, then, that he sends his love. To Matilda he sends affection and to his friends his respects.

(In)Conclusion

I have explored, in this article, a post-humanist reading of one particular subject. I have not represented him as the unified rational subject of liberal humanism—the subject assumed and produced in many representationalist accounts. Through a diffractive analysis, Thomas Blomfield has become someone, like any of us, who has permeable boundaries, boundaries that are open to affective flows and lines of force from outside and inside (the exteriority-within) himself. Mobilizing those flows and forces, he crystallizes and re-crystallizes not only himself, in his specificity, but also the material conditions of his space-time. He thus crystallizes humanity’s struggles, its passions, its divisions, and its limitations.

Barad (2008) argues that “What often appears as separate entities (and separate sets of concerns) with sharp edges does not actually entail a relation of absolute exteriority at all” (p. 122). What has emerged in this work with the material of Thomas’s letter is that, perhaps especially when he draws sharp boundaries between himself and others, setting out to represent them by mirroring what he sees, he is constituting himself and the other in the socio-political discourses and practices of his place-time. Through those discourses and practices, he is able to maintain his position in the world without collapsing under the oppressive force brought to bear by himself and his men on colonized subjects.

In animating Thomas Blomfield’s letter, and responding to its animating force, I have thus explored the constitutive flows in between specific human subjects, material objects, and a range of onto-epistemological lines of force—such as religion, class, and colonialism. I have explored the constitutive work that produces Thomas Blomfield at the same time that it constitutes those others with whom he intra-acts. I have looked at how the words on the page of his letter invite his audience into different forms of existence—permeating their and our indefinite boundaries—and also re-citing those boundaries that make oppressive social relations possible.

The separate bounded entities that are produced in representationalist accounts are constituted, in a diffractive methodology, not as fixed or unified entities, but as permeable, mobile, and multiple—with blurred boundaries and no clear, or even possible, separation between exteriors and interiors. Thomas Blomfield’s letter crystallizes the specificity of himself through multiple, changing, conflicting discourses and practices. His relationship with his family members, and my relationship with him, “is not a static relationality but a doing—the enactment of boundaries—that always entails constitutive exclusions and therefore requisite questions of accountability” (Barad, 2008, p. 122).

The illegibility of the conditions of intelligibility through which Thomas’s military and colonial power is constituted mean that he is unaware of his own work in constituting the Irish peasants as those who can and should be oppressed by the British government. To the extent that the conditions of intelligibility remain illegible, it is impossible for him to become accountable for his part in the English oppression of the Irish. His horror and his earlier sorrow are registered on his material body, his emotions animate his account of himself, and they animate, at the same time, the social and political boundaries through which his life and his work can be made to make sense.

A different kind of horror impacts itself on my body, as I learn to recognize the centuries old implications of those crystallizations of religious and class and national-racial difference. I have in this writing willingly identified myself as a Blomfield descendant, and I have become attached to Thomas, as I have lived with him through his letter, through the complex manifestations of his exteriorities-within in 1799 in Dundalk. He has enlarged my capacity to appreciate the complex entanglement of subjects in relation to each other and to the continuities and breaks in the onto-epistemological worlds in which we take up our subject-hood. He has offered me (I might say animated my thinking-being toward) a new comprehension of diffractive methodology.