Category: History

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Flesh in Suspension: Process, Perception, and the Emergence of the Body in Bacon

Francis Bacon Painting (1946) From – https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79204

In the spectral interior of Painting (1946), a solitary figure occupies a suspended space, standing or perhaps hovering beneath an umbrella whose ribs inscribe a faint geometry across the violet air. Behind him, carcasses hang in sanguine suspension, their surfaces rendered with visceral immediacy that resists narrative containment, while a yellow boutonnière glows on the figure’s lapel with the precision of a small Rembrandtian sun. Curtains frame the scene like a stage, yet the space itself evades conventional depth, oscillating between theatre, interior, and liminal field. The image, scraped from the residue of catastrophe, does not pursue representation or abstraction in any conventional sense; it enacts the human body as an event within paint, registering its presence through tension, exposure, and gesture.

Before this work, Bacon’s early paintings had already revealed a fascination with the body as a site of dissolution and transformation. His prewar experiments, such as Crucifixion (1933), translated Expressionist and Surrealist vocabularies into a distinctly personal idiom, merging biomorphic abstraction with the residue of figuration. By the early 1940s, this interest in corporeal fragmentation reached its first major articulation in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). There, distorted forms occupy a shallow, orange field, their mouths opened in silent convulsion, suggesting both scream and species—part human, part animal. The work’s triptych structure evokes religious painting while stripping it of transcendence, presenting flesh as spectacle and ordeal rather than redemption. The spatial compression and the emphasis on bodily distortion anticipate Painting (1946), where similar compositional tensions are reimagined within a more architectonic field. Between the two works lies a continuity of inquiry: the crucifixion as event becomes the grammar through which Bacon formulates a postwar phenomenology of the body.

Created in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Painting (1946) has often been read as an allegory of slaughter, a meditation on human destructiveness and the dehumanization of modernity, sometimes described in terms of “sacred violence.” Yet this reading risks imposing a moral narrative onto what Bacon approached as a phenomenological inquiry: the encounter with the body as matter, sensation, and site of perceptual engagement. In this sense, the painting is not a story about what happened to humanity, but a study of how the human figure emerges in paint, how forms coalesce under the pressures of gravity, space, and attention. The figure, the umbrella, and the surrounding carcasses operate within a unified visual ontology, each element a node in the network of perception that the painting constructs.

Bacon’s sense of embodiment is intensified by the historical moment, as the atomic bomb, the devastation of London from aerial bombing, and the collapse of Britain’s imperial order shaped his perception of the human body and its vulnerability. The postwar image-world, documented in photographs of ruins, mass graves, and the anonymous debris of cities, transformed the visible into a register of loss, where vision and memory were inseparable; to see was to recall, to witness, and to bear the imprint of catastrophe. Within this visual economy, Bacon’s figure appears precarious and contingent, dwarfed by forces political and technological as much as material. It does not restore order to experience but reveals the body as residue, caught within the circulation of destruction and survival that defined postwar perception. The painting enacts a phenomenology in which human finitude is measured against impersonal, almost cataclysmic forces; flesh becomes an emergent property, appearing only through its interaction with the conditions that undo it.

Bacon’s own account of the work underscores the primacy of emergence over prefiguration. He claimed the image “happened” to him, beginning as a bird alighting on a field and transforming into something grotesque, unbidden, and particular. In this methodology, accident is not a lapse of intention but a condition for the work’s very possibility. Each mark, smear, and overpainting becomes both material and event, a residue of process made visible. Art historians have identified a subtle echo of Poussin’s Adoration of the Golden Calf in these chaotic, contorted forms, where the human propensity toward frenzy, disintegration of order, and moral collapse are rendered through the careful choreography of bodies; Bacon internalizes and abstracts this, translating collective panic into a visceral, corporeal experience. The painting’s surfaces, shaped by the interplay of control and contingency, open a space for the viewer to apprehend the body not as symbol or narrative vehicle, but as a dynamic presence in time and space. The human figure appears as both phenomenon and condition of appearance, establishing a template for Bacon’s postwar practice in which body, matter, and perception are inseparable.

The body in Bacon’s work exists as matter before meaning. It is not a symbol, nor a vehicle for narrative; it is a residue of perceptual forces, a site where sensation, gravity, and temporal pressure converge. The surrounding carcasses reinforce this ontology of flesh, presenting mass and texture stripped of moral commentary, while the umbrella and suit, though formally distinct, are subjected to the same forces that govern the composition. Each element registers its presence through the tension of appearance rather than representation, even as critics have noted visceral associations with slaughter; as The Guardian observed, Bacon’s paintings recall the “smell of death” evoked by crucifixions and meat, yet this association emerges from perception rather than imposed narrative. The hanging flowers in the work allude to how butchers would manage this smell in their own shops.

Francis Bacon: Human Presence (2024), published by the National Portrait Gallery, offers a comprehensive look at Bacon’s portraiture from the 1950s onward, highlighting his psychologically charged approach, responses to other artists, and the development of his groundbreaking practice.

This attentiveness to surface, to the way flesh registers and refracts light, aligns with a broader epistemology of vision. Michael Baxandall’s concept of the “period eye,” describing historically contingent structures through which visual culture is perceived, resonates with Bacon’s approach in postwar Britain; the painter’s gaze is informed by photography, medical atlases, and wartime documentation, yet translated through a highly personal material practice. The body is dissected and catalogued not to convey scientific knowledge as Muybridge had done, but to make visible the conditions under which perception and sensation cohere. It is an epistemological inquiry enacted through paint.

Through this method, painting becomes a phenomenological operation. The surface records pressures, accidents, and iterative decisions of the studio while mediating the viewer’s encounter with the body. Portraiture is reflexive. Bacon establishes a principle that will define his postwar oeuvre: the human figure emerges through process and is inseparable from the physical, temporal, and perceptual forces that both produce and destroy it. Flesh is both object and event, and the work’s authority derives from its insistence on presenting the body as an active site of appearance rather than a preordained icon.

Camera: Francis Bacon – Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting by Martin Harrison examines how photographs, film, and media images shaped Bacon’s work. It traces influences from Velázquez, Poussin, Rodin, Muybridge, and Eisenstein, showing how these sources informed his painting practice and contributed to his stylistic development.

The environment around the main figure functions as more than backdrop; it actively shapes the experience of the body. Curtains, partitions, and the umbrella’s geometry organize the composition while simultaneously interrupting the gaze, producing a controlled yet unstable field of perception. These devices create a tension between containment and exposure: the figure is both framed and restrained, present yet partially obscured. The slatted geometry of the umbrella, and faint parallels to blinds or screens, introduces a subtle modulation of vision, suggesting that seeing is always mediated by structural conditions.

Through attention to framing and architecture, Bacon situates painting as an active negotiation between perception and presence. The visible world is not merely represented but interrogated; boundaries, partitions, and light conditions articulate the limits and possibilities of seeing, while the figure registers their effect. In this sense, the work functions simultaneously as a study of corporeal vulnerability and an exploration of the mechanics of vision, demonstrating that spatial organization is intrinsic to both the production and apprehension of the human form.

Francis Bacon: Painting, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (2019), edited by Ben Ware, brings together essays exploring Bacon’s art through existential, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic lenses, engaging thinkers from Freud to Heidegger to illuminate his work and methods.

Painting (1946) gathers the formal and conceptual motifs that would shape Bacon’s postwar practice: the suspended figure, the carcass, the enclosing partitions, and the slatted geometries that regulate vision. Yet some of these elements predate the work itself and anticipate later developments. The figure’s dark suit and white collar recall the papal vestment in Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X (1650), while the partial enclosure evokes the architecture of both tribunal and confessional. These correspondences would resurface with full intensity in Head VI (1949) and the later Pope series, where the seated figure becomes the locus of both containment and exposure. The agape mouth reveals Bacon’s dialogue with the visual archives of the twentieth century, particularly the photograph of Joseph Goebbels at the Berlin Sportpalast, captured mid-oration with his mouth open in a gesture of command and fury. This image, a study in the performative collapse of authority, resonates alongside imagery from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), where the scream becomes a register of terror and resistance.

Within this visual system, repetition operates not as redundancy but as investigation. Bacon revisits these motifs to test how the body, framed by its architectural and historical conditions, can register sensation without narrative mediation. Each recurrence refines the logic first articulated in Painting (1946), in which the figure is both object and event, suspended between enclosure and eruption. The later Pope paintings can be seen as variations on this initial grammar: they preserve the structure of the isolated body within a bounded field while deepening the tension between visibility and concealment that defines Bacon’s vision of postwar embodiment.

The spatial and material strategies crystallized in Painting (1946) consolidate concerns already present in Bacon’s earlier work, yet they also inaugurate the formal vocabulary of his postwar practice. Motifs (Rosie Broadley calls them ciphers) such as the suspended body, the enclosing framework, and the calibrated interplay of light and shadow had appeared in tentative form before 1946, but here they achieve a structural and conceptual coherence that would persist through the 1950s and 1960s. In the triptychs and later variations on the reclining figure, Bacon returns to these devices not through repetition alone but as a method of inquiry and study; each reengagement tests how flesh, form, and perception are continually reconstituted within the material field of painting.

Ultimately, Bacon’s work is significant not for a single figure or scene, but for the method it establishes, rendering the human body in all its fragility and intensity. His portraits function as studies of others and of himself, with painting acting as both mirror and medium, where perception, gesture, and material presence converge. The body emerges through interaction with space, light, and paint, enacting a subtle phenomenology in which flesh and vision co-arise. Portraiture becomes a site of inquiry, where artist, subject, and viewer intersect, and where the conditions of appearance are examined as rigorously as the forms themselves.


Books consulted in this analysis:

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Fragments in Conversation: Imagining Twombly and Guston in Rome

In a quiet courtyard of the Capitoline Museum in Rome, the colossal hand of Constantine rests on its plinth, a fragment of imperial ambition and human scale. Here, Guston and Twombly meet, observing and responding to the same ruin through their very different artistic sensibilities; the hypothetical encounter becomes a meditation on gesture, history, and the ethical weight of mark-making, allowing the past to speak while their own practices converse across time.

The afternoon sun warmed the stones of the Capitoline Museum’s courtyard, its light striking the marble façades with a soft, diffuse glow. The colossal right hand of Constantine rested on a low plinth, isolated from other objects, a fragment of a once-magnificent imperial statue. Its scale was imposing even as a fragment, and the careful carving of the fingers and veins conveyed both power and a subtle human vulnerability.

A collage that I created from a photograph of Twombly (perhaps taken by Robert Rauschenberg) and Philip Guston at the Capitoline Museum in Rome.

The colossal right hand of Constantine, displayed on a plinth in the Capitoline courtyard, is a surviving fragment of a seated statue created between 313 and 324 AD for the Basilica of Maxentius. Originally part of an acrolithic composition, the emperor’s head and exposed body were carved from Parian marble, while the draped cloak was rendered in gilded bronze foil; this suggested both divine authority and imperial grandeur. The statue, which once rose approximately 10 metres, assimilated Constantine to Jupiter, portraying him as a god on earth; the raised index finger, now partially restored, likely held a sceptre, reinforcing the gesture’s symbolic assertion of power.

Today, the hand conveys a mixture of monumental force and fragile humanity. The work’s fragmentary state, seen alongside other preserved sections of the colossal statue, including the head and central arm, reveals the sculpture as a ruin that still communicates its historical and political ambition. As isolated fragments, these remnants encourage reflection on the passage of time; the vulnerability of even the most imposing symbols; and the ethical and aesthetic weight of human representation, themes that resonate profoundly with both Guston’s and Twombly’s concerns in painting.

τῷ σωτηριώδει σημείῳ, τῷ ἀληθεῖ ἐλέγχῳ τῆς ἀνδρείας τὴν πόλιν ὑμῶν ἀπὸ ζυγοῦ τοῦ τυράννου διασωθεῖσαν ἠλευθέρωσα, ἔτι μὴν καὶ τὴν σύγκλητον καὶ τὸν δῆμον Ῥωμαίων τῇ ἀρχαίᾳ ἐπιφανείᾳ καὶ λαμπρότητι ἐλευθερώσας ἀποκατέστησα. -- Eusebius 

Under this singular sign (singularius signum), which is the mark (insigne) of true excellence, I restored (restituo) the city of Rome, the senate, and the Roman people, torn away by the yoke (iugo) of tyrannical rule (tyrannicus dominatio), to their former freedom (libertas) and nobility (nobilitas). -- tr. Rufinus

Guston leaned against a nearby column, sketchbook resting loosely in his hands, eyes fixed on the hand with an intensity that seemed to challenge the world to respond. “Even as a fragment,” he said, tapping his fingers against the page, “this hand carries a grotesque weight. It’s absurd, monumental, human. Every mark here insists on being read as a statement of power and presence. It reminds me of the hooded figures or the shoes in my later paintings: blunt witnesses to human absurdity and moral consequence.”

Guston shifted slightly, letting the weight of the fragment press on him as he traced an invisible line from the marble back to his sketchbook. “Even fractured, it asserts authority; even incomplete, it demands a response. The hand is absurdly large, but it is human; its veins, its fingers, its tension—all of it insists that someone, somewhere, bore responsibility for the act. There is a moral weight in these gestures, whether carved in stone or brushed on canvas.”

Twombly stood a few paces away, tilting his head sideways as he traced the subtle fractures in the marble. “I understand,” he said, voice calm, almost lyrical, “but for me the incompleteness is essential. The gesture does not exist merely to confront; it exists to be felt, to be remembered. The cracks, the missing pieces, the space around it—all of that creates a dialogue between past and present. My marks are like that; they do not dominate the surface; they listen to what is already there, extending the story rather than imposing it. Even in ruin, the hand speaks, but it allows us to speak back.” His words echoed the improvisatory gestures and calligraphic lines of Fifty Days at Iliam, where each mark floated between presence and absence, between history and recollection.

Guston drew a blunt, quick line across his sketchbook, a gesture almost corporeal in its insistence. “I grant you that,” he said, “but there is an ethics in confrontation as well. The past presses on us, and the fragments of history demand recognition; silence or mediation is not always sufficient. When I paint, I confront moral and historical weight directly. This hand, monumental though incomplete, insists that someone accounted for every gesture, every line, every mark. There is responsibility in scale and in execution; the fragment reminds us that grandeur is inseparable from human intention and consequence.”

Twombly’s gaze lingered, following the curvature of the knuckles and the subtle slope of the wrist. “And yet there is also an ethics of receptivity,” he said. “Not every gesture must dominate; some exist to be extended or echoed. In its incompleteness, the hand allows us to inhabit the space it leaves, to feel the gestures that preceded us. The hand already exists. Our gestures extend it, converse with it, but do not dominate it. In its incompleteness, it teaches humility. Every mark we make can be a response rather than a statement. Painting is similar; we mark, we trace, we respond, but we do not always impose. The ruins speak to us precisely because they permit reflection as well as recognition.”

For a long moment, the courtyard fell into silence, the distant shuffle of tourists paling against the quiet gravity of the fragment. Guston’s gaze remained intense and corporeal, measuring the hand as if willing it to yield its secrets, while Twombly’s eyes drifted over the fractures, absorbing the residue of centuries. The colossal hand became a mediator between them, embodying the convergence of human ambition, ethical responsibility, and historical fragility. In that shared attention, both understood the stakes of gesture and mark; one through confrontation, the other through evocation, and both through fidelity to what remains.

Finally, Guston nodded toward the fragment. “They wanted to make power eternal,” he said, “but what survives is fragmentary, grotesque, human. That is the lesson for us: every action, every word, every figure, every mark carries weight.” Twombly turned back, eyes following the line of the fingers. “And in that fragment, in the silence between gestures, I feel history breathing. Painting is its echo—not the hand itself, but the trace it leaves, its shadow.”

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Seeing, Hearing, Speaking: From Buddhist Ethics to Moral Blindness in Contemporary Media

The three wise monkeys—see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil—have travelled from 17th-century Japanese shrines to contemporary streaming television. This post traces their journey, exploring how a moral maxim rooted in Buddhist ethics has become a symbol of complicity, selective perception, and critique of power in shows like Alien: Earth, The White Lotus, and Only Murders in the Building.

The motif of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil is one of the most recognizable symbolic triads in global visual culture. Its origins are usually traced to early modern Japan, where in 1617 the sculptor Hidari Jingorō carved the three wise monkeys at the Tōshō-gū shrine in Nikkō. The phrase in Japanese—mizaru, kikazaru, iwazaru—literally means “do not see, do not hear, do not speak.” The pun arises because the suffix -zaru indicates negation while saru also means monkey. The monkeys therefore embody the maxim in a visual and linguistic fusion. The religious background is both Buddhist and Confucian. In Indian sources that travelled along Buddhist transmission routes, there are injunctions to avoid corrupting the senses by guarding sight, hearing, and speech. These were absorbed into Chinese and then Japanese traditions where self-regulation of perception and conduct became moral instruction. The monkeys therefore originally symbolised virtue, discipline, and the refusal to indulge in evil by policing the senses.

At Nikkō Tōshōgū, a UNESCO World Heritage site dedicated to Tokugawa Ieyasu, a famed carving of three monkeys adorns the stable for sacred horses. Known in Japanese as “sanzaru” and in English as the “three wise monkeys,” it remains the shrine’s most celebrated image.

Once the motif left its shrine context, its meaning began to migrate and transform. When European travellers encountered the monkeys and reproduced them in prints and decorative arts, they became part of the broader art movement of Japonisme, which captivated Western artists and collectors in the mid-19th century with Japanese aesthetics and symbolism. The monkeys, admired for their compositional clarity and triadic structure, were often reinterpreted to suit European tastes; in Victorian England and later in North America, to “see no evil” no longer signified virtuous self-restraint but deliberate blindness. The phrase became a critique of those who ignored corruption, injustice, or cruelty by pretending not to notice. Detached from their Buddhist ethical origins, the monkeys were recast as symbols of hypocrisy, complicity, and self-preservation—a critical lens on human evasions that persists today.

In contemporary streaming media, the three monkeys have shed any quaint or exotic connotation to become a living, adaptive symbol of denial and selective perception. Science fiction, satire, and crime comedy all engage the motif because these genres are preoccupied with what is seen, heard, and spoken, and with the consequences of turning away. The monkeys now function as a lens through which audiences can examine not only character behaviour but also the structural mechanics of power, privilege, and moral evasion that shape modern narrative worlds.

In Alien: Earth, the narrative stages a civilization dominated by corporate elites whose decisions exert life-or-death consequences with near-total impunity. The refusal to see, hear, or speak operates as a cultivated strategy of wilful ignorance; executives and powerful actors turn away from the human costs of their ambition, masking exploitation and ethical transgression behind layers of procedure and profit. The three monkeys emerge as an ironic emblem of this structural blindness, highlighting how moral abdication is embedded in systems of power. Knowledge and warning exist, yet they are ignored, deferred, or commodified, producing a world in which suffering is visible but systematically unacknowledged. By invoking this ancient motif, the series critiques not only individual denial but also the political and technological mechanisms that enable it, offering a cynical meditation on complicity, control, and the ethics of corporate governance.

The three monkeys on the wall of Slightly’s Room.

In The White Lotus, the satirical lens exposes how privilege enforces selective perception as a form of social power. The wealthy guests and resort operators deliberately ignore the labour, inequality, and suffering that sustain their comfort; to “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” becomes a strategy of moral insulation. The three monkeys here serve as an ironic emblem of systemic blindness, illustrating how performative innocence masks structural exploitation. What began as a religious maxim for ethical self-discipline is transformed into a critique of entitlement and complicity, showing how social and economic hierarchies institutionalize ignorance while allowing moral corruption to proliferate under the guise of civility and leisure.

White Lotus Season Three

Comedy offers yet another transformation of the motif in Only Murders in the Building. The trio of amateur detectives should in principle be the antithesis of the monkeys; their task is to observe, listen, and speak. Yet their eccentricity and missteps mean that they often fail to see what is in plain sight, to hear crucial truths, or to articulate findings coherently. The irony lies in the fact that the very structure of the series invites viewers to identify with these failures, to enjoy complicity in the gaps between evidence and interpretation. The comic inflection therefore reveals how the motif can be mobilised not only as critique of blindness but also as a mirror of the audience’s own desire for mediated narratives of crime and justice.

Only Murders in the Building, Season Five.

Taken together, these examples demonstrate that the three monkeys remain a powerful semiotic device, capable of registering complicity, denial, and ethical abdication across cultures and media. In Japan they disciplined perception; in the West they became shorthand for deliberate blindness and hypocrisy; in contemporary streaming television they expose the mechanics of privilege, power, and selective attention, showing how systems of wealth, authority, and narrative control facilitate moral evasion. The migration of the motif illustrates how a Buddhist ethical maxim has been transformed into a critical instrument, tracing the enduring intersections of ignorance, responsibility, and spectacle in human society. Perhaps its most urgent lesson today is a return to its original purpose: guarding our senses against the constant onslaught of information, opinion, and moral distraction in the age of social media.

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More thoughts On the Calculation of Volume

James Joyce’s Ulysses transformed modern literature by distilling the immensity of lived experience into the span of a single day. June 16, 1904, becomes in Joyce’s hands a universe unto itself: a temporal container vast enough to hold myth, politics, history, desire, and the smallest gestures of the everyday. The novel’s radical gesture was not merely narrative compression but the demonstration that the totality of modernity, its anxieties, its fragmentations, its pleasures, could be staged within the ordinary hours of a single date. Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume undertakes a similarly ambitious project, though refracted through a contemporary sensibility that is both ecological and philosophical. In Balle’s work, November 18 is not only the date around which Tara Selter’s consciousness circles but also an emblem of how time itself can collapse, repeat, and be lived otherwise.

The significance of November 18, especially in its Danish context, underscores that this is no arbitrary choice. It suggests a historical memory and collective atmosphere imprinted onto the present. Yet in Balle’s rendering, the repetition of this day becomes less about history as event and more about the possibility of inhabiting duration differently. Where Joyce excavates the myths and archetypes lying beneath the surface of modern Dublin, Balle turns to the structures of temporality itself, showing how repetition might create not stasis but a heightened awareness of interconnection. November 18 becomes an aperture through which the density of life (ethical, social, ecological) can be perceived.

As I noted in my other article about these books, the temporal compression of November 18 finds a parallel in the sestertius of Antoninus Pius that Tara Selter contemplates. The coin, depicting Annona with the modius, grain, cornucopia, and ship’s prow, condenses the Roman system of provision into a single, graspable unit, where the measurement of grain enforces both nourishment and governance. The modius standardizes abundance, making it calculable, equitable, and socially legible. In reflecting on this coin, Tara apprehends the ethical and material stakes of measurement, just as the recurring day crystallizes human experience into a disciplined, perceptible unit of time. Measurement, whether of grain or hours, becomes an ethical practice, an engagement with responsibility and the limits inherent in sustaining life, much like the gathering, interpreting, and distributing of data and algorithms, where each unit carries moral weight, shaping outcomes with both insight and consequence.

The resonance with Walter Benjamin’s notion of history as constellations of fragments is strikingly evident in Balle’s work. Perhaps its because his work has been on my mind lately but Benjamin posits that history is not a continuous progression but a montage of moments, objects, and dates that can illuminate the totality of a system when apprehended with insight; each fragment, each artefact, carries the potential to reveal the hidden structures of power, social relation, and human intention. In Balle, both the sestertius and November 18 function precisely as such fragments. The coin, with its depiction of Annona and the modius, condenses the economic, administrative, and symbolic machinery of the Roman Empire into a single tangible unit; November 18 compresses the ethical, temporal, and ecological stakes of modern existence into a recurring day. Together, they operate as microcosms, each having its own aura, carrying within it a dense network of dependencies, obligations, and consequences, where the material, social, and natural orders intersect.

Yet Balle’s use of repetition diverges from Benjamin’s messianic impulse toward redemption. The recurrence of November 18 is not a promise of liberation or fulfilment but a careful interrogation of limits and attentiveness. The reader, following Tara Selter’s consciousness, is invited to inhabit a temporal loop that foregrounds responsibility, patience, and the ethical weight of observation. Each repetition becomes its own sphere or container: an opportunity to measure, to account, to confront scarcity and abundance alike, compelling a sustained focus that parallels the meticulous attention the Roman administration had to give to the distribution of grain. In this sense, Balle transforms Benjamin’s fragmentary flash into a disciplined experience: repetition illuminates the structures and stakes of life not by producing transcendence but by demanding care, precision, and a continuous negotiation with both the natural and social orders. The coin and the day together suggest that understanding the whole is inseparable from attention to the smallest units (whether of grain, of time, or of ethical action) and that these units carry their own weight as sites of reflection, responsibility, and moral reckoning.

In this respect, I was reminded of Byung-Chul Han’s reflections on the exhaustion produced by late-modern temporality and how this provides a counterpoint to Balle’s literary experiment. I find his work to be quite challenging but worthwhile. Han diagnoses contemporary life as dominated by relentless acceleration, the ceaseless expansion of tasks, information, and digital stimuli, and the consequent erosion of coherent narrative or ethical orientation; meaning is dispersed across a multitude of fleeting flows, leaving the individual fatigued, overstimulated, and disoriented. Balle, by contrast, deliberately inverts this condition. In On the Calculation of Volume, November 18 is not a day among many but a temporal loop, a durational container in which events repeat and attention must be sustained. The temporal compression forces a confrontation with the minutiae of existence and the limits of endurance, compelling both protagonist and reader to recover subtle distinctions, relational patterns, and ethical nuances that are ordinarily lost in the acceleration of ordinary life.

Where Han describes exhaustion as the product of constant motion and dispersal, Balle depicts a different form of fatigue: the strain of repetition, the psychological and ethical labour of inhabiting a single day over and over, attending to the consequences of each gesture, thought, and measurement. Yet this repetition is paradoxically generative rather than purely oppressive. By arresting time, Balle opens space for new modes of perception: the attentiveness to measurement, to the ethical distribution of resources, to the interplay of human action and ecological consequence becomes possible precisely because the temporal horizon is constrained. The fatigue here is not a loss of agency but a crucible for intensified awareness, a disciplined encounter with the ethical, temporal, and material stakes of ordinary life. The volume of it all. Through this temporal inversion, Balle stages a critique of modernity’s over-acceleration, showing that slowing, repeating, and attending can reveal dimensions of experience that rapidity conceals, and that the act of returning, calculating, and noticing can itself become a mode of ethical and perceptual renewal, much like meditation or the disciplined rhythm of pranayama cultivates awareness, patience, and a conscious engagement with the flow of breath and time.

The concept of vast, interconnected phenomena that defy easy comprehension resonates with Balle’s text in profound ways. These are occurrences whose scale and duration extend beyond the grasp of typical human understanding—events like climate change or global environmental shifts. In On the Calculation of Volume, November 18 serves as a miniature version of such an overwhelming phenomenon. Though it appears as a single day, its repetition gives it a temporal and ethical magnitude that challenges simple linear understanding. Each recurrence builds upon the previous one, adding layers of consequence and action, creating a sense of accumulating significance that mirrors how large-scale ecological changes unfold over time. Just as these crises stretch across generations and ecosystems, the repeated presence of November 18 compels the reader to engage with time and consequence in new, complex ways.

The hyperobject-like nature of November 18 compels Tara Selter (and, by extension, us, the readers) to inhabit temporality differently. One must attend simultaneously to the immediate, tangible realities of action and measurement and to the broader, often imperceptible consequences that unfold across the infinite loop of the day. This dual awareness mirrors the ecological imperative imposed by climate change: human agency operates within systems whose scale is difficult to grasp, yet it remains consequential. Tara’s recognition that she can “overuse” objects, whether by drinking too much coffee at her usual café until supplies run low or finding something missing from the grocery shelf, further emphasizes how small, individual actions reverberate through larger systems. In these moments, she becomes acutely aware of the fragility and limitations inherent in the cycles of consumption, a reflection of the broader, often invisible systems that govern availability and scarcity.

Balle dramatizes this tension in literary form, using repetition to make perceptible the otherwise invisible structures of responsibility, scarcity, and ethical consequence. In doing so, the novel cultivates a sensibility or an affect attuned to both temporal and ecological depth, encouraging readers to recognize that living responsibly entails not only action but careful, sustained attention to the interplay between the measurable and the immeasurable. In this light, Balle’s work offers a subtle critique of the prevailing data-driven narrative, suggesting that while the rise of algorithms and metrics promises clarity, it often oversimplifies the complexities of human experience. The novel’s focus on repetition and attention to the limits of measurement reminds us that not everything can be quantified, and that some truths, especially those that lie in the realms of ethics, ecology, and human relationships, elude the grasp of data.

Taken together, the coin, the day, and the novel itself function as material arguments about how humans orient themselves in worlds of overwhelming density. Joyce taught us that one day could be all days, that the everyday was vast enough to hold mythic significance. Balle takes up this challenge for our contemporary condition, showing how repetition, stasis, and recursion can equally serve as apertures onto the totality of our lives. November 18 becomes a new “Bloomsday,” not for Dublin but for the precarious world we now inhabit: a world where administration, ethics, ecology, and philosophy converge upon the smallest units of experience, compelling us to ask not only how to live through time but how to live in time differently.

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The Theology of Measurement: Annona, the Modius, and Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (Volumes I and II)

Sestertius (Coin) Portraying Emperor Antoninus Pius from the Art Institute of Chicago

I have just finished reading the first two English-translated volumes of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume. In these volumes, the protagonist, Tara Selter, reflects on a single object whose significance extends far beyond its material form: a sestertius of Antoninus Pius showing Annona enthroned, holding grain and a cornucopia, with a modius and a ship’s prow at her side. Though small and utilitarian, the coin, embodies a dense convergence of administration, ethics, and philosophy. It is not merely a medium of exchange; it functions as a material argument, condensing political, social, and theological reasoning into a tangible and accessible object. This object is a totem used by the author to explore the larger theme of how measurement structures human understanding and moral responsibility, showing that quantification (like that of the temporal unit of the “day” of November 18), is never purely technical but always entwined with ethical, political, and social dimensions.

Through her reflection on the coin, Tara confronts the central concern of the book: how measurement, here represented by the modius, structures both human understanding and moral responsibility. The image of Annona transforms a technical act into a reflection on governance, obligation, and the translation of natural abundance into regulated, distributable form. In the books, Tara becomes Annona. The coin demonstrates that quantification is never purely instrumental; it is simultaneously practical, ethical, and theological. By situating Tara’s encounter within the intellectual and administrative context of imperial Rome, Balle foregrounds a broader meditation on the nature of measurement, its consequences, and its moral significance.

The protagonist encounters not merely an ancient coin but a compressed meditation on the very nature of measure. The sestertius of Antoninus Pius depicting Annona, holding grain and cornucopia, with the modius and a ship’s prow beside her, is never treated as incidental ornament. It functions as a text in its own right, a statement in bronze that carries the weight of theology, administration, and mathematics all at once.

The choice of a sestertius is deliberate. This denomination offered a broad metal disc suitable for allegorical images and political messaging; it was more than a medium of exchange, it was a medium of thought. The Annona type of Antoninus Pius, struck in the 150s, is precisely the kind of object that the protagonist seizes upon: an artefact whose apparent banality conceals a dense weave of symbolism, administrative practice, and philosophical resonance. The coin passes hand to hand, but it also passes idea to idea, translating the act of provision into a language of images.

On its surface, the sestertius stages a double drama. The obverse presents the emperor’s portrait, a carefully chiselled symbol of enduring authority and serenity untouched by war. The reverse depicts Annona, the embodiment of Rome’s sustenance, ensuring that grain reaches the populace. The protagonist recognises that this duality conveys a compact theology of rule in which sovereign power and the material well-being of the people are inseparable; governance is not merely the issuing of decrees but the assurance that bread will reach citizens. Holding the coin is to grasp a microcosm of the empire’s bargain, where loyalty and obedience are repaid with sustenance and order.

This reflection opens into the larger meditation of the narrative. If Annona represents provisioning and the modius is her attribute, then measurement emerges as the hinge of both empire and ecology. The protagonist sees that imperial authority is exercised not only through images, ships, and laws but above all through measure; translating abundance into equitable portions parallels her own understanding that the sustainability of her world depends upon attention to limits and careful accounting of resources. The coin crystallizes a deeper truth: authority, provision, and action, whether imperial or personal, are inseparably bound to measurement and consequence.

The modius occupies a complex space at the intersection of the practical and the symbolic. In everyday Roman life, it was a standardized container for grain, essential to ensuring that the cura annonae, the administration of the city’s food supply, functioned effectively. The emperor was responsible for guaranteeing that each measure distributed to the populace was neither deficient nor excessive, yet on the sestertius, the modius assumes significance beyond the utilitarian; it signifies the translation of nature’s unbounded fertility into a quantity that is comprehensible and governable by human standards. The coin communicates that grain, harvested across distant provinces and transported across the Mediterranean, is made intelligible, distributable, and ultimately just through precise measurement.

Measurement carries a moral and symbolic weight. By resting her hand upon the modius, Annona conveys that volume is not a simple numerical abstraction; abundance must be managed, scarcity moderated, and the gifts of the earth integrated into the social order. The bronze of the coin makes this promise tangible and enduring, circulating among citizens as a reminder that imperial authority extends not only to law and territory but also to the sustenance of life itself. In this way, the act of measuring, ordinarily performed in granaries, is elevated on the coin to a gesture that combines technical exactitude with moral and quasi-theological significance; it prepares the protagonist to reflect on measurement as an act of justice and obligation.

The protagonist comes to understand that the act of measuring is central to the ethical and conceptual framework of the text. The calculation of volume is inseparable from questions of justice and responsibility; every measure carries consequences for the distribution of resources. The modius on the Antoninus Pius sestertius becomes a concrete representation of this principle, demonstrating that the management of abundance requires precision and accountability. The protagonist recognises that excesses of nature can be translated into ordered, comprehensible, and equitable forms only through careful calculation.

She observes that measurement enacts a moral and social contract; to quantify is to mediate between potential chaos and structured provision, between natural plenitude and human need. The modius functions as both a mathematical device and a symbol of responsibility, revealing that human comprehension and moral stewardship are inseparable, and that the act of measurement becomes a disciplined, quasi-theological exercise through which the natural and social orders are harmonized.

Annona is not merely a figure on a coin; she serves as a conceptual lens through which the protagonist understands the relationship between nature, measurement, and human obligation. Unlike Ceres, who embodies growth and fertility, Annona translates the boundless potential of the harvest into a regulated, measurable form that sustains society. Her posture, the placement of the modius, and the presence of the cornucopia and ship’s prow signify governance, order, and provision rather than mere abundance. She mediates between the natural world and human society, demonstrating that volume, when measured, becomes both a material and ethical instrument.

The protagonist notes that mediation operates across scales; from individual granaries to the imperial logistics network, Annona embodies the principle that measurement structures relations between humans and nature. The sestertius communicates that abundance must be mediated through calculation, that provision requires oversight, and that human responsibility is embedded in the act of measurement. Annona thus emerges as a symbol of the theological and moral dimensions of measurement; to quantify is to act within a framework of obligation and care, to convert natural plenitude into ethical order, and to recognise that human intervention is necessary to transform potential into practical sustenance.

Her encounter with the Annona sestertius crystallises the central argument: measurement is never purely technical but always imbued with ethical and quasi-theological significance. Volume is both a mathematical and moral category; it governs physical substances and social relations alike. The modius becomes a point of reflection, showing that quantifying is inseparable from human responsibility and oversight.

Through this encounter, she interprets measurement as a disciplined engagement with the world. To set grain into a modius is to convert potential into ordered provision; to calculate volume is to exercise judgment that mediates between abundance and scarcity. The sestertius demonstrates that the logic of measure extends beyond granaries into broader moral and civic understanding, where precision, accountability, and stewardship are intertwined. It embodies the convergence of human comprehension, ethical responsibility, and governance, making abstract principles tangible and situating the protagonist within a system where mathematics, obligation, and moral reflection are inseparable. Tara’s choice and agency are rife with meaning.

The Annona sestertius, seen through Balle’s lens, encapsulates the text’s exploration of how measurement structures both human understanding and moral responsibility. Calculation is never neutral or purely technical; it is a deliberate act through which abundance is rendered comprehensible, ordered, and ethically distributed. The coin, combining imperial portraiture with symbolic imagery, reveals the intersection of human governance, natural plenitude, and moral obligation. Volume functions as a medium in which mathematics, ethics, and theology converge. Measurement becomes a mode of care; an affect: it is simultaneously practical, moral, and a form of stewardship that binds the natural and social orders. The protagonist’s reflection affirms the central thesis: the theology of measurement, articulated through the modius and Annona, demonstrates that human calculation is a conduit for order, justice, and the harmonization of nature and society.

Further reading: These two books are both valuable resources for understanding how Roman imagery communicates political, ethical, and symbolic meanings, making them especially useful for the analysis of the Annona sestertius in this essay and the book. 
- Paul Zanker – The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus
- Richard Brilliant – Visual Narratives: Storytelling in Roman Art