CSP 23 Mess: A Conceptual History

Once upon a time, mess was something people ate. (At a particularly hungry juncture in the book of Genesis, for instance, an elder son named Esau sells his birthright to his brother Jacob for a “mess of pottage.”) However, over the course of the nineteenth century, the word mess gradually extended the range of its meanings to include more abstract states of mixture; it enriched, piecemeal, its spiritual resonances and cultural applications. Today our appraisals of messy situations, messy feelings, and messy political processes owe their cogency to the nineteenth century’s formalization of this fine term for formlessness. This seminar tells the story of the concept’s evolution by sampling eight distinct types or episodes of mess: the culinary kind, of course, as well as the semantic effect called ambiguity, the affective fields of impertinence and righteous outrage, architectural motifs of sprawl and waste, the info-fuzz termed white noise, and the strange medleys of free jazz. Course texts include a mock-epic by Joel Barlow titled “The Hasty-Pudding” (1796), Elizabeth Stoddard’s female bildungsroman The Morgesons (1862), Pauline Hopkins’s racial-uplift melodrama Contending Forces (1900), the Watts Towers in South Los Angeles, and Kendrick Lamar’s multi-vocal masterpiece, To Pimp a Butterfly (2015).