Friday, September 30, 2011

Speculatives, OOOs, shibboleths

by J J Cohen

Eileen has been good enough to start posting the Speculative Medievalism conference's sound files. Kellie Robertson and Drew Daniel are first. Listen to them, and you will see that even if you have no idea what the phrases "speculative realism" and "object oriented ontology" are supposed to mean, you will easily understand what is at stake in both. Kellie's talk was a model of clarity and accessibility, as was Drew's provocative response.

My training as a medievalist occurred within a rather traditional doctoral program. I realized quickly that much of the animus against Foucault, Cixous, Lacan -- to name a few button-pushers of the time -- arose not so much from disagreement with their arguments as anger or despair at being made to feel ignorant by someone's knowing invocation of biopower, objet petit a or écriture féminine. Even if you knew French, it was another language. Sometimes these citations could make it seem like the speaker belonged to an exclusive club, and what auditor wants to hear it announced that their membership credentials are not up to snuff? So after composing quite a philological dissertation in which all the theory work happened silently, I determined that I could best accomplish the kind of scholarship I wanted to undertake by always explaining terms, a no shibboleth rule. I'd never shy away from invoking Deleuze's notion of the assemblage, but at its first use explain what the French word agencement means, and what Deleuze hoped to express through the noun's deployment. It's a principle of readerly generosity, really: never make your audience feel dumb, because most of the time they will take it out on you.

I don't always live up to my own principles, I know. I meant Of Giants to be readable by those with no background in Lacan and Zizek; it can act as a short introduction to both, I think/hope/pray. Medieval Identity Machines is Deleuzian, but not in a clubby way (I think/hope/pray). Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity should be readable by those without a background in postcolonial studies or critical race theory. And so on. Well, that is the ideal: I'm not saying I always succeed.

So I realize that my Speculative Medievalisms piece, "Sublunary," doesn't quite do that. The talk was offered to a gathering of specialists, and I had only 20 minutes. The graft that it performs didn't allow for much background into speculative realism or twelfth century Latin historiography, so the majority of readers of that piece are likely missing some essential background. "In the Middle" is becoming known for some of the work we've collectively been doing around object oriented ontology and its kindred strains of philosophy, but I wouldn't want readers to feel like this is some kind of new Kabbalah. Luckily, Kris Coffield (of Fractured Politics) has done us all a huge favor, composing a lucid history of and entryway into OOO for Wikipedia. Check it out.

I also want to share here a succinct overview I composed of Actor Network Theory, OOO and vibrant materialism for my Melbourne talk on "Feeling Stone" (though I ultimately did not include it). I posted these paragraphs quite some time back at Google+, but in the hope that they shed some little light on terminology and domesticate some jargon, I offer them here as well. You'll see that the post relates each critical approach to how it offers an understanding of stone as a lively substance.

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Associated with the French sociologist of science Bruno Latour, Actor Network Theory (ANT) offers a mode of understanding nonhuman agency that insists that there is no difference between nature and culture (or, more radically, that nature and society are not pre-existing and self-evident realities; they possess no explanatory power; there is no human/world duality). According to Actor Network Theory, a stone enters into multifold relations with other entities, creating through these connections hybrid and quasi objects that can be composites of human and nonhuman elements, all of which have the potential to assert agency. A smooth rock discovered on the beach bears a history of inestimable subterranean forces, primordial volcanoes, the ceaseless rhythm of waves, fleeting use as a gull’s hammer, trigger to the human impulse to grasp objects of iridescent durability and remarkable symmetry. Objects are best understood in action,because that is where their agency emerges. A stone is nothing more than the alliances it can support, defeat, foster or resist. Graham Harman says it best in his account of Latour’s work:
"there are only actants, forever lost in friendships and duels. Any attempt to see actants as the reducible puppets of deeper structures is doomed to fail. The balance of force makes some actants stronger than others, but miniature trickster objects turn the tide without warning: a pebble can destroy an empire if the emperor chokes at dinner. (Prince of Networks 21)
ANT is a movement-based,detail-oriented analytical mode that proceeds slowly, at a geological pace,tracing the tangle of threads that form the networks connecting things to each other. Within such a network even matter that should be inert comes to life,since it has the power to enable or resist, to “turn the tide without warning.”

If ANT has a downside, it is a tendency to think of objects as being whollya bsorbed into the networks in which they participate. They give themselves over completely, hold nothing back. The philosopher Graham Harman argues that no two objects can really touch each other (all touch is mediated), and that objects always withhold a part of themselves from every relation (we can never know an object in its entirety). This approach is often called speculative realism, and in Harman’s case more specifically Object Oriented Ontology (OOO). Its strength is that it grants the object a dignity by preserving its unbreachable mystery. Harman also insists upon the particularity of objects: stone enters into numerous relations as a stone, a singular entity rather than a plural and generic substance. OOO grants stone autonomy, as well as a kind of sacredness: the lithic will always withdraw from full scrutiny, will always hold in its depths an inexhaustible potency.

A third and intimately related approach to matter is Jane Bennett’s notion of vibrant materialism, AKA Thing Power. In Bennett’s account a rock is not recalcitrant, for to label it thus is only to narrate the world from a human point of view, in which stones exist only for us. All materiality is inherently lively: it exerts agency, regardless of human alliance or intention. This omnipresent vitality – “obscured by our conceptual habit of dividing the worldinto inorganic matter and organic life” -- invites us to a nonanthropocentric ecology, one in which the activity of stone not only matters, but shimmers. With that luminescent adjective I mean to stress the aesthetic component ofvibrant materialism. Even more than Latour and Harman (both of whom possess apoet’s ardor for the beautiful), Bennett describes a world enchanted by the vivacity of the nonhuman. If we encounter the world “as a swarm of vibrant materials entering and leaving agentic assemblages,” then “what was adamantine becomes intensity” (107), and no object remains mute. Or lifeless: “A life thus names a restless activeness, a destructive-creative force-presence that does not coincide fully with any specific body” (54). A dance of bodies and objects.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Riding the Lynx-Eyed Aristotle with Kellie Robertson, Graham Harman, and Drew Daniel

Figure 1. Kellie Robertson's mashup of Graham Harman-as-Phyllis "riding" Aristotle

by EILEEN JOY

Joining this company, with paws extended, and pupils dilated wide, Ockham's lynx-eyed Aristotle stands poised to forage for what lies hidden within the dark world of physical nature that Graham Harman's project has plumbed so fiercely.

--Drew Daniel, Response to Kellie Robertson @Speculative Medievalisms 2

We are now about two weeks away from Speculative Medievalisms 2: A Laboratory-Atelier, held at The Graduate Center, CUNY on September 16th, and I am slowly but surely going through and cleaning up all of the audiofiles so that I can make them available to all those who want to hear them. What I offer here first is the audiofile for Kellie Robertson's talk, "Abusing Aristotle: From Phyllis to Graham Harman," where she asked us to consider all of the ways in which Aristotelian physics have been taken up in different periods (medieval to modern) in "partisan" and often de-historicizing modes (which also point to Aristotle's historical "capaciousness"), and also Drew Daniel's response, which proposed (following William of Ockham) a "nocturnal, feline," and "lynx-eyed Aristotle" and the "work of weirding" as an important component of of collaborative work in Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology across the medieval/modern divide. Those of you who were there will remember this as a lively and spirited set of remarks and exchange between Kellie and Drew, and for everyone else, you can listen now:


Kellie Robertson, "Abusing Aristotle, from Phyllis to Graham Harman" [with Response from Drew Daniel]

If you're interested in downloading an mp3 or other version of the audiofile for listening on iTunes or other audio platforms and your own devices, go HERE. And don't forget, too, that punctum books will be publishing the proceedings of the event in Winter/Spring 2012:

Speculative Medievalisms 2: A Laboratory-Atelier, ed. The Petropunk Collective

Figure 2. Kellie Robertson at Speculative Medievalisms 2, Sep. 2011 (The Graduate Center, CUNY)

Monday, September 26, 2011

Speculative Medievalisms: The Book

by EILEEN JOY

Speculative Medievalisms, like some weird friar-alchemist in an inexistent romance, plays the erotic go-between for these text-centered and text-eccentric intellectual domains by trying to transmute the space between past and present modes of speculation from shared blindness to love at first sight. Possibly succeeding, the volume brings together the work of a motley crew of philosophers and medievalists into prismatic relation.

Now that we have concluded our second Speculative Medievalisms: A Laboratory-Atelier event this past week at The Graduate Center, CUNY (our follow-up to the first event held at King's College London last January), we are pleased to announce that punctum books will be publishing the combined proceedings of both events (to include the responses and even some responses to the responses!), and you can see the full Table of Contents here:

Speculative Medievalisms: A Laboratory-Atelier

ALSO: Stay tuned, as I will soon be posting the audiofiles from the NYC event as well!

And don't forget to follow punctum books on Facebook and Twitter!


Friday, September 23, 2011

Oliphaunt Books and punctum announce Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects

by J J Cohen

Through a partnership with punctum books, GW MEMSI will be publishing an impress known as (sound the horn!) Oliphaunt Books. The first title in this series is Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects. Perhaps you will recognize it from the conference of the same name. Yet these are full essays, not conference proceedings -- and, having edited most of them already, I must say that they are wonderful. The volume's ravishing cover was designed by Nicola Masciandaro.

The table of contents appears below. The book itself will be published as a freely downloadable PDF and a print on demand volume early in 2012. Watch this space, and all hail punctum books.

PS You can friend Oliphaunt and/or MEMSI on Facebook if you want to be notified when the book is ready, as well as other relevant news. Neither page sends out many posts; you won't be spammed.

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The GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute is happy to announce the first volume in its Oliphaunt Books series. We hope to have this volume available very early in 2012.

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects (ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen) examines what happens when we cease to assume that only humans exert agency. Through a careful examination of medieval, early modern and contemporary lifeworlds, these essays collectively argue against ecological anthropocentricity. Sheep, wolves, camels, flowers, cotton, chairs, magnets, landscapes, refuse and gems are more than mere objects. They act; they withdraw; they make demands; they connect into lively networks that might foster a new humanism, or that might proceed with indifference towards human affairs. Through what ethics do we respond to these activities and forces? To what futures do these creatures and objects invite us, especially when they appear within the texts and cultures of the "distant" past?

Table of Contents
  • Jeffrey J. Cohen (George Washington University): Introduction, "All Things"
  • Karl Steel (Brooklyn College): “With the World, or Bound to Face the Sky: The Postures of the Wolf Child of Hesse”
  • Sharon Kinoshita (University of California, Santa Cruz): “Animals and the Medieval Culture of Empire”
  • Kellie Robertson (University of Wisconsin-Madison): “Exemplary Rocks”
  • Valerie Allen (John Jay College of Criminal Justice): “Mineral Virtue”
  • Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University): “Powers of the Hoard: Notes on Material Agency"
  • Peggy McCracken (University of Michigan): “The Human and the Floral”
  • Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville): “You Are Here: A Manifesto
  • Julian Yates (University of Delaware): “Sheep Tracks”
  • Julia Reinhard Lupton (University of California, Irvine): “The Renaissance Res Publica of Furniture”
Response essays:
  • Lowell Duckert, "Speaking Stones, John Muir, and a Slower (Non)humanities"
  • Jonathan Gil Harris, "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Twenty Questions"
  • Nedda Mehdizadeh, "Ruinous Monument': Transporting Objects in Herbert's Persepolis"

Thursday, September 22, 2011

The palm at the beginning of fellowship leave

by J J Cohen

The title to this post is an obscure Wallace Stevens reference. Yesterday I was invoking Luigi Pirandello to explain the changes to Facebook, which tend towards the meta. What's wrong with me? I am guessing that without a classroom in which to pontificate, I'm getting all professorial in other parts of my life.


I've been on fellowship leave since July. How much work have I accomplished for that book I'm writing? Not much. Well, there was that talk in Melbourne, which yielded a draft of my introduction (nice link to audio here). But then I was waylaid by the Speculative Medievalisms conference, as well as the convergence of recommendation requests that September always yields: job letters for grad students on the market, project endorsements, and graduate school recs. I'm also directing MEMSI while on leave, probably a mistake. I'm presenting some talks in the spring semester that have nothing to do with stone (more likely, both will treat zombies: one on their eating habits, one on their aesthetic sense), and have had to give those some thought. Eileen and I have been hard at work at a proposal for a collaborative grant.


There have been some great moments. Australia was the best trip my family has taken together. NYC had magical moments, as when we were walking to Eileen's lecture at an architectural bookstore and suddenly the tallest buildings glowed orange: the setting sun penetrated the day's cloud cover (picture here). But where are the hammocks, palm trees and drinks in frosted glasses that are supposed to come with a year of leave? I don't have an answer to that, yet, but I have made a start in that festive direction. I've placed a small palm tree on my desk. When I look at its unnatural but nonetheless attractive fronds, the little thing reminds me that I do have a freedom from service and teaching obligations that is precious. More importantly, when my colleagues look at the palm tree they are reminded that I am on leave and they are not.


Oh, and I do have a new skill that not being in the classroom has allowed me to hone. I am making a hobby of shaping pieces of dried fruit into likenesses of friends and family. As you can see, my daughter loves this new enthusiasm of mine.


Today's mission is to decide if hanging a hammock in my office will be too much, or not quite enough.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

"Refuse the assumption of immutability": Will Stockton, Playing Dirty

by J J Cohen

I had so many good intentions about my summer reading. I accomplished a fairly vast amount, and thought by the end of August that I'd be composing a massive blog post to ruminate over rocks, fire, fantasies of Aborginal culture, and ecotheory (because that is what I tend to read at the beach). But ... it didn't quite happen.

Nonetheless I do want to put up a brief post about one of my favorite books from those months, Will Stockton's Playing Dirty: Sexuality and Waste in Early Modern Comedy. Before I read this work I'd been thinking a great deal about psychoanalytic criticism, and why it had lost some of its appeal for me. Partly this rumination had to do with an essay I was writing that returned me to Lee Edelman's No Future (a book that ended up arguing has much to say about thinking the inhuman, especially in its concluding chapter). Partly, too, the "surface versus symptom" panel sponsored by Exemplaria -- and the theme of a February conference to be held by the journal -- had me considering the psychoanalytical approach's potential but also its limits.

Stockton's "analytically promiscuous" (xx) book helped renew my belief that a queer psychoanalytic praxis doesn't have to end in disembodied (anti)sociality, negativity and predictability. Smart, well written, and wide-ranging, the book is also (dare I say it?) fun. Its queer bodies "bear the burden of ahistoricity and excrementality within straight or linear narratives of history and civilizing process" -- and therefore includes women, fat people, aristocrats, Jews, and homosexuals. It's quite a mix. And quite a dirty book. That's not an asterisk on the cover.

The chapter on The Unfortunate Traveller and anti-semitism is a tour de force, while that on "Shakespeare's Ass" presents a Falstaff I've never seen before, as well as some puns that will make you groan. My favorite passage comes at the end, in a chapter on "The Pardoner's Dirty Breeches." Stockton begins with the Canterbury Tales but ends up with a much larger, more inspirational claim:
These playful exchanges repeatedly place The Canterbury Tales at the contested foreground of early modernity. They also demonstrate that the Symbolic is mutable and pluralistic, always open to contests of signification and translation that recalibrate reality itself. Though quite queer, the Pardoner acts as if his cynical confession does not generate the contest that it does, as if the ideologies that shape reality itself were not amenable to change. Especially in our present political climate, where much homophobic rhetoric is so absurd as to raise the question of belief, it is key to not becoming similarly cynical that we who identify as queer refuse the assumption of immutability, and that we do not relinquish the ability to speak -- and why not kynically? -- truth to power. (118)
As you can see, there is much in this book for medievalists and early modernists, as well as for anyone interested in psychoanalytic approaches to literature and queer theory. It's also a great book to carry around so that you can explain the cover to the unsuspecting. I've never grossed out and fascinated my 14 year old son so thoroughly.

Monday, September 19, 2011

Sublunary

by J J Cohen

Speculative Medievalisms concluded, for some of us, with magnificent streaks of sun fingering across the Manhattan skyline. The next evening Karl's book party ended, for some of us, with a 4 AM subway ride back to the city. And now I'm in my office, answering emails and scheduling MEMSI events as if this irruption of the Otherworld had never taken place. Diminution into ordinariness and the onset of routine mix melancholy with relief.

I introduced my talk at Speculative Medievalisms as a textual laboratory, an experimental mixing of worlds that do not often touch through modern and medieval texts (a philosophical essay, a work of historiography, a Breton lay) that are about how unlike worlds touch and what happens in the aftermath of that encounter. My aim was to take Object Oriented Ontology seriously: not as a critical mode to be applied, but as an articulation of concept/tools that might reconfigure how we think about the workings of some narratives ... as well as how these narratives in their workings potentially transform these concepts when they enter their worlds. It's part of an ongoing project that may become a book, provided I someday actually get Stories of Stone written.

The talk appears below. During the Q&A, Dan Remein perceptively asked if there wasn't more going on with its angels than what OOO could account for. I answered that yes, doubly: they are partly inspired by the work of Michel Serres, who is not exactly a speculative realist (though much of what he has composed is in sympathy with SR projects). More importantly, though, these erratic and essential intermediaries carry with them a quiet meditation on how no matter how exhaustively we attempt to articulate our debts, no matter how much we insist that we have been inspired by others and that nothing we do is solitary and that any good scholarly project is a communal work, those essential to its coming to being always fade. The project breathes, and its coming into life becomes a series of enigmatic traces. That vanishing is an injustice, but I have not found a more just mode of doing work.

The passages I treat from Geoffrey of Monmouth on Merlin may be found in on the web here (Book 6 chapter 17-18; Book 8 chapter 1-19; this is obviously not the translation I use), and Sir Orfeo is available as an e-text in its entirety.


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            “Between the moon and the earth there live spirits whom we call incubus-demons.”
             So declares Maugantius, summoned before the king to explain how a boy named Merlin could have been born without a father. Inter lunam et terram, between a celestial globe in ceaseless circulation and the dull earth: in this intermedial space dwell creatures at once human and angelic. Incubus-demons can assume mortal forms and descend to visit earthly women. “Many people have been born this way,” Maugantius asserts. Among the progeny of such intercourse is Merlin, destined to become our iconic wizard. This genesis narrative marks Merlin’s advent into the literary tradition. The story yields no evidence of his future as a bespectacled and senescent figure, cloaked in robes and wielding a wand. Dumbledore is a diminished and modern avatar. The primordial Merlin is much more difficult to emplace. Between moon and earth is a gap that opens because the two realms cannot touch. Merlin arrives from a kind of heavenly lacuna, a suspended and disjunctive space created because two bodies which are two worlds endlessly withdraw from each other. Aerial and moonlit, this middle realm is knowable only at second hand. Maugantius makes clear that his knowledge of what dwells between lunar possibility and the cold earth’s heft arrives vicariously, through books of history and philosophy.
            Speaking of philosophy books and strange intermediacy, Graham Harman has argued that “Objects hide from one another endlessly, and inflict their mutual blows [“physical relations”] only through some vicar or intermediary” (“On Vicarious Causation” 189-90). The Merlin episode suggests a medieval version of this statement that is just as true: “Worlds hide from one another endlessly, and enjoy their mutual embraces [“physical relations”] only through some vicar or intermediary.” Merlin’s birth is the weird result/enabler of an asymmetrical, humanly inassimilable relation. Merlin’s mother is a king’s daughter and a cloistered nun who nightly finds a handsome man in the solitude of her cell. The incubus-demon who fathers Merlin is of unknown biography and intentions. He sometimes touches the ordinary world, but just as often withdraws from terrestrial connection. His desires cannot be reduced to the merely sexual. He wants at times to kiss and hold the nun, at times to converse invisibly on unstated subjects. Merlin arrives, that is, through an abstruse relationship that unites for a while two beings from oblique realms. The angel-demon and the solitary princess never fully touch, or do so askew, in a conjoining that is textually enabled only backwards, through the strange progeny who makes possible and embodies their “shared common space” (Graham Harman’s term for the third object within which two others meet, 190) or “thalamus” (Geoffrey of Monmouth’s word for the nun’s cell, a Greek noun that also means “chamber” “bedroom” “bridal bed” and, metonymically, “marriage”: that is, the space of an unequal, complicated, potentially disastrous, possibly transformative caress). The relation between the nun and the incubus engenders a creature who if not wholly unprecedented is nonetheless unpredetermined. Though Maugentius can invoke a history for such an arrival, he cannot account for Merlin’s erratic life to come.
            The text that I am speaking about in this language that weds Object Oriented Ontology to Latin historiography is Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1136). Geoffrey’s history is most widely known for having bequeathed to the future the King Arthur of enduring legend. Without Geoffrey this provincial British warlord would be an obscure medieval footnote rather than the progenitor of a still vibrant world. At his first appearance in Geoffrey’s text Merlin is a precocious and quarrelsome young man. As the story unfolds he will reveal surprising abilities, demonstrating that seemingly inert rocks may contain within them bellicose dragons; foretelling grim futures that include incineration, poison, and flowing blood; enabling through his transformative potions an adultery-minded Uther Pendragon to engender Arthur. Merlin alters completely the timbre of the text in which he appears. The History of the Kings of Britain has until the moment of his entrance offered a chronicle of the island’s early days. Its sedate Latin prose describes how Britain was founded and who ruled its civil war loving kingdoms. Wonders and supernatural events before his advent are few. A tribe of giants to kill, a sudden rain of blood, a sea monster and some ravenous wolves are scant exceptions to a martial account of settlement, inheritance, dissent, and political intrigue. Merlin appears just after the first mention of magic in the narrative, in the form of incompetent magi whom the perfidious King Vortigern summons to assist him in finding a way to escape the persecutions of the Saxons. Merlin is not himself a magician; magi are figures of failure in the story. For Geoffrey of Monmouth Merlin is a prophet, a poet, a schemer, an architect and an author, a figure of singular ingenuity rather than of saintly or demonic inspiration. He cannot be domesticated into mere category.
            After his unexpected advent the rules for how the story may unfold change. Earlier in the History when an earthbound king dreamt of traveling spaces of cloud and air, his fate was to plummet with his manufactured wings to a shattering death (Bladud, who practices “nigromantium” rather than magic, 30). That stretch between earth and moon had not yet opened for narrative sojourn. Merlin, however, born of the meeting of nocturnal radiance with mundane constrictedness, conveys the wheel of Stonehenge across the sea “with incredible ease.” This transmarinal relocation is not accomplished through supernatural agency. There is nothing divine or occult about the movement. Merlin works with the earth’s givenness, its alliance-seeking materiality. The monoliths are swiftly transported via his operationibus machinandis (“feats of engineering” 128) and machinationes (“machinery,” “engines,” “contrivances”). Merlin is an engineer, a vicar of causation who knows that objects launch into motion only through the intermediary agency of other objects. The stones are disassembled, loaded onto ships and carried to their current home for repurposing as a British monument, thus proving the power of ingenuity (ingenium, the Latin word that gives us “engineer”). Significantly, we are never told of what Merlin’s machinationes consist. A materialist but not a reductionist, Merlin knows well that “inscrutable depths” intractably hold the objectal world.
            Merlin is likewise a vicar or engineer of diegesis. He moves the narrative, but cannot be absorbed back into it. He remains an essential mystery, a figure who changes everything and at a certain point simply vanishes, but even after his quiet disappearance his presence permeates what follows. Though he never meets Arthur, that king’s ambiguous destiny on Avalon is inconceivable without Merlin’s having set into motion the path of his ambivalent life. The text that Merlin creates is eccentric to what precedes: what sought to be history opens into a possibility-laden new genre, a mode to be christened in the future romance.
            Merlin embodies the strange prospects offered by that space inter lunam et terram, between earth's banal givenness and the moon's unreachable allure. This suspended geography might be called sublunary, but by that term I do not mean mundane. The sublunary designates a region neither terrestrial nor empyrean: unregulated by tedious rules about proper history, untouched by diurnal limitations, immune to the stasis that holds heaven. Sublunary means unpredestined by humans and gods, an intermedial sweep where the fixities of doctrine, custom and theology do not necessarily obtain. The wandering incubus who traces this space, celestial but not heavenly, a lover of earthly things but not bound to the small spaces of earth's human dwellers, imbues in his progeny the ability to escape constricted textual spaces as well.
            “Between the moon and the earth there live spirits whom we call incubus-demons.” The pithy declaration is sudden, breathtaking. It opens an unforeseen space and populates it with creatures who are both familiar and utterly strange. The advent of the sublunary floods the text with alien luminescence, and for me calls to mind another strange phrase about lunar glow. In his essay “On Vicarious Causation,” Graham Harman describes the solitude of reticent objects, describing how these cloisters are sometimes breached by oblique, transformative, but carefully mediated relations. He writes that “While its strangeness may lead to puzzlement more than resistance, vicarious causation is not some autistic moonbeam entering the window of an asylum” (187). The metaphor does its Merlin-like work, transforming a philosophy that might have contemplated the “dull realism of mindless atoms and billiard balls” into “an archipelago of oracles or bombs that explode from concealment ... [the] sacred fruit of writers, thinkers, politicians, travellers, lovers, and inventors” (212). Harman employs this lunar and lunatic metaphor to convey (and reject) meager, inviolable solitariness. We can see already from Geoffrey of Monmouth, though, that radiance from the sublunary sphere cannot be immured in an asylum or convent. It engenders strange and rules-changing progeny by placing into communication seemingly isolated bodies or objects. An angel-demon enters the window of a nun’s cell and enables the advent of Merlin, he who can discern in dead stone the possibilities of dormant dragons and of lithic wheels ready for conveyance across vast waters. No moonbeam is in the end solipsistic, even if some objects in this world attempt withdrawal into utter isolation. Lunar pull is incessant, drawing artists and philosophers to speculative modes, to dreaming of incongruent but at times imbricated worlds where even magic is not weird enough.
            Geoffrey of Monmouth is not the only medieval writer to have populated sublunary expanses so vibrantly. Incubus-demons in their inscrutable flights share interlunar space with voyagers who traverse the clouds in ships. Gervase of Tilbury describes a congregation who, upon leaving church, witness an anchor lowered from the clouds (Otia imperialia, c. 1214). A mariner shimmies down its rope, hand over hand. He is seized by the onlookers and drowns in the moistness of terrestrial air. Between heaven and earth sail aerial vessels of unknown design, dwell “beings neither angelic, human, nor animal” (as Robert Bartlett entitles a wonderfully miscellaneous section of England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings). This sublunary space might also open underwater, as in Ralph of Coggeshall’s report of merman caught in the nets of an English fishing boat (Bartlett 688-89), or the belligerent fish-knights of the Roman de Perceforest. Always radiating at a slanted angle to lived human reality, the intermedial realms also frequently erupts from underground. In the Breton lays that are among the literary progeny of Geoffrey’s History, the space is most often called Fairy.
            The Breton lays are short, romance themed narratives, often with Arthurian settings. Sir Orfeo, a good example of such a work, describes the lays as full of marvels (“ferli thing”), war, woe, joy, trickery, adventures, enjoyment, fairies, and love (4-12). The Breton lays are an English genre set within a "magical" Welsh or Breton past. Composed in French and English, the stories are replete with radiant objects, magic, strange beings, monsters, and music. Their worlds open repeatedly into unexpected geographies, into spaces similar to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s sublunary expanse: across the roiling sea traversed by the lovers’ ship in Marie de France’s Guigemar, for example. Or within the rock that the author of Sir Orfeo envisions as the entrance to the Fairy Realm, a seemingly underground kingdom where all normal rules for objects, agency, telos and time are suspended. A hunt proceeds without prey, bodies are caught in eternal disaggregation, captivity is a pleasant slumber, being endures without becoming. The Breton lays are a medieval version of speculative fiction, a space to think the possible without recourse to theology, to explore a terrain rich in mysterious objects without predetermined answers or even clear objective.
            Sir Orfeo is a queer story, grafting the classical myth of Orpheus and his lost Eurydice to elements of English history and romance. Its setting is Thrace, but the city has been relocated from ancient Greece to not-so-long-ago Winchester. The queen does not die, but is abducted into Fairy by its enigmatic king. His domain is accessed in two ways: at a grafted (“ympe”) tree under which Queen Heurodis falls asleep, and “in at a roche.” That Fairy should be a kind of omnipresent underworld resonates uncannily with Graham Harman’s description of the objectal world. He writes that we are "moles tunneling through wind, water and ideas no less than through speech-acts, wonder and dirt” ("Vicarious Causation" 210). A subterranean milieu, "numberless underground cavities," but a place of neither finitude nor negativity. And sparks from that distant satellite do penetrate from time to time, perpetually exploding and renewing a wide sublunary world, “an archipelago of oracles or bombs” (212).
            The Fay world obliquely and multiply touches our own. After ten years of wandering, Orfeo discovers his stolen wife in a kind of non-juridical Hades, where bodies are forever arrested in their self-undoing: headless, butchered, burnt, bound, slumbering in a fragmented nondeath, caught in the moment at which they have been taken (y-nome) by the Fairies. This is a somnolence removed from time, preservation in the agony of capture, a withdrawal into untouchable solitude. Among these grotesque sleepers Heurodis is anomalous: the kidnapped queen slumbers peacefully beneath a grafted tree ("ympe-tree") while the dismembered, the mad, the strangled and the drowned neighbor her dreams. Perhaps the peacefulness of Heurodis arrives because she did not resist the advent of her taking. The Fairy King warned her that should she not appear at the appointed time at the grafted tree in the courtly world, "thou worst y-fet / And totore thine limes al / That nothing help the no schall" (170-2). By surrendering to adventure, to the thing that arrives unwilled and sometimes undesired, she is transported. An ambivalent future opens that otherwise could not have arrived. The queen is the only one of these sleepers who is also glimpsed in movement outside of Fairy, where she accompanies on his aimless hunt the King who stole her from her familiar world.
            In her surrender to advent Heurodis is like her husband. Once his wife is abducted by the fairies, Orfeo dons a pilgrim's cloak but seeks nothing. He wanders the wilds in a bare existence, a barren space of "snewe and frese." Nothing pleases ("seth he nothing that him liketh"). Whereas Henry David Thoreau famously discovered in the sunbathing of a serpent the appearance of "thing-power," the invitation that the world's materiality offers to "be surprised by what we see" (Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter 5), Orfeo discerns only "wilde wormes," unsatisfying roots to eat, and "berien but gode lite" (“berries of little worth”). No vibrant materiality here. Yet through the music of his harp he allies himself with "weder ... clere and bright," with a forest yearning for resonance, with birds and wild beasts hungry for "gle" and "melody." The ecological conjunction that he creates through his harp seems to call forth the King of Fairy, who wanders the woods with his retinue on a chase in which no animal is pursued. Orfeo, ten years in the forest and transformed now into an arboreal semblance ("He is y-clongen also a tre!" exclaim his subjects upon his return), has given himself over to adventure: a coming or avenir that like the Fairy King's hunt moves without aim. Adventure is surrender to an overlap of worlds, an embrace of an intermedial cosmos larger than the confines of a single subjectivity.
            Orfeo speaks for the first time since his exile began when he beholds the falcons that the fairies bear. These effulgent birds remind him of his abandoned life ("Ich was y-won such werk to se!"). Once he conjoins Otherworld and relinquished court he finds his opening. Adventure is an act of worldly intersection, like the arrival of an incubus at a conventual cell: you cannot seek it, it's an object rather than an objective, but you can train yourself to perceive its arrival, to recognize the dangerous invitation to the sublunary that adventure offers, an allure that warps the orbit of ordinary life. Orfeo follows the fairy retinue into a rock and across the flattest of plains. He rescues Heurodis with his music. The Fairy King fears the two are ill-matched, but offers no impediment to their return: no fateful injunction not to look back as they depart the Fairy realm, only an unexpected benediction: "Of hir ichil thatow be blithe," I hope that you are happy with her. Orfeo is.
            The Breton lay abandons the grim ethos of the classical myth from which it arises: no fading of Eurydice at the threshold of the underworld, no dismembering of her grieving husband by crazed bacchants. While speculative realism seems to prefer the gloomy and the somber for its image store (heavy metal, H. P. Lovecraft, dark ecologies), the Breton lays tend to conclude with the equivalent of sunshine and rainbows, suggesting a happier but no less serious register at which objectal relations might be explored. Nor do I wish to turn Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History or the Breton lay Sir Orfeo into allegories or romans à clef for the working of object oriented ontology. While it is true that there is an uncanny intersection between Graham Harman’s work on vicarious causation and Geoffrey’s originary myth of Merlin, you won’t find the latter briskly expostulating “five kinds of objects ... and five different types of relation” (201). Geoffrey’s sublunary is too chaotic to be organized into a metaphysics, no matter how fascinated he is by causation and allure. He did not compose in 1136 an uncanny prophecy of the advent of flat ontologies in 2011. Art is tangled, sprawling and untidy compared to philosophy’s crisp distinctions. Having explored what is enabled by the conjunction of Geoffrey’s “between the moon and the earth” and Harman’s “autistic moonbeam entering the window of an asylum,” I would now like to ask what is eclipsed when that moon moves into such momentary terrestrial congruence.
            Erratic angels like the incubus-demon, the Fairy King and Merlin are the vicars or intermediaries who make possible the world's vibrancy by enabling contact and relation. They allow the emergence of transformative textualities, even while they themselves are left behind at that luminous advent. These messengers can be dangerous. In the Breton lay Sir Gowther, the same incubus who engenders Merlin impregnates another woman with a son who will become a rapist, a murderer, and his family’s undoing. Sir Orfeo oscillates between a vibrant materialism and a dark vitalism, replete with the messy, melancholic, admixed and unbeautiful stuff of the world that is as just as much an ethical ecology. Such a textual expanse is also an artistic thought experiment conducted through the objects of the everyday world, rendered marvelous through the excitation of objectal and material potency -- but it is an experiment in which not every participant is allowed a full story. As the Fairy King, the incubus-demon, the nun, and Merlin learn, a mediator's love is necessary to make the machinery (ingenuity, contrivances, art) of the text spring into action -- and a mediator’s love is unrequited. Though these figures open new worlds for and bestow unexpected futures to others within their texts, their shared fate is silent abandonment. Speculative awareness comes through the labor of those reduced to mere go-betweens, those who move from one place to another in order to change both. These mediators are literally sublunary angels, messengers who in their erratic flights refuse reduction into narrative or philosophical order. Perpetually conveyed, traveling without necessary destination, these disordered angels remind us that a retreat into tidy heaven leaves too many abandoned on the rubbish heaps of the earth.
            Speculative realism requires speculative narrative, along with its troubled and troublesome angels. We need to examine the world as it is, in its catastrophic givenness, but also to consider as well how it might be, not just in the past or in the future but in the now: a place where the inhuman has agency, narrative, the power to withdraw, but also to caress, to create sublunary realms that with or without our consent touch us, take us out of our asylums or cells, create strange new beings of futurity, menace, and promise who will vanish into our stories, our futures that are ever arriving -- futures that are narratives of the air and the lofty moon, but unfold just as easily in an asylum, a convent, or “in at a rock.”

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Speculating in New York

by J J Cohen

Tonight we will be celebrating the launch of Karl’s beautiful new book in farthest Brooklyn, but before those festivities begin I thought I’d take a moment in the quiet of my hotel room to jot down a few notes about the Speculative Medievalisms conference at CUNY yesterday.

Actually, I’ll start with the CUNY panel from Thursday night, where Jane Bennett, Levi Bryant and Graham Harman presented. Jane was the first speaker, and reflected upon the sensibility or “mood component” of Object Oriented Ontology/Speculative Realism via a meteorological analogy: “sunny, clear and cool,” like the “dude philosophers” who blog its contours. She then spoke of ethics as sensibility formation and proposed that OOO might think more about earthiness (which she glossed as the sensuous specificity of everyday things) and sympathy (attractions and connections between similarities). Her avowedly “leftist, egalitarian” approach would attend to things as earthly forces, to presencing over reserve. She called this a new material sensibility, and concluded “What would it mean to start living differently, sensing differently, if we were to really believe in OOO?”

I wish I could have stayed for the discussion that followed, since the answer to that question haunts me … but just as Levi Bryant began talking about SR as a movement towards what he calls the Wild, several of us had to depart to attend Eileen’s lecture at the Public School on SR and literary criticism. Held in an architecture bookstore, the event drew about 30 people from various backgrounds who sat on steps and listened to Eileen give a swift survey of Thing Studies and then speak engagingly about how the field had influenced her own work. Eileen was eloquent. She spoke with the open doors of the small store behind her. Passers by would peer inside, sometimes pausing to eavesdrop. One man passed twice, performing an awkward grand jeté each time. The weather was changing, gusts of cool wind entering as punctuation marks for Eileen’s talk: a perfect conjunction of world and speech.

The Speculative Medievalisms confab the next day was well attended (about 90 people) and lively. Eileen’s opening remarks stressed speculation as a rigorous process (though I personally would frame it as a creative process that may or may not be enamored of rigor); an investigation of the possible; a displacement of language as the reigning and sole determinant of meaning; and the granting to things of their full mediating power. Anna Klosowska then spoke about illegibility, translation, remembrance, willed forgetting, and a kind of capacious and tolerant philology. Allan Mitchell was all about cosmic eggs, exploring the rich possibilities of tarrying with the seminal, gestational moment that the ovum offers. He touched upon how such cosmogenic eggs enable a thinking about the substantiality of the cosmos that the Genesis narrative does not allow, an intriguing medieval “thinking before the human.” Kellie Robertson detailed the historical multiplicity of Aristotles – that is, the ways in which the philosopher has been appropriated and changed throughout time, yielding a longue durée of unease with him (“every age engages in a romance with Aristotle that ends unhappily”). She looked specifically at Aristotelian inclinatio and its de-centering of the human, gave us a preview of Graham Harman’s work later in the day, and provided an unforgettable image of Harman riding the philosopher as if he were Phyllis. Drew Daniel in his response excavated a small counter-archive of Aristotles, including Ockham’s “lynx-eyed” version of the philosopher, and wondered about alternate possibilities.

After a lively lunch (many of us went to a Chinese-Indian fusion restaurant nearby that I like), we returned to the archives: Julian Yates brought to light a kind of “kitchen archive” in Shakespeare, one on which a recipe (and recipes are playscripts, as well as a kind of metaphysics) might break into a drama like Titus Andronicus and pose weird questions about how to live well. Yates assembled a kind of machine or mangle out of Shakespeare, Bruno Latour, Titus, and a French housewife named Irène that worked beautifully to connect recipes, mortality, and ethics. He was assisted immensely by the fact that the early modern English word for piecrust is “coffin.” Liza Blake gave a response that wondered about what an OOO practice of critique would actually look like, taking Harman’s Prince of Networks as her point of departure.

After my presentation, Ben Woodard gave a fantastically smart response which used synopses of two moon stories as a launching point for following a winding path through a long philosophical tradition … a path that converged beautifully (I thought) with the one I tried to create via a more literary tradition. The questions I was asked – like the queries posed throughout the day – were intense and complexly engaging. Props to Dan Remein, though, who figured out that my “textual laboratory experiment” wasn’t just about placing OOO next to medieval texts to see what ignites, but also a wondering about how a scholarly work can ever adequately acknowledge the crowd of people behind its making. Graham Harman’s talk, delivered rapidly and lucidly, reiterated his own approach to objects at length, demonstrated why other ways of understanding objects are beset by philosophical problems, and then rethought Aristotelian possibility in ways that resonate with the OOO project. Patricia Clough’s response reframed the OOO mission as a multi-disciplinary alliance (science, art, philosophy) that opens an aporia between ontology and epistemology, productively enabling the object to BE as it was never allowed before.

A wine reception followed, and then a long, slow dinner at a restaurant with food inspired by Brittany. We then moved to a trendy bar that was a little too loud and a little too filled with the fragrance of the whole pigs that people were ordering in the attached restaurant … so we wandered over to another bar tucked into a nook of a small hotel. “Lounge” would be a better word: the place looked like it had been built in 1970 and tenderly preserved henceforth. As our numbers steadily dwindled, we moved to the Ginger Man, a pub, and when that establishment closed at 3:45 it was time for karaoke. A magical two hours of Journey, Green Day, Spandau Ballet and I don’t know what else brought us to 6 am and the rising of the sun. Not a bad little day, all in all.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Merlin as Vicar of Causation

by J J Cohen

Speculative September in NYC culminates, quite naturally, in Speculative Medievalisms II, because all good things lead to medieval studies. But I'm taking the train from DC early tomorrow morning so that I can attend “Speculative Realism: A Conversation with Jane Bennett, Levi Bryant, and Graham Harman” at CUNY followed by Eileen's class "Toward a Speculative Realist Literary Criticism” at the Public School. If my head doesn't explode by the end of those two events, well, then I'm not drinking enough nitroglycerin.

But I hope it doesn't explode, because that would be messy, and I'll be speaking on Friday afternoon and that is difficult when you are acephalic. I hope to see some ITM readers at Speculative Medievalisms, where I'll be linking Geoffrey of Monmouth with Graham Harman via Merlin, naturally enough.

Below, a small taste of my talk "Sublunary." Read up on your object oriented ontology, grab your Latin dictionary ... and go!

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Graham Harman has argued that “Objects hide from one another endlessly, and inflict their mutual blows [“physical relations”] only through some vicar or intermediary” (“On Vicarious Causation” 189-90; pdf here). Merlin's advent suggests a medieval version of this statement that is just as true: “Worlds hide from one another endlessly, and enjoy their mutual embraces [“physical relations”] only through some vicar or intermediary.” Merlin’s birth is the weird result/enabler of an asymmetrical, humanly inassimilable relation. Merlin’s mother is a king’s daughter and a cloistered nun who nightly finds a handsome man in the solitude of her cell. The incubus-demon who fathers Merlin is of unknown biography and intentions. He sometimes touches the ordinary world, but just as often withdraws from terrestrial connection. His desires cannot be reduced to the merely sexual. He wants at times to kiss and hold the nun, at times to converse invisibly on unstated subjects. Merlin arrives, that is, through an abstruse relationship that unites for a while two beings from oblique realms. The angel-demon and the solitary princess never fully touch, or do so askew, in a conjoining that is textually enabled only backwards, through the strange progeny who makes possible and embodies their “shared common space” (Graham Harman’s term for the third object within which two others meet, 190) or “thalamus” (the word used for the nun’s cell, a Greek noun that also means “chamber” “bedroom” “bridal bed” and, metonymically, “marriage”: that is, the space of an unequal, complicated, potentially disastrous, possibly transformative caress). The relation between the nun and the incubus engenders a creature who if not wholly unprecedented is nonetheless unpredetermined.

The text that I am speaking about in this language that weds Object Oriented Ontology to Latin historiography is Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1136). Geoffrey’s history is most widely known for having bequeathed to the future the King Arthur of enduring legend. Without Geoffrey this provincial British warlord would be an obscure medieval footnote rather than the progenitor of a still vibrant world. At his first appearance in Geoffrey’s text Merlin is a precocious and quarrelsome young man. As the story unfolds he will reveal surprising abilities, demonstrating that seemingly inert rocks may contain within them bellicose dragons; foretelling grim futures that include incineration, poison, and flowing blood; enabling through his transformative potions an adultery-minded Uther Pendragon to engender Arthur. Merlin alters completely the timbre of the text in which he appears. The History of the Kings of Britain has until the moment of his entrance offered a chronicle of the island’s early days. Its sedate Latin prose describes how Britain was founded and who ruled its civil war loving kingdoms. Wonders and supernatural events before his advent are few. A tribe of giants to kill, a sudden rain of blood, a sea monster and some ravenous wolves are scant exceptions to a martial account of settlement, inheritance, dissent, and political intrigue. Merlin appears just after the first mention of magic in the narrative, in the form of incompetent magi whom the perfidious King Vortigern summons to assist him in finding a way to escape the persecutions of the Saxons. Merlin is not himself a magician; magi are figures of failure in the story. For Geoffrey of Monmouth Merlin is a prophet, a poet, a schemer, an architect and an author, a figure of singular ingenuity rather than of saintly or demonic inspiration. He cannot be domesticated into mere category.

After his unexpected advent the rules for how the story may unfold change. Earlier in the History when an earthbound king dreamt of traveling spaces of cloud and air, his fate was to plummet with his manufactured wings to a shattering death (Bladud, who practices “nigromantium” rather than magic, 30). That stretch between earth and moon had not yet opened for narrative sojourn. Merlin, however, born of the meeting of nocturnal radiance with mundane constrictedness, conveys the wheel of Stonehenge across the sea “with incredible ease.” This transmarinal relocation is not accomplished through supernatural agency. There is nothing divine or occult about the movement. Merlin works with the earth’s givenness, its alliance-seeking materiality. The monoliths are swiftly transported via his operationibus machinandis (“feats of engineering” 128) and machinationes (“machinery,” “engines,” “contrivances”). Merlin is an engineer, a vicar of causation who knows that objects launch into motion only through the intermediary agency of other objects. The stones are disassembled, loaded onto ships and carried to their current home for repurposing as a British monument, thus proving the power of ingenuity (ingenium, the Latin word that gives us “engineer”). Significantly, we are never told of what Merlin’s machinationes consist. A materialist but not a reductionist, Merlin knows well that “inscrutable depths” intractably hold the objectal world.

Merlin is likewise a vicar or engineer of diegesis. He moves the narrative, but cannot be absorbed back into it. He remains an essential mystery, a figure who changes everything and at a certain point simply vanishes, but even after his quiet disappearance his presence permeates what follows. Though he never meets Arthur, that king’s ambiguous destiny on Avalon is inconceivable without Merlin’s having set into motion the path of his ambivalent life. The text that Merlin creates is eccentric to what precedes: what sought to be history opens into a possibility-laden new genre, a mode to be christened in the future romance.
Merlin embodies the strange prospects offered by that space inter lunam et terram, between earth's banal givenness and the moon's unreachable allure. This suspended geography might be called sublunary, but by that term I do not mean mundane. The sublunary designates a region neither terrestrial nor empyrean: unregulated by tedious rules about proper history, untouched by diurnal limitations, immune to the stasis that holds heaven. Sublunary means unpredestined by humans and gods, an intermedial sweep where the fixities of doctrine, custom and theology do not necessarily obtain. The wandering incubus who traces this space, celestial but not heavenly, a lover of earthly things but not bound to the small spaces of earth's human dwellers, imbues in his progeny the ability to escape constricted textual spaces as well.

The Job Market

by J J Cohen

The MLA Job Information List went live yesterday.

I'm writing letters for several people on the market this year, so I'd been anxious to see how many medieval and early modern positions would be posted. Answer: not a whole lot. It is still a bit early, so a few more positions will no doubt appear, but by my very quick count there looks to be no more than 10-15 tenure track positions in each time period. Do the math: if 200 people apply for each, then ...

Here's wishing all the best to ITM readers on the market. At this point custom dictates that I should insert some gallows humor to lighten the mood, but really, it's just too depressing to contemplate the number of very good candidates who will not find employment this year.

Monday, September 12, 2011

3 conferences you should attend

by J J Cohen

So I am writing or thinking about writing lectures for three upcoming conferences, each of which could use a medieval and early modernist presence (if that's who you are) and welcome theorists of all kinds as well. Please consider submitting a paper for the second and third; you have plenty of time. I leave it to you whether you think my native element more closely resembles NYC, the Orlando Airport Marriott, or Edinburgh -- but I'd be happy to see you at these events.

1. Speculative Medievalisms II. This Friday! (A great thing about this event is that my talk was due to Ben Woodard two weeks ago, so I'm done.)

2. The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts on “The Monstrous Fantastic” (Orlando, March 21-25). Me! And China Miéville! And Kelly Link! And a midnight reading in a cemetery! I haven't quite chosen my topic quite yet, but it looks like it will involve zombies.

3. Sensualising Deformity: Communication and Construction of Monstrous Embodiment (Edinburgh, June 15-16 2012). An exploration of monstrosity, embodiment, and the senses. This one looks to be interdisciplinary and very cool. And did I mention it is in Edinburgh? The conference has a great blog and is on Twitter. Not sure what I'll do here but maybe something on agalmatophilia. But maybe not; this one needs more thought.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

5 Days and Counting Until SPECULATIVE MEDIEVALISMS 2

by EILEEN JOY

In 5 days [Friday, Sep. 16th], some of us will be convening in New York City for Speculative Medievalisms 2: A Laboratory-Atelier at The Graduate Center, CUNY, to join in speculating with Anna Klosowska, Allan Mitchell, Kellie Robertson, Drew Daniel, Julian Yates, Liza Blake, Jeffrey Cohen, Ben Woodard, Graham Harman, and Patricia Clough, and you can see the full program schedule, with advance readings [specimen texts], and how to pre-register here:

Speculative Medievalisms 2: A Laboratory-Atelier

This coming week actually brings a whole host of "speculative realist" and "object oriented ontology" luminaries [Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Timothy Morton, Jane Bennett, Steven Shaviro, etc.] to NYC for a veritable banquet of events, and you can see the detailed line-up of all of those here:

Speculative September NYC

I hope to see everyone soon in New York! [Let me also add here that I will be recording/podcasting the entire event for those who cannot be there.]

Friday, September 09, 2011

EXCITING NEWS: Featured Speaker Line-Up for 2nd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group

Figure 1. from Marget Long, Bad Light (work-in-progress)

by EILEEN JOY

The Conference Committee for the 2nd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, "cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university," to be held in Boston from 20-23 September 2012, and co-organized by Northeastern University, M.I.T., Boston College, the BABEL Working Group, postmedieval, and punctum books, is pleased to announce that we have just finalized our list of featured speakers and we're especially excited about the "pairings" we have put together. The speakers have been chosen both for their very different disciplinary and field differences but also for certain affinities that we feel they [might] share. The idea is to see what sorts of serendipitous occasions might arise when scholars working in very different fields simply "bump" into each in a shared plenary session in which they have all been asked to talk about their current work and projects, and maybe also to think a little about the uniqueness of their respective disciplines. The final line-up, then, is as follows:

Plenary Session #1:


Lindy Elkins-Tanton (Director, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution for Science), former Assoc. Professor of Geology at M.I.T., Assoc. Editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, and currently working on NSF-funded projects on continental dynamics (Siberian Flood Basalts and the end-Permian Extinction) and on the chemistry and physics that control planetary evolution in the first tens of millions of years of the solar system. She has also been involved in spacecraft missions, including the SAGE Venus lander and the International Lunar Network.

Plenary Session #2:

Jane Bennett (Chair, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University), author of Thoreau’s Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild (1994), The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, Ethics (2001), and Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010).

David Kaiser (Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Department Head of MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society, M.I.T.), author of the award-winning book, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (2005) and How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (2011), which charts the early history of Bell’s theorem and quantum entanglement. His edited volumes include Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives(2005), and Becoming MIT: Moments of Decision (2010). He is presently completing a book entitled American Physics and the Cold War Bubble.

Plenary Session #3:

Carolyn Dinshaw (Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and English at New York University) + Marget Long (MFA, Rhode Island School of Design); Dinshaw is author of Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (1989), Getting Medieval: Sexualities and  Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (1999), and the forthcoming How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers and the Problem of the Present (Duke Univ. Press), which looks directly at the experience of time itself, as it is represented in medieval works and as it is experienced in readers of those works. Long works with photographs, video, and text to explore questions of historiography, representation and the physical experience of photography itself. Her work has been screened and exhibited at Anthology Film Archives, Exit Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Contemporary Artists Center, Cinders, American Cinémathèque, DGA Video in Los Angeles, and in a solo show at Safe-T Gallery in Brooklyn. Recent projects include A Daguerreotype Sideways: Re-Visiting Mathew Brady’s Studio @ 359 Broadway, 2009-2011 and Bad Light. Her current book project is a cultural history of the flashcube called Revolutionary Forces.

Sans façon (Glasgow, Scotland), a collaborative art practice between French architect Charles Blanc and British artist Tristan Surtees who undertake diverse projects, both temporary and permanent, predominantly exploring the complex relationship between people and place.

The more full description and Call for Papers for the conference can be found here:


Right now, we're asking for session proposals by 15 December 2011, but we're happy to take individual paper proposals as well. Some time after the 15th of December, we'll send out a new CFP asking for proposals for specific sessions and also for individual proposals.


Figure 2. from Sans façon, "The distance between us" [public art installation in Birmingham, 2005]