Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Nothing Has Yet Been Said: On the Non-Existence of Academic Freedom and the Necessity of Inoperative Communities


Figure 1. still image from Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

by EILEEN JOY

As promised, here now is the more full text of the paper I delivered at Harvard this past Monday, and THANK YOU to Richard Cole and the other graduate students at Harvard for giving me this opportunity to pause in what has become a horrifically taxing and stressful work schedule in order so spend some time reflecting on the always-evolving mission of the BABEL Working Group  --


Nothing Has Yet Been Said: On the Non-Existence of Academic Freedom and the Necessity of Inoperative Community

Eileen A. Joy


But if this world, even though it has changed … , proposes no new figure of community, perhaps this in itself teaches us something. We stand perhaps to learn from this that it can no longer be a matter of figuring or modeling a communitarian essence in order to present it to ourselves and to celebrate it, but that it is a matter rather of thinking community, that is, of thinking its insistent and possibly still unheard demand, beyond communitarian models or remodelings. … Nothing has yet been said: we must expose ourselves to what has gone unheard in community.

~Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community

Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic. Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality ... that possesses revolutionary force.

~Michel Foucault, Preface to Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

I want to begin by saying something about the image from Wes Anderson’s 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums that adorns the poster for this talk. Why this image? Partly because, on one level, all of Anderson’s films seem to be about misfit families—with ‘family’ here denoting actual, more traditional ‘kinship’ families, but also circles of friends and accomplices, whose dysfunction is rendered with a certain tender sweetness, and whose commitment to each other, with occasional failures of loyalty, remains steadfast. Characters in Anderson’s films typically do not get what they want or deserve, but the one thing they never relinquish is their affection for each other, even when that affection might be fucked up, or laced with sadness. They pursue ridiculous adventures that typically fail (such as Steve Zissou in The Aquatic Life of Steve Zissou chasing after a mythical “jaguar shark” in order to kill it as revenge for the death of a friend, or the three brothers in The Darjeeling Limited looking for their estranged mother in India who abandons them not once but twice, or the two misunderstood children in Moonrise Kingdom running away together), but these ill-advised adventures are conducive nevertheless to the development of aesthetic practices for more artful styles of living, which also explains why some critics hate Anderson’s films for their archly aesthetic (and thus supposedly non-realist) staging. Nevertheless, many of Anderson’s characters are fiercely determined to chart different (often foolish) courses, and to do so stylishly. And for me, style is neither incidental, nor merely an ornament, to the content of one’s life. As Anna Kłosowska has memorably put it, “style, neither fact nor theory but facilitating the transition between the two … is the generative principle itself.”[1] Or as Aranye Fradenburg has also put it, “Aesthetic form is a spellbinding (or not) attempt to transmit and circulate affect, without which not much happens at all.”[2] Let us not underestimate style, then, especially for what it contributes to natality, to “something else” emerging.
            With regard to the particular still image from The Royal Tenenbaums of Margot and Richie Tenenbaum, the brother and (adopted) sister who are in love with each other, smoking cigarettes on the rooftop of their Manhattan brownstone, with Richie’s hawk Mordecai perched on Richie’s glove, it’s hard for me to explain why and how, over the years, this image has served as an emblem for me (literally, a sort of badge and also heraldic device) of the BABEL Working Group’s core mission: to craft medieval-modern mashups in order to reveal the uncanny and untimely ways in which the medieval and modern co-inhabit each other; to promiscuously cruise subjects, theories, and disciplines not believed to be “proper” to the field of medieval studies; to work on an ethics and politics of friendship (no matter how messy and difficult) as the vital heart of forms of scholarship that emerge from a certain “togetherness,” no matter how asymmetrical, dissensual, fractured, and flawed at times; and most importantly, to embrace, even with joy, our “fucked-up-ness,” or as Chris Taylor once memorably put it in an essay about the ways in which our critique of each other’s work can become unproductively toxic,
We live on and through [the fictions that we’re inclined toward each other even when “we sometimes decline from one another or swerve away into terrible things”] … for the simple reason that we are all too wounded by this world to not carry fucked-up-ness with us in ways we can’t even know without the rigorous, critical, sustaining, and enriching help of our revolutionary friends.[3]
The image of Margot and Richie Tenenbaum on the rooftop also resonates with me because it signals that we need to embrace our failures—in their case, the failure to move beyond their arrested development, to fully overcome their dysfunctional childhood. More pointedly, we need to embrace failure as integral to what we do without giving up on each other or our work. And we don’t necessarily have to “grow up,” to allow ourselves to become “disabled” for what Joan Retallack has described as “the kinds of humorous and dire, purposeful play that creates geometries of attention revelatory of silences in the terrifying tenses that elude official grammars.”[4]
            So let me begin (again) by saying that, ever since leaving my tenured faculty position in August of 2013, that I have faced all sorts of difficulties and even despair as regards my decision to manage the affairs of the BABEL Working Group and punctum books full-time. The invitation to give a talk here at Harvard came at a propitious moment, especially as I was asked to comment on the aims and projects of BABEL, and not wanting to simply repeat or rehash the things I have said on that subject over the years, I felt a keen urge to take advantage of the opportunity to really reflect on what I think is most important right now—within medieval studies, yes, but also more broadly, within the humanities and the university-at-large, and also, for myself personally. Throughout the past few months—and as a direct result of the difficulties of maintaining our projects as independent but also para-institutional entities, which has led to moments of personal and also collective depression—I’ve had to examine everything I’m doing and constantly ask myself if it’s worth it and whether or not I even know anymore what matters. For example: What sort of work is worth doing and on whose behalf and for what purposes? What is a “personal life” and how does one construct it with any sort of thoughtfulness and care? Even more pointedly, is “personal life” a too impoverished category for living? In other words, does one really have a life for oneself and then some sort of “other” life, or lives, as in that old distinction between “work” and “life” (?)—a distinction, I might add, I have always believed is unhealthy, especially within the university where we are already more free to choose our labors than so many others who are forced to work at soul-crushing jobs they can only hate. Can a collective survive, without becoming fascist, or is it always doomed to fall apart at some point? Can we figure out ways to survive but also to embrace that eventual falling apart in ways that might prove liberatory and sustaining? On this question, I have always concurred with Bill Readings in The University in Ruins that cultivating certain “rhythm[s] of disciplinary attachment and detachment,” as well as abandoning “disciplinary grounding” (while still retaining the “structurally essential … question of the disciplinary form that can be given to knowledges”), is more important than installing permanent structures for the creation and dissemination of knowledge (whether academic departments or scholarly associations), but: how to create a collective that could cultivate and sustain such continual unsettlement, ungrounding, and abandonments, and which would be willing to dwell in a “university in ruins” as a mode of “try[ing] to do what we can, while leaving space for what we cannot envisage to emerge”?[5] Who, further, will sign on for a group whose mission is continual disruption and which seeks an inoperative community without identity? This question partly stems from Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking on community and how,
behind the theme of the individual, but [also] beyond it, lurks the question of singularity. What is a body, a face, a voice, a death, a writing­—not indivisible, but singular? What is their singular necessity in the sharing that divides and that puts into communication bodies, voices and writings in general and in totality?[6]
An “inoperative community” would be one that merely commits itself to thinking community beyond its bad histories and beyond any futurizing ideologies that seek specific (utopian) ends. My question (and worry) of whether or not anyone will want to join an inoperative community, especially under the aegis of a humanities under siege by techno-managerial forces, is also partly influenced by the thinking of the cultural critic Jan Verwoert, who has also asked,
If, living under the pressure to perform, we begin to see that a state of exhaustion is a horizon of collective experience, could we then understand this experience as the point of departure for the formation of a particular sort of solidarity? A solidarity that would not lay the foundations for the assertion of a potent operative community, but which would, on the contrary, lead us to acknowledge that the one thing we share—exhaustion—makes us an inoperative community, an exhausted community, a community of the exhausted. A community, however, that can still act, not because it is entitled to do so by the institutions of power, but by virtue of an unconditional, exuberant politics of dedication.
This would be to think of community as a sort of “mutual admiration society,” but also as a convalescent ward, in which “taking care” (of ourselves and each other) would be more important than “performing” according to so-called “professional” standards and protocols. What sorts of agencies might we be able to craft under these conditions that would be mutually sustaining and which would not signify giving up? And given various tears in the fabric of the Real that we are currently grappling with—whether the end of liberal education as we thought we knew it or ecological catastrophe—how does this change what I, or anyone, should hope for? As Jonathan Lear explicates beautifully in his book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, “as finite erotic creatures it is an essential part of our nature that we take risks just by being the world” and the world itself is not “merely the environment in which we move about”; rather, “it is that over which we lack omnipotent control,” and at any moment, it “may intrude upon us,” outstripping “the concepts with which we seek to understand it.”[7] So, in merely thinking the world, we always take the risk “that the very concepts with which we think may become unintelligible.” In such a scenario, can we continue to believe in community formation (especially with an eye toward cultivating practices of inoperation) as a form of radical hope—not hope as an affective (and ultimately insipid) orientation toward definitive (projected) outcomes, but rather, hope as a longing, or desire, for things that we do not fully, and cannot ever fully, understand? Finally, one last, but increasingly (for me) the most important (and terrifying) of all of these questions: will it be possible to survive as an idealist, as a humanist, or will the endless machinery of neoliberalism really grind all of us down who aren’t focused on monetizing everything?
            Given all of these questions (or worries) and my own personal upheavals, the one phrase I keep returning to is “academic freedom.” There is perhaps no concept that is seen as less debatable among academics than “academic freedom,” but I’ve personally always been a bit bothered by it, partly because, over the years, I’ve seen so little of it in actual practice (and this is very much part of the reason BABEL came into existence at all—my, and others’, feeling that there isn’t much academic freedom in the precise place where it is cherished and argued for as an ethical good of the highest value). Quite obviously, one isn’t going to get very far arguing against the importance of academic freedom, but at the same time, most discussions and debates about academic freedom see it as inextricably connected to, and guaranteed by, tenure, and I’ve always been a little mystified by this—first, because I believe that freedom of expression should be vigorously cultivated, cared for, and defended as a legal right everywhere and for everyone, but secondarily, and more importantly: what about everyone in the university who does not have tenure, and now, with non-tenure stream teaching positions making up about 70% of all teaching positions, what about those who never will have tenure? And for the increasingly privileged few, what are you supposed to be doing, free expression-wise, before you have tenure: as a graduate student, as a postdoctoral fellow, as an assistant professor, etc.?
            But here’s the weird thing: these are not the questions that really interest me. You see, I believe that even if all faculty at all universities had tenure, there would still be very little academic freedom, not because faculty can be fired at will, regardless, for the things they might say and write (although we see examples of this all of the time, in quite frightening ways), but because of all the myriad ways in which we are coerced (both forcefully and more subtly) to think alike, or to follow certain methodologies of thought, outside of which it is believed only “bad” or nonsensical scholarship could result. In his very short and extraordinary Preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Foucault wrote that, in the face of what he called “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us,” we should concentrate all of our energies on these questions,
How does one introduce desire into thought, into discourse, into action? How can and must desire deploy its forces within the political domain and grow more intense in the process of overturning the established order? Ars erotica, ars theoretica, ars politica. ... How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior?
Increasingly, I find academic freedom to be the most vital, but also most elusive, element of academic (and para-academic) life. There is no academic freedom, per se; it is not even a right. What it is, instead, is a kind of practice that we have to work at (vigilantly) every day (for ourselves and for others), and at the same time, it is also a state of being, a sort of ontological ground without which practically nothing new could ever emerge nor proceed, which is why I believe one of the most important tasks—perhaps the only task—of an inoperative community today would be to simply clear space (to make room). One must be free from worry, free from debt, free from hunger, free from predators, free from ill health, free from bullying, free from censure, free from oppression, free from harm, free from grief, and so on, before one can even begin to feel safe enough to express oneself, or even to work at all as a thinker and researcher, unbesieged by various fears. This is true more generally for everyone, of course, and is considered by many to be a global human right, but who guarantees this, who works on its behalf?
            It is worth repeating: freedom is a state of being, and it is not natural. What this means is that we actually have to work, and fairly hard at that, to establish the means, spaces, and mechanisms with which anyone anywhere at all could exercise their so-called “academic” or any other sort of freedom. We have to feel free (which is not the same thing as actually being free, but which will have to “do” in the interminable interim), and I find myself lingering here because I don’t think I have ever given a talk anywhere about my own work, or about BABEL, where at least one anxious audience member hasn’t said, in so many words, “well, that’s all cool for you, but what about those of us who are more vulnerable and less established? How can we say just whatever we want, or pursue work that has no one’s pre-approval when we’re still trying to get a job, still trying to get tenure, etc.?” There is no real answer to this question except some sort of version of “stop being so scared,” but that’s easy for me to say because guess what? No one scares me and they never have. I’m weird that way.
            The better answer is, let me help you to feel less scared to want the things you really want. Let me work with you, and with others, to secure the freedom you don’t actually have yet, and that won’t be guaranteed by tenure, especially as the university becomes more corporatized, but also because nothing is guaranteed in this world, everything is provisional, and there are a lot of jerks out there. We are also jerks when we’re not paying enough attention to what is going on around us. We are also jerks when we don’t care enough to do something when the university doesn’t live up to its ideals (however elusive, however difficult to put into actual practice). Part of what spurred my thinking on all of this was watching the movie Selma on the plane from Los Angeles to Washington, DC just this past week. The movie was stirring and moved me to tears, but I couldn’t help but think to myself that, even though it was a stunning achievement to mobilize all of those people to walk across the bridge in Selma and to also get the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, when I look back at that moment from our current vantage point, I feel as if I glance across a wasteland of black lives that have never, ever mattered enough to us, and who have been ground down through poverty, violence, racism, and the like. Because legal acts don’t guarantee the sorts of prosperity (of mind, soul, and body) that enable real freedom (as ontological ground) such that one could exercise one’s freedom as a practice that contributed to one’s well-being and flourishing.
            I know that sounds tautological, but it’s the only way I know how to express this idea at present—that what we need to work on now, if we really care about “academic freedom,” is not just ensuring or extending tenure for more persons (although of course that is important), but also working, in Foucault’s words again, to track down and extirpate “all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives.” In my own experience, I have seen the university serve as a fertile ground for this sort of everyday tyrannical bitterness. Do you know why? Because it’s populated by humans. We aren’t always the kindest or even the bravest species on the planet, but because we chose to work in this place called a university, we have to try harder, and our only motto should be “we think in here.” And we shouldn’t have to justify that to anyone. But we sure as hell need to work harder to secure the necessary resources (both material and somatic-psychic) for such an institution, and the persons within it, to be safe from harm, so that they can pursue the work they most desire to do.
            So what I’m ultimately trying to convey here is that, if someone were to ask me today what BABEL is about—what it stands for, what it is trying to do, what it is trying to effect—I would say something like, we are trying to create spaces of radical hospitality within which persons feel more free (which is not the same thing as being completely free: that could never be possible given the forces that shape this world, both human and inhuman) to experiment, to take risks, and most importantly, to pursue in their work their (and not our) desires, unencumbered by professional anxieties over whether or not those desires are legitimated in advance by what our “fields” have already deemed as “proper” to themselves. This is also to ask that we replace the idea of the humanities as some sort of guarded (and self-regarding) competitive-agonistic staging ground of cultural authority with the idea that the humanities—especially in its role as a critical site for the creation and dissemination of knowledge—be reconceptualized as a site for the care and curatorship of all persons who desire to contribute their labors to an always precarious, always unsettled, and most importantly, always unbounded intellectual commons. This is to say—for the one, for the singular, and thus for all. And by choosing to never define exactly what it is we do in here with recourse to what others have deemed in advance to be “correct,” and also because, similar to Herodotus’s Scythians who could not be captured by Darius’s Persians because they were so skilled at running away, we refuse to engage the sovereign in the manner they demand of us, we remain elusive, vagabond, intinerant, and also free.


[1] Anna Kłosowska, “Style as Third Element,” in On Style: An Atelier, eds. Eileen A. Joy and Anna  Kłosowska (Brooklyn: punctum, 2013), 35-36.
[2] L.O.A. Fradenburg, “Beauty and Boredom in the Legend of Good Women,” Exemplaria 22.1 (2010): 66 [65-83].
[3] Chris Taylor, “Going My Way? Anarchist Inclinations and Lorde,” Of C.L.R. James [weblog], November 17, 2013: http://clrjames.blogspot.com/2013/11/going-my-way-anarchist-inclinations-and.html.
[4] Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 62.
[5] Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 176, 177.
[6] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 6.
[7] Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 120, 116.

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Divine Women: Respectability Politics and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale

by KARL STEEL

Besser Chart
Chart from Besserman
[read Eileen first if you haven't yet!; same for Ta-Nehisi Coates, here]
If you teach Chaucer, you’re likely more than familiar with this bit from the Nun’s Priest’s Tale:
Wommennes conseils been ful ofte colde;
Wommannes counseil broghte us first to wo
And made Adam fro Paradys to go,
There as he was ful myrie and wel at ese.
But for I noot to whom it myght displese,
If I conseil of wommen wolde blame,
Passe over, for I seyde it in my game.
Rede auctours, where they trete of swich mateere,
And what they seyn of wommen ye may heere.
Thise been the cokkes words, and nat myne;
I kan noon harm of no womman divyne. (VII.2356-66; Riverside ed)
You may also know the double meaning of the last line, which depends on whether we read “divine” as a verb or as an adjective: “I am not able to guess any sin about woman” (divine as verb) or “I know no sin about divine women [i.e., women devoted to theology, i.e., a nun, like the Prioress]” (divine as adjective). In 1977, Lawrence L. Besserman charted the line's various possibilities;[1] then in his Variorum edition, Derek Pearsall complained that Besserman, “overreliant on mechanical aids” (in this case, the Middle English Dictionary), generated an ambiguity entirely of his own making; then finally (?), Peter Travis’s Disseminal Chaucer demonstrated, quite keenly, that “Besserman’s systematic taxonomizing is absolutely consonant with a dominant methodology of a typical medieval liberal arts classroom” (63).
I think we can safely keep teaching the line as a pun.
Now, while Besserman took the line as a “veiled critique of the Prioress and her tale” (70; no pun intended?), I think we can take his reading further by understanding it as an instance of medieval respectability politics.
Here’s a succinct paragraph on the theme from Michelle Smith’s “Affect and Respectability Politics,” her contribution to the (sadly still) essential special issue of Theory and Event on Ferguson and “disposable lives”:
The signature of respectability politics is its disavowal of the legitimacy of black rage. By respectability politics, I refer to the first resort of marginalized classes. On the one hand, like all democratic politics, respectability politics seeks to realize collective aspirations whether grand (justice, equality, full participation) or pedestrian (balanced budget, community policing, bike paths). On the other, respectability politics evince a distinct worldview: marginalized classes will receive their share of political influence and social standing not because democratic values and law require it but because they demonstrate their compatibility with the “mainstream” or non-marginalized class. So, have you been discriminated against on the job market? Take off that hoodie and pull up your sagging pants! Rejected by the magnet school? “Nigga” is not a friendly greeting! Have the police thrown you against a wall againto search your pockets? Don’t stand on the street looking like you’re up to no good! Propriety breeds respect. Did your unarmed son/daughter/husband/wife/best friend/cousin die after the police applied the chokehold too vigorously? Cooler heads will prevail!
Respectability politics burdens the marginalized with the obligation to make themselves right; they shift the blame from deadly systems to individuals and their habits; they absolve the status quo of its own guilt; the call for respectability erases the many marginalized who themselves are respectable, who are marching peacefully, who are responding to violence with as much calm as they can muster, and still being battered and killed for all that; and finally the call to respectability erases the illegitimacy of the system people are being required to live up to, and the real possibilities for justice that “disrespectable” behavior might manifest. Respectability politics is mostly bullshit.
respect
For the Nun’s Priest to say, among other things, “I know no sin about divine women” is to divide women into two categories (at least): divine women or even godlike women; and all the others, the less respectable women, who fall somewhat short of the low mark of divinity itself. This line, heard in its second sense, allows the Nun’s Priest to maintain his clerical misogyny—“wommenes conseils been ful ofte colde”—while propping up the whole system that clerical misogyny justifies, and that sustains his own privilege. It allows him to gaslight us by denying that he himself holds, acts on, and benefits from the beliefs that are actually his own and those of the patriarchy that owns him.
After all, some of his best friends are women.
For trusteth wel, it is an impossible
That any clerk wol speke good of wyves,
But if it be of hooly seintes lyves (Wife of Bath's Prologue, III.689-91)
We can imagine, now, some of the respectable women of the Canterbury Tales and what happens to them: Emelye, Custance, Griselda, Virginia. You might have your own list. And we can mark, quite neatly, just how far respectability gets these adherents to appropriate behavior.
And we can see, then, that respectability politics demands – to choose an example not at all at random – that black people be divine: to be better than white people; to be better than people; to be saints; to be gods. Respectability politics loves the crucified respectable saint; and it loves just as much to crucify those who can’t or won’t be saints. Respectability politics is bullshit.
[thanks to Alison Kinney for talking this through with me. Any errors, in politics or anything else, are probably my own]
[1] Lawrence L. Besserman, "Chaucerian Wordplay: The Nun's Priest and His 'Womman Divyne.'"  The Chaucer Review 12.1 (1977): 68-73

Sunday, April 26, 2015

The Connection of Desire to Reality Possesses Revolutionary Force: Going to Harvard

by EILEEN JOY

Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic. Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality ... that possesses revolutionary force.

~Michel Foucault, Preface to Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

I arose very early this morning (4:30am) in Washington, DC to board a train to Boston, as I am giving a talk at Harvard tomorrow afternoon (details on poster above). In point of fact, I really didn't sleep much at all last night. Because to be honest, I'm pretty depressed, and while I can't go into all of the details here, suffice to say that this past year has been a hard one and some new hardships are on the horizon. I'm sad and frightened and yet remain paradoxically hopeful and optimistic because I can't see the point of grabbing on to anything except hope and optimism. I've always hated people who tell me "everything will be okay" when, really, they have no idea and it's just an empty platitude that people say when they don't know what else to say. It's supposed to be comforting, but is, for me, inherently annoying. But I also really believe (again, paradoxically) that everything really will be okay. I'm just not sure when, and as Hamlet might have said, "there's the rub." Throughout the past few months, I've had to examine everything I'm doing and constantly ask myself if it's worth it and whether or not I even know anymore what matters -- as in, what sort of work is worth doing and on whose behalf or for what purposes? what is a personal life and how does one construct it with any sort of thoughtfulness and care (and even more pointedly, is "personal life" a too narrow category for living: in other words, does one really have a life for oneself and then some sort of "other" life, or lives, as in that old distinction between "work" and "life" -- a distinction, I might add, I believe is unhealthy)? is it possible to survive as an idealist, as a humanist, or will the endless machinery of neoliberalism really grind all of us down who aren't focused on monetizing everything (on which point, see Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution)? And so on.

I share these thoughts because I was recently invited, by Richard Cole (who has an essay in postmedieval's issue on the Holocaust) and other graduate students at Harvard, to give a talk for their Medieval Studies Workshop. I asked them to give me guidance on what they wanted me to talk about, and they said they wanted to hear about BABEL and its various projects, for which I'm deeply grateful (and honored), but I've given quite a few talks about BABEL over the years, and I don't want to just repeat myself. Given my own personal upheavals, this feels like an opportunity to engage in some serious reflection on what I think is important and most meaningful right now -- not just for me, but for everyone who works within (or just to the side of) the university, and the phrase I keep coming back to is "academic freedom." There is perhaps no concept that is seen as *less* debatable, among academics, than "academic freedom," but I've personally always been a bit bothered by it, partly because, over the years, I've seen so little of it in actual practice (and this is very much part of the reason BABEL came into existence at all -- my, and others', feeling that there isn't much academic freedom in the precise place where it is cherished and argued for as an ethical good of the highest value). Quite obviously, one isn't going to get very far arguing *against* the importance of academic freedom, but at the same time, most discussions and debates about academic freedom see it as inextricably connected to, and guaranteed by, tenure, and I've always been a little mystified by this, first, because I believe that freedom of expression should be vigorously cultivated, cared for, and defended as a legal right everywhere and for everyone, but more importantly: what about everyone in the university who does not have tenure, and now, with non-tenure stream teaching positions making up about 70% of all teaching positions, what about those who never *will* have tenure? And for the increasingly privileged few, what are you supposed to be doing, free expression-wise, *before* you have tenure: as a graduate student, as a postdoctoral fellow, as an assistant professor, etc.?

But hang on a minute, because this isn't really where I'm headed. You see, I believe that even if all faculty at all universities had tenure, there would still be very little academic freedom, not because faculty could be fired at will, regardless, for the things they might say and write (although we see examples of this all of the time, in quite frightening ways), but because of all the myriad ways in which we are coerced (both forcefully and more subtly) to think alike, or to follow certain methodologies of thought, outside of which it is believed (by many!) only "bad" or nonsensical scholarship could result. In his very short and extraordinary Preface to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, Foucault wrote that, in the face of what he called "the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us," we should concentrate all of our energies on these questions,
How does one introduce desire into thought, into discourse, into action? How can and must desire deploy its forces within the political domain and grow more intense in the process of overturning the established order? Ars erotica, ars theoretica, ars politica. ... How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior?
Increasingly, I find academic freedom to be the most vital, but also most elusive, element of academic (and para-academic) life. There is no academic freedom, per se; it is not even a *right*. What it is, instead, is a kind of practice that we have to work at (vigilantly) every day (for ourselves and for others), and at the same time, it is also a state of being, a sort of ontological ground without which practically nothing new could ever emerge: one must be free from worry, free from debt, free from hunger, free from predators, free from ill health, free from bullying censure, free from oppression, free from harm, free from grief, and so on, before one can even begin to feel safe enough to express oneself, or even to *work* at all as a thinker and researcher. This is true more generally for everyone, of course, and is considered by many to be a global human right, but who guarantees this, who works on its behalf, etc.? It is worth repeating: freedom is a state of being, and it is not natural. What this means is that we actually have to work, and fairly hard at that, to establish the means, and the spaces, and the mechanisms (etc.) with which anyone anywhere at all could exercise their so-called "academic" or any other sort of freedom. We have to be and *feel* free, and I find myself lingering here because I don't think I have ever given a talk anywhere about my own work, or about BABEL, or about punctum, etc. where at least one anxious audience member hasn't said, in so many words, "well, that's all cool for you, but what about those of us who are more vulnerable and less established? how can we say just whatever we want, or pursue work that has no one's pre-approval when we're still trying to get a job, still trying to get tenure, etc.?" There is no real answer to this question except some sort of version of "stop being so scared," but that's easy for me to say because guess what? No one scares me and they never have. I'm weird that way.

The better answer is, let me help you to feel less scared to want the things you really want. Let me work with you, and with others, to secure the freedom you don't actually have yet, and that won't be guaranteed by tenure. Because nothing is guaranteed in this world, everything is provisional, and there are a lot of assholes out there. We are also assholes when we're not paying enough attention to what is going on around us. We are also assholes when we don't care enough to do something when the university doesn't live up to its ideals (however elusive, however difficult to put into actual practice). Part of what spurred my thinking on all of this was watching the movie Selma on the plane from Los Angeles to Washington, DC just this past Wednesday. The movie was stirring and moved me to tears, but I couldn't help but think to myself that, even though it was a stunning achievement to mobilize all of those people to walk across the bridge in Selma and to also get the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, when I look back at that moment from our current vantage point, I feel as if I glance across a wasteland of black lives that have never, ever mattered *enough* to us, and who have been ground down through poverty, violence, racism, and the like. Because legal acts don't guarantee the sorts of prosperity (of mind, soul, and body) that enable real freedom (the ontological status) such that one could exercise one's freedom as a practice that contributed to one's well-being and flourishing. I know that sounds tautological, but it's the only way I know how to express this idea at present -- that what we need to work on now, if we really care about "academic freedom," is not just ensuring or extending tenure for more persons (although of course that is important), but also working, in Foucault's words again, to track down and extirpate "all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives." In my own experience, I have seen the university serve as a fertile ground for this sort of everyday tyrannical bitterness. Do you know why? Because it's populated by humans. We aren't always the nicest or even the bravest species on the planet, but because we chose to work in this place called a university, we have to try harder, and our only motto should be "we think in here." And we shouldn't have to justify that to anyone. But we sure as hell need to work hard to secure the necessary resources (both material and somatic-psychic) for such an institution, and the persons within it, to be safe from harm.

There is much more to say on the subject and this is only a preamble for the talk I will give tomorrow, after which I'll return here to post the text of the whole talk and offer more reflections. And if you're in Boston, I hope you'll drop in and help me think through all of this.


Monday, April 20, 2015

Fractal Prioress

by KARL STEEL

It's a disappointment if any given semester of teaching the Canterbury Tales again doesn't help me develop what feels like a new interpretation. Some samples from past years: Walter talks like a philosopher, but Griselda acts like one, and suffers like one too (borrowed from its development by one of my former students, Rachel Merenda); Dorigen weaponizes the concept of honor to effect her own salvation, thus avoiding the fate of the less imaginative Virginia (note how she humiliates Aurelius in the busiest street!); the horse in the Friar's Tale is the very image of the irresolvability of the problem of intention, responsibility, and agency; and so on (?).

Here's today's idea.

I seye, that in a wardrobe they him threwe,
Wheras thise Jewes purgen hir entraille.
O cursed folk of Herodes al newe,
What youre ivel entente yow availle?
Mordre wol out, certein, it wol nat faille,
And namely ther th'onour of God shal sprede;
The blood out cryeth on youre cursed dede. (Prioress's Tale VII.571-78, Mann ed.)

I was struck today by the al newe: here's the past event, done again, so that it's never past. The Jews do what they do because they have to, and they always have; the Christians, likewise ever young or old in their youth, also do what they do because they have to, as they always have; this is always the first murder (“the voice of thy brother' s blood crieth to me from the earth”), which never stops being committed. As my student presenter observed today, and as you have no doubt observed too, the widow is an analog of the Virgin Mary, the boy an analog of Christ, and the Jews, well, the Jews: the crucifixion is happening all over again.

But there's a couple other repetitions. There's the final stanza of course, which begins like so:

O yonge Hugh of Lincoln, slain also
With cursed Jewes, as it is notable,
For it is but a litel while ago (VII.684-86).

As we know, Little Hugh of Lincoln died in 1255, some 130-140 years prior to Chaucer writing this tale. It's not a “litel while ago,” unless, that is, everything is always new, always fresh, always circling around with no point of escape.

There's yet another repetition, however, one that I think may have escaped notice by the poem's commentators to date. Maybe not! Here's what I'm noticing:

  1. Boy sings the Alma Redemptoris, 641 and 655
  2. Boy is killed, again, when the grain is taken out of his mouth
  3. Abbot and community falls on the ground “and still he lay, as he had been ybounde” (676), which we all know recalls the earlier binding of the Jews (“and after that the Jewes leet he binde” (620) [edit: see Adrienne W. Boyarin here for more!]
  4. And then there's a procession (“and after that they rise, and forth been went, / And toke awey this martyr from his beere” (679-80), which might recall the earlier procession on the hunt for the singing corpseboy (“The Cristen folk that thurgh the strete wente / In coomen for to wondre upon this thing” (614-15).

Singing, killing, binding, procession, and at the heart of it a “sely” boy wise beyond his years but young as well. Somewhere in this, we might even put the boy's double burial, in a latrine, and then “in a tombe of marbilstones cleere” (680).


Now, in a Christian exegetical context, these echoes might just be understood as anagogic repetition: the supersession of the cursed Jews by the blessed Christians. But in the context of a circle of violence, suffering, and ongoing newness, we can understand VII.641-680 as a miniaturized version of the tale as a whole, a miniature that's repeated again in shorter former in the final stanza on Hugh of Lincoln. This fractal repetition recalls the Mass itself, which repeats everywhere and always the incarnation and crucifixion; and it also anticipates the structure of Thopas, whose structure of diminishing returns (18 stanzas, 9 stanzas, 4 ½ stanzas) might itself be understood as a kind of fractal repetition.

In the Prioress's Tale, ever young, but also ever old, stuck in the same loop, we have a picture of the liturgy and the liturgical year (maybe?), and also, especially, a picture of a cycle of violence that can't end until the Prioress and her community give up on the memory of sacrifice, suffering, and redemption.


How's that? Who else has done this?
(for earlier Chaucer posts here by me: here (Prioress), here (Physician), here (Nun's Priest), here (Friar), here (Man of Law), here (Wife of Bath's Tale), here (manuscripts), and here (Prioress)) (and still more: Prioress, Prioress, and Prioress)

Saturday, April 18, 2015

Making Race Matter in the Middle Ages

by EILEEN JOY

... the study of the European Middle Ages has denied blacks the right to a shared medieval past that would, in turn, authorize them to share the present that emerges from it. In other words, denying blacks medieval coevalness allows Euro-centric cultures to relegate modern blacks to a strictly modern status in which their history appears to be without the authorizing length and depth available to whites. The denial of medieval coevalness encourages students to ask, ‘Where were the black people in the Middle Ages?’ in a tone that suggests they are not entirely certain whether black people existed at all.

~Cord J. Whitaker, "Race-ing the dragon: the Middle Ages, race and trippin’ into the future"

Race exceeds race. A sedimented history: many particles swirling around; particles settling down. Making race matter shows us how race matters. And we realize how making race matter becomes intrinsic to a project of queering space as well as time.

~Sara Ahmed, "Race as sedimented history"

This week marks the publication of the first issue of postmedieval's 6th volume --


-- edited by Cord Whitaker, and featuring essays by Sara Ahmed, Dennis Austin Britton, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen + Karl Steel, Jamie Friedman, Asa Simon Mittman, Randy Schiff, Robert Sturges, and Michelle Warren. Some very important work has been done on race in medieval studies, especially in the 14 years since the 2001 special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies titled "Race and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages," edited by Thomas Hahn, and yet, as Cord asks us in his Introduction to this issue, the question for us now is not whether or not the Middle Ages have been "raced" in our studies, bit more pointedly,
exactly how are they raced? Not whether, but how is medieval race-thinking different from modern racism? How does it contribute to the formation of modern racism? What can we decipher of the intellectual, cultural, psychological and even emotional dynamics that give rise to race-thinking in the Middle Ages? In short, how does medieval race work from the inside out?
These questions are important if we want "to approach race in the Middle Ages not as possible but as certain," which means, in Cord's view, "to resist the temporal hierarchy that posits the medieval as ineffably other, and to resist the related racial hierarchy that posits some groups of people -- marked out by religion, culture, phenotype, geography -- as primitive, behind the times, ‘medieval,’ while others living concurrently are considered modern." Ultimately, the issue as a whole "destabilizes modernity’s claims to its distinction and independence from the Middle Ages; it destabilizes whiteness’s claim to normativity," and it "forces open ‘the margin of hope against every power play that demands order,’ especially racial hierarchy, especially modernity." In addition to Cord's Introduction, "Race-ing the dragon: the Middle Ages, race and trippin’ into the future," the issue includes the following contents:
ARTICLES
Race, sex, slavery: reading Fanon with Aucassin et Nicolette
Robert S Sturges
On firm Carthaginian ground: ethnic boundary fluidity and Chaucer’s Dido
Randy P Schiff
Are the ‘monstrous races’ races?
Asa Simon Mittman
Making whiteness matter: The King of Tars
Jamie Friedman
From the Knight’s Tale to The Two Noble Kinsmen: Rethinking race, class and whiteness in romance
Dennis Austin Britton
‘The last syllable of modernity’: Chaucer in the Caribbean
Michelle R Warren

RESPONSE ESSAY
Race as sedimented history
Sara Ahmed
BOOK REVIEW ESSAY
Race, travel, time, heritage
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Karl Steel
CONGRATS to Cord and his contributors for such a brilliant issue, and for helping to ensure that our work on race in the Middle Ages never neglects something that Jeffrey and Karl point to, importantly, in the conclusion to their book review essay -- namely, that,
There is no innocent apprehension of the body, nor, thankfully, any way to reduce the body simply to life itself, though of course many have tried. No merely scientific understanding of race exists, nor an anterior time that will save us from its difficult histories. The obligation therefore endures to continue thinking with race, and to think continuously against race. To forget this fact is to remain without hope of change.

Friday, April 10, 2015

Changes Are Underway at postmedieval


by EILEEN JOY

As mentioned in a previous post, changes are underway at postmedieval (now entering its sixth year of publication, and with exciting special issues forthcoming this year on Race, Medieval Poetry and Contemporary Poetics -- can you imagine translating Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons backwards into Old English? Well, get ready . . . , -- Latin American Gothic, and New Critical/Liberal Arts), and beginning with Volume 7 (2016), as reported previously, Julie Orlemanski will be replacing Holly Crocker as Book Reviews and FORUM Editor, and Molly Lewis (PhD student in medieval and early modern studies at George Washington University) is our new Editorial Assistant. We issued a Call for a third editor to work alongside Myra and I, and we want to thank everyone who put in a bid for the position. It was while sorting through these very creative proposals that we were also serendipitously led to create yet another position, Editor for Digital Initiatives (EDI), about which we are very excited, especially as we very much want to continue creating new and vibrant models and platforms for knowledge creation and dissemination, hopefully helping to shape the future(s) of academic publishing in ways that are conducive toward a more rowdily democratic, open, and more globally networked medieval studies. We think this sort of editorial position is unique for an academic humanities journal to create and we're pretty excited about it.

In short, Lara Farina (West Virginia University), who has been both a contributor to postmedieval (Cognitive Alterities/Neuromedievalism issue) as well as one of its guest editors (The Intimate Senses issue), and a longtime BABEL co-conspirator (see, for example, her essay, "Sticking Together," in Burn After Reading), will be joining Myra and I as Co-Editor, about which we are pretty stoked since we have also long admired Lara's smart and stylishly creative scholarship on erotic/embodied reading practices, queer sexuality, and medieval sensation (especially touch). Also joining us will be Daniel Powell (Marie Skłowdowska-Curie Fellow in the Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network, King's College London and a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Victoria) will be joining us as Editor for Digital Initiatives. Daniel will work closely with Julie on further developing our FORUM, our semi-annual open-access web platform for public, open, and (hopefully) spirited conversations and debate relative to the content published in postmedieval and to pressing issues and questions circulating in medieval and early modern studies, and the humanities, more broadly. But this is just one piece of the EDI position. More specifically, with Daniel's guidance, we've described the EDI's job this way --

The EDI is meant to challenge received orthodoxies of scholarly knowledge production and scholarly communications. In this we are inspired by ongoing developments in the digital humanities, new media publications, Open Access, the maker movement, and information visualisation. The EDI will have three primary areas of responsibility and initiative building:
  • postmedieval FORUM: Since 2011, postmedieval's FORUM has provided an open-access, online space for debates around, responses to, and explorations of pressing topics in medieval studies and the humanities more widely. Beginning in Fall 2015, the EDI will become co-editor and co-coordinator, with the Book Reviews Editor, of the FORUM, part of an ongoing commitment to a more responsive and reflexive publishing platform in the face of rapidly changing research landscapes.
  • Innovative Dissemination and Publication: Scholarship is, more than ever before, taking unexpected forms and reaching unanticipated audiences. Rather than retrench, postmedieval hopes to originate innovative models of creating, disseminating, and publishing high quality research, with an emphasis on experimentation as a critical component of the research process.
  • Peer Review and Social Knowledge Creation: In cooperation with MediaCommons and using CommentPress, postmedieval has undertaken three experiments in crowd review since 2011. While cognisant of the manifold difficulties inherent in crowdsourcing, open peer review, and networked collaborative scholarship, we believe it vital to continue pushing the boundaries of more processural forms of scholarship. 
Daniel will bring to this position his own research interests (which center on two disparate, but complementary periods, the early modern age of print, roughly 1476 – 1660, and the contemporary Information Age, roughly 1941-present, with a special focus on how cultural expression – stage, print, film, new media – is materially enacted using a variety of media, and how such media is preserved, accessed, and used within the academy), as well an an already impressive background within the Digital Humanities (you can see more about Daniel HERE).

Please join Myra and I in welcoming Lara, Daniel, Julie and Molly into the postmedieval fold, and in the meantime, get ready for this --


Cord Whitaker's issue of "Making Race Matter in the Middle Ages" will go LIVE next week, on April 14th!

Tuesday, April 07, 2015

Meat and Sympathy and the Uses of the Past

Meat stencil, near Jardin de Reuilly
by KARL STEEL

Very pleased to have attended the Shakespeare Association in Vancouver last weekend, where I was part of a pair of seminars on animals organized by Karen Raber and by Holly Dugan and me (for Jeffrey's 2012 report on the SAA, read here).

Key words from both sessions included the following:

Agency vs Mechanicity
Expertise vs the Purified World of the Modern Conference-Goer
Scale
The Individual vs Herds vs Swarms
(Un)Natural Histories
Gesture vs Logocentrism
Meat vs Sympathy

As nearly all of these overlap with my current work, I found myself at first unpleasantly suffused with jealousy: how dare these folks talk about worms, bees, swarms, automatic behavior, and all the other main threads of what’s finally moving towards becoming How Not to Make a Human? How dare these Shakespearians get in my business?

But it’s not my business: it’s a community, and what feels like turf-stealing is actually just the inevitable direction of the field and the coalescence of a community of readers. We’re all in this together.[1] And with that, my brain cleared, and I was able to listen with as much charity as this wretched soul could muster.

So: a longer treatment of one keyword cluster: MEAT vs SYMPATHY.

It’s often said that supermarket culture obscures the living origins of animals, shielding meat-eaters from the violence that feeds them. The shock of butchery is key to Sue Coe’s slaughterhouse art, for example, or in the grand reveal, not without sexual violence, of the cannibalistic butchery of female clones in Cloud Atlas (don’t really recommend clicking through). It’s thought that this should turn our stomachs, so that all that’s needed to undo animal exploitation is to force the return of what our antiseptic modernity covered.

The medievalist can observe, first, that it isn’t just the moderns who hid the shock of butchery. The relationship between the English words for animal (cow, pig, sheep) and the analogous French words for meat (beef, pork, mutton) has long been a favored classroom example of class ideology. But if class ideology at once aestheticizes and naturalizes labor relations, it also does the same thing to food relations. The Francophone nobility gets its meat, cooked and served, while its Anglophone inferiors do the dirty business with the livestock, with their bodies and the animal bodies all bodies at the rough mercy of a carnivorous elite accused, more or less metaphorically, of eating both.

The medievalist can also observe that butchery is also already hidden by the urban butchery legislation of the later Middle Ages. London, Avignon, Ferrara, and presumably others insisted that animals be slaughtered well out of sight, and that offal be sold separately and less visibly than flesh, encoding a distinction between guts and meat that continues in the division between extreme and normal meat-eating.

But this medievalist upswelling misses a key point, which is that this concealment of the supposed shock of slaughter was only the smallest part of the medieval (or early modern) meat-eating experience. Raber’s seminar observed that early moderns (like medievals) saw animals being driven to slaughter often; they saw horses beaten in the streets; they thronged to see bears baited; they thought that certain kinds of animals required baiting to be made palatable or delicious (eg, Cleanness, “My boles and my bores arn bayted and slayne” [55; my bulls and my boars are baited and slain]); and they wrote notorious recipes that began with “take a rooster and beat it to death” (called “barbaric” by some, but culinary and hence cultural by better thinkers). They saw all this, and ate as much meat as they could, even marking it as the most pleasurable food by forbidding it on fast days, which, at least for the late medieval Roman church, encompassed nearly a third of the year. Meat was fun! It was delicious! It was fun and delicious even though the passage from animal to killing to meat was, for most people, routine.

We therefore might say that the invisibility of meat production allows the meat industry to continue comfortably, just as the invisibility of labor props up our own crummy system, for whatever value of “system.” We can say all this while still observing that “visibility” is nonetheless not just a matter of seeing something or being near it.[2] As we observed in our seminar, we have an astonishing capacity to rationalize or normalize or ignore the misery that surrounds us and lets us be. Misery becomes its own justification.[3] Every document of civilization, which includes the document we call our selves, is also at once a document of barbarism. Or of culinary techniques. We have to imagine that the apparent willingness of livestock to be driven to slaughter became its own argument for slaughter. Why would they go so willingly if they didn’t deserve to be eaten?

One last point: the notion that the medievals – or the early moderns, for that matter – were somehow more in touch with (animal) things and therefore ate meat more honestly upholds a notion that the real came first and then culture followed, with a gradual diminution of honesty and truth over time, until we get our antiseptic present. This nostalgia for the origin, this belief in the truth of first things, can and has been traced from Plato and his Ideal Forms to postapocalyptic lit (with its survivalist belief in the final return to the truth of nature). This nostalgia also encodes the break between past and the modern, even if, in the case of meat, it locates the break between a combined medieval/early modern animal practice and an industrialized (and presumably dishonest) slaughter that arrives only centuries later.

Regardless of where the origin is thought to be, the idea that people have a primary connection to animals as a whole (say, as children), that socialization as such is the culprit, that subrational “lived experience” is distinct from cultural practice, that getting before culture is somehow going to save us and others, and so on, belongs to the precritical fantasy of origins and the fantasy of the superiority of an imagined direct contact.[4] I’ll counter this all by saying that one advantage of speculative realism is that it aestheticizes everything: objects are not more natural than culture. More importantly, though, I'll say that sympathy requires work. It requires training. It requires cultivation. It requires what we can do as academics, even! And the past is not an answer to our lack of sympathy but rather just one resource for us, here in 2015, to try to do the work of making things better.




[1] (one must presume, with an inevitable thanatopolitical community-cleansing a la Roberto Esposito, although the possibilities for biopolitical management in a SAA seminar is admittedly rather limited)
[2] Putting aside for now the inevitable problems with all sensory metaphors.
[3] Many atheists, for example, haven’t yet abandoned theodicy, with the market now playing God’s old role of sense-maker
[4] Straw man? Maybe!