tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post3144177651273417577..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Medieval Inhuman Art: Geoffrey of Monmouth and Marie de FranceCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-47151053087203992182008-11-06T12:56:00.000-05:002008-11-06T12:56:00.000-05:00Karl: not really a response so much as a bibliogra...Karl: not really a response so much as a bibliography, I guess.<BR/><BR/>Thomas Nagel's "What is it Like to be a Bat?" in the <I>Philosophical Review</I> (forget the issue and year) and David Barash's recent essay in <I>The Chronicle</I> (http://tinyurl.com/6rrkjw) both speak to your post in different ways. And both are good reads.prehenselhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04801371989123252511noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-50173340071491341322008-11-06T09:54:00.000-05:002008-11-06T09:54:00.000-05:00I suppose I accept the (partial) inhumanity of lan...I suppose I accept the (partial) inhumanity of language, ships, and especially of ships that take us inexorably away from ourselves. I accept this <I>at least</I> if I accept that whatever surprises us with a life of its own--and when a object, or especially an artifact, becomes <I>art</I> it springs to (its own) life--is at once inhuman and, if you will forgive me, in human.<BR/><BR/>This is just a fancy way of saying that the aesthetic response happens in between us and a something else that is, in that response, becomes (known as a) someone else. Experienced is perhaps a better word than known here. The response is traffic between what we already know to be in us and that which is inherent to the artifact. This is its inhuman life, immortal perhaps, perhaps waiting to surprise others in the same way, perhaps in ways we could never comprehend. It is its own life, after all.<BR/><BR/>I'm drawn to these thoughts less by the inhumanity of language in Lacan (or various other models in which our lives take form by being poured into various ominous structures) by Prehensel's nice Frankenstein analogy than I am by my recent reading of Julian Yates. "Inhumanity," whether in Lacan (et al.) or Shelley, is all too often thought to be a scary thing. Yet we are always already inhuman, not just because of the impossibility of arriving at a human identity (see me, ad nauseam), but also because of the networks, assemblages, what have you, of heterogeneous time, place, living and quasi-living things by which we are our always shifting ourselves. It's not scary, not ominous. This is an exhilarating (and I'm tempted to say, with Ignoge, exilerating) inhumanity. <BR/><BR/>Many of us will see tomorrow just what Yates can do with an inhuman object, so I'll just offer a few key moments from his "Accidental Shakespeare," <I>Shakespeare Studies,</I> 34 (2006): 90-122. <BR/><BR/>Here's what he says he's up against:<BR/><BR/>"Our rhetoric of description demands that we take the human as a founding category and requirement for intelligibility. We craft our histories accordingly, subordinating the lives of the nonhuman actors in our midst to chronologies we derive from human institutions (political and religious) or the genealogies of our practices (sexuality, discipline)."<BR/><BR/>But inspired--so far as I can determine, above all--by Bruno Latour, Michael Serres, and Isabelle Stengers, he wonders about oranges (among other things, but primarily oranges) and asks:<BR/><BR/>"What do oranges make of us? Can I inhabit the perspective of an item of use, and travel the world and the archive as orange, by becoming "orange"? If we (persons and oranges) are engaged in a "common becoming," what does that do to the stories we tell to legitimate or excavate our present?" <BR/><BR/>"The question of what it is an orange or oranges might "want" functions instead as the limit to what I can say--a question that should precisely not be answered but retained as an empty set that taxes our acts of making and feats of description to remind us that we are actively constituting a world by and in our writing of "oranges." One day that set may be filled--oranges may already be asking for things, but in a language I do not yet comprehend--and when that set is filled, our discourses, the conditions of production of knowledge about what we call the world will be irrevocably changed."<BR/><BR/>We might even ask, to really dislodge the (old) human, what it means to think from the perspective of our own intestinal fauna, the lifeworlds within what we too often, too obstinately, continue to think of as our own life.medievalkarlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12440542200843836794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-29958177266204721642008-11-04T11:03:00.000-05:002008-11-04T11:03:00.000-05:00Jeffrey: I'm happy to follow you down the road wit...Jeffrey: I'm happy to follow you down the road with Roger Caillois and to accept that art is not necessarily human, although it certainly plays a central role in human culture. But I've never bought Lacan's take on language or even on his Imaginary and Symbolic realms. Language is not inhuman, although the various processes of, maybe, being indoctrinated/dragged into a symbolic realm that you did not invent can certainly be [inhumanly] violent. So, language can perform inhuman operations, but it is not, in and of itself, inhuman, at least, I don't think so. Is it just me, or isn't that obvious? This makes my head hurt sometimes. But I will admit that I don't buy into Lacan's idea on this . . . at *all*.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-26976669648769747992008-11-04T10:20:00.000-05:002008-11-04T10:20:00.000-05:00That was excellent Prehensel: neither trite nor po...That was excellent Prehensel: neither trite nor poorly-thought-out! For Lacan language is inhuman, even monstrous: it catches up the subject and renders him/her wholly self-alienated.<BR/><BR/>My favorite essay on language and the inhuman is David C Clark, on the difficult but wonderful Canadian poet bp Nichol: "Monstrosity, Illegibility, Denegation" in Monster Theory, ed. yours truly. It's a great piece (with lines like "defacing or marking the text precisely by unmasking its readability as a humane figure imposed upon a monstrously indifferent otherness"), the only problem being that the layout of the Nichols poem was totally screwed up in printing the volume.<BR/><BR/>Back to the ship of poetry. Eileen, unless you accompany me down the road that Roger Caillois (a writer indifferent to literature) has mapped, you will never believe me that the ship is inhuman (transport fashioned of human hands though it seems, I am arguing that it isn't actually a human movement machine, but the irruption into literature of what would in a rock be a city, a vision of the underworld ...). That is, Caillois' thesis of nature's "innate" or "objective" lyricism means that any art or beauty (he uses the words interchangeably) is not a human projection onto some indifferent canvas, but a mutual participation ... or better yet: a poem that leaves you reeling and the efflorescence of vivid color on a dark sea floor are two versions of the same inhuman thing. Humans did not invent art, but found art within them, like a grey geode might disclose tendrils of purple calcite. What Caillois argues -- and what I agree with -- is that just because we humans found a way to put art into language, that doesn't mean that either the language or the art are the things that make us unique or human.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-34351990372680168582008-11-03T23:54:00.000-05:002008-11-03T23:54:00.000-05:00Dan and Eileen: I noticed that formulation, the la...Dan and Eileen: I noticed that formulation, the language is not human. I'll admit that on first blush I didn't buy it, but then I was thinking about Lacan. If we <I>enter into language</I> then language is indeed separate from the human. <BR/><BR/>Maybe it's separate in the same way Frankenstein's monster is separate from human. It was created by humans, it is certainly composed of human material, but cannot be called "human" in any meaningful way.<BR/><BR/>I mean, if we do enter into language--in whatever way we imagine that happening--then it seems that language would be different.<BR/><BR/>That is probably a trite and poorly-thought-out response. Dan, can you do me one better? Please?prehenselhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04801371989123252511noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-21535512612759957192008-11-03T18:57:00.000-05:002008-11-03T18:57:00.000-05:00But if poetry isn't human, then maybe *access* to ...But if poetry isn't human, then maybe *access* to it is? And this reminds me of something that Dan says over and over again, here and elsewhere, that I don't think I really believe: that language is inhuman. I would love for Dan to expound upon that more.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-54629923820494239722008-11-03T18:50:00.000-05:002008-11-03T18:50:00.000-05:00Ok, I was commenting on Dan's comments and then al...Ok, I was commenting on Dan's comments and then along comes Eileen and opens the conversation even more. I have a kid to put to bed soon, but want to say two things quickly, as placemarkers to return to later: the conflation of art/beauty/the sublime isn't mine but a commonplace of Elaine Scarry derived aesthetic theory. It needs to be thought more deeply but I am not sure I can do that in this essay.<BR/><BR/>The inuhumanness of the boat for me derives from the version of it I know from the Grail legends, where (and this resonates so well with what Dan has written) its transports are to a linguistic/symbolic realm that leaves the human (and especially the humane) so far behind: think of Lancelot's exclusion from the presence of that vessel. I guess Iw as suggesting that poetry itself is not human ... but need to do something more with that shipJeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-21549359959681973972008-11-03T18:44:00.000-05:002008-11-03T18:44:00.000-05:00or me, good poetry is something that has a certain...<EM>or me, good poetry is something that has a certain effect on the language itself--on language itself. Among its many functions, are to open the language, disrupting what has fallen into 'idle talk' (a la Heidegger) such that we might imagine alternatives. So, poetry should be crashing always up against its relation to language.</EM><BR/><BR/>I love what you wrote Dan and do not find it a tirade at all. That passage I reproduce above is now on one of my virtual sticky notes to keep in mind as a possible poetic manifesto.<BR/><BR/>I'd also add that what you wrote about Heaney's poetics also explains his incomprehension of Grendel and his mother.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-7662480220625589702008-11-03T18:40:00.000-05:002008-11-03T18:40:00.000-05:00Jeffrey, Karl, and Dan: I am coming very late to t...Jeffrey, Karl, and Dan: I am coming very late to this thread, but since this all intersects with my own trying to work out an historical poethics, I had some thoughts and comments I wanted to share here, and no response is necessary [at this time, *here*, maybe some*where* else, in the future]; this is just food for thought and maybe for Jeffrey as he revises this essay:<BR/><BR/>1. Jeffrey, you invoke the sublime toward the beginning of this excerpt, especially in relation to the ways in which the sublime might "broach" a "possibly infinite series of worldings"--how do you define the sublime more particularly? I ask because I realized, after reading this, that the one term that runs throughout this piece yet is never mentioned or overtly discussed is *beauty*, so I wondered to: what has beauty to do with any of this? And yes, I know that's awfully tricky, and yet, your piece is all about beauty, even raving [historically] useless beauty, on some level.<BR/><BR/>2. I love what you do with Geoffrey's narration of Ignoge's weeping and then falling asleep--even before you got to the ways in which this opens up a "circuit of identification" between character and reader [bypassing Geoffrey, in a sense, or perhaps his "program"], I was thinking something like "affective synapse"--it creates a kind of "jump" between scene and reader that allows for multiple counter-narratives and even *affections*, but if this circuit/synapse, as you write, is difficult "to close or to forge," that left me wondering: what questions/feelings/desires are left hanging here?<BR/><BR/>3. Is this really an "eruption of art" that occurs in the Ignoge episode [for, after all, the entire work is art, regardless of Geoffrey's or anyone else's protests to the contrary], or rather, is it an epi-phenomenon?<BR/><BR/>4. In relation to your question, Jeffrey, within your analysis of Marie de France's "Guigemar,"<BR/><BR/>"Could lyricism take a less human, more beautiful form than that vessel gliding across the world’s seas, enlarging the world with every wave its prow traverses?"<BR/><BR/>Isn't a ship made by humans, though, for human transport? I thought, too, of the ship that steered itself in Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale" and therefore had no human oarsmen, so to speak, and yet it exists to carry humans from history to fantasy and back to history again. A ship is thoroughly human, isn't it?<BR/><BR/>5. I loved the way that images of blood linked so many of your narrative moments here, but it got me thinking, too, about what blood, maybe, represents, in relation to the human and inhuman. A rainstorm of blood seems both inhuman/magical and human/or at least biologically animate at the same time. Is it a kind of vitalism, albeit removed from the body [*any* body]? Can it become pure art, once it is removed from its bodily containers and takes on other forms [rain], yet how is always, somehow, sacrificial and therefore, always human?<BR/><BR/>6. I love the idea, raised by Dan and then later elaborated upon by Jeffrey, of poetry as a kind of alternate history/worlding and/or "intensification" of history that is nevertheless, in my mind, still always human. Dan wrote, quite provocatively,<BR/><BR/>"Might there be a difference between history and historicism, and something like historicity? That might allow us to think of a thing which escapes the economies of historicism, offers us those impossible hopes and wonders. Here, these wonders would never lose their historicity. They would always happen, in some sense, a relative sort of sense, in 'a' time. Any Being caught in the affective gravity of such a density would still be always dying. But with the hope of wonder--even if this is only a hope before (as I always want to channel Kermode) the door of disappointment if finally shut on us."<BR/><BR/>This seems to me to be the critical question we should be asking ourselves, over and over again. This will also means asking the question, as Michael Moore posed it in a recent letter to me, whether or not culture can even be understood: "what is it, does it offer access to any truth, does it incorporate some transcendental moment or phase?" Further, can we "understand the 'historicity of events' by reference to the 'possibility of history' (J. Taubes)"? We may cringe at terms like "transcendence" and "spirituality," and prefer instead something like "the eruption of art" or "aninormality" or "de-[human]subjectivization," but what is this whole excerpt by Jeffrey, as well as Dan's comments about "temporal/affective gravity," aiming at if not some kind of, in Jeffrey's own term, *ecstasy*?Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-22598710735238046262008-10-31T02:28:00.000-04:002008-10-31T02:28:00.000-04:00Dan: Here's an incredibly short, inadequate respon...Dan: Here's an incredibly short, inadequate response. I wish Pound had turned his attentions to <I>Beowulf</I>. He hit the Seafarer and the Wanderer (I think), but I would have loved to see how he would have made <I>Beowulf</I> new.prehenselhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04801371989123252511noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-6270088813268307632008-10-30T23:31:00.000-04:002008-10-30T23:31:00.000-04:00"I know its odd for an OE-ish person to be hostile..."I know its odd for an OE-ish person to be hostile to Heaney, but no matter how much I sometimes enjoy his verse, I am DEEPLY troubled by its formal implications" ?<BR/><BR/>Written by me, above. I am loath to start this for two reasons. 1. I know I am going to end up on a tirade. I just know it. Poetics get me excited. I will try very hard to not say anything too hastily. 2. I want so badly to like Heaney's work. <BR/><BR/>So first of all, I need to make clear that as a poet I owe a certain debt to Heaney, who, for me, at a particular time, provided me with a model for really sharp work on the level of the sound of words, and the importance of their etymology. Additionally, poems like "Station Island," are important to me for their engagement with the problems of growing up in a 'sacred wood' and actually wanting to live 'in the upkeep of ghosts.'--and specifically for addressing Joyce as it does, following the faux terza-rima of eliot following the real terza-rima of dante, so appropriate for writing poems in the upkeep with ghosts. Additionally, he made Beowulf a best-seller. And dang, that's pretty fantastic. And yet. <BR/><BR/>I see, in the same (Station island) poem, a kind of irresponsibility in wanting the poem to be something which can transcend all that. Part of this problem emerges, I think, in (despite his deftness for etymology and sound), a problematic relation to language and the subject which seems to me one that simply ignores what has happened in the last 50 years with respect to how we might think about the subject in language, the subject of language, et al. For me, Heaney sees language as something a subject can still wield as a transparent, integrated, sovereign whole. And that subject wields this language in order to produce 'a good poem.' But why do we write poems? The following is taken from Verse Magazines Blog: <I><BR/><BR/>Slate's poetry editor Robert Pinsky responds to reader questions (the kinds of questions he must be insanely tired of answering as three-term Poet Laureate) with poems. Except for one response, which is also our favorite:<BR/><BR/>9. Well, I like poetry that is amusing, that maybe makes me chuckle a little. I'd rather read something reassuring and light than something complicated or gloomy. Is that bad? Does that mean I am a jerk?<BR/><BR/>Yes. [verse's editors respond]<BR/><BR/></I><BR/><BR/>This is a little crass, perhaps, but what underlies it is a symptom of a deep problem of america's poetry workshops: the idea that the goal is to somehow write 'good poems.' Well, what the hell is a good poem? Or better, not what is it, but what does it do? Dickinson famously felt it should take the top of your head off. Most contemporary English-language poetry seems to make an appeal to a fiction of an 'I' which can speak transparently in its plenitude, standing up to be counted among the denizens of identity politics. Such work is an attempt at expression dependent on a) the correspondence theory of truth b) a positing of the individual which, pretending that language and the social forces embedded therein do not also shape and compromise the individual, does the individual a dire dis-service (I am thinking right here of Adorno mostly). <BR/><BR/>And so, I am getting to the part about Old English and Heaney and his popularity. I have some good friends who are grad students and professors and non-academics that love the Heaney Beowulf. They usually love it because its just 'good verse' and it got people to read Beowulf. For me, good poetry is something that has a certain effect on the language itself--on language itself. Among its many functions, are to open the language, disrupting what has fallen into 'idle talk' (a la Heidegger) such that we might imagine alternatives. So, poetry should be crashing always up against its relation to language. So when Heaney introduces his translation with the claim of desiring his verse to be like that of what he perceived the OE to be, being "attractively direct," I am suspicious. What does he sacrifice to achieve "directness of utterance" as it puts it? He claims that this directness is placed in opposition to fidelity to alliteration and sound/literalness which would result in an unnatural sound in modern english. He prefers a "natural" sound and desires to avoid the production of an "artificial shape." Such an opposition betrays a basic belief in language and his speakers as potentially natural. it cannot see language as a technology which affect and effects peoples and histories. It buys into a nature/technology divide which certain of us medievalists are certainly suspect of in our own CRITICAL work, but seem to give a pass to in something simply because it is "poetic." Paul Bové, in his book <I> Destructive Poetics </I> (Columbia UP, 1980), following Heidegger sees all language as potentially historical, making poetic language open to the same critique as critical languages, but also opening up poetics language to the same functions as criticism and theory. What I see in Heaney's approach (his famous essay on contemporary composition anthologized in the Norton Contemporary is called 'feeling into words' which is basically a recipe for self-expression) is a very troubling attempt at producing a kind an aesthetics that are impoverished because their lack of troubled relationship to language results in a lack of historicity, and a lack of ethical concern for history. <BR/><BR/>What Heaney misses in thinking that a good poem in another language should sound 'natural' like a poem in our own, is the possiblity that what is need from a good poem now in any language is exactly what disarticulates this natural/artificial divide, [putting the <I>technologies</I> of translation in a particularly good place to help out!] as an effect within the language itself (this is the possibility Benjamin envisions when he speaks of the function of translation to determine first the effect of the original work on its language). <BR/><BR/>What Heaney misses is the possibility of a message from the past, in the form of traces of OE effecting Modern English and making it awkward, rescuing it from idle talk and giving it a capacity for historicity.<BR/><BR/>So many things bug me about the prizing of Heaney, by Norton and others (some in the field I respect so very very much and am friends with also). Among them is this. That we who are SO SO radical in our thought and politics, in our work, our attempts to Be together are critics, and think the past in the present and the present in the past, to engage with language across time, to mourn the dead, to love queernesses--that the poets we all too often prize that write in the present, are not the ones who, if we actually examine the political implications of their language rigorously, are entirely cool with the rest of how we operate. As a poet writing today, this seems like a large problematic blind spot, especially as we call more and more often (me included) for work in history and criticism and theory which is 'poetic' or, in fact, 'poetry.' If we are forming coalitions with poets still writing--and we should be--why are we not looking for more radical work?dan remeinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-87213940443307764982008-10-29T14:36:00.000-04:002008-10-29T14:36:00.000-04:00Jeffrey: yes. And by tomorrow night, I promise t...Jeffrey: yes. And by tomorrow night, I promise that I will. For today, there is too much Piers Plowman in my life to do so. And, if I'm ever laureate of anything...well, I will surely let you know.dan remeinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-72244532227307305232008-10-29T12:31:00.000-04:002008-10-29T12:31:00.000-04:00OK, I my eyes are going to pop out from reading an...OK, I my eyes are going to pop out from reading and rereading both my essay and these excellent comments ... but poet laureate Remein I must ask: can you say a bit more about what you mean when you write "I know its odd for an OE-ish person to be hostile to Heaney, but no matter how much I sometimes enjoy his verse, I am DEEPLY troubled by its formal implications" ?Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-69053356994726122672008-10-29T09:53:00.000-04:002008-10-29T09:53:00.000-04:00PS to Karl, cybertheory on possible worlds and phe...PS to Karl, cybertheory on possible worlds and phenomena like Second Life were behind my description of GofM's achievement as the establishing of a consensual world, as you gleaned.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-30918877066730073122008-10-29T09:16:00.000-04:002008-10-29T09:16:00.000-04:00Thank you Karl and Dan for this very helpful comme...Thank you Karl and Dan for this very helpful commentary. I've just posted a slightly related line of thought <A HREF="http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2008/10/two-pieces-on-spirituality-and-art-from.html" REL="nofollow">here</A>.<BR/><BR/>The cautions are very useful Karl: you know what it is like when deep in writing; sometimes you (or at least I) forget the things you know as you try to make your point. That binary of sodomy/heterosexuality has more to do with Thorpe's translation of Geoffrey than with the Latin or with the cultural moment. Thanks also for the song lyrics, and the pointing out of the aesthetic straw man, which is in fact not an especially well stuffed straw man at that. And here is a problem with the essay throughout: historicism is itself set up in straw man like terms. Dan was getting at this as well.<BR/><BR/>On the one hand I am trying to make the point that historicism endures in medieval studies because it is rigorous yet adaptive and flexible. It is an excellent mode of reading texts with context. But I also want to argue that temporality is more complicated than historicism typically allows, since historicism tends to be synchronic and moment-focused. Not always of course -- look at Strohm on the "temporal archive" -- but <EM>typically</EM>. Sometimes that moment is fully in the past; sometimes it is a later moment as determinant of the truth of a past; almost always readings proceed via careful documentation of context.<BR/><BR/>This seems to me a fundamentally human way of reading: meaning the world is as large as the human ambit allows, but no larger.<BR/><BR/>But what about if we allow inhuman temporal spans that do not necessarily negate the possibility of communication across eons? What if we posit a temporality that also allows communication across the boundary of the human? This potentially inhuman (or at least potentially nonanthropocentric) mode is something more than historicism can attain. It allows finitude, probably; but it also allows that we can never know where to draw the line that would enable finitude's limits. I've often quoted Gil Harris's phrase "temporal promiscuity." Can two vastly separate temporalities nonetheless queerly cohabitate? I love Dan's formulation: "a point of high density, the objects are of such a temporal/affective gravity, that they implode on themselves, folding/looping/worming time and space." YES. I'm not sure historicism can move us to that density, but I'm pretty sure that art can. Not as an escape from history (that'd be like an escape from body, or from air, or from any other precondition of existence), but as an intensification of history, its enfolding to make what otherwise might be estranged intimately touch.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-12258844930324027242008-10-27T21:15:00.000-04:002008-10-27T21:15:00.000-04:00Jeffrey, this is a beautiful essay. I love it. R...Jeffrey, this is a beautiful essay. I love it. Really. Great for me as a poet and as a critic, and as the one for whom being one of those means being the other. And my sense of either task involves a need to give ones self over to something inhuman, non-human, (like language), to attend to the world in such a way to mark off what a work of art might enclose/unconceal.<BR/> I hope to be back with more later--I printed this out and read it on the train this morning on the way to classes and don't have a ton of time tonight--but I am interested in the play in this whole essay (all three parts) between escaping history as a thing which seems to happen and then other times as a thing which is impossible. Art as inhuman works for me within the play of this as an impossible thing. But, very generally, why _want_ to escape history? Why not, in Marie, objects which acquire such a density not of signification, but of worldliness. Then perhaps we don't leave history, but rather, like a point of high density, the objects are of such a temporal/affective gravity, that they implode on themselves, folding/looping/worming time and space? I am adverse to the possibility imagining escapes from finititude at certain costs, and I think you are attending to this in the essay--so I'm interested in how this might further work? After all, in this way art is actively doing something to World and Worlds, and not just acting out some mimetic mirror-trick. <BR/><BR/>Might there be a difference between history and historicism, and something like historicity? That might allow us to think of a thing which escapes the economies of historicism, offers us those impossible hopes and wonders. Here, these wonders would never lose their historicity. They would always happen, in some sense, a relative sort of sense, in 'a' time. Any Being caught in the affective gravity of such a density would still be always dying. But with the hope of wonder--even if this is only a hope before (as I always want to channel Kermode) the door of disappointment if finally shut on us. <BR/><BR/>So, I feel like I am really on board with this project--does what I've said betray that really I'm missing something really big about it? <BR/><BR/>I mean--I think this essay is additionally a nice antidote to the problem of the lyric in contemporary poetry as well. American poets go on writing 'lyrics' long after things like the 'subject' and the 'I' of poetry have been contested, killed, resurrected, killed again, in theory and criticism, and many 'trained' poets don't realize how much the lyric doesn't function so simply as the self-presencing of a self-expressing speaker. This is the difference between poets I don't really think are so interesting anymore who reports narrative in well-crafted lineated verse that is--no matter how well crafted--still deeply caught up in a sense of 'art' which ignores the future and the past by supposing a rather transparent relationship to the human and a transcendance of time achieved by something so well-wrought (ie. Vendler and her cronies, Heaney and Jorie Graham et. al.--I know its odd for an OE-ish person to be hostile to Heaney, but no matter how much I sometimes enjoy his verse, I am DEEPLY troubled by its formal implications). And that is the other reason I worry about escaping from history too simply--we end up back at boring poems complicit with right wing politics and New Republic commentators [and just so I am not complaining without being productive, antidotes to this problem in contemporary amerc. poetry: Rosmarie and Kieth Waldrop, Ben Lerner, Graham Faust, Marjorie Welish, Cole Swenson, Michael Palmer, et. al.]. So, I love this essay, I love it. I wonder what we could connect to this in the contemporary--in terms of what this means for how we might write now--poets/critics and all in between. Marjorie Welish might be a good example, I was once told when I expressed my love for her work that what I loved was cold affectless cyborg poetry even though I found it full of affect, though perhaps still cyborgish.dan remeinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-31891563069564467752008-10-27T10:29:00.000-04:002008-10-27T10:29:00.000-04:00Much to enjoy here, Jeffrey, and much to comment o...Much to enjoy here, Jeffrey, and much to comment on. If you'll forgive me, my VERY disjointed comments....<BR/><BR/>On other writers 'filling up Geoffrey's world,' I wonder if scholarship on Second life would be fun and/or helpful?<BR/><BR/><I> but a world which nonetheless functions as if real, inviting other authors and scholars and fans to contribute their fictions masquerading as histories, their new characters, their enlargements of the consensual world’s inherent possibility</I><BR/>I'm just thinking of the reality effect as the unmotivated excess in a text, but I also think of it in, sorry, Heideggarian terms of being awakened to purposelessness, of the world not being for us. With these 2 approaches to reality in mind, I wonder if there's a third that your "function[ing] as if real" describes?<BR/><BR/>On "exuberant heterosexuality": just an obvious caution on this, since in the 12th c. 'heterosexuality' is not the counter to sodomy. Reproductive sex is, which is the sex that reaches out to the future (*cough,* but you know where this idea goes).<BR/><BR/><I> We understand why “as long as the shore lay there before her eyes, she would not turn her gaze” [Nec oculos a littore auertit dum littora oculis patuerunt, a nicely balanced bit of Latin lyricism, 8]. We comprehend why she weeps. If we are responsive to this uncharacteristically poignant effusion ebbing through the sangfroid of the text, her tears become ours as well. Geoffrey can give her weeping no answer, no conclusion: enervated by sadness, Ignoge falls asleep in her new husband’s arms.</I><BR/>I haven't checked this, but I wonder if equal parts checking in some Dronke and Ovid's <I>Heroides</I> would get us a good sense of the genre and/or schoolroom exercise Geoffrey is working in when he writes this. Not that this would obviate your reading, but it'd still be good to know.<BR/><BR/><I>Carolyn Abbate writes of the “unconquerable” voice of the women seemingly silenced by opera’s murderous narratives, arguing that “this undefeated voice speaks across the crushing plot.” Abbate observes that such a woman can be “undone by plot,” yet remain “triumphant in voice.”</I><BR/>My favorite example here is <A HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6kTmWYIAcw" REL="nofollow"><I>Tosca</I></A> (if you don't know the story, the bullets were supposed to be blanks: oops)<BR/><BR/>In re: <I>pluuia sanguinea</I><BR/>I would be betraying my love of rocknroll if I didn't quote a certain <A HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLjPQL8MXjo" REL="nofollow">Slayer</A> song:<BR/>Trapped in purgatory<BR/>A lifeless object, alive<BR/>Awaiting reprisal<BR/>Death will be their acquittance<BR/><BR/>The sky is turning red<BR/>Return to power draws near<BR/>Fall into me, the sky's crimson tears<BR/>Abolish the rules made of stone<BR/><BR/>Pierced from below, souls of my treacherous past<BR/>Betrayed by many, now ornaments dripping above<BR/><BR/>Awaiting the hour of reprisal<BR/>Your time slips away<BR/><BR/>Raining blood<BR/>From a lacerated sky<BR/>Bleeding its horror<BR/>Creating my structure<BR/>Now I shall reign in blood!<BR/>==<BR/>More to the point, I wonder if you could exploit the eschatological genre (which is, above all, an attempt to give shape to the future, even if the shapes are--necessarily?--monstrous) in which Geoffrey is working here.<BR/><BR/><I>aesthetic object so dense in its significations that it cannot be reduced to a single meaning</I><BR/>Sort of a strawman, I think, since what CAN be reduced to a single meaning?<BR/><BR/>On <I>Yonec</I>: nice stuff, and for more, see the discussion in <I>Claustrophilia</I> <BR/><BR/>==<BR/><BR/>Read something this morning that I think you and your project will love: <A HREF="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/gobekli-tepe.html?c=y&page=1" REL="nofollow">Gobekli Tepe,</A> an 11,000-year-old temple:<BR/><I> The abundant remnants of wild game indicate that the people who lived here had not yet domesticated animals or farmed.</I><BR/><BR/><I>But, Peters and Schmidt say, Gobekli Tepe's builders were on the verge of a major change in how they lived, thanks to an environment that held the raw materials for farming. "They had wild sheep, wild grains that could be domesticated—and the people with the potential to do it," Schmidt says. In fact, research at other sites in the region has shown that within 1,000 years of Gobekli Tepe's construction, settlers had corralled sheep, cattle and pigs. And, at a prehistoric village just 20 miles away, geneticists found evidence of the world's oldest domesticated strains of wheat; radiocarbon dating indicates agriculture developed there around 10,500 years ago, or just five centuries after Gobekli Tepe's construction.</I><BR/><BR/><I>To Schmidt and others, these new findings suggest a novel theory of civilization. Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies.</I><BR/><BR/>And, just to remind you: <A HREF="http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001313.html" REL="nofollow">Manuport</A>Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.com