tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post4683088799128436278..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Embracing the Swerve: A Fugitive Medieval StudiesCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-48014082824301356542010-04-05T13:39:20.710-04:002010-04-05T13:39:20.710-04:00Karl: I would just add here that I think it's ...Karl: I would just add here that I think it's definitely important to also talk about the pleasure(s) of archival and other types of work [lexicography, codicology, philology, etc.] within our field, and I think acting as if these different interests can ever really be sequestered from each other is partly a false assumption. This is why I also included the bit from Anna [with a real emphasis on the "may" in what you see below]:<br /><br />"The erudition required by our texts and the field's more than usual respect for tradition, may provide a safe refuge from [pleasure]. Yet, it seems that at our most assertive, when we publicly embrace our fetish and are able to speak our pleasure in little known facts, we are less pathetic."<br /><br />I've always assumed that Dinshaw's work on "vibrations" in the archive [in, even more specifically, going through Hope Emily Allen's papers at Bryn Mawr] bears directly on, not just feeling/touching/affect, but also on the *felt* pleasures of historical/archival research.<br /><br />The key, I think, as you already indicate, would be in not drawing too-distinct lines between what "I" do versus what "they" [or anyone else] do [keeping in mind that the inter-relations between all of the texts that make up "medieval studies" are thickly constructed and multi-tendril-ed], and to assume a certain radical open-ness toward the possible "good" of anyone's work. We should have contention, of course. Ideas are contestable and need to be argued in order to be "processed," as it were, as fully as possible, and in order to have "progress" in any so-called "knowledge" discipline, but gate-keeping is something else entirely, which we don't need, where we might say to a scholar: your work, at initial starting point, is irrelevant, unwanted, and maybe even shouldn't be allowed to be published [not because it is shoddy scholarship, but because it says what are already determined to be the "wrong" answers]. But we do need, and will always need, what might be called strong debate.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-55845954425575953032010-04-05T10:01:09.845-04:002010-04-05T10:01:09.845-04:00Briefly: thank you for the Fradenburg! If the past...Briefly: thank you for the Fradenburg! If the past (and imagine for a moment we can, after Latour and Serres, use this word in the singular, and use it as being in simple opposition to the past) is absent, it is also present. The trace is not only a way of thinking absence. It's a way of remapping the present/absence binary far more complexly: Not wholly there also means not wholly <i>not</i> there.<br /><br />Appropos of...what? I'm reminded of a conversation I had at dinner, where I spoke about having consulted, earlier that day, Tony Hunt's multivolume <i>Teaching and learning Latin in thirteenth-century England.</i> It's hard to imagine a more 'medievalist' study: large chunks of it are Latin word lists with their Anglo-Norman translations, taken from manuscripts, detailed lists of manuscript contents, lists of the spread and influence of various pedagogic and lexicographic manuals by John of Garland, and so forth. What could be more dull? More necessary? More unreceptive to pleasure or wonder? What's less huggable?<br /><br />I asked "I know it's a cliché, but I don't really know how to answer the charge that all our work on pleasure and openness and nonappropriation and so forth is parasitic on this 'real' scholarship done dully and dutifully in archives." And Dinshaw suggested that there was pleasure, too, in work like Hunt's scholarship, of a sort that was as yet inaccessible or unknown to me. I declared, "problem solved!" Dinshaw (I paraphrase, likely): "At least for tonight." And I thought, what would our scholarship look like if we didn't <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=KBNXs3woYwcC&pg=PA123&dq=you%27re+so+paranoid&ei=t-u5S_eQG5KCyASjuKE7&cd=1#v=onepage&q=you%27re%20so%20paranoid&f=false" rel="nofollow">paranoiacally</a> seek out oppressions, but sought out, instead, pleasures? If, as well, we didn't decide that what we alone were doing was fun, compared to those stodgy Speculum types, but that they too were having fun, but just fun we couldn't recognize, as yet? That their gatekeeping--whoever they are--and binary drawing doesn't mean we have to do the same.<br /><br />With that in mind, I thought of one comment that evening about my paper, which was, iirc, that my understanding of psychoanalysis was too pessimistic. Maybe so. There is a tendency, though, in psychoanalytic readings to think desire as a reaction and impossible attempt to repair some lack. That IS pessimistic. On the other hand, however, psychoanalysis also requires that we recognize that pleasure is at work in any enterprise. There's something there, then, for me, for the orientation I'd like my future work to take.medievalkarlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12440542200843836794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-68985376977955118132010-04-05T09:01:08.043-04:002010-04-05T09:01:08.043-04:00And just for fun, here two of of Dan's "t...And just for fun, here two of of Dan's "translations" of the Old English poems "found" newly-"discovered" companion to the Exeter Book:<br /><br />[chronicle poem]<br /><br />eanwulf took the kingdom, adorned man calling all the shots. in the north they gather at the thing, the slaughtermen on-call, ready for the election. new digital registration. our noble forebear, the king eÞelfrid, running a wolf to his end, did violent things during the early period. he was not on time, it befell us it was not appointed, it was not to us happy. the concern is for an accurate hunger, but the looping is not precise. try to take some food, get into narrow. thorem and ælfwyn bring a noble thing in exchange for a riddle about history. thorem, song-crafty man, wrought a thing for the mind-craft of us-two in the assembly, for mood-plot alone. no selves are clean. there are few boats to take the full cups to the exiles. the orders are to come up with a riddle for every thing. an up-sea is a blue roof, a ship-rune is a message or a vote. the rule is hard but gets much name.<br /><br />[riddle 13]<br /><br />spies are flat and horizontal and adorned, and they rove around the floating beams like beams turn-through as light unmoored from the now. these are and are not merely decoration and adornment when we build, in noble-mood, with these beams. what now does ceowulf say? in this assembly of the king i grew up healthy and grew this appetite, being flat. it is not evil but there are point-steps and each teaches how to kill. likewise in order to love the way one can hide behind water and one shall love the way that an ice-light of knives can guide each finger to a narrow. a man shall encrypt and exchange only only to the bottom of my burn-mark. here arises a spacious wave-play wound around the reader. little reader, you may now chance the code because once cracked and strewn across life-rooms all over mercia what the hell can you do except shout island! cold sorrow! or make instead a discourse. decisions, moment a narrative becomes more of a riddle. the split of the reader crouched, hiding behind the slaughter-pile and the bookpiles can alliterate the sexual relations out of life while knowing full well that the best way to kill-off your bishop is by touching a fictitious dead woman. she fucked plenty and maybe knew something about infanticide and the difficulty of escaping when surrounded by swamp and mud. now, bound up under a beam of a riddle what i call on you.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-6975847294273517432010-04-05T08:43:38.974-04:002010-04-05T08:43:38.974-04:00Eileen, awesome and awe inspiring. Reading it now....Eileen, awesome and awe inspiring. Reading it now. (BTW, I changed the quote from my paper to record the slight changes I gave it in the hours leading up to the event itself)<br /><br />Starting to think maybe Derrida's discussion of the event in <i>Without Alibi</i> will be the way to take the Erk paper further. Quoting from C. Wolfe's quotation from it in What is Posthumanism, 9, "an event worthy of the name ought not, so we think, to give in or be reduced to repetition," but rather "ought above all to <i>happen</i> to someone, some living being who is thus <i>affected</i> by it." Derrida then, per Wolfe, contrasts this to the work of the machine [a tool of reaction, I might say]. Is it possible, JD wonders, to think of the event and the machine together? Wolfe suggests yes, through systems theory...and I think maybe I have a vision now of my July Erk paper.<br /><br />Now to read your post...medievalkarlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12440542200843836794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-65274665130878185042010-04-05T07:16:47.168-04:002010-04-05T07:16:47.168-04:00I want to spend the entire morning pouring over th...I want to spend the entire morning pouring over this post, but I'm in my office before 7 AM (early even for me!) because I have to lecture on Henry V at 11, and have never lectured on the play before. If you read my Twitter or FB updates you know I will be "swerving" around -- or maybe unto -- the breach that keeps opening in that performance's middle.<br /><br />Quickly, though, I want to qualify two things here related to me me me. That opening quote taken from a footnote of my essay (I think) is such a strong endorsement of historicism! To say that as an interpretive mode it is the sine qua non of medieval studies is surely to overstate the case, so let me modify what I have said too forcefully: I can certainly imagine -- Dan Remein has well imagined -- modes of interpretation indifferent to historicism but nonetheless cogent.<br /><br />Speaking of modifications: "The Weight of the Past" was delivered as a lecture in the ASC series a year ago (Feb. 2009). Most everyone present at the panel last week saw me give the live version, which is rather different from the published one -- it deploys a series of beautiful images to stage a visual/affective argument along with the verbal one. After I gave the paper at NYU, though, <a href="http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2009/02/medievalists-trash-washington-square.html" rel="nofollow">and after we went out drinking later</a>, I took back the ending of the essay, with its wrongheaded movement into mourning, <a href="http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2009/02/future-of-weight-of-past.html" rel="nofollow">and supplied a credo of provisionality instead</a>:<br /><br /><em>Many things about the closing paragraph do not ring true to what I had hoped to achieve in the piece: its hortative mode, its ethical high-handedness, its injunction to mourning, its funereal finality.* I realize now that what I have been attempting in "The Weight of the Past" project is not an ethics but an ethos: instead of an ethics of compulsion to remembrance, an ethos built upon the practice of wonder. I am attempting an explicitly collaborative praxis -- and by "collaborative" I actually mean "inhumanly collaborative": I'm as interested in alliances with rocks, texts, forces of nature, and corpses as I am with the living and the dead. The project offers, I hope, an invitation to coinhabit a world made strange.</em><br /><br />The comments to that post are well worth reading in regard to Eileen's here today.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.com