tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post1811075126535658386..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Towards a Restless Medieval Studies: ReduxCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-7336568546205218692008-05-02T19:25:00.000-04:002008-05-02T19:25:00.000-04:00Wow indeed! Eileen, I am looking forward to that p...Wow indeed! Eileen, I am looking forward to that post when you find the time. In the meantime, I will definitely read that book.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-22738659817160744682008-04-30T22:01:00.000-04:002008-04-30T22:01:00.000-04:00Cf. this Howe Chartres is ultimately a ruin for us...Cf. this <B>Howe</B> <I>Chartres is ultimately a ruin for us, not just in its decayed architecture, but because, in Howe’s own words, we “do not visit it as a place of worship” (Howe 2003, 116).</I> to <B>Eileen,</B> <I>It is not the so-called “science” of language and manuscript studies, but the art of the affective intelligence that can hope to help us draw close to these dead others, and to consider both their silence and the ruins of their words, while also imagining the possibilities of contact, of reanimation.</I> And then, also this, from <B>Kofi,</B> <I>Think of a sacred stone at a pilgrimage site which, as Mary Kate put it, is sacred "only as it is made and remade through the desire of each visitor." A visitor who puts her hand on the stone is literally touching some of those who came before her, but as Karl says, they are not necessarily aware of her presence. But is she not in a sense touching the hands of those who are to come after her too, and is there not a sense in which a sort of awareness of those future ones, and her place in maintaining the sacredness of that site, allows her to be aware of them?</I> which I read AFTER writing what follows below. Talk about touching across time that collapses time!<BR/><BR/><I>Pace</I> Howe (whose book on travel I have NOT read: so perhaps apologies needed), I have visited Chartres as a place of worship, but just not as a <I>Christian</I> worshiper; if I'm a worshiper of anything, it's delightful sensations, and the cathedral at Chartres (if not the food) provides them in spades. I wonder, then, about the division wrought by the purported piety of our medieval travelers to Chartres and how I'm supposedly severed from them by the fraying and snapping of faith. <BR/><BR/>[So much of the following is inspired by Eileen's delightful post, and the conversations we've have hear over the last...year and a half?] <BR/><BR/>Some of the medieval visitors, many of them no doubt, were visiting it to worship, but some of them, or all of them in some way, must have felt something of what I've felt there: the size of the thing, the delight of being in on the joke while recognizing old narratives in the stone, and no doubt even 500 years ago, a sense of temporal distance, of being in the presence of workers who labors and loves live on stupendously to be picked up again by unnumbered visitors over the centuries. Perhaps these medieval co-worshipers even felt wonder, and despair, at what it must have taken to raise those stones, at who must have suffered, forgotten, but for the beauty their suffering brought us. They must have felt a shared being with the stones and they stories they tell, which are also the great silences that can never find a voice [think here of my call for a Marxist phenomenology]. They must have felt a shared being with the others feeling all this, then, in their past, and in their future. This same delight and admiration and sadness would be shared by me, and it will be again by the hundreds and thousands after me, and perhaps even by other species, present and to-come. All of us feel all this, in some sense, together. I don't want to think, then, I'm lacking something in Chartres: even without the particulars of any faith, I join there a community of sensation. <BR/><BR/>As for the University, and the crumbling arrogance of its Uni, and heterotopic hopes: yes!Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-31627368721670568512008-04-29T13:12:00.000-04:002008-04-29T13:12:00.000-04:00Kofi: thanks so much for your comments here. I was...Kofi: thanks so much for your comments here. I was thinking there is also some real resonance between your own thinking in your recent post here on David Wallace's book ["Time, again"] about what might be called a poetic subjectivity that can serve as a productive mode for exploring various forms of "connectedness" with the past, as well as for being able to really *see* those [paraphrasing Wallace] "sign[s] or detail[s] in a visual field" that would provoke "some deep – yet highly subjective – sense of connectedness with people of the past."<BR/><BR/>As to the various arguments that I think you are right to point out have been made here on this blog for a while now for scholarship as a kind of "long-term guerrilla poetics" [and I really love that phrasing and may steal it], I was struck a couple of weeks ago by something Amy Hollywood said when she was visiting Washington University and giving various talks and seminars on her current research in progress--on, for example, her recent essay on the "fanaticism of critique," published in the Harvard Theological Review, "Acute Melancholia," in which Hollywood argues that,<BR/><BR/>"melancholic incorporation – central for Freud to the foundation of the *self-critical* agency (later the super-ego) and hence to the foundation of moral,<BR/>scientific, and cultural life – is both essential to subjectivity, community, and politics and<BR/>at the same time poses a potentially great danger to these fragile entities"--<BR/><BR/>and at one point she remarked that, as a historian, she was becoming increasingly interested in the formulation of a poetics of history, or a poetical scholarship. She recommended I read Joan Retallack's book "The Poethical Wager," so I dutifully ordered it and am reading it now, and I think, Kofi, that you would like it a lot in relation to your work, especially, with island culture. And frankly, it speaks so stunningly well to the conversations we have been having here about our scholarship, especially in relation to temporality and "placement" and styles of writing, that I just think everyone should read this book! Here are some excerpts from the Introduction, "Essay as Wager":<BR/><BR/>"Life is subject to swerves--sometimes gentle, sometimes violent, often violent out-of-the-blue motions that cut obliquely across material and conceptual logics. . . . How can one frame a poetics of the swerve, a constitutive preoccupation with what are unpredictable forms of change? One might begin by stating this: what they all have in common is an unsettling transfiguration of once-familiar terrain. They tend to produce disorientation, even estrangement, by radically altering geometries of attention. . . . Whether global leaders recognize it or not, the world is now in a situation where the fractal geometry of coastlines, with their ecologically dynamic, infinite detail, may be a more productive model for the interrelationship of cultures. . . . I believe we learn the most about what it can mean to be human from border-transgressive conversations."<BR/><BR/>". . . I'm interested in a poethics that recognizes the degree to which the chaos of world history, of all complex systems, makes it imperative that we move away from models of cultural and political agency lodged in isolated heroic acts and simplistic notions of cause and effect. . . . It makes much more sense to conceive of agency in the context of sustained projects, during the course of which many swerves may occur but which one guides with as much responsible awareness as possible. . . . In our unpredictable, polyglot world this means working out some kind of dynamic equilibrium between intention and receptivity, community and alterity."<BR/><BR/>Now here is where it gets *really* interesting, as far as I'm concerned, with crafting a new kind of poetic/poethical scholarship:<BR/><BR/>"I count on the form of the essay--as urgent and aesthetically aware thought experiment--to undertake a particular kind of inquiry that is neither poetry nor philosophy but a mix of logics, dislogics, intuition, revulsion, wonder. The result can be a philosophical poetics as lively as current developments in the form of the prose poem. . . . The most vital meaning has always come out of a dicey collaboration of intellect and imagination. The intuitive nature of this (inherently playful) balancing act makes it hard to fully know what one is doing while one is doing it. At the end of my work on this book, I wonder if it was about arriving at realizations still barely articulated in it--that a poetics of memory, for instance, must be transfigured by an informed poetics of desire if it's to nourish agency. (The question of meaningful cultural agency is what's always at stake.) By poetics of desire I mean whatever moves us toward a responsive and pleasurable connection to the world by means of informed sensualities of language."<BR/><BR/>Wow. But Retallack is also keenly aware of the pitfalls, pitfalls which we also talk about a lot in relation to our historical scholarship, or to what we think we mean when we say "historical" or "historicism," I think:<BR/><BR/>". . . in all this is an afterimage, aftertaste of discomfort with my own poetics of desire--an acute sense of chronically irresolvable reciprocal alterities. Reciprocal alterity, as ethical and epistemological destabilizing principle, reveals itself in the problem of pronouns. However much one (or is it I?) may try for clarity, the conversation will never arrive at the apotheosis of the insider. Neither will it arrive at the status of reliable narrator."<BR/><BR/>As to the term "poethics" itself, which Retallack coined in the 1980s (when she was working with John Cage), she writes,<BR/><BR/>"I present this hybrid as frank and unholy union of modernist and postmodernist questions joined to the Aristotelian concern for the link between an individual and public ethos in pursuit of the good life--a good life that must be contrived in the midst of happenstance and chaos."<BR/><BR/>Now, there is also all sorts of wonderful stuff in this chapter about time and writing and agency, and I think I just realized the whole book deserves its own blog post. So that's something for another day!Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-38507075223230728692008-04-29T11:49:00.000-04:002008-04-29T11:49:00.000-04:00Oops, Liza: I *know* you are at New York Universit...Oops, Liza: I *know* you are at New York University, but when I originally wrote the essay back in October, I obviously was confused. I'll make sure that gets fixed before it hits "real" publication. My apologies.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-25077747879298776932008-04-29T11:37:00.000-04:002008-04-29T11:37:00.000-04:00This is a fantastic piece Eileen - let me say that...This is a fantastic piece Eileen - let me say that your vision of the university and its actors seems absolutely utopic to me - I've always liked the image, seen in a few other places on this blog, of scholarship as a kind of long-term guerrilla poetics, always with a necessarily elusive end in sight, but dashing off into the bushes in pursuit of alternate routes we glimpse along the way, or just to stand in front of a beautiful waterfall.<BR/><BR/>Mary Kate's reading of Nicholas Howe, also suggested to me a possible answer to Karl's question regarding how the present might actually speak to the past, or the future to the present. I wonder if one of the places this can happen is at one of Howe's memorial sites, where time and space/place really come together. Think of a sacred stone at a pilgrimage site which, as Mary Kate put it, is sacred "only as it is made and remade through the desire of each visitor." A visitor who puts her hand on the stone is literally touching some of those who came before her, but as Karl says, they are not necessarily aware of her presence. But is she not in a sense touching the hands of those who are to come after her too, and is there not a sense in which a sort of awareness of those future ones, and her place in maintaining the sacredness of that site, allows her to be aware of them? And I mean this in a more literal sense than it appears. The person behind her who is about to touch the stone, for example. Their eyes might meet, and in that moment there may exist between them an understanding of their role in the maintenance of that sanctity. Does the future pilgrim, the one in line behind her, not share a common awareness with the present pilgrim? The woman who is touching the stone can share this awareness with all those she can see until the end of the line. But do we have to draw the limit at those who she can no longer see when the line curves around a corner? If she can be said to share an awareness with the future pilgrims she can see directly, what about those others? Is the relationship between present and future delimited here by line-of-sight? Or does she continue to share awareness with those other future pilgrims in as literal a sense as she shares it with the ones directly in line behind her?<BR/><BR/>It seems to me that a lot of the things you decry, Eileen, are the product of this line-of-sight thinking. If point A can't be connected directly to point B and then to point C, then there obviously can't be a connection between A and C. We need our multiple desiring-machines, our roaming guerrilla packs, to drag us around those corners.<BR/><BR/>I hope these thoughts make sense; they are the offspring of a very recently-awakened mind. Great paper Eileen- I can't wait to read the whole thing.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1445922238515142782008-04-29T11:33:00.000-04:002008-04-29T11:33:00.000-04:00on my way to a meeting about contingency, so will ...on my way to a meeting about contingency, so will have to read and digest this later, but a quick note to say 1) I'm flattered my comments have appeared in your work (!) and 2) I'm at New York University, not Columbia. But more soon -- long live schizoanalysis!Liza Blakehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05105726464955172469noreply@blogger.com