tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post8412454302561798278..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: early modernCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-72662043905102451382015-04-27T07:29:07.664-04:002015-04-27T07:29:07.664-04:00Oxford postgrad here. Could I please get a succinc...Oxford postgrad here. Could I please get a succinct, useable definition for "continuist" and "alterist" approaches?Kristen Nicolehttp://academia.edu/KristenNicole18noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-10487694015681068812012-12-03T12:00:23.159-05:002012-12-03T12:00:23.159-05:00I propose we take our cue from Eastern history and...I propose we take our cue from Eastern history and rename the Long Middle Ages (476-1492) the Warring States Period.David Moleshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07334889574898460118noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-57685809485513766682012-12-02T16:11:23.121-05:002012-12-02T16:11:23.121-05:00I like both of Tobias's naratives of epochal c...I like both of Tobias's naratives of epochal change, the Marxist and the Anthropocene. To which I might add the Homogenocene or "Columbian Exchange," which identifies the ecoological consequences of the re-integration of the Americas into the Eurasia-Africa ecosystem after 1492. Though I suppose that's forgetting the medieval Viking settlement of Greenland, etc.<br /><br />I like that narrative in part b/c it's convenient for me as a 16-17c specialist. But I suppose that's all the more reason to suspect it.<br /><br />We also can't choose just one: the Columbia exchange, the Marxist expansion, climate change (which arguably began with agriculture, per the Ruddiman thesis) all are happening, all the time.Steve Mentzhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02927244468764583378noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-54560561648332417692012-12-02T14:20:41.757-05:002012-12-02T14:20:41.757-05:00This piece on higher versus lower organisms and th...This piece on higher versus lower organisms and the immortal jellyfish controversy seemed oddly relevant:<br />http://phylogenomics.blogspot.com/2012/12/twisted-tree-of-life-award-14-nytimes.htmlJeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-30153782924288636322012-12-02T12:32:31.103-05:002012-12-02T12:32:31.103-05:00I realized as I wrote "sixth mass extinction&...I realized as I wrote "sixth mass extinction" that I was invoking some of the re-turning implied by the strophe in catastrophe. And I guess there's an interesting intellectual and rhetorical effect in saying--oh, yes, this has happened before ... 250 million years ago! Tobiashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07453320289426629793noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-25680314370198325532012-12-02T12:12:47.856-05:002012-12-02T12:12:47.856-05:00Thanks for that very smart comment, Tobias.
On t...Thanks for that very smart comment, Tobias. <br /><br />On the one hand, sure, it does seem like the rise of the global market and the hegemony of capitalism have changed everything and the world is no longer what it was, so that "the degree to which capitalism has effectively dissolved all the older forms of collective relations" (aka "primitive society") is profound. And yes, of course, we don't live in classical Rome or Neolithic Britain and things have changed. But some problems unfold as soon as we attempt to locate a suitably primitive society and hope they will actually conform to what is posited as the Before of capitalism. Such societies seldom comply. As Steve Muhlberger mentioned in a great comment <a href="http://modernmedieval.blogspot.com/2012/12/history-without-transition-briefly-noted.html" rel="nofollow">here</a> "in the time of Hammurabi in the city of Ur, they had fast food outlets." Egypt, Phoenicia, classical Greece, Rome, Neolithic Britain? Very sophisticated world markets that may not have been fully capitalist but certainly don't conform to the idea that social relations within a "global system of commodity production" were not theirs, in some degree. An insistence upon radical rupture as the engine of historical change can obliterate facts that belie rupture's inaugurative zeal.<br /><br />I admit though that I am out of my depth here. I'm not working within a Marxist or Jamesonian frame, and don't know such critical modes as well as you clearly do. But I will say that one of the reasons I think a lot about extinction and have been embarked for the past few years on my geological project is not because I think the Anthropocene is a radical break so much as an acceleration via a new life form of something we've seen before. The Permian extinction is being replayed (stones can tell us that story) -- yes at new hands but via the same deadly combination of gases and thermal devastation as has apparently happened previously. The results will no doubt be the same. It's not as if we don't possess a good map from the past for the destination at which we seem hellbent at arriving.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-37266312776787323122012-12-02T11:41:05.149-05:002012-12-02T11:41:05.149-05:00I’m entirely sympathetic to your sense that the ti...I’m entirely sympathetic to your sense that the time of history is best understood as heterogeneous, knotted, “vorticular,” defined by differential speeds of sedimentation and erosion, as prone to repetition and sudden emergent constellations as to linear unfolding. At the _same time_, I’m compelled by two materialist arguments about the unidirectional linearity of history. The first is Jameson’s frequent claim that capitalism introduces a radical discontinuity in history (which he, often enough, defines in terms of “modernity”), a rupture that all thinking about the present and the past must grapple with. For instance, from _The Political Unconscious_: “ideology leaves its mark on myth criticism insofar as the latter presupposed an unbroken continuity between the social relations and narrative forms of primitive society and the cultural objects of our own. For Marxism, on the contrary, it is the radical break between the two social formations which must be stressed, if we are to begin to grasp the degree to which capitalism has effectively dissolved all the older forms of collective relations” (69). Consider that every single object in the office where I’m sitting, except perhaps the dust and the air, has passed through a global system of commodity production. Isn’t “modernity,” in its most meaningful theorizations, a way of confronting the implications of that fact? Of course, even more significant is the fact that the air I’m breathing contains the artifacts of human activity. It is this fact that has led geologists to designate the emergence of a new geologic period, the Anthropocene. A slightly different but equally valid form of periodization would be in terms of the sixth mass extinction event. It seems to me almost inevitable that cultural historians with any sort of materialist commitment will increasingly grapple with the historical break implied by the unprecedented human agency over geophysical and ecosystemic processes that begins in the late eighteenth century (well, we could argue about that date). With regard to climate change, the feedback loop offers a particularly haunting principle of time’s irreversibility and directionality. There is, of course, an etymological hint of vorticular turning in “catastrophe,” but we also need to think about catastrophe in terms of unidirectional accumulation, feedback loops, and extinction. I entirely understand the imperative to resist any model of periodization that implies the homogeneous linear passage of time (especially when understood teleologically or progressively). But I think we also learn something crucial about ourselves—about the terrifying vertiginousness of our present, of our headlong rush into the future—by recognizing historical breaks, our rupture with the past. Tobiashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07453320289426629793noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-13570586070085564382012-12-01T07:05:06.394-05:002012-12-01T07:05:06.394-05:00Thanks, Jonathan, for making that link. Yes, I'...Thanks, Jonathan, for making that link. Yes, I'd argue for the "incongruous non-agreement between singular noun and plural verb" as a foretaste of the temporally and linguistically dense archive we get with the Books of Mandeville ... but also with the Middle-to-Nothing AgeS themselves. <br /><br />Having a plural designation for the period is a happy accident -- and as you've pointed out before, a happy accident reserved to English.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-67926619529485989852012-11-30T21:20:27.874-05:002012-11-30T21:20:27.874-05:00*with "early modern" a self-conscous shi...*with "early modern" a self-conscous shift or realignment<br /><br />[sorry for the transposition of words]Jonathan Hsyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13214201468052661183noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-12910456031418466172012-11-30T21:19:16.360-05:002012-11-30T21:19:16.360-05:00This is really engaging and provocative, Jeffrey, ...This is really engaging and provocative, Jeffrey, and I'm glad that you've been asked to offer a perspective here. Steve beat me to the question about the status of the periodizing moniker of the "Renaissance" here, with "early modern" shift a self-conscious realignment (conceptual pivot) from retroactive affinity to a seemingly more progressive one.<br /><br />I'm actually very intrigued by what seems to be almost a 'throwaway' reference to the AYBABTU internet meme, as I wonder if you might say more about the strange effects of mistranslation and plurality here (an incongruous non-agreement between singular noun and plural verb)? My sense is that you are reincorporating some of this through your excellent comments about the polyglot multiplicity (heterochronicity) of Mandeville/s, but I'm still trying to sort out the connection...Jonathan Hsyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13214201468052661183noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-14189187455231569002012-11-30T15:01:45.933-05:002012-11-30T15:01:45.933-05:00Soup v strata, sediments v flavors. It all comes b...Soup v strata, sediments v flavors. It all comes back to rocks v seas, doesn't it?<br /><br />Great stuff. Catastrophe is certainly nonlinear, though Lindy's great BABEL chart reminds us that, if we shift temporal frames, it starts look linear. <br /><br />I'm not really sure either early modern or Ren can be salvaged, but I also doubt either can be jettisoned. Imperfect tools, like historicism itself. <br />Steve Mentzhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02927244468764583378noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-50214667016004994352012-11-30T13:05:55.780-05:002012-11-30T13:05:55.780-05:00Thanks, Steve, for these great observations. Very,...Thanks, Steve, for these great observations. Very, very useful.<br /><br />I was trying to trace in the position paper the results of happy accidents and complicated self-nominations. Medievalists didn't choose to be in the middle, but here we are in that unillumined waiting room between Important Moments of Progress -- and as it turns out mediality provides some surprisingly handy tools for thinking about time outside of linearity. (Catastrophe, I'd say, is likewise nonlinear: it's vorticular). "Early modern" has so much incipience built into it that it's hard to move it to a nonteleological or nonprogressive frame (where nonprogressive does NOT mean devoid of change) as the various periods christened with a post have done for themselves. I don't think it's impossible but the terms don't yield much flexibility. Renaissance isn't much better, unless the rebirth is a return from the dead and thereby involves zombies. THAT kind of Renaissance is ripe for thought.<br /><br />I've said this many times in my writing and I'll state it again: historicism is a kind of sine qua non of methodological integrity. You can't not have some measure of historicism built into your interpretative schema if you hope to do ethical justice to the past. But historicism is in and of itself an insufficient frame: when it's a closed system, it stultifies, and worse, it reduces a lively history to stasis. Psychoanalysis has also been great at teaching us that you can't study historicism without also understanding pleasure and fantasy and desire (and, thereby, intertemporality). <br /><br />It's a complicated mesh. We've inherited some good tools, but others need to be rethought, or maybe broken. I don't believe in a nontemporal soup so much as polytemporal strata. I do think time is thick and thin, slow and fast, all at once. And I'm less interested in flavors and fads than I am in what the ingredients in that soup or materialities in that vortex might say, how much they hold in reserve, how they trigger change and themselves change via surprising relations as the catastrophes mount and loosen the sediments.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-72624962330366596442012-11-30T12:18:41.112-05:002012-11-30T12:18:41.112-05:00Interesting. I suspect many early modernists might...Interesting. I suspect many early modernists might respond to this prompt through "early modern" as a revision of "Renaissance" rather than through anti-medievalism -- though of course both terms sing that old Dark Ages blues. I wonder how much, despite your valiant and admirable effort to escape into a "nontemporal" middle at the end, all configurations of periodicity in lit/cult studies aim to, in your phrase, "serve the period well." Or, in other words, even imaginative post-whatever critics remain implicitly bounded, at least by expertise, familiarity, audience, etc. How nontemporal can we really get, even if you teach Lear, I teach Beowulf, and we both teach Latour? Lotta historicism still flowing through academic creekbeds. Landscapes change, but not on human time scales.<br /><br />I hope for literary historicism to develop a richer critical language for thinking about change, especially catastrophic change, across different time periods. Change is really the hard thing to make sense of, since it requires a baseline of assumed continuity -- change in relation to what? -- as well as some idea of consequence or direction: change into what? The relentless horizontalization of New Hist doesn't do change well, it seems to me. In this context, I think "early modern" has more interesting implications than "Renaissance," though I'm also attracted to more specific terms like "globalization" or even the "Columbian exchange." Without in any way wanting to repeat the anti-medievalism you rightly warn against, of course -- almost all interesting things happen in all historical periods, differently, i changing forms.<br /><br />I like the polychronous/fluid Middle Ages that I find at ITM & other places, but the risky end-state of such methods, as you well know, is a Nontemporal Soup in which, as JLB says, "everything happens at the same time...exactly, precisely now." I like the taste of that Borgesian soup, as I suspect you & the ITM gang do too, but it's strong stuff. Our diet craves variety.<br /><br />Some smart writers, including Rob Watson, have recently gone back to the "Renaissance" rather than "early modern," and it makes me think that there's some value in more, rather than fewer, methods of partial periodization, particularly if we remember that all periodizing systems create error as well as (potentially) insight. Doesn't every decade, every season, every century or day of the week have its own flavor? <br /><br />Steve Mentzhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02927244468764583378noreply@blogger.com