[Noli] me tangere

by J J Cohen

In the comments to this post by Eileen I wrote:

My question ... has to do with community and the noli me tangere of Jesus, the words that leave Margery reeling. The most puzzling moment of GM is for me just after the Kempe chapter has taken its long political swerve, into the controversy over government funding of the NEA. CD writes:

And in defense of our united (but not necessarily unified) interests as queers, as medievalists, as proponents of queer scholarship, as humanities researchers, as advocates of higher education, and as supporters of academic freedom, we say to those who would eliminate us: Don't touch me. (GM 182)

Even after all this time that last imperative startles me, because I must admit that I have always expected something rather different to follow the eloquent injunction other than a boundary drawing differentiation (the entire book has been an argument against boundaries). Why this limit, why the noli me tangere? Why not something like You have already been touched?

Eileen responded:

I was startled, too, but I partly took that as a form of the "answering back" that Dinshaw was illustrating in Margery Kempe's life and also as a kind of political threat to the powers-that-be in the U.S. Congress and elsewhere regarding queer/human rights. Of course, it's paradoxical to much of what Dinshaw is advocating for in the book regarding affective touch as an historical method, and brings back the question of how touch can be too forceful, too appropriative, and violent. But we might also say that we can, and must have both: that we need to argue for and practice a form of life that is affective and in which touch can have moral and ethical agency, while at the same time realizing that there will always be those who will touch violently and who need to be answered "back," whose force might have to met with, at the very least, forceful talk.

Mary Kate added:

Maybe a moment like that, which effectively forces her to halt her "life project" is also a moment where scholarship might help illuminate something that remains from that life project, in the form of the text: A kind of desire in excess of that which is allowed, or allowable -- an excess registered, perhaps, in tears (Jeffrey, do you have something on this from MIM? I don't have it in NC). But moreover, that excess which makes these figures -- these bodies -- exceptional, in a very literal sense. I'm always reminded of another mystic when reading Margery -- Hadewijch of Brabant, whose visions are of Minne, and fulfillment therein. At one point in her visions she explains how she is better than the saints, precisely because her desire can be excessive, can exceed what God wants her to desire. She can want Him more than He wants her to. A Saint, by definition, would desire only as much as God wanted. Maybe a part of this kind of history is also to reclaim these desires -- maybe ultimately wanting more from history than scholarship can give, but opening to being touched by what can still be perceived, and perhaps, partially, remembered. Maybe to letting that excess spill out over centuries -- talking a self into existence.

I want to return to this moment of not touching because it still seems to me anomalous to CD's project, and especially to Margery Kempe's. While it is true that Kempe answers back, she does not typically reply with a Don't touch me. There are obvious, clear cut cases when she must draw an inviolable boundary, of course, as in the face of potential rape. As CD points out so well, a fear of impending sexual violation is constant throughout Kempe's book, and with good reason.

Yet an answering back that takes the form of Don't touch me has an inbuilt limit: the point at which discourse fails and force is deployed, despite any refusal of this force's right to be marshaled, despite firm assertions of noli me tangere. I've argued in Medieval Identity Machines (in a chapter called 'The Becoming-Liquid of Margery Kempe") that in situations where speech has become perilous Kempe relies on the haptic power of pure sound, nonlinguistic utterances that have a visceral effect on her auditors, including herself. She forms alliances with the tears, storms, thunder and music that are the soundtrack of her work. Her tears are infectious, touching those who hear them -- even her scribe: "Also, whil the forseyd creatur was ocupiid abowte the writing of this tretys, sche had many holy teerys and wepyngs ... and also he that was hir writer cowed not sumtyme kepyn himself fro wepyng." Here is how I put it in MIMs:

This contagion "involving terms that are entirely heterogeneous" [Deleuze and Guattari] -- this unnatural participation through which tears seep from Kempe's history to her body to her narrative to her scribe to her book, catching up pages and words and sounds and bodies in its unsettling flow -- also instantiates an affective model for receiving (rather than simply reading) the text. Even if Kempe's tears and cries sometimes failed to precipitate community and understanding during her life, her book will serve not as the recorder but the promulgator of her wepyng, the catalyst for intersubjective assemblages which will implant her affect anew and trigger "unheard-of becomings."

I'm quoting this because I want to emphasize that Don't touch me was not the strategy Kempe used most often, nor most effectively: she touched, affectively, with nonlinguistic sound when necessary, emptying herself into vast spaces like echoing cathedrals and implanting in the bodies of her auditors a vibration that often turned out to be sympathetic. When she answers back, it tends to be through a very material tactility, rather than via the forbidding of touch.

Nor is Don't touch me necessarily our own best strategy as humanists for ensuring that our labors are valued and funded. As the chair of an English Department for two years and newly the director of a medieval and early modern studies institute, I have found myself constantly arguing -- mainly with scientists -- for both these things, recognition of value tied to tangible support. My university is smitten with policy, with globalism, with politics. It also has a strange and enduring love affair with the natural sciences, disciplines we are structurally ill equipped to support. How do you secure funding for a project on narratives of wounded black veterans of America's early wars, for example, when so many resources are being assigned to an (imaginary) science center that started out costing $100 million and now could easily be twice that? When your university has a debt load equal to its endowment, how do you ask for the $120,000 it takes to get a medieval/early modern institute up and running for three years? You do it by touching your would-be detractors, by ensuring that what you do is recognized as already in them, often much to their surprise. When our Dean of Special Projects, a biologist not well disposed to interdisciplinary humanities work [everyone should remain in their category, English professors shouldn't be philosophers, that sort of thing] was meeting with me about funding some disabilities studies related projects, I started off by asking him about his own training, his own passions for art -- and so we had a conversation about the Arthur Quiller-Couch poem "The Twa Corbies" and the representational work of animals in narrative. The key was to find the familiar, and use that to carry him along to a place where he didn't expect to be, a place that had it not initially touched something in him would have been too far away to step -- the place where humanities scholars can speak about animals, or about disability and its queer relation to sexuality, and not have a biologist reject them out of hand. I used similar means with our chief research officer, a man who had never funded a project that was not foreign policy or microscope oriented -- a man, that is, who thought that research was something social and natural scientists did, and that involved equipment and interviews rather than symposia where conversations unfolded. He's the one who finally wrote the check that created GW MEMSI. Likewise, it was selling the allure of the archives -- old books have such cultural cachet, even among those who prefer particle accelerators over Michael Chabon -- that we were able to fund for five years an undergraduate research seminar at the Folger. This seminar has produced works like a brilliant undergraduate thesis entitled "The Whorish, the Objectified, and The Transgendered: Spenser’s Female Others and The Drive of Jouissance."

Persistence -- continued touching -- reminding one's auditors that they have already been touched, perhaps long in the past, perhaps by the past itself: these seem to me far more effective than Touch me not. Why else would Margery Kempe almost die of grief when Jesus pronounced those words?

The Past in the Past

by Karl Steel

In her post below, Mary Kate writes:

On the final page of the book, CD defines “getting medieval” as this: “using ideas of the past, creating relations with the past, touching in this way the past in our efforts to build selves and communities now and into the future” (206). This conception seems to get us into the thick of a problem of temporality – how does the unidirectional “arrow of time” stop being so unidirectional upon closer inspection? How, to borrow from CD in her reflection on the book, “Got Medieval” (published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, No. 10), do we identify and examine the “copresence of different chronologies to explore the power of multiple temporalities in a single moment?”

This leads me into my next, brief question. In GM, the medieval past touches the present in various ways. However, as much as CD corrects the homogeneous premodern of Bhabha, Baudrillard, and others, as much as she demands that the so-called modern allow itself to be or realize that it is touched by an abjected, mobile past, her own medieval strikes me as homogeneous as well to the extent that it is not itself touched by its present pasts.

CD writes well about the Lollard assault on the 'crimen Sodomorum' of institutional religion, on its wealth, on its alimentary excess. I don't believe, of course, that CD presents this material as if it sprang ex nihilo (or ex Wycliffo); after all, she cites and uses Penn R Szittya's important The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature. At the same time, I don't think there's enough mobilization in GM of one of the most peculiar aspects of medieval textuality, namely, its habitual, even constitutive reuse of centuries-old writings, and of the mnemotechnics in which production was always a rearrangement of pasts. Antifraternal critique reuses moral approaches from the twelfth-century Parisian critique of bad living clerics, which itself redeployed work by Gregory the Great; no doubt we could keep pushing this further back, or expanding the lines outward to form something more rhizomatic than genealogical. I also imagine--although I haven't done the legwork--that Lollard ecclesiastical critique, especially its antimendicant critique, derives at least in part from the work of the Spiritual Franciscans, and thus we would have seen critiques internal to the Friars turned against the Friars as a whole, and from there, turned against the whole of the Church.

GM is already a big book, and it's certainly a great book. It seems ungracious to complain that it should have been bigger, more capacious, that CD should have loosened the 40-year boundary she set for her medieval analysis. We would have needed another 100 pages. I should, then, present this not as a critique but as a call to be inspired by GM to keep on pushing. Readers of ITM know that this work is already being done, especially with JJC and MKH's attention to the polychronicity of ruins and stones, of the distant past of ruins and the very distant, unfathomable past of fossils inhabiting and confounding various medieval presents, whether they're 8th or 10th or 12th century. Although this question might remind us too much of the postmodern inability to break with the past, we might also wonder in whose voices the Lollards speak when they think themselves using their own voices?

The Ruins and the Past

by Mary Kate Hurley


When Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval first came out in 1999, I was still in high school – I wasn’t even sure I’d be a medievalist yet, though I think by my junior year I’d decided I wanted to be a professor. I’d never heard of queer theory, much less queer history. Moreover, I’d never seen Pulp Fiction. Granted, I still haven’t seen Pulp Fiction, but there’s only so much one can do in nine years. It took me nine years years to come to this text – though while I was reading it this past weekend, it felt familiar, and strangely so. I’d imagine that at least a part of this strange familiarity is because the work resonates with more recent work that I’m also familiar with (if hard-pressed to identify), but the greater part is probably because of a course I took with CD last year at NYU. The course was on "Time and Temporality" in medival literature – and so the ideas I take from Getting Medieval are largely concerned with time. How might we think through what this text means in 2008, and what does it mean to encounter a groundbreaking text later, though still not late, in its reception critically. Moreover, what questions does the text enable us to ask in 2008, nine years after its entrance into medieval studies? What does it do to our relationship to the past as an object of study, when it too now comes to us from a past?*

On the final page of the book, CD defines “getting medieval” as this: “using ideas of the past, creating relations with the past, touching in this way the past in our efforts to build selves and communities now and into the future” (206). This conception seems to get us into the thick of a problem of temporality – how does the unidirectional “arrow of time” stop being so unidirectional upon closer inspection? How, to borrow from CD in her reflection on the book, “Got Medieval” (published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, No. 10), do we identify and examine the “copresence of different chronologies to explore the power of multiple temporalities in a single moment?”

One of the things that most struck me about this book is that it inspired not a sense of argument in my response, but a more general sense of assent. If I’ve identified it correctly, I think a part of that reaction is bound up in the question of methodology – CD is outlining a methodology that uses texts, not using a methodology to uncover something about a specific text, as Dan Remein formulated so brilliantly in his comments to JJC’s post below. If I’m touched by this book, it’s not in terms of how I view a specific medieval text – Dinshaw outlines a theory of texts which resonates with my experience of them, but if the book is rewriting my sense of the past, it is doing so on a much more global level, like a techtonic plate shifting in the course of centuries, not a minute phenomenon that has quantifiable results.

Still, there is a moment in the text that I think materializes, or at least localizes, the idea that I find most intriguing. Quoting from Glück’s Margery Kempe, CD cites one of the moments in which Glück feels, most profoundly, the articulation of the self-as-performance in relation to Margery Kempe: “But the main interest of the novel lies in the melding of the narratives, characters and voices, most passages in Bob’s voice, one in Margery’s (Chapter 9), others in a hybrid of those two voices: ‘I’m Margery following a god through a rainy city. The rapture is mine, mine the attempt to talk herself into existence.’ (MK 13)” (167)

To talk herself into existence. Depending on how you take this phrase, meanings begin to crop up right and left – to talk so that she might exist, to talk herself into wanting to exist, etc. The question here – raised explicitly in the interview CD cites with Robert Glück—might be phrased thus: “That quandary over what experience means and how the authority, or whatever authenticates experience, runs back and forth between yourself and the world” (GM 170). As Dinshaw herself points out in the chapter, there is a kind of community-forming impulse that goes along with the text, one that is specifically related to the distension or extension in time performed by the text: “The work is thus an “open form,” opening the possibility of relations between characters and readers, not all of which are controlled by the writer” (171). CD goes on to cite Glück in another essay, “Fame,” and she asserts the following: “If ‘the fragment of language evokes the melancholy pleasure of a ruin,’…its ‘eternal’ and ‘shared’ qualities here are nonetheless limited at last.” (173)

I want to question that quotation for one moment. I wasn’t able to find the entire essay on short notice, but I did find the text cited elsewhere, and the lyric beauty which characterizes that first fragment continues through the line: “the relinquishing of meaning, the falling away and recontextualizing of human scale to include the non-human, the unshared, mysterious and unsharable…which is shared.” It seems to me (and I am hardly an expert) but a part of what is so touching, if you will, about a ruin, is that it insists on touching you, without letting you into the reality of its own existence**. Out of time, and therefore, out of place in a landscape that has already outlived the ruin’s first time, if you will, there is a certain untimely-ness about the ruin, the way it impinges on the present in a way that asserts not only that the past endures but that the past continues, and does so with or without the will of a (fictive) present. It suggests, perhaps, that time is a fabric, not an arrow, or a stream. Moreover, it’s a fabric that is remade as parts wear thin, with threads of a past so intertwined with our own that separating them out can unravel reality itself. Now, I’ve taken the metaphor a bit far, but what I think matters here is the gesture: I wonder if, having looked back to see the ways in which we can forge a relationship with the past, part of what we can start to see in 2008 as we re-encounter Getting Medieval –or in my case, are touched by it for the first time—is the way in which what survives from the past is like a ruin, the ways in which Medieval Studies itself might be a kind of ruin***. Untimely in a world that insists on the past AS past, the Middle Ages can profoundly trouble our sense of a the Modern – by asserting, with Bruno Latour, that we’ve never been modern in the first place. The question – perhaps without definitive answer, but still useful for all that – is what are we to do with the past? And what is the past to do with – or to – us?

Footnotes

* - Thanks to Jeffrey for helping me formulate this -- I'd be interested to hear how other readers felt concerning the book, because I had a very hard time finding a way to interface with it...
** - I thought this might particularly resonate with Karl's work on animals.
*** - I know I'm profoundly influenced by Eileen on the past-as-ruin, but can't come up with specific citations.

Touching Carolyn Dinshaw

by J J Cohen

Karl's post foregrounded the haptic, and wondered about phenomenology. The excellent and wide-ranging discussion historicized tactility well, emphasizing its similarity to both sight and smell, a kind of medieval synesthetic array.

My way of entry into the discussion is to hesitate at the welcome mat. Quite literally.

I first met Carolyn Dinshaw when I was a graduate student. This was just when the Dark Ages were becoming Middle. Dinshaw had been invited to my university to lead a discussion of a precirculated paper at a medieval colloquium (a paper that would later be published as "A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"; it was my first real exposure to Judith Butler's work, and made a convert of me). Chaucer's Sexual Poetics was making its big splash. Liz Scala had commanded me to read that book now, so I did (Liz is always right when she commands you to do something) -- and I was blown away. Reviewers would not always be kind to the volume (one of Dinshaw's faculty hosts was preparing a not very favorable one for Speculum at the moment she was visiting, as I recall), but I loved it for its unabashed feminism, for its new readings of works that were beginning to feel familiar, for its panache.

As a prelude to her paper presentation, Dinshaw was invited to an informal lunch with faculty and graduate students. (These lunches, dubbed for obscure reasons the Chester A. Arthur Appreciation Society, were always held at a restaurant more beloved for its inexpensive wine than its good food.) Dinshaw sat directly across from me ... and I was seized with panic because I was just a graduate student, and what the hell could I say to Carolyn Dinshaw? I so love your work, it's the most exciting stuff out there, will you sign my copy of Chaucer's Sexual Poetics? My eyes were drawn to her book bag, which was actually a rubber welcome mat that had been folded in half and welded into a kind of brief case.

"I like your welcome mat," I stuttered. It is possible that we then went on to talk about Judith Butler. Or Bertilak. Or cheap wine. I don't really know, but I do remember this: she impressed me as someone with whom you could speak about all of these things, and in return she would gently suggest that you were wrong and maybe ought to rethink what you were assuming to be true. She would always do this with such interest and intensity that it didn't matter that the ground was being systematically removed from beneath your feet. This loss could be disconcerting, could be queer (in the sense of estrangement, productive disruption -- to steal some synonyms from Getting Medieval). You might feel the roiling effect of that which will "shake up the ground of traditional categories and actions" (157).

But something about that welcome mat bent round into traveler's case was reassuring. Even if the destination was not necessary known in advance, stepping through that door to the unknown (a door that seemed as much in the past as the future and present), giving up on pilgrimages to certain knowledge: these commitments have their rewards, their pleasures, their lingering touch.

As it turns out I was fortunate enough to hear much of Getting Medieval as conference presentations and big lectures before it was published. The book has always had a comfortable feel for me, like coming home -- probably because (as Karl noted in the comments to his own post) to read a book first encountered almost a decade ago is in many ways to meet a temporally disjunct version of oneself. For me, much of what was to come later in my career was catalyzed by my glimpse of a welcome mat at a table in a Cambridge restaurant c. 1991. Returning to Getting Medieval is like traveling back in time, and realizing how much of the past inheres.

So, here is my question for you, dear readers, as well as my welcome mat: did this book touch you in the past? what resonances did a rereading call forth? And -- if you are lucky enough to be giving the book a first read -- does anything I've written do anything besides make your mouth water for cheap wine, and your browser yearn to surf eBay for welcome mat briefcases?

Opening Up

by KARL STEEL

I've a longer post planned, but for now, I offer this, a key moment (for me) in Getting Medieval, one I marked with "a passage to be quoted again and again."

The queer historian...is decidely not nostalgic for wholeness and unity; but s/he nonetheless desires an affective, even tactile relation to the past such as the relic provides. Queer relics--queer fetishes--do not stand for the whole, do not promise integrity of body; they defy the distinction between truth and falsehood, as do ordinary fetishes, but they offer the possibility of a relation to (not a mirroring or completing of) something or someone that was, or that was thought, or that was specifically prevented from being or even being thought. Wrenched out of its context of hypocrisy and stagnant, nostalgic longing for wholeness, the queer Pardoner's preoccupation with the matter of past lives can reinforce the queer sense of the need for and prompt the creation not of the kinds of books that would please 'historians,' as Foucault sneered, but rather of another kind of 'felaweshipe' across time. (142)

I also offer a few (undeveloped) questions provoked by rereading Getting Medieval with two things in mind: the phenomenological turn in queer theory, and Valerie Allen's On Farting.

• Twice, Dinshaw expresses (what looks to me like) impatience with Barthes' phenomenological turn (see 40 and 51), yet I wonder how GM would have looked had Dinshaw attended more to the passivity phenomenology recognizes in touching. Touching brings together, sure, but it is also causes the toucher to be touched. Skin goes both ways, and even to speak of "both" is a limitation. We need a middle voice, a grammar neither active nor passive. Dinshaw of course speaks strongly of affect, but I also feel--at least for now--that speaking of "connection," of "relationships," by preserving the two (or more) separate things being brought into relation, occludes the great altering intimacy of being touched.
• But we can get still closer. Dinshaw speaks of touching as a contrast to sight. Touching brings us into contact with someone or something, and, so long as it is a caress rather than a grasping, it has none of the pretensions to mastery that sight does. We are contaminated by touch (recall: contaminate from con + tangere), each one of us touched, the passive and the active mingled. I wonder, however, how an attention to smell--midway between sight and touch--a sensing at a distance, in which we are contacted by the thing sensed, a sense that seems particularly bodily because particularly animal, would have altered GM. Consider Valerie Allen:

  Like ears, nostrils never shut voluntarily. Permanently open for business, they are how we receive the world. Ears may be stopped for an indefinite period, but without inhalation, we die within minutes. The very act of drawing breath is one with smelling: 'man only smells during inhalation....To perceive no smell without inhaling seems to be peculiar to man.' For as long as we are alive, we sniff the world around us, including ourselves....Through every pore and orifice we wrap ourselves in smell, signing the air. As dogs well know, urine offers the most exact signature, shit and saliva close runners up. To smell the intestinal by-product of another brings one into extimate relation with them; more profound than psychoanalysis, it entails a knowledge of them more intimate than sight or hearing, more detached than touching or licking, a knowledge of the other where their very being participates in yours. (50-51)