NO FILTER: Suffering, Finitude, and other supposed truths about animals

by KARL STEEL

Three times (!) in the last week, I've had people raise their eyebrows at me when I said I recently missed a deadline. Let me assure you that this isn't my first time at the tardy rodeo. This one (June 1) I missed  because - I'm claiming - I've been so hard at work, and because I found myself writing things I shouldn't. My essay on "Animals and Violence" for the Routledge Handbook for Animal-Human History has transmuted from a rather dull Frankenstein's monster of old blog posts and précis of previously published stuff into an overambitious reconsideration of the problem of the "medieval" in accounts of violence and animality. Of course I want to share a bit with you, but perversely, I'm not giving you part I (on animality, the medieval, and the politics of time), nor the next part of part II (on Margery Kempe's vegetarianism), but rather this not very medieval bit, which ultimately breaks up a little with a bit of Derrida that I've long loved. Boohoo.

Thanks to all the contributors to my Facebook thread asking for bibliography on violence, thanks to John Protevi for some behind-the-scenes discussion, thanks to Steven Bruso for sending me his bibliography on the same, and thanks to Jared Rodríguez for some last-minute, very welcome PDF help. Enormously helpful.

And here's the chapter section:

Sauprellen, anon c. 1720, detail; from the Jagdschloss Grunewald (see also)

It is not uncommonly said that habitats generated by internal combustion engines and electronics lack the crowds of animals common to what are often called “premodern,” “preindustrial,” or “developing” habitats. It is supposed that medieval people were therefore “more in touch with” animals than their modern counterparts. The standard argument continues in this way: because medieval people relied on animal labor, traveled on animals, and because they could not have misunderstood where meat came from, they did not need to compensate for their “unnatural” separation from animals by surrounding themselves, for example, with overbred, useless pets. Their relationship to animal life was truer than ours, where "ours" equals that group of people most likely to be reading this chapter.

The faults of the argument stem first from its implicit narrative of a fall and decadence, as if the real came first, followed by a long slide towards our antiseptic present. This nostalgia for the origin and its attendant belief in the truth of first things can and has been traced from, for example, Plato and his Ideal Forms to present-day postapocalyptic literature (with its survivalist belief in the final return to the “underlying” – a favored spatial metaphor -- reality of nature). The idea that people have a primary connection to animals as a whole (say, as children), that socialization as such is the culprit, that subrational “lived experience” is distinct from and more authentic than cultural practice, that getting before "modern civilization" is somehow going to save us and others, and so on, belongs to the precritical fantasy of origins and the fantasy of the superiority of an imagined unmediated contact.

In an animal rights context, the argument has been that industrialized production of meat somehow separates us from our "real" engagement with its real source in animal life and animal death. Supermarket culture is particularly to blame for shielding meat-eaters from the violence that feeds them. The shock of butchery, of getting past the hypocrisies of industrialized carnivorousness, is key to Sue Coe’s slaughterhouse art, or in the grand reveal, not without sexual violence, of the [I recommend not clicking on the link] industrial, cannibalistic dismemberment of female clones in Cloud Atlas. This argument follows the standard logic of ideology critique, insofar as it claims that only by coming face-to-face with the "reality" of the modes of production can we finally surmount the cruelty of our polyannish relationship to work and consumption. As has been demonstrated repeatedly in a variety of contexts, such claims are overblown: there may be some value in revealing what goes on in industrial farming - the very reluctance of these operations to open their doors to scrutiny is evidence enough of that - but what may be far more difficult to change is the consumer’s certainty that, in the end, their needs are worth it all, regardless.

Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning lambastes the “Messianic approach to art-making,” which holds that being “ambushed” by with the “truth” is an essential or even desirable goal of art. Nelson argues that truth, good action, knowledge, and least of all good art may not require revelation, surprise, horror, or destruction. Revelations of cruelty may be little more than revelings in cruelty. They might produce nothing but sensations of disgust, alienation, self-loathing, and guilt, or the self-aggrandizement of feeling that one feels more intensely or just more honestly than others, or that one has been exiled from bourgeois comforts (or that one has discovered some new way to épate them for their supposed hypocrisy). Revelations of cruelty might lead to still worse, titillation and enjoyment and from there to the desire for more cruelty, not because cruelty treats others as things, but because it recognizes that others can suffer in ways that things cannot.

Dominick LaCapra’s History and its Limits arrives at similar ends through its assault on conjunctions of the sublime, the transcendent, and sacralized violence, and on generalized, antihistorical obsessions with wretchedness, particularly as practiced in the work of Agamben, Bataille, and Žižek. When Lacapra turns his attention to one of Coetzee’s fictional creations, the animal rights activist and writer Elizabeth Costello, he joins Nelson in arguing against the notion that identification necessarily leads to empathy, and empathy necessarily to kindness. Coetzee’s Costello analogizes the death of animals to the Holocaust, accusing those who kill animals of being like the camp guards, whose fault, she insists, was that "the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims." Lacapra observes that while this may be so, Costello's argument that this cruelty can be blamed on a failure of identification can hardly account for sadomasochistic projection: no doubt, some killers and other villains can and do perceive their victims as like themselves, vulnerable and dependent, and therefore, for those very reasons, suitable targets of cruelty.

With all this in mind, we are now in a position to reconsider one of the most philosophically challenging, influential demands for an identification with nonhuman suffering. This is Derrida’s statement on the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. As Derrida observes in his The Animal that therefore I am (L'animal que donc je suis), when Bentham proposes that the important question about nonhuman animals is not whether they can speak or have reason, but whether they can suffer, this "changes everything" [change tout]. To a large degree, Derrida is correct. Where philosophers have traditionally excluded or included nonhumans within the human community of rights on the basis of positive capacities – for example, the capacity to make tools, form family relations, exhibit a theory of mind, or various forms of "lack" in Lacan, Heidegger, and their epigones – Derrida focuses on a shared non-capacity, what he calls a "nonpower at the heart of power," the ineluctable, general exposure of animals and humans alike to discomfort, injury, and death. If thinking about animals and humans begins not with abilities, language in particular, but with a shared vulnerability, certainties about agency and freedom all happily collapse.

Derrida's recentering of the animal question on suffering still has two problems: the first is that it raises the possibility that animals may be killed ethically so long as their suffering is eliminated. This would be "humane killing," which comes as such a surprise that an animal has no time to experience fear or pain: this is the goal of the slaughterhouse design championed by Temple Grandin, developed through her identification with nonhuman sensory worlds. The second issue is that identification with the "nonpower at the heart of power" need not necessarily result in less cruelty or more kindness. An awareness of suffering need not necessarily result in the desire to end it.

These objections are perhaps too practical. Derrida's concern is less with animal welfare than with philosophy. He is led to his logical endpoint by his approach to language, in which having language, this supposed distinguishing capacity of humans, is itself not a capacity, but an entanglement in an always shifting, preexisting, limitless network. At the furthest end of this "nonpower" lies the figure of the animal, preserved in Derrida's analytic, despite his attempts to do otherwise, as a homogeneous figuration of abyssal mystery.

More to the point for my analysis is that Derrida arrives at this problem by aiming at "the most radical means of thinking the finitude that we share with animals, the mortality that belongs to the very finitude of life" [la façon la plus radicale de penser la finitude que nous partageons avec les animaux, la mortalité qui appartient à la finitude même de la vie]. The truth of things may be an aporia, and therefore necessarily, anti/foundationally unreachable, but what it is not is in the middle of things. One has to follow things through to their end to find this truth of absence. Toril Moi's championing of ordinary language philosophy identifies many of the problems in this, not least of all the fact that "Derrida's deconstructive concepts at once enact and deconstruct such ideality," thus requiring that concepts meet the demands of a presumably philosophical purity so that deconstructive analysis has something to disprove. 

The purity in its most intense form, as an absence, Derrida discovers in death, suffering, and inability, all of which lie on the other side, at the before (the radical, from the Latin radix, root) and at the after (the finitude, from the Latin finis, a close or conclusion). The "nonpower at the heart of power" locates truth, even if that truth is a void, in suffering, vulnerability, violence, death, across borders, and at least implicitly across temporal limits. Whatever its dedication to upsetting pretensions to unmediated experience, nostalgia for origin, and all other myths of purity, it also needs these myths in order to preserve the grounds for deconstructive analysis. 

All this is not to demand that human and animal difference should be conceptualized around differences in ability. I welcome a focus on nonpower, among other things, even if, as Dominic Lacapra observes, this focus goes rather "too far in acknowledging human disempowerment" in relation to nonhumans. It is rather to question both the centrality of suffering in Derrida's analysis and the accompanying centrality of finitude, and the presentation of all of this as authenticity: Herbert Marcuse's "Ideology of Death" should make us suspicious about any elevation of "a brute biological fact..into an existential privilege" (for introducing me to this essay, thank you to Aranye Fradenburg's superb Sacrifice Your Love).

Nor am I denying the actual practice of cruelty. Animals can and do suffer, generally not just like people, but nonetheless in their own ways. Recognizing this suffering is no small matter. Furthermore, to say that revelations of cruelty may not necessarily lead to an end to cruelty is not to say that such revelations are valueless: possible results may range from individual kindness to wholesale assaults on an otherwise indifferent or worse social order. Or they may lead to anti-Semitic and Islamophobic assaults on (certain forms) of animal slaughter: good for some animals, bad for some people. I am challenging notions that center right action on the discovery of suffering, especially when this discovery of suffering is elevated into being a central truth – as it can be, strangely enough, for thinkers as antithetical as Bataille and Derrida --- and on those that insist that the route to that truth is through the discovery of cruelty where it was otherwise unsuspected or unfelt.

Man is the Pasture of Being, Part 1: Evilmerodach

by KARL STEEL

This series of posts is going to be about sky burial, ecomaterialism, edibility, and birds vs worms as eaters of bodies, and it’s going to be the rough draft for the first section of my “worms” chapter for my second book. Hang tight if that’s what you want. If the first thing you want, however, is a deep dive on the cultural afterlife of one of the less famous Babylonian kings, then you, my friend, my perhaps avian friend, are in for a treat.

This is the story of Evilmerodach, who cut up his father's corpse and fed him to 300 birds.

Sometime in the early fourteenth century, the Speculum humanae salvationis (The Mirror of Human Salvation) hit Latin Christendom like a ton of allegorical bricks. Available in more than 380 manuscripts from 1324 on, a typical page looks like this:

BnF Lat 512 34r - non-allegorical bricks?

Above, we have two illustrated scenes from the Bible, and below, an interpretation in Latin verse (or, as the fourteenth century wore on, still other languages: English, French, Dutch, Czech, and especially German, but oddly not Italian). For the most part, the SHS illustrates expected scenes: Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden; Noah’s ark; Jonah’s slithering out from the whale; Abraham’s interrupted sacrifice of Isaac; the misery of Job. More surprising are the many historical scenes, largely drawn from the life of David and the Book of Judges: Ehud kills Eglon; Samson pulls apart a lion’s jaws; Benaiah (whom you might remember as a son of Jehoiada) also kills a lion; and, in illustrations as horrific as Goya’s Disasters of War, David punishes his enemies.

BL Sloane 346 18v

And, in every illustrated version I’ve seen (17 so far), Evilmerodach (elsewhere also spelled Evilmarodach, Awel-Marduk, and, less likely, Amel-Marduk) is dismembering the exhumed corpse of his father, Nebuchadnezzar the great, and feeding his limbs to the birds. He is supervising, alone or with his retinue; or he’s standing over a slab or table or down in the sarcophagus, doing the dirty business himself; he has an ax, a knife, or a falchion, presumably coded as the weapon of an “eastern” tyrant. We know he’s the king because he’s wearing a crown; his father’s also crowned, although his head’s likely to be lying on the ground, staring up blankly at his son; or it might be the meal of one hungry bird. Or, it might be hoisted aloft, slung between two. Like a cocoanut (BnF Latin 512, 27r or especially BL Sloane 346 18v).

This would clearly seem to be a bad thing. This is how, for instance, Jacopo de Cessolis’ kingship manual-cum-commentary on chess takes the story: though I don’t know why Friar Jacopo made Evilmerodach his exemplary bad king (research is ongoing, but my eye's on you Giles of Rome), this exhumation is chief evidence that our Bablyonian king needs moral instruction: for Evilmerodach was “a jolye [vigorous] man without justyce and so cruel that he did do hewe his fader’s body in thre hondred pieces and gaf hit to ete and devoure to thre hondred byrdes that men calle voultres” (Caxton’s translation; for the medieval French, see here). I would be astonished if this late thirteenth-century work (surviving in more than 100 manuscripts) were not the immediate source for SHS’s Evilmerodach moralization. But I’m just as certain that neither treatment is quite fair to our king.

The earliest account dates to Jerome’s early fifth-century commentary on Isaiah (for 14:18). He ascribes the story to the Jews (narrant Hebraei huiusmodi fabulam; PL 24: 162C-D), but Josephus’s history, for example, confines itself only to the Biblical account of Evilmerodach’s involvement in Joachin’s triumphal return (Jeremiah 52:31-34, essentially the same as 2 Kings 25:27-30); the Biblical history in pseudo-Philo (middle of the 2^nd c?) doesn’t go any later than the Book of Judges; the twelfth-century traveler Benjamin of Tundala sticks to the Biblical account; so the earliest extant written Jewish version of it belongs to the fourteenth-century Rhineland. Or so says Louis Ginzberg. It may be that the tradition passed, in fact, from the Christians to the Jews.

In Jerome, Evilmerodach gets what Jacopo doesn’t grant him: a motive. Evilmerodach had reigned during the seven years his father lived as a beast, and, when Nebuchadnezzar returned to sanity, he, in his gratitude, flung his son in prison, where he (along with the Jewish king Joachin, aka Jeconiah, aka Coniah) languished until the old king finally died. But Evilmerodach’s counselors needed convincing that Nebuchadnezzar was really gone (metuebant ne viveret qui dicebatur exstinctus); so Evilmerodach had him dragged from the tomb with hooks and ropes, and, with all the moral authority of a just king, proclaimed: “Sepultis omnibus qui a te interfecti sunt, tu solus insepultus iacebis” (all will be buried whom you killed, and you alone will lie unburied). End of story. Quite the opposite of tyranny.

The story shows up next in one of Agobard of Lyon’s (d. 840) many treatises against the Jews, where this Johnny One-Note uses it to prove the truth of Christ’s resurrection. Of course. Still hooks and a rope (unco et funibus); no dismemberment; no birds. These we first get in Haymo of Auxerre’s (d. 855) roughly contemporary Isaiah commentary. Evilmerodach is certain his father will come back: “my father dies when he wants, he rises up again when he wants!” (Pater meus quando vult moritur, quando vult resurgit). Joachin – now coming into his own as a clever courtier – knows just the trick: get 300 birds from various parts of the world, exhume the body, cut him into tiny pieces, and tie every part to a bird (ligaret unicuique avi partem suam), saying: whenever these very birds gather together, then your father will resurrect (Cum hae simul aves quandoque convenerint, tunc resuscitabitur pater tuus). Hugh of St Victor’s (d. 1141) commentary on Joel, like Jerome, ascribes the story to the Jews (Hebraica docet), and simply has Evilmerodoch, still scared, concoct the idea on his own. Here he burns his father to cinders, which he splits into four bags: tying the bags to the necks of four eagles, he releases them to travel to the four corners of the world (Quo in quatuor marsupiis dispertito ad quatuor aquilarum colla ligagavit, quibus per quatuor orbis climata dispositis eas avolare permisit).

It would take Peter Comestor’s (i.e. Peter the Eater’s) enormously successful Historia Scholastica (1173) for Evilmerodach story to get close to its final form: king, 300 parts, 300 birds, and, finally, birdfood. Peter’s version also benefits from an admirable directness:

When he began to reign, he raised up Joachin, whom he had a companion in prison, and fearing that his father would resurrect, who had returned from being a beast into being a man, took Joachin into counsel; at whose counsel, he exhumed the corpse of his father, divided it into 300 parts, and gave the 300 parts to 300 vultures. And Joachin said to him, “Your father will not resurrect until these vultures return together”
 [Cumque regnare coepisset, elevavit Ioachim, quem socium habuerat in carcere, timensque ne resurgeret pater suus, qui de bestia redierat in hominem, consuluit Ioachim. Ad cuius consilium cadaver patris sui effossum, divisit in trecentas partes, et dedit eas trecentis vulturibus. Et ait ad eum Ioachim: “Non resurget pater tuus, nisi redeant vultures in unum.”]

All that Peter misses is the accusation of tyranny. For my friends in English departments, one last, less recherché citation: Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, which is basically Peter Comestor’s version, with its English translations having Nebuchadnezzar’s diced corpse going to “þre hondred vultures” for “etynge” (in Higden’s Latin, “devorandas”), and in the other, as well, to “iij c. gripes” [300 vultures; def. C], presumably also for eating.

To look at this with more charity than Jacopo de Cessolis did, Evilmerodach is simply doing what any king must do. He must secure his rule, both against other present claimants, and against his own lineage, which must neatly, definitively swap him in for the previous king. The previous king really needs to be gone: the king is dead (“are you sure?”); long live the king (“but only this one, for now”)! Faced with this, Evilmerodach, like any king, does what he must. Antique psychoanalytic interpretations of the primal hoard, with everything that follows from that (non/nom/nomnomnom du Père), should also be suggested: the dismembered father, made really dead, is all at once an overcoming of Nebuchadnezzar’s tyranny, a perpetuation of it (by dishonoring the dead), an act of power (who else can get away with desecrating a king’s corpse?), an act of fear (“is dad really dead?”), and of course something that looks more than a little like butchery. As if Evilmerodach were planning to eat his father’s corpse.

Like a ferocious beast. Recall that the story is also one about humans and animals: being with the beasts is like being dead; and being returned to the beasts simply reverses what he had been in his madness. He ate grass as an ox (Daniel 4:30), and now he himself is fodder.

Evilmerodach makes his father a bird feeder.

But Jacopo de Cessolis made him a tyrant, and the Speculum humanae salvationis piled on, so that, even in published scholarship, Evilmerodach’s sometimes charged with having killed his father (this post is, among other things, a resource to ensure that no one else makes this mistake). The Middle English verse explains:

King Evilmeredach of swilk / some tyme gaf for lyknesse
When he in his dede fadere / exercised his wodenesse
Whas body dolven out of the grave / in thre hondreth gobets he kitte
And to thre hondreth voltoures / forto devoure dalte itte
So in thaire fadere crist for thaym dede / haves fals cristen thaym wodely
What thay wilfully synnyng hym est sones crucifye
And thay synne more wreching / crist in his deitee
Then they yt crucified hym lyving / here in humanitee.

That is, Evilmerodach’s treatment of his father is like those who through their sin crucify him over and over again. And that would seem to be that: Evilmerodach is now just plain Evil.

Except that Evilmerodach normally shares his page with Absalom, David’s rebellious son, captured and killed when his long, beautiful hair tangles itself in a tree.

Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 1806 31v

 For the SHS interpretation, Absalom is no bad son. Instead, he’s a symbol of Christ: Absalom is stabbed by three spears as he dangles from the tree, just as Christ was stabbed by three lances, that is, three pains, namely, the severity of the pain, the bitter grief of his mother, and carrying the weight of the sins of the damned.

This delirious allegorization, like nothing so much as the modern habit of finding Christ in any given thing (warning: dog), reminds us that allegory does not completely overwrite the vehicle. Instead, the sometimes shocking inadequacy of the vehicle to tenor forces us to remember the vehicle’s continued material existence. Though allegory is sometimes -- especially in the Middle Ages -- held to be the “nut” underneath the shell of a literal reading, in this case, the “nut” is the historical referent, available for, and grounding, unceasing and mobile interpretation. In this case, though he is temporarily read as Christ, Absalom remains behind the SHS interpretation what he must still be, a bad son; though he is temporarily read as a figure for blasphemous, false oaths, or just sin in general, Evilmerodach likewise remains a frightened king, doing what he must. And whatever the interpretation, his father’s corpse remains a corpse, dismembered, and the birds remain hungry birds.

We should not lose track of the material business of Evilmerodach. If we remember that, we can pay better attention to the Evilmerodach’s craft. Certainly, sometimes the SHS just throws the new king into the tomb with his father, losing itself in the specificity of this weird solution to royal succession (Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Ms. germ. fol. 245 48r; similar, but less odd, BnF Latin 511, 26r). At times, Evilmerodach wields a sword, a royal weapon, and just hacks away at his father’s corpse as he would any other human body (Ms Douce 204 25v or Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek, Codex 206(49) 25r). Sometimes, however, he uses an ax (BnF Latin 9585, 30v), sometimes with the body on a wooden table, working like a butcher (Sarnen, Benediktinerkollegium, Cod. membr. 8, f 26r).

Sarnen, Benediktinerkollegium, Cod. membr. 8, f 26r

We can compare it to this butcher, for example, from Caffaro di Rustico da Caschifellone’s groundbreaking annals of Genoa, one of whose manuscripts features this worker among its many other civic marginalia (BnF Latin 10136, 6v).

BnF Latin 10136, 6v

As I observed in How to Make a Human (208-10), medieval people were fully cognizant of the similarity between animal and human flesh (after all, the Latin carnis doesn’t differentiate between the two), and the concomitant similarity between butchers and, well, people butchers. Like soldiers. And not only soldiers.

But the distribution of the royal body to the birds also recalls a ritual that has captured the love of ecocritics, me among them. This is the Tibetan ritual of “sky burial,” which, regardless of its variations, always sees corpse fed to wild birds. I’ll have much more to say about this in my next post: about the sometimes ahistorical enthusiasm for this ritual in ecocritical art, in what would have been known about it in Latin Christendom, what this has to do – and doesn’t have to do – with late medieval Christian burial practices, and what is at stake, from an ecocritical perspective, between being esca vermibus (food for worms) and esca avibus (food for birds). And I’ll also have something to say about Heidegger (a sneak preview: I’ll argue that der Mensch ist das Futter des Seins, Man is the fodder of beings).

For now, though, I’ll leave you with this: the connection of Evilmerodach with sky burial seems to be a stretch, and, indeed, for most of the manuscripts I’ve been able to examine, it is. Evilmerodach is a bad, bad king, and he’s doing a bad, bad thing, although he is also, in some manuscripts, being a perfectly good butcher, albeit with an unusual carcass. It may be too much to see this as intimating any kind of sky burial.

Except that at least one German illustrated adaptation of the Bible, Morgan M.0268, fol. 021v, features – surprisingly – Alexander the Great arriving (naked?) through the woods, and, in the middle, a dinner party with Roxana of Bactria, and then, in the right, what I think might be mistakenly labeled as Evilmerodach, dismembering his father and feeding him to the birds. Whoever he is, he's not wearing a crown; but the Morgan believes him to be Evilmerodach; notably, he is in the east, where this late fourteenth-century artist would have expected to find sky burial. And in at least one German Alexander, Evilmerodach’s shrine [“sarc”], green as grass, makes an appearance (3563-67) .

Morgan M.0268, fol. 021v

 I may just be on to something. Part two will arrive in several days.

2 Brief Notices: The Old English Poetry Project + Wael Shawky's Cabaret Crusades

by KARL STEEL

First read Jonathan Hsy below on the George Washington U Digital Humanities Institute's "Disrupting DH" event, paying particular attention to the CALL TO ACTION at the bottom.

Two things for you to do, whether you're not in NYC or you are.

First, the Old English poetry project, made by Bob Hasenfratz and Miller Oberman. I saw Bob present on this last night at the New York Medieval Club, where he described the project and walked us through some various ways of presenting translations of several Old English maxims. How should compounds be presented? How should punctuation be handled? Line breaks?

More importantly, he asked US to comment and to use this website in our teaching. Note the COMMENT function here, for example, which you'll find throughout the site: quibble with translations, make suggestions, build in your own glosses, have your students work out projects, and so on! The field's open. And continue coming back, as Hasenfratz and Oberman aim to translate no less than the entire poetic corpus of Old English. Those of our readers who are heavy into Old English and translation -- David Hadbawnik and Dan Remein for example -- may want to play around with Bob and Miller's manifestos, in particular (not least of all because Dan, along with Lawrence Venuti, was the guiding, and oft-cited, spirit of Bob's presentation).

Second, PS1 just opened its show on Wael Shawky's Cabaret Crusades. First, I recommend reading Matt Gabriele's tweets on the crusades here. It'll just take a couple minutes. For a slightly longer take, Dave Perry in The Guardian. Then get out to Queens, if you can, between now and the end of August, to see Shawky's marionettes and films, which base a retelling of the first and second crusades on Amin Maalouf's The Crusades Through Arab Eyes. Here's Shawky explaining the project (with French subtitles)

 

And here, a few of my photos from yesterday. If you're in NYC, I recommend doing what I'm going to do: grab your artist friends and make a day of watching the films. I suspect this will be my favorite PS1 show since their Schlingensief retrospective (confiteor: I tend to love PS1)

Postcolonising the Medieval Image

by J J Cohen

A new website dedicated to postcolonial approaches to medieval visual materials is now live. Supported through an AHRC grant, the site was founded by Eva Frojmovic and Catherine Karkov of Leeds University. "Postcolonising the Medieval Image" offers a growing collection of resources including conference announcements, a library of abstracts, and lists of news and events.

Bookmark this one.

New Critical Modes Part 2

by J J Cohen

Cary Howie and I recently posted excerpts from our interchanges about a special issue of postmedieval we're co-editing with the awkward, horrible, unpoetic, ghastly, barbaric and probably enduring title of New Critical Modes. The conversation we had and which I would like to continue today carries traces of these posts:

• [Oceanic] Critical Modes

• In My Craft or Sullen Art Exercised in the Still Night: Getting Serious about Pleasure (Again), and Also About Seriousness

• Logophilia and Lucidity

• The Language that Locks Others Out

• Tous les sens

• Inapposite Art

• Stories of Stone (draft)

• The Future of 'The Weight of the Past' / Credo

• Towards a Restless Medieval Studies

Each of these pieces concerns a tangle of related issues: jargon, clarity, communication, innovation, art, criticism, poetry, beauty, love, self-identity, difficulty, welcome, community, boundary.

From John Mandeville to Roger Caillois, I've been blogging over the past year my work-in-progress on stone as a kind of liquid or organism or matter-energy or artist or communication device. These posts have been accessed many times, by lightly commented upon. Compare them to the recent posts on lucidity and jargon, with their vigorous comment threads. To join a conversation about what academic writing can and should sound like is easier, it seems to me, than to reply to an essay in which a stone speaks. The stakes for the former are also higher and more self evident than for the latter. Right?

So I can't help asking: is there something within such a misfit critical mode that locks readers out? Are such modes inhospitable to the kind of convivial and nomadic™ medieval studies In the Middle is supposed to cultivate? Are they unwelcoming, ungracious? Is there a chasm between content and form? (Blog posts are, after all, their own genre).

In his comments to "[Oceanic] Critical Modes" a gifted poet/artist/medievalist named Dan Remein wrote:

I'd like to see critical work appears in language that does not register as in a critical mode, a truly new mode, one we do not yet know how to read ... I want to ask not so much about 'poetic' diction, abstract formulations, the logophilia Jeffrey recently blogged about, but also about the _poetics_ of the work in terms of what effect the language of the writing is having on language--what is the language itself doing and how--who or what does it 'speak' and what discourses does it register in, circulate, repeat, cite, etc. I want to urge you to include some things that are really really new, that break radically with old forms, take up a place in the tradition of work that resists being easily incorporated into or 'redeemed' as recognizable critical prose--prose trying to _do_ something poetically other than communicate scholarly information, prose (or verse!) whose function, rather than to communicate, must be understood to function in terms of its phenomenological capacities (outside of the 'correspondence theory of of truth,' for a philosophical reference point) is say, to name, to call, to break, to push, to open, to crack, to feel, to beckon, to cruise, to turn on or off, to....

Dan also connected some new critical modes to literary modernism -- an insight I'd endorse from personal experience. I realized long ago that a significant portion of the citational unconscious of my writing derives from Eliot, Stevens, Pound, H. D., and Stein -- along with some modernist-mediated Shakespeare and Glas-era Derrida (all of whom are intimately related, I think). Something about these artists' love of tradition in fragments, their ardor for the new, and their logophilia captured my own imagination long ago.

[illustration: rocky shore with invisible storm, Ogunquit, August 2009. By author]

But here is my hesitation. On the one hand, a part of me is drawn to Dan's injunction "not to change our 'methodologies' regarding 'scholarship' or the 'style' of our writing, but to build/construct our pieces of criticism from the perspective of what the language is capable of speaking/doing." Yes! is my first reaction. But another part of me wonders about (1) my actual ability to pull off such experimentation (Dan can accomplish such a task; I'd only be imitating bpNichol or Gertrude Stein, and not very well: so, the failure of my craft is what lurks here); and (2) the receptivity of any audience to such a mode.

Dan further argues that a new critical mode ought to "look different and not apologize for itself," ought to demand much of the reader without providing maps (introductions, conclusions, brackets that keep the experiment bounded and knowable). Again, a part of me is attracted to such vision of the art of medieval studies. But another voice inside me, concocted of ambivalence as I am, blocks me from my desired assent. This isn't the same voice that has prevented me from working with medieval mystics, or medieval labor rights activists -- the part of me that has ensured that the Middle Ages I write about is a weirdly and anachronistically secular one, a world largely without God or god-substitutes. But it is related, since I worry that such an art can seem the vatic guardian of a truth intentionally withheld.

Dan, of course, is urging nothing of the sort: hence his invocation of the "I" as multiple, his emphasis on collaborators. I believe he'd object that the kind of work he is envisioning shuts out only the lazy reader, the one who will not work alongside and through and into the text, the one who will not open to the encounter or collaboration. There are many readers of this sort.

So, what if such a new kind writing, such a new critical mode, existed -- but what if its ocean was so deep that its writer wholly lost sight of sand and shore, of readers and friends? Despite its joy in the new, modernism is underwritten, it seems to me, with despair. So what would happen if an oceanic mode were attempted (sea and stone became equally liquid), but only silence greeted the transubstantiation? Tidal indifference and a disappeared shore: who can write to that solitude?

Worse, what if a writer were to convince himself that he had journeyed deep into newly navigated waters, only to find the ocean that he thought surrounded him was never really all that deep?

Hidden Treasures at the Met Museum

by Irina Dumitrescu

Tucked into a fold of the cavernous Metropolitan Museum of Art, a three-room exhibition of medieval manuscript drawings entitled “Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages” is on display until August 23, 2009. Despite the exhibition’s flowery review in the New York Times, these faded books draw few visitors in comparison with the epic Francis Bacon retrospective on the same floor of the Met. Still, medievalists will find unexpected, and unexpectedly breathtaking, treasures among them.

The collection is a particular treat for the Anglo-Saxonist. Saint Dunstan’s Classbook is on display, opened to the well-known image of the tiny monk Dunstan bowing to a brobdignagian Christ. Byrhtferth’s computus diagram fills an entire page of Oxford, Saint Johns’ College MS 17. A tenth or eleventh-century English copy of Prudentius’ Psychomachia is illustrated by eighty-nine stately images. The Arenberg Gospels, the Sherborne Pontifical, and the Bury Saint Edmonds Psalter offer examples of the dynamic and finely-detailed line drawing we know from the Utrecht Psalter. (Looking at these images I realised what the strange grace of slouching angels in undulating robes reminded me of – the “broken doll” look of a Vogue editorial model!) As if that weren’t enough, the Harley Psalter is also here in New York, unbelievably fine and brilliantly coloured. I had only ever seen enlarged black-and-white reproductions of Harley Psalter images, and thought them rough and unimpressive. Seeing the Harley in person, I realised that the exquisite lines of its drawings simply do not survive magnification, and that much of the dynamic quality of the figures results from their vivid, almost playful, colouring. Ironically but perhaps unsurprisingly, the occasional reproductions and magnifications of manuscripts on the exhibit walls were never as vibrant as the real thing.

I fell in love with other pieces as well. A ninth or tenth-century copy of the First Book of Maccabees from St. Gall features energetic battle scenes, with orange, yellow, blue, and green shields popping like bright Easter eggs from the manuscript page. A long scroll of Peter of Poitiers’ The Compendium of History through the Genealogy of Christ demonstrates that medieval artists would have appreciated flow charts and Power Point. The Sawley Map lets us imagine a world in which Europe is not at the top. And a twelfth-century English copy of Terence begins with an author portrait of the playwright and a drawing of thirteen theatrical masks waiting for use in a cupboard. While Terence looks expressionless at the reader, the masks practice a ghoulish variety of grimaces.

It is probably a mistake to follow up an exhibition on the glorious but quiet achievements of early medieval art with a Francis Bacon retrospective. Bacon’s paintings, overwhelming in both size and traumatic force, have a tendency to push anything else out of my consciousness. (And as they do so, they prove Mary Carruthers’ point about violent imagery and memory much better than any medieval manuscript could.) Still, looking at the ways in which Bacon painted people and people-parts in cages, seeing how one version of Bacon’s Pope Innocent is trapped in interlocking cages and bars, I understood some of the strange, subtle power of medieval images. Among the diagrams in the “Pen and Parchment” exhibition are a German consanguinity chart, entirely contained within the body of Adam, and a diagram by Opicinus de Canistris in which the universal church is drawn within one man’s body. These diagrams are curious to the modern eye, but they offer us a radically optimistic vision of a universe in which lines and boxes create order within the human, rather than fencing him in. In Three Studies for a Crucifixion, Francis Bacon opens up the human body and forces us to examine its grotesquely confused innards. In his diagram of the church, Opicinus places the crucifixion within a whole and unblemished body; he acknowledges human suffering, but shows us a way to find the meaning beyond it.

[thank you, Irina, for this fantastic guest post -- JJC]