Watery Metaphor: Much-Belated Meditations on Oceanic New York

by JONATHAN HSY

In this blog post, I’m trying out some ideas in response to Oceanic New York. See an excerpt from JEFFREY’s contribution to (what is now) a book project HERE and this recent update/meditation by Steve Mentz, the “Prime Mover” of the event and related book project (see HERE). [NOTE: The images and captions only impressionistically relate to the text.]

One of most compelling aspects of Oceanic New York was how its varied presentations aimed to explore and rethink metaphors of connectivity. The ocean is a conveyance-machine, a life-sustaining environment and agentive force in its own right, a dynamic medium/mode of transport that enacts the flow of matter, languages, and cultures. Emerging as another theme across the presentations was the idea that ocean invites us to adopt fluid modes of temporality as well. As I listened to the presentations, it became increasingly clear that thinking about the ocean requires a capacity to sustain different notions of scale concurrently. In a blog posting soon after the event (see HERE) Steve recalls “Nancy Nowacek’s direct statement that we must live in more than one temporal register at the same time.” Indeed, these presentations moved into multitemporal registers through a variety of approaches: eco-theoretical, linguistic-poetic, philosophical-scientific, aesthetic-artistic, architectural-communal. As Mentz observes: “There’s no way to capture the fluid dynamism of the event itself — but formal play and poetic experiments can gesture toward that multiplicity in different media.” What I hope to offer in my response is a more deliberate consideration of the “fluid dynamism” of the event, exploring my current (pun intended?) thoughts on its multiplicity and play.
   

[Above: Oceanic New York, St. John's University, Sep. 26, 2013.  EILEEN, displaying her love of #disasterporn, shows an image of a sublime green wave overtaking New York City.]

Linguistic Registers

A certain delight in wordplay and poetic experimentation with metaphor characterized many of the Oceanic New York presentations. In his etymological wordplay, JEFFREY (read THIS) evinces a transtemporal oceanic contact zone, and he does so in a writing style appropriate for relating the dispersal of peoples across time and thinking about the watery spaces they traverse.

Jeffrey’s multitemporal experimentation with etymology and near-puns implying motion and polyglot vessels of transport (“convoy, convey, convoke”) makes me ask how transportable different oceanic theories of connectivity become when they are expressed through poetic tropes (i.e., wordplay or metaphors). The transportability of oceanic paradigms (the question of whether a way of thinking about the ocean that derives from one context can carry over to another) is something that premodern scholars have contended with for some time. Indeed, it would appear that there is now a "critical mass" of different connectivity paradigms in play that are each to some extent unmoored from the specific oceanic spaces that generated them. I'm thinking of Sebastian Sobecki’s (2007) work on South Pacific connectivity and its (admittedly cautious) application to a networked medieval Irish Sea and North Atlantic (The Sea and Medieval English Literature, 14-15); or Jeffrey's previous work (2008), where archipelagic modes of thought migrate from the Caribbean to the British Isles; or explorations of connectivity informing the British archipelago to emerge in a forthcoming (2016) issue of postmedieval issue ed. by Sobecki and Matthew Boyd Goldie. Very recently, Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Karla Malette’s wonderful co-edited collection A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History (2013) has helped Anglophone readers to revisit connectivity via the profoundly intertwined literary histories of languages and cultures throughout the medieval Mediterranean.

Akbari engages with recent work by David Abulafia (2011) on the longue durée history of the Mediterranean and Horden and Purcell’s seminal The Corrupting Sea (among others) to break out of constraining monolingual approaches to literary history; she finds in the medieval past a more expansive mode of (re-)de-territorializing discrete linguistic, literary, and national traditions. Most importantly for this discussion, Akbari also entertains how theories of connectivity that derive from this particular sea’s “enclosed” quality and movement of currents might actually transfer to other landed medieval “Mediterraneans”— such as the vast Sahara, or diverse terrain of the Silk Road (4). If there is a single global ocean (as this issue of PMLA posits and Steve Mentz entertains HERE in his article on blue cultural studies) then an “Oceanic New York” just happens to be one locality among many in a contiguous terraqueous globe. Rather than perpetuating a rigid distinction between land and sea, “both/and” orientations take connectivity as a feature traversing all spaces (a point I suggest in a different way in my own work – see footnote if you're interested).[1]

[Stone marks former site of glacial pond. St. John's University, Sep. 26, 2013.]

Watery Motion

In A Sea of Languages, Karla Mallette pinpoints an excellent linguistic metaphor to suggest new ways of thinking across different scales of time concurrently. In “Boustrephedon: Toward a Literary Theory of the Mediterranean,” Mallette puts Classical writing and reading practices in conversation with the medieval Mediterranean Sea for the benefit of modern-day readers. “Boustrophedon,” she notes, is a Greek adverb denoting “turning as the ox plows,” and insofar as the adverb denotes motion it provides a model for conceiving the back-and-forth transit of texts, languages, and ideas. As Mallette states, a “tidal rhythm of ebb and flow” implicates “our contemporary entanglement with the Arab world to the medieval Mediterranean,” a globe where Arab and European worlds implicate one another (260). This back-and-forth mode of thought registers — however unexpectedly — with Lowell Duckert’s presentation on “glacial erratics” and the flow of ice, and the Iroquois name for the Hudson (entity of water) as the “river that flows both ways.”

I love what these models of back-and-forth-transit achieve and would add that the materiality of the “boustrophedon” metaphor warrants further consideration, as it weirdly enacts an amphibious leap across land to water. That is, “boustrophedon” originally refers to the motion of a yoked ox in a profoundly landed, agricultural context— and it is being extended by analogy to a sea and the fluid modes of conveyance it enables. The landedness of the “boustrophedon” metaphor renders it simultaneously alien to and appropriate for limning the surfaces of an enclosed sea.[2]

           

As we test the flexibility of oceanic metaphors to structure thought, we are eventually faced with Heather Blum’s dictum: “The sea is not a metaphor” (670).[3] Or rather (as Steve suggested in his presentation) the sea is not only a metaphor. Adopting a spatial metaphor that thinks not in terms of back-and-forth surface motion but plumbs the ocean’s watery depths, Blum observes: “Oceanic studies calls for a reorientation of critical perception, one that rhymes with the kind of perspectival and methodological shifts ... seen [in] influential conception[s] of history from the bottom up” (671). In this shift to a vertical/horizontal orientation, Blum cannot help but wax poetic with a metaphor of her own: the conceit that one critical orientation “rhymes” with another.

[Moments in time: Spencer Finch's The River That Flows Both Ways (2009) documents a single day's journey along the Hudson through snippets of color. Finch photographed the changing colors of the Hudson once every minute. This combination of two photos was taken at the High Line on Sep. 28, 2013.] 

Waves (Sound and Water)

Blum’s use of “rhyme” to indicate critical orientations that resemble one another brings me ultimately to one physical, kinetic feature of the ocean: waves. And here I mean waves of water and of sound. Each of these presentations (in its own way) manipulated sonic phenomena to suggest the materiality of oceanic metaphors and watery poetics. Wordplay and the poetic effects of cadence and rhyme not only help transmit to ideas but they also implicate sound as a key mode of idea-conveyance. Sound, to adopt modern scientific discourse, is a vibration that propels itself as waves through a medium (be it water or air). It might not be surprising, then, that we can resort to stylized patterning of sound-waves to convey how we — terrestrial, air-breathing creatures — conceive transit through a water-filled environment. To communicate some sense of transit through waves and currents of water, we create verbal and linguistic “waves” (in medieval acoustic theory, sound breaking air) to enact analogous motion. As Patricia Yaeger observes, a contemporary “rush of aqueous metaphors [across oceanic studies] lends materiality to a world that becomes more ethereal every day, to a discourse that has taken to the air, that threats iPhones like oxygen saps, as if our very lungs and sinews could be extruded into cyberspace” (523).[4] I might tweak this observation slightly to say that attending to the materiality of metaphor and sound exposes how the ocean facilitates thought in a global (literary, linguistic, temporal) scale.

Oceanic New York has helped me to think more carefully about materiality of metaphor, or — to put it another way — to confront the physicality of thought. Sonic patterns and verbal tropes are one strategy for making ideas perceptible to the senses, so it is fitting that thinking about the ocean and diverse watery environments would provoke such varied concurrent modes of expression. These presentations in the original “event” of their oral-aural-sonic delivery and in their printed manifestation in graphic form cover a range of topics, but collectively they achieve a shared effect: they seek to embody varied modes of transit through space and time. (By the way, such embodied linguistic mimicry is not limited to sound: H-Dirksen Bauman’s work on Deaf literary theory notes the ASL gesture for the verb FLOW manually enacts a downward motion resembling water, enacting a “kinetic model of the world.”[5])

These acts of watery thinking in all their variety instill an attentiveness to the terraqueous worlds we inhabit. These concurrent critical modes — and ludic exploration of metaphor and language — reveal the manifold functions of the ocean and attend to the perpetual motion of all that participates in it, with it, and through it.

---

[1] In my own work on polyglot spaces, I’ve encouraged a similar “both/and” orientation toward the transit of tongues and people: a critical mode that attends simultaneously to landlocked (local, grounded) conditions of literary production as well as oceanic connective trajectories; see Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature (Ohio State UP, 2013), especially chapter 2 and the coda.

[2] The capacity of “boustrephedon” to connote concurrent temporal registers is a feature of fictive realms too. The constructed Antlatean language, which re-creates a proto-Proto-Indo-European language with non-PIE elements, is written in boustrophedon to evoke “back-and-forth movement, like water” (says the creator Marc Okrand, who also happens to be the creator of extraterrestrial Klingon).

[3] Hester Blum, “The Prospect of Oceanic Studies,” PMLA 125.3 (May 2010): 670-677.

[4] Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons,” PMLA 125.3 (May 2010): 523-545.

[5] H-Dirksen Bauman, “On the Disconstruction of (Sign) Language in the Western Tradition: A Deaf Reading of Plato’s Cratylus.” In Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking, ed. H-Dirksen Bauman (U Minnesota P, 2008), 127-145, at 141.

Jenna Mead on Premodern Places

by J J Cohen

Here is a bit from Jenna Mead's eloquent review of David Wallace's Premodern Places. Although it appeared two years ago in Parergon, I only just discovered it. I'm sharing a portion because I think Mead well articulates the achievement of the book. My own belief is that Premodern Places is one of the most important interventions into medieval studies in a long time. I've been surprised not to hear more from other medievalists about the book; that's one of the reasons I invited Kofi Campbell to blog about Wallace's work. I was happy to hear Premodern Places cited and discussed at NCS Swansea, though -- and was reminded once again of the time lag between a book's publication and the appearance of noticeable effects of its scholarly impact.

David Wallace’s Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn begins as ficto-criticism; a genre that inserts autobiographical self-realization into theoretically-conscious critical scholarship. Alice Kaplan’s, French Lesson: a Memoir (1993), Stephen Muecke’s No road (bitumen all the way) (1997) and Ross Gibson’s Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002) are exemplary instances. Wallace’s readers may be more familiar with its iconic version in Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Energy in Renaissance England (1989) where his opening claim – ‘I began with the desire to speak with the dead’ – is coeval with a sub-genre known as ‘confessional criticism.’ While it is by now a well-sanctioned rhetorical move, the opportunity to insert an authorial subjectivity into what is a scholarly and interpretive project is an indicator of Wallace’s commitment to rethinking the generic and thus intellectual boundaries of canonical criticism in which... he has a significant stake.

Premodern Places takes the form of a looping, fragmentary itinerary: Calais Gate, ‘Flaundres’ – the location of Chaucer’s ‘Pardoner’s Tale’ – Somerset, Genoa, the Canaries or Fortunate Islands and Surinam. In each place – neither a starting point nor a destination but rather a pause – Wallace identifies, to use Roland Barthes’s term, a punctum: ‘a sign or detail in a visual field provoking some deep – yet highly subjective – sense of connectedness with people in the past’ (p. 2). For Wallace, in each place, there is a detail that provokes in him a sense of such connectedness ...

Wallace’s alter ego on his journey through these premodern places is Geoffrey Chaucer. The autobiographical narrative of the ‘Introduction’ – ‘I grew up in England, but now live mostly in Philadelphia’ – ripples the texture of scholarship in the dedication, in photograph credits, an unnamed figure in a picture, the intermittent use of the first person in singular and plural, in scattered touristic details and an occasional chauvinism. or Wallace, this moment is not so much a punctum as one of enfremden (‘the process of estranging, alienating, or rendering foreign’ 139) because the same ‘reviving classicism’ that enables Chaucer to ‘articulate a new poetic identity coincides with, meshes with, and ... decisively sustains the westward movement of slaving across the Mediterranean’ (p. 183). The sublimity of the Trecento that is central to traditional conceptions of Chaucer as poet, English as ‘pure,’ turns upon ‘the binomial most fundamental to classical consciousness ... : liberty and servitude’ (p. 192) materialized in Genoa’s thriving slave trade to which Chaucer is to be imagined as some kind of witness.

This, I think, is Wallace at his most risky, speculative and, paradoxically, suasive. Somewhere near the deep heart of Premodern Places is an attempt to meditate upon ‘the English-thinking imaginary’ (p. 239) for which both places and texts must be made visible and thus readable. Hence, perhaps, those aspects of this book which readers may find surprising and unnerving: the eclectic selection of materials and atemporal sequences, a set of quirky connections and an eddying movement of prose both anecdotal and formal, hints of an unresolved frisson of sexual desire and masculinity, the scholar as restless subject combined with an unashamedly subjective scholarship. Whatever the frustrations of an Englishman (not quite) at home in the land of the free, readers will be grateful for the Dutch (or is it Flemish?) courage it took to write this provocative and challenging book.

The whole review is worth reading in Parergon 23.1 (2006) 230-34.

Karl's performative interspace, or, 'I want to...'

Karl's Kalamazoo paper was a work of art, riffing on the Gowtherian Idyll post he'd placed here a while ago and deploying his lexical trademark phrase (see the comments here) of "I want to ..." in order to open up what I now dub a performative interspace.

Briefly -- and correct me if I am misrepresenting you, Karl -- his Kzoo paper attempted to imagine what it would be like to stop Gowther before he could leave the idyllic hillside, before he had to exit that space where for the first time he has experienced a generosity existing outside the demand for reciprocation. Karl went further, and spoke of his own desire to co-inhabit that space, to be with Gowther and the greyhound in a realm where charity is divorced from telos.

I've been thinking about Karl's paper quite a bit, especially as it touched the other presentations in the panel. Eileen, especially, forged such a middle space while detailing the impossible desire of a demon to touch, to love, to be with a solitary saint. In a moment filled with anguish and desire, she lingered over the sadness of this demon forced to become fugitive, a demon hesitating with yearning even as he is compelled to depart. I think, too, of Nicola wandering the sadness of the dispersive "cloud" he described, and Anna errant in the worlds she evoked. What made all four of these so impressive was their performative force: they brought into being the interstices they imagined. Another way of saying this is that these four scholar/performers found in their texts moments of generosity, of invitation: they accepted their provocations, formed an alliance with what was offered, brought themselves and their texts to a space where both could meet, mingle, change. It was a wonder to behold ... or, as audience member, to be caught up in the becoming, even to participate unawares.

We've been talking quite a bit on this blog about new critical modes. I happened to watch an important one performed* at Kalamazoo.

*and yes I keep using that word intentionally, since I seem to have performance theory on my mind

Why U Penn Comp Lit Grad Students are Cool

Check out this website for a lecture series they have been running since 1996.

From the site:

What Is Theorizing?

Theorizing is an experimental forum for thinking through literature, philosophy, and culture beyond disciplinary boundaries.

Founded and organized by students at the University of Pennsylvania since 1996, Theorizing is a non-profit lecture series. The program is coordinated by graduate students in Penn's Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory.

If you follow the links to the archive, you can even listen to audio recordings of many of the lectures. Later today I'll be listening to one of my favorite anthropologists, Alphonso Lingis.

An untimely essay arrives just in time

The latest edition of Early Modern Culture consists of a cluster of essays meditating on time. Though they all have their strengths, check out the response by my GW colleague Jonathan Gil Harris, who writes:

What has been left out of historicism's false choice between synchronic and diachronic analysis is any theorization of anachronism. For historicists, anachronism is the bogey to be avoided. It is a byword for bad or unthinking scholarship; by implying proximity or affinity between past and present, anachronism breaks the law of temporal distance and difference. But at what cost do we cleave to this law as an apotropaic safeguard against universalism? What do we do when historicism's archeological layers get messed up, when we are confronted -- in Abbas's apt formulation -- with the "layers of fossil sedimentation after an earthquake, rather than properly buried strata of an orderly succession of historical moments"? Indeed, to what extent may such "earthquakes" be the norm rather than the exception? And what happens to the past's "fossils" once they are re-exhumed? How is the matter of the past not necessarily dead (as Greenblatt's famous séance-like tryst with early modernity -- "I began with the desire to speak with the dead" -- would have it), but still alive and active in the present?

In this context it's salutary to return to Fredric Jameson's Political Unconscious, the work that has not only provided historicism with its de facto imperative, "always historicize!", but also helped translate the terms synchronic and diachronic from linguistic to historical analysis. The new historicist/cultural materialist debates of the nineteen-eighties employed the terms of Jameson's study to advance two divergent ideals of what he supposedly meant by "always historicize!": always contextualize in relation either to a moment or to a transition. What got neglected was how Jameson's injunction is, in some respects, also a call to anachronize. Noting the propensity of literature to resist any univocal reflection of the material circumstances of its production, Jameson writes how literary "form, secreted like a shell or exoskeleton, continues to emit its ideological message long after the extinction of its host." With his suggestive metaphor of the exoskeleton, which boldly reanimates the dead fossil of Foucauldian archeology as a past organism partially alive in the present, Jameson suggests that historicism needs to do more than simply read synchronically and/or diachronically; it also needs to consider how its objects are anachronistic assemblages that are temporally out of joint with themselves and their moment. In the process, Jameson makes space for what Nietzsche called the "unfashionable" or "untimely."

The untimely is that which is out-of-time, inhabiting a moment but also alien to it. By resisting absorption into a homogeneous present, it also brings with it the difference that portends the future even as it conjures the past. This insight is developed with particular intensity in the work of Walter Benjamin. In his study of German baroque trauerspiel, Benjamin argues that this dramatic genre characteristically awaits a future that is enabled by the untimely figure of the ruin; the latter enacts the irruption of the past into the present, but in a form that strips both "now" and "then" of their synchronic plenitude. The ruin makes itself available to allegorical manipulation by the playwright, who seeks to bestow on it a new, future plenitude that may never come. The trauerspiel playwright's reworking of the untimely ruin thus resembles the "weak messianic impulse" that Benjamin identifies in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History." Like Nietzsche, Benjamin rails against the antiquarian spirit that insists on collecting historical facts simply so that these may be organized in orderly temporal sequence "as things really were." The "Theses" propose instead what we might call an untimely materialist historiography: Benjamin's historical materialist "seizes on a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger" in order to explode the empty homogeneous time of the present and usher in, if not the Messiah, then at least the hope of redemption from that danger. Benjamin thus qualifies historicism's investment in orderly temporal distance by insisting as well on the strategic proximity of past and present - an explosive time-brew, to paraphrase Serres once more, that has the power to generate new imaginative and material possibilities.

Harris's response in its entirety may be accessed here. There is even a response to Linda Charnes's response to the response in which Harris lauds medievalists for their work on the topic. Harris invokes many of the names we see frequently on this blog, and discusses the Menon/Goldberg PMLA piece that Michael posted upon recently as well.

Touching On

"Queerness works by contiguity and displacement, knocking signifiers loose, ungrounding bodies, making them strange; it works in this way to provoke perceptual shifts and subsequent corporeal response in those touched ... It makes people stop and look at what they have been taking as natural, and it provokes inquiry into the ways that 'natural' has been produced by particular discursive matrices of heteronormativity. ("Chaucer's Queer Touches / A Queer Touches Chaucer" 76-77)"

Following on from JJC's transgenic bunnies and the touch of the queer, I have just returned from Leeds (the home of the International Medieval Congress) where I was attending a conference devoted to Jacques Derrida's On Touching-Jean-Luc Nancy called The Future Matters: Apropos of Derrida's Touching on the Technology of the Senses to come in a Post-Global Horizon. Oddly, there was no mention of the Middle Ages (or medieval scholarship on touch) despite Derrida's critique of what he calls haptocentrism in the phenomenological tradition which touches, in Tangent number V, on the concept of the flesh and touch in Christianity (winding through Didier Franck and Jean-Louis Chretien). The strangely baroque figure of the touch or kiss of the eyes which Derrida mobilizes in this book would also seem far less strange to readers of Medieval Literature. This amazingly dense and extravagant book (a kind of sequel to Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology and Speech and Phenomena) sees Derrida doing a lot of palintropic turning back (to Aristotle, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas) so I'm wondering if anyone at ITM has thought about how On Touching might be a resource for Medievalists (I'm thinking of SIr Gawain and the Green Knight, Troilus and Criseyde, or The Pardoner's Tale as obvious touchstones) turning to the critique of "humanualism".

I would also take this opportunity to mention that we have recently lost Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean Baudrillard and to mourn their passing. It seems Nancy, who should have died in the early 1990s, will survive them all.

RE: The Sharp Report of Scott Eric Kaufman's Owne Petard

Recently, over at Acephalous, Scott Eric Kaufman has shared a "conclusionless" draft of his essay on the history of theory in the 1970s and 1980s, titled "Culture of Argument" [ver. 2.8]. I encourage everyone to read it, but for convenience's sake, I will share with you here some of its highlights, as well as the response I have posted on Kaufman's blog. If you find yourself really interested in this subject, you will also want to check out N. Pepperell's response at Rough Theory. To hopefully not do "rough justice" to Kaufman's essay, here is my overly abbreviated version of his argument:

1. Gone are the days of the early 1980s when important journals like Critical Inquiry were committed to a dialectical pluralism "in which key figures in the field debated each other openly before the entire profession";
2. thanks to "the marked decline in the investment required to print and distribute a journal" [due to new publishing softwares, readily available], we have seen an explosion of sub-disciplines within sub-disciplines, which has contributed to the "balkanization" of the field of theory and to a situation where extra-disciplinary theories have developed that are, lamentable, cut off from purposeful engagement with "wider" conversations within the discipline [literary studies] at large;
3. the only alternative to "balkanization" is "to embrace a kind of institutional thoughtlessness in which certain foundational ideas are denuded of their original theoretical entailments." So, for example, Laura Mulvey's important essay on the gaze in film studies has been utilized [in Kaufman's words, "routinized"] by other theorists for various purposes without taking into consideration all the dimensions of the Lacanian underpinnings of her original argument;
4. the anthologies born out of the vigorous theory debates of the 1970s and 1980s "authorized a particular version of the critical past in order to empower a particular vision of the critical present," which version of the past has since ossified, such that the emergence of "virtuoso readers" [in the words of Frederic Jameson, critics who produce "bodies of criticism in which the practice of peculiar and sometimes eccentric textual interpretations is at one with the projection of a powerful, nonsystematized theoretical resonance"] has since become stymied;
5. these Jamesonian "virtuoso readers," whom Kaufman valorizes [I believe] in his essay, "evince both Hegelian seriousness—an aggressive commitment to the consequences of their premises—and a keen eye for the particularities of the literary work before them";
6. "The absence of Hegelian seriousness [in much current theoretical work] . . . is a byproduct of theory’s codification, in the form of anthologies, during the last years of the 1980s. Previously, these essays were encountered in the wild. They were still provocative, certainly, but as objects of debate instead of reverence. The ceaseless discussion about theory (broadly defined) in the period between its arrival in 1966 and its consolidation in the late 1980s trained a generation of literary scholars to see fine points of distinction between competing theoretical models. The generation of scholars following the advent of theory anthologies possessed a book—singular and imposing—containing a series of models applicable to literary texts. A 'theoretical approach' defined thus might employ one or more of these theories in an effort to make sense of a text, but in so doing these theories ceased to be discrete entities. They became, en masse, theoretical. Preauthorized, different texts from the theoretical canon could be applied with no regard for any internal contradictions such applications would entail"; therefore,
7. "The incorporation of this vitiated form of theory into the professional mainstream has made it increasingly difficult for virtuoso critics to emerge because the entire process of professionalizaton—beginning with the teaching of theory, via anthology, to graduate students and extending to the kind of deep historical research currently required for publication, as well as the absence of a forum in which sustained theoretical debates can be held—precludes the development of Hegelian seriousness"; as a result:
8. "Critics today no longer fear their methodology will be scrutinized at all, much less in the discipline’s flagship journals. They are free to borrow from different traditions in the service of producing 'interesting' readings. Nowhere is the abuse of this freedom more apparent than in the work of Homi Bhabha, who, as much as any currently prominent thinker, embodies the spirit of the age of the theory anthology. Almost every page in The Location of Culture (1994) yields citations appealing to anthologized authority—such as 'as Lacan reminds us' or 'the work of Said will not let us forget'—or which cite thinkers whose work is predicated on mutually exclusive assumptions"; so,
9. "If we, as a discipline, are to promote the development of more Jamesonian virtuosos, the desire to introduce new theoretical models into the fold most be coupled with a commitment to what W.J.T. Mitchell, writing at the height of Critical Inquiry’s influence, called 'dialectical pluralism': 'the weeding out of error, the elimination of trivial or marginal contentions, and the clarification of fundamental and irreducible differences…the kind of communication which clarifies exactly what is at stake in any critical conflict'."
10. Not quite concluding, Kaufman writes, "Stemming the creep of naïve eclecticism should be of the utmost concern, but doing so would require a forum in which an aggressive commitment to strong beliefs, weakly held, could be displayed," and a "new forum—one which shares the commitment to debate once embodied by Critical Inquiry—is necessary if we hope to see a new generation of Jamesonian virtuosos emerge."
    

Here is my somewhat tentative response:

First, I am glad I read Scott's essay, "Culture of Argument." Having been taught theory—mainly of the structuralist, narratological bent [Ricouer, Iser, Ingarden, Barthes, Brooke-Rose, Jakobson, Bahktin, Pavel, etc.]—while undertaking an MFA in fiction in the late 1980s, and then later—in the more classic "high theory" mode—as a PhD student in medieval literature, in the late 1990s, Scott's essay rang fairly true for me, at least as regards some of the earlier debates among literary studies theorists, the development and entrenchment of what might be called a theory canon [now ossified], and the ways in which certain theorists can be deployed alongside each other in an analysis of a literary text without regard for the intellectual "incoherences" that inhere in what might be called their obscene couplings [such that, as Scott argues, one should not invoke Foucault and Althusser in the same sentence as if they would agree about the psychic-social makeup of "the subject"]. Speaking as a medievalist, I am always glad to see anyone historicizing theory—it's an important project, and one significant book on this subject, written by a medievalist, that everyone should read, is Bruce Holsinger's The Premodern Condition (Chicago, 2005).

Scott's overall argument, however, I fear, has some serious Romantic (even Byronic/masculinist) tendencies, and also makes some (I think so, anyway) logical fallacies. On the more minor level of logical fallacies, I simply do not see the connection between "the marked decline in the investment required to print and distribute a journal" and theory's "balkanization." First, even desktop publishing is not cheap, and I speak from experience on this point. Printing and distribution are still an issue, and always will be, even with purely online journals like Postmodern Culture that still need individual and institutional subscriptions (and institutional support in the way of staff hours, space, equipment, and supplies) to stay afloat. Yes, there has been what might be called a certain explosion in sub-field-type journals (of both the more traditional "print" and more contemporary electronic variety), but we have a sui generis-type situation here: theory "balkanizes" itself, then the journals follow, not the other way around. Simply put, to say that the so-called "balkanization" of theory is somehow made possible through cheaper, more readily available publishing processes is pushing the supposed sequence of events just a bit too hard (while also ignoring the fact that publishing, even digital publishing, is hugely time- and cost-consuming).

This brings me to the idea of the "balkanization" of theory. Ever since the first time I saw this metaphor, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, in fact, it has made me cringe. Its (supposedly) negative connotation is directly connected to the historical situation from which it draws its name: the Balkan (breakaway) states of the former Yugoslavia, and all of the problems (even bloody violence) attendant thereupon. What lies beneath the invocation of this history, if the invocation is meant to be negative (which, in Scott's critique, I believe it is), is a secret desire to have things "whole" again, more "unified." The processes of a metaphorical "balkanization" speak to a certain chaos and headless politics that can only be confusing and deadly, or at the very least, decadent. The threat of miscegenation and degeneracy looms ("sub-disciplines within sub-disciplines"). As to whether or not the obscene births of these so-called sub-disciplines, cut off from more broadly-inclusive and cross-disciplinary theoretical debates, is a good or bad thing for the field of literary studies as a whole: let us set that aside for the moment. For me, the more pressing question, at least as regards Scott's essay, is: why this yearning for the "One"? (A place/site, in other words, such as Critical Inquiry's "Critical Responses" section, nostalgically drawn by Scott as lamentably "past," where everyone who matters could somehow gather and voice strong, yet weakly held, opinions and hold each other accountable.) There is something eerily totalitarian in this wish—that, somehow, all theoretical discourses could be drawn under one eye, where everyone would be responsible and accountable to everyone else, but this also assumes a kind of high arbiter, or set of "higher" value judgments that would structure the inevitable debates. (Of course, the fact that Scott also invokes Hegel over and over again in the most positive of ways is also telling in this respect.)

One last minor quibble regarding the logic of Scott's essay: it simply cannot be assumed that the establishment of theory anthologies, and hence the canonization of certain essays/book chapters/theorists, necessarily affects the way all later theorizing turns out. First of all, there are many, many programs in which theory is not taught via the anthology, or even the anthology-method. I was not taught theory this way; indeed, in my PhD program, I was taught theory by two professors (married to each other, in fact) who insisted we read whole books, and the list was eclectic, to say the least, and often unconnected to whatever has been included in "the anthology." Therefore, I read Foucault's Discipline and Punish and Judith Butler's Bodies That Matter, sure, but I also read Owen Flanagan's The Varieties of Moral Personality, J.M. Bernstein's The Fate of Art, Diane Elam's Feminism and Deconstruction, Bill Readings' The University In Ruins, Zygmunt Bauman's Postmodern Ethics, and so on. Further, anyone with half a brain in a graduate program can intuit for themselves that one cannot really understand a theorist through extracts from that theorist's corpus (or, "whole body"). To understand any theory, and to deploy it as ethically and as intelligently as possible, is to also know that theorists, like any human being (like Jack London, for that matter, to steal a figure from Scott's essay), develop their thinking over a lifetime, and in the course of that lifetime, experience (and articulate) various shifts and changes (and even apostasies and paradoxical contradictions) in their thought. If this is not taken into account in the deployment of any theorist's thought (Foucault, for example, cannot be invoked just vis-à-vis Discipline and Punish, without also taking into account his later writings on governmentality), there is a certain intellectual dishonesty that will result. I actually agree with Scott that much work in current theory suffers from this dishonesty (especially in relation to the theoretical "fogbank" Scott invokes by way of Homi Bhaba's work), and that this likely, as Scott also points out, has something to do with processes of hiring and tenure and the general rush everyone seems to be in these days. I have devoted much of my own career to the thought of Emmanuel Levinas (and to Derrida's writings on Levinas, as well as on ethics and justice more generally), and I recognize that I could spend my entire lifetime just reading those two (and whoever they might invoke) and no one else, and I would still be trying to figure out my own theoretics of violence, suffering, and justice, which is what I mainly work on (within the sub-discipline of Old English culture and literature). From an ethical, but also from a professional standpoint, I consider this theoretical labor enough for my own career. Which is also to say, it isn't necessarily a more vigorously pursued cross-disciplinarity that will "save" theory from its intellectual dishonesty, but rather, a deeper mining of just a few texts over the course of one's professional life might do the same trick and could be eminently valuable. Think of rabbinic scholars who devote their entire careers to reading (and thinking about/writing upon) the Talmud, and how the Talmud itself is that "One" site that gathers unto itself all readings, all rabbinical thought, which is, in itself, in the words of John Donne, "a little world made cunningly."

Regarding my larger concern with Scott's essay, why is what Scott terms "Hegelian seriousness" so devoutly to be wished? Why are "Jamesonian virtuosos" [read: singularly "great" theorist-geniuses] also, so desired? How shall we define "sophistication," and who shall judge that? It would be idiotic of me to argue against Scott that a certain "dialectical pluralism" is not to be wished for—pluralism I am all for, even dialectical pluralism. It's just that Scott leans so hard on the "dialectical" side of the term, by which he means "Hegelian seriousness." It's all very masculinist and forbidding (and also participates in a kind of queer heroic ethos), as if somehow we—the supposedly really smart literary critics—possess the means to judge, in pluperfectly "Hegelian" fashion, each other's ideas. It's awfully "disciplinary," isn't it? (Scott's argument is also dependent, to a certain extent, on the idea that theory should somehow be made more systematic, more centralized if even more cross-disciplinary, more scientific, more classically rhetorical, more epistemologically coherent—all mirages of modes of intellectual "validation" I thought theory had helped to demolish; this leads me to what would have to be an essay for another time—how theory, past and present, has never been able to escape its grounding in Western empirical thought even as it seeks to call that empiricism into question). Here's the sentence from Scott that really leaped off the page at me:

"Stemming the creep of naïve eclecticism should be of the utmost concern, but doing so would require a forum in which an aggressive commitment to strong beliefs, weakly held, could be displayed."

I've always been of the belief that we need more naïvete, and not less—if there is such a thing as genius, it often stems from a form of naïve questioning (ask anyone in the sciences how this works). Why an "aggressive" commitment? An "aggressive" commitment to a particular theory makes more sense in a discipline like human rights philosophy or sociology or bioethics, where more than the interpretation of the operations of language in a literary text really is at stake. Rather than gather at the wished-for forum (theory's lost "center"—e.g. the Critical Inquiry of days gone by) where everyone could aggressively debate their theories of literary interpretation, and certain geniuses would emerge out of this tensile field of discussion, theoretical muscles rippling, I would rather slip away into a sub-discipline, and get lost.

[as a post-script, I would also just add here that I think some credit is due to the originator of the idea of "weak ontology"--Kaufman's strong beliefs, weakly held: the work of the political philosopher Stephen K. White, especially his book Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory; this is a very important book which I have plugged before on this blog]

Entry for RACE (Dictionary of the Middle Ages)

RACE
An entry for the supplement to the Dictionary of the Middle Ages (Vol. 14: First Supplement, ed. William Chester Jordan (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2004) 515-18


Medieval notions of race are no more easily explicated than contemporary ones. In both cases we are faced with a composite category of identity which gathers together ambivalent, often contradictory elements. Because it has been so often invoked to disparage some groups while ennobling others, race can be best understood as emerging within a struggle for power both tangible (control of government, land, literacy) and intangible (prestige, social influence, the ability to narrate history effectively). Race, in other words, cannot be a neutral term.


The Composition of Medieval Race

In a widely influential formulation, the historian Robert Bartlett has drawn upon the writings of the canonist Regino of Prüm (c. 900) to argue that medieval races (diversae nationes) typically thought of themselves as distinct in descent, customs, language, and law. Arguing that biological forms of racism were rare during much of the Middle Ages, Bartlett downplays the importance of descent as a racial determinant. Because the remaining three categories are neither innate nor inalterable, the race of an individual or group could change over time. Customs like hairstyle, dress, and the rituals surrounding the consumption of food and drink might be adopted. The English colonizers of Ireland were often accused of "going native" in their coiffure, costume, and even manner of horseback riding. So much power did Isidore of Seville ascribe to words that he argued that the dispersal of peoples at the destruction of the Tower of Babel had created not only the world's linguistic groups but also its distinct races.

Yet a new tongue could be mastered in order to gain social advantage. The languages spoken by subordinate or conquered peoples might recede due to loss of prestige. Sometimes, like Arabic in Spain, Wendish in areas occupied by German speakers, or Pictish in Britain, a language would vanish entirely as its native speakers died out, were forced to leave, or were absorbed into other linguistic populations. Law was no less protean. As a living, human institution, juridical power could be manipulated to constitute new communities, enfranchising some groups while excluding others. After William the Conqueror was crowned king of England, he instituted what became known as the murdrum fine, the sum of money to be paid by the English of any area in which a Frenchman was found dead by unknown hands. Such a penalty was necessary to ensure the safety of an alien minority among their new subjects, and its application was a potent reminder of how dramatically control of the land's governance had shifted. A century later, however, Richard fitzNigel could argue that the murdrum fine now applied to any unsolved homicide since intermarriage had, he claimed, rendered the English and French indistinguishable, at least at social levels higher than the peasantry. William's desire to protect his imported cohort reinforced their separateness from the country over which they now had dominion, while Richard's generalization of the law's purview envisioned a newly unified community, capable of transcending the differences engendered by the Norman conquest.

To Bartlett's list of the cultural components of medieval race could be added some additional constituents. Because race is intimately related to social status, economic class was demarcated along racial lines. Rural dwellers and the poor might be imagined as having descended exclusively from a subordinated group, and might even be represented with darkened skin and other features that visually set them apart from élites. Race frequently had theological undertones. Although medieval Jews, Muslims, and Christians each experienced a great deal of internal heterogeneity in the practice of their faiths, all three groups were as a whole confident that they possessed the only true knowledge of the divine, and this difference, they held, set them apart. The imagined unity of each religion also offered a potent ideological tool. That all Christians could be supposed to constitute a single race was a sentiment which proved useful in promulgating support for the crusades. According to this logic Jews and Saracens were different not because they had darker skin or distinguishing facial features, but because they practiced inferior ritual and held to an alien creed. In theory baptism could completely transform an unbeliever. In the romance The King of Tars, a Saracen's dark flesh is said to be whitened through the sacrament's transformative power. The connection between race and religion, moreover, inevitably erased internal nuance from those imagined as inhabiting supposedly inferior categories. Latin Christians classified as Saracens a diverse array of Muslim and non-Muslim Arabs, Turks, Armenians, Kurds, and non-Western Christians such as the Nestorians, Jacobites, and Maronites. The Arab chroniclers who recorded the invasion of their lands during the crusades in turn typically referred to the polyglot and multiethnic invaders from Europe as the Franj, mainly because a majority of their leaders could converse in French. Medieval imaginings of race often invoked the species line. Disparaged races were either compared to animals or held to be bestial themselves, as in the unflattering portraits that Gerald of Wales painted of the Irish in his History and Topography of Ireland. Finally, and more abstractly, race was also a matter of allegiance. Early in his life Gerald identified with the Anglo-Norman side of his family, but later became (in recognition of his mixed blood) more sympathetic to the Welsh; William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon, both of mixed Norman and English descent, became in the course of their lives progressively more English-identified.


Race or Ethnicity?

Given that a collective religious designation such as Christian could function like a racial category, it could be objected that the conceptualization of "race" which the western Middle Ages inherited from the classical past is closer to what is today meant by the term "ethnicity." When the Romans described the Greeks, Germans and Celts as races, for example, they were usually implying only that these peoples varied from them in language, customs, and geographic origin. Similarly, dissimilarities between the Welsh and the English, the Irish and the Vikings, the Germans and the Slavs, and so on would appear to be exclusively ethnic differences, if ethnicity is the proper contemporary term to describe the cultural variations which distinguish peoples, and if race refers to the distribution of physical or biological differences throughout human populations. Yet to differentiate between the two terms by asserting that one has mainly to do with culture and is therefore changeable while the other involves bodies and is essentially immutable generates immense difficulties. Contemporary science has made it clear that there is no genetic basis for racial classification (that is, race is not ultimately a matter of discernable variation in human biology), while classical and medieval theories of astrological influence, climatology, and physiology ensured that the differences which set one people apart from another were understood to be as corporeal as they were cultural.

Galenic humoralism was especially influential in this respect. According to humoral theory, the temperateness or inclemency of a given geography and the position of the astral bodies in its skies profoundly influenced both the character and physiology of that land's inhabitants. Climate and celestial influence determined the distribution of the four bodily humors, the vital fluids which were thought to regulate health and hold sway over personality and emotion. Encyclopedists like Isidore of Seville and Bartholomaeus Anglicus therefore stated that the men of Africa suffered from an overheating of their blood, darkening their skin and rendering them spiritless cowards. In contrast, frigidity for Bartholomaeus engendered whiteness; the pale skin of northerners was for him the outward sign of their innate valiance. Gerald of Wales wrote in his Description of Wales that the English were cold in nature because they originated in polar regions, while the Welsh were fiery because they were descended from desert-dwelling Trojans. Christian polemicists declared that intense sun and the ascendancy of the planet Venus ensured that Saracens were forever bellicose and sensual. Like geographical location and climate, moreover, religion and law were thought to have immediate, bodily effects. When Englishmen like John of Salisbury stated that the Welsh were "rude and untamed," they based their assertions mainly on the fact the Welsh people so vigorously resisted assimilation into England. Inferior customs and religious ritual rendered the Welsh, it was thought, inferior beings. This supposed deficiency had intellectual, emotional, ethical, and physical components.


Differences between medieval races were clearly imagined in corporeal as well as cultural terms. Nonetheless, it has been argued by some medievalists that a period which did not live with the legacy of chattel slavery based upon skin color could not possibly have conceptualized race in the modern sense of the word. While there is undoubtedly truth to this observation, the issue becomes more complicated when investigating geographies in which slavery based upon dermal pigmentation did exist (such as late medieval Italy), or when the uneven relations among Latin Christians, Jews, and Muslims are examined. Even if these groups did not necessarily enslave each other or make judgments about identity based solely upon general differences in skin color, all became entangled in a circulation of mythologies which entwined cultural and bodily differences to deadly effect. That is, even if the contemporary terms race and ethnicity can often be used interchangeably in the study of medieval cultures, it could be reasonably asserted that when imbalances of power exist between groups, and especially when physical, mental, and ethical differences are held to differentiate a powerful group from those over whom a superiority is being actually or imaginatively asserted, race will be the preferred term.


Race and Blood

That race is a controversial term among medievalists owes much to the fact that, although it is etymologically related to Latin and romance terms describing descent, the word has no exact medieval equivalent. Natio, gens, genus, stirps (and to a lesser extent populus, nomen, sanguis, and lingua) are the most frequently encountered Latin nouns today translated as "race," but in many instances these terms could more accurately (or at least more neutrally) be rendered nation, people, ethnic identity, linguistic community, family or kin group. Yet even a word as seemingly familiar as natio, destined to become the modern English word nation, implies in a medieval context not an ideological entity like the United States, with its idea of a shared geography whose diverse population nonetheless constitutes a single community. A medieval natio need be nothing more than a group of people linked by their common descent: natio and its vernacular equivalents (e.g. ME nacioun) derive ultimately from the verb nasci, 'to be born,' and the word therefore carries with it implications which we would today describe as biological. Race, in other words, may be inseparable from culture, but it is almost always also involved in questions of blood.
Twelfth-century England provides a useful example of these complexities of medieval race. Before the advent of the Germanic tribes in the fifth century, much of Britain had been a composite of Celtic and Roman elements. The new immigrants from Scandinavia forcibly took much of the southeast of the island for themselves, absorbing some of the native population (Cerdic, a sixth century ancestor of the West Saxon royal line, is a Celtic name) and pushing the remainder farther to the west. These peoples they christened the Welsh, "foreigners." The sixth century warrior-saint Guthlac is said to have been captured in a battle against them, and to have learned their "sibilant speech." Ethnically diverse and unlikely to have thought of themselves as constituting a single race, these colonizers of the island eventually formed many small kingdoms which, over time, forcibly annexed each other to become ever larger ones. As these structures of power grew, their multiplicitous beginnings were forgotten and myths began to circulate that allowed them to imagine a greater unity than they in fact historically possessed. The historian Bede conveniently reduced the many tribes to Angles, Saxons and Jutes; King Alfred declared himself the ruler of the Angles and Saxons; by the time Edward the Confessor ascended to the throne, he was monarch of a united Anglia, or England. When William the Conqueror invaded, the Duke of Normandy ruptured the unity of a nation which had long possessed a shared language, sense of history, governmental coherence, and a powerful belief in its own community. In the years after the victory at Hastings, the French-speaking followers of William replaced the English at the highest levels of power. The court, the provincial aristocracy, governmental administrators, bishops, abbots, and even the wealthiest citizens of the towns were now immigrants. Racial tensions were endemic; even the monasteries witnessed deadly violence.

Despite the fact that cities had been forcibly reconfigured, property seized, lives lost, and despite the fact that English had suffered a complete loss of its prestige as a written language, in time the French began to feel at home enough in their country to begin calling themselves English. Within two or three generations they had almost completely assimilated, illustrating how malleable medieval race could be. Yet a group of French-speakers whom the Normans had brought with them across the channel did not find it so easy to become part of this reconfigured nation. Ashkenazic Jews had emigrated from Normandy shortly after the conquest, and by the middle of the twelfth century could be found inhabiting many English cities. Beginning in Norwich (1144), accusations circulated that Jews were ritually murdering Christians. These stories, obsessed with the flow of blood and depicting Jews as innately hostile to Christians, raised as much skepticism as belief, but their effect could be powerful: in 1190 Jews were murdered on the streets of Lynn and incinerated in the wooden tower in which they had taken refuge in York. The Jews were permanently excluded from England's newly shared sense of community on account of their supposedly absolute otherness. To emphasize this racial separateness, Jews were eventually enjoined to wear distinguishing garb and forced to pay punishing taxes. In 1290 they were expelled completely from the island.
The assimilation of the Normans and English into a unified realm and the fate of the Jews suggests that medieval race is ultimately a process rather than a stable state of being. Just as the Frenchness of the Norman rulers would eventually vanish, allowing them to become as English as a family who traced their origin to the Germanic migrations, likewise the Jews -- who initially were not met with any discernible hostility as they settled into English towns -- were over time transformed into a bloody people whose persecution and exclusion would (it was imagined) allow England a triumphant sense of community. Meanwhile, of course, the colonization of Wales and Ireland was rapidly proceeding, allowing race to take another embodied form at the so-called Celtic Fringe. Perhaps the truest statement to make about medieval race is that it is always possessed most vividly by the excluded and the ostracized.


Bibliography

Akbari, Suzanne Conklin. "From Due East to True North: Orientalism and Orientation." In The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. New York: St Martin's Press, 2000, pp. 19-34. Explores the relations among climate, skin color and medieval race.

Bartlett, Robert. The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. A seminaldiscussion of the components of medieval race.

Foot, Sarah. "The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity Before the Norman Conquest." Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series VI (1996):25-49. Details how Anglo-Saxon ethnic variation was overcome by a powerful myth of shared race.

Gillingham, John. The English in the Twelfth-Century: Imperialism, National Identity and Political Values. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000. Argues in several essays that twelfth-century England saw a renewed sense of unity at the expense of the Welsh and Irish.

Heng, Geraldine. "The Romance of England: Richard Coer de Lyon, Saracens, Jews, and the Politics of Race and Nation." In The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000, pp. 135-71. Examines the mutual dependency of racial categories of difference and their utility in creating national unity.

Kruger, Steven F. "The Bodies of Jews in the Late Middle Ages." In The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays Presented in Honor of Donald R. Howard, ed. James M. Dean and Christian K. Zacher. Newark, D.E.: University of Delaware Press, 1992, 301-13. Delineates the ways in Jewish bodies were thought to differ from Christian bodies.

----------. "Conversion and Medieval Sexual, Religious, and Racial Categories." In Constructing Medieval Sexuality , ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, 158-79. Emphasizes the ambivalence of conversion in affecting medieval conceptions of race.
"Race and Ethnicity." A special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.1 (2001). Contains many articles debating the usefulness of "race" to the study of the Middle Ages.

Uebel, Michael. "Unthinking the Monster: Twelfth-Century Responses to Saracen Alterity." In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 264-91. Surveys medieval depictions of the Saracen as a monstrous figure.

Wormald, Patrick. "Engla Land: The Making of an Allegiance," Journal of Historical Sociology 7 (1994):1-24. Describes the process of identification which enabled the unity of "Anglo-Saxon" England.