Ice at #NCS14

Langjökull, which I hiked with my family in 2012

by J J Cohen

The most recent International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo was wonderful in many ways, but also at times reaffirmed my increasing dissatisfaction with traditional conference panels. Three or four loosely connected papers plus a response and then (if there is time, because inevitably someone has gone too long) aleatory questions from the audience that may advance the communal topic or may (if the session chair is not moderating) allow the three people who study liturgy to render the session on postcolonial medieval studies a liturgy session because one paper had a brief reference to liturgical calendars -- well, I don't always get as much as I would like from such gatherings. Blogs and other social media have made these loose sessions less useful than they were in the past, since it is now fairly easy to garner public feedback on ideas and projects without reading an excerpt in front of an audience for fifteen minutes. Such sessions can be productive, especially when the theme is specific, the papers carefully curated by the organizer, and the panel moderated so that the conversation is inclusive and focused. But that does not always happen. I find myself drawn more to sessions with multiple, short presentations and lingering discussion afterwards, to roundtables that approach a single issue from multiple perspectives, and to spaces adjacent to as well as within the conference that are not part of the official program.

I've written here at ITM about para-conference space as a fecund expanse for modes of thinking and doing that official conference sessions disinhibit: see the justification for the GWMEMSI Rogue Session at the last Kalamazoo, as well as my account of what actually unfolded there. For the upcoming BABEL conference in Santa Barbara, a large group of us (13!) crowdsourced and brainstormed a special session on SCALE that includes an outdoor "collaboratory" in the Channel Islands. The day before the conference begins, we will take a boat to Santa Cruz and hike the rocky canyon around Scorpion Bay, hoping something will emerge from this peripatetic and communal cognition that would not have been possible within a conference room. And at the upcoming New Chaucer Society Biennial Congress in Reykjavik, I've arranged two roundtables on "Ice" that will include a group hike of Sólheimajökull, a glacier in the south of the island. If time permits we will also head to Eyjafjallajökull, the ice topped caldera of a nearby extinct volcano. Oddur Sigurðsson of the Icelandic Meteorological Office (and respondent to the Ice roundtables) will lead us, since he knows this glacier intimately through his studies. We've hired a well reputed expedition company to supply us with the necessary equipment and keep us safe. It seems to me that if we are going to gather in Iceland to speak about representations of ice, if we are going to theorize ice and think with it, we also ought to walk across a frozen expanse together.

If you are attending NCS, I hope you'll come to the roundtables on the first day of the conference. Abstracts for the presentations are below.

ICE ROUNDTABLES

WEDNESDAY 16 JULY

GROUP 1: 9:00-10:30

1A Roundtable: Ice (1) Theory (HT 103)

Thread: North: Texts

Organizer: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Chair: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

1. Timothy S. Miller, University of Notre Dame, “Like Ice / Ice Like: Fluidity, Solidity, and Reading Metaphor Backwards”

Ice famously lies at the foundation of Chaucer's dream poem The House of Fame -- figuratively but not literally, we might be tempted to add, unless we recognize that the poem consistently confuses the figurative and the literal in a way that might enable a new reading of the frozen foundation of the goddess Fame's castle. After all, in Chaucer as elsewhere in medieval and modern literature, ice most often figures fluidity rather than solidity, change rather than stability. Inspired by both recent posthumanist thought and the complex allegorical mechanisms of the poem itself, this paper raises a simple set of questions: first, what can the House of Fame and other medieval narratives that employ ice in the discourse of metaphor and/or allegory tell us about ice in its material ecologies? How do those ecologies differ from the world of metaphor that the substance so frequently inhabits and undergirds? In order to begin answering these questions, this paper willfully adopts an inverted reading strategy: what if we were to read Chaucer's House of Fame as if it were a poem fundamentally "about ice," that is, as if the vagaries of human fame that the poem dramatizes were an extended metaphor for ice and its inherently fluid mutability rather than the other way around? One of most brilliant things that has ever been said about the poem must be Robert W. Hanning's suggestion that we read it backwards, but this paper proposes reading the House of Fame "backwards" in a different way: reading its foundational metaphor backwards, as it were. Furthermore, it is the presence of ice itself -- a subject of endless fascination and commentary in classical and medieval scientific writings on phase change -- that permits this inversion. Although fluid in more ways than one in its transformation from liquid into solid, ice also seems to signal the end of mutability in becoming a substance no longer fluid but fixed. Yet medieval authors who employ ice in metaphor rely on the substance's concealment within itself of the potential for reversal, for melting and reverting to water. In medieval narrative, then, ice so often appears to be a feature of the natural world taken as a given and a known -- "cold as yse" had become a well-worn phrase even in the 14th century -- and then invoked as such to explore the complexities of human relations through reference to something believed simpler and more intelligible. But everywhere that we find ice, we should perhaps take this radical but necessary step to understanding a key ecology of the inhuman: imagining the human world as a metaphor for phase change, especially since the human body cannot itself ever endure such an experience (medieval bodies, too, could only be "frosyn to dead"). But in reversing the ways that ice has been used to explain the human, perhaps we can use the human to travel beyond the human and approach ice itself.

2. Lowell Duckert, West Virginia University, “Icespeak”

“I want to find out what these stones and rocks and pieces of ice are trying to say to me.” (Terje Insungset)

“We heard the world open, express itself, clamor, rumble, call, demand, invade, fear, be moved, forbid. I’m telling the story of the world beginning to tell its story.” (Michel Serres)

Recent ecocritical studies of voice tend to privilege organic sounds (like those of animals). To counteract this tendency, my presentation will amplify the presence of one nonorganic voice around us – ice. The human is never the sole speaking subject in these conversations – a position that the recent collection Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point (2012) unfortunately ignores. Following Tim Ingold’s (2011) call for a more theoretically-rigorous and materially-inflected investigation of soundscapes (or any –scape), and building on Michel Serres’s theories of noise as a creative force that generates multiplicities outside of meaning, I will argue that icescapes are soundlabs that synthesize (“place together”) humans and nonhumans into noisy assemblages. These alliances, or what anthropologist Steven Feld (2003) deems “acoustemologies,” disrupt our ways of knowing and being in the world while, at the same time, create new forms of response, new theories of speaking, and more expressive modes of ontology. To examine the potential that icespeak holds, I will turn to two soundlabs in particular: (1) modern scientists’ obsession with the “song” of icebergs, a frequency emitted by ice at 0.5 Hz and thus inaudible to human ears without additional instruments; (2) the “experimental” compositions of Terje Insungset, whose “icemusic” synthesizes the artist’s body with its material medium. Icespeak’s synthesizing agency never reaches totality; icy noise can signal the unidentifiable or herald an oncoming catastrophe, for example. Yet both soundlabs reconceive ways of synthesizing our shared stories and bodies beyond the “death cries” of calving (a common conception); they redefine listening as an active response to nonorganic speech; they emphasize the improvisation, endless variation, and enchantment that living with/in a noisy, and melting, world entails; and they compel us, finally, to attend to voices not our own, and to tell stories of beginnings rather than of ends with them.

Paul Kos, “The Sound of Ice Melting” (1970)

3. Ethan Knapp, Ohio State University, “Frost”

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow

--         W. Stevens

            This roundtable presentation would have two aims.  First, I'd use the opportunity to offer my own short take on Object Oriented Ontology, coming out of past work with Heidegger and aiming to suggest a place or two where I see OOO coming into particularly fruitful connection with various modes of historicist analysis and critique.  Second, I'd try to use this framework to cast some fresh light on one of the most famous moments of Gower's Confessio Amantis, the beau retret made by Amans at the conclusion of Book 8, when Cupid pulls out the fiery dart that he had thrust into him at the outset of Book 1, leaving Gower suddenly an old man, outside the parade of lovers, baffled by the passions that had driven him as Amans. 

            This new state is described through a seasonal metaphor.  Gower looks in a mirror, sees his new state, and glosses it through an extended description of the passage of months in a year, as Spring yields to Winter.  This metaphor is usually exhausted as a traditional topos linking the passage of human years to the passage of seasons, a meaning certainly important in the context of the Confessio's regular invocation of humanity as microcosmic fulcrum of the broader world.  But I'd like to put some additional pressure on this moment.  Of all the elements that mark the condition of winter in this topos (cold, grief, darkness, barrenness, hunger) it is clearly, and emphatically, cold that most engages Gower here.  The dart whose removal precipitates this scene is described always as "fiery" or "hot"; Venus tends the wound left behind with an ointment "mor cold than eny keie"; and the description of Winter itself begins with "frost, snow, wind and rain" and ends simply with "chill."  Moreover, within this wintry constellation, frost seems the crucial term.  Winter is evoked here to gloss the changes Gower sees in his own face, and these changes all connect to frost – a new pale color, veiny wrinkles and his face 'defaced' as though it were covered from view by a new element.

            So, why frost?  My thoughts are still preliminary at this stage, but I'd like to explore the way in which frost appears here as the mode through which the elemental form of ice comes most directly into contact with the human, in a process of near fusion that leaves both changed.  Frost covers.  It spreads and becomes something like a second skin, rendering the human into another icy object.  The strangeness of this transformation helps explain, I think, the delicately ambiguous tone of the conclusion to the Confessio.  Amans becomes Gower as he is covered by frost, as he enters into a frosty stage of existence.  This is quiescence, of a sort, but it is also Gower presenting himself as author of the scene.  Hence my epigraph – the Gower of this passage is not so much moral satirist as he is an object coming to know itself as object.

            I can add here that I also plan to contextualize this reading by contrasting Gower's metaphoric choice of fire and frost to the more conventional Petrarchan choice of the antonyms fire and ice.  The two pairs are usually taken to be pretty identical oppositions, but I'll aim to tease out the sense of this small, but I think important, alteration in the convention.

           

4. Steve Mentz, St. John’s University, “Hugh Willougby Talks to the Seafarer about Ice”

This talk will tell the story of an imagined conversation about ice between a literary and a historical figure. The literary figure, the narrator of the anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem “The Seafarer,” treats frozen northern waters as a symbol of physical, cultural, and spiritual alienation. The historical figure, Sir Hugh Willoughby, who froze to death on board his ship Bona Esperanza in the winter of 1553-54 while attempting to discover a Northeast Passage, provides less direct testimony, but the surviving documents of his fatal voyage imply that he treated ice as a physical obstacle. My talk juxtaposes these two points of view – the poetic narrator’s alienation and the historical figure’s encumbrance – to argue that ice represents an environmental limit that human culture translates into a cultural symbol. The frozen, “ice-cold waves” (“iscaldne waeg” 19a) the Seafarer endures transform themselves over the course of the poem into a promise of a reward from God in heaven (“Faeder on heofunum” 115a). Willoughby, by contrast, confronts an ice-scape that cannot be transmuted into symbol. I will explore these two points of view in relation to three central experiences of premodern cultures in the frozen north Atlantic – discovery, mystery, and catastrophe – to argue that ice provides an especially clear vision of two related elements in human conceptualizations of their environment: first, that it is difficult and dangerous to transform environmental dangers into symbolic tokens, and second, that doing so is, usually, irresistible. For a modern extension of the dangers, pleasures, and challenges of making alien seascapes into poetry, I’ll conclude with a brief description of Caroline Bergvall’s brilliant new poem Drift, which combines an experimental translation of “The Seafarer” with the historical records about the “Left-to-Die boat” containing Lybian refugees that drifted through the Mediterranean in 2011 under the watchful eyes of NATO planes and ships. Bergvall’s poem combines historical catastrophe with medieval poetic beauty, and she, like me, asks how poetry responds to alien environments.

2B Roundtable: Ice (2) Writing (HT 104)

Thread: North: Texts

Organizer: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Chair: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

1. Dan Remein, New York University, “Icerune”

How does ice make its mark in what is ostensibly human literary language? This paper will consider this question especially as it concerns the Old Icelandic Greenlander Sagas and their place within a longer literary history of ice in the medieval North Atlantic. Ice, or 'is,' has its own runic character in the “futhork.” The opening pages of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda refer to a swelling floe of toxic ice in the yawning-void whose melted drops form the first of the mythic frost-giants. Earlier in the medieval period, the Old English Riddles invoked the delicate icing-over of a puddle, a wave transforming from slushy churn into ice, and the noise of an iceberg accelerating into breakup and contact with shore. The Norse Greenland settlements would have been beset by ice: whether at home, on the marginal areas of habitation, or at sea. Fluctuations in coastal ice conditions in the thirteenth century seem to have required altering older routes from Iceland to Greenland. Norse Greenlanders headed to the icy far north of the Davis Strait to hunt walrus, and some may have relied on the u-shaped curve of this ice shelf to direct them across the strait when headed to North America for timber and iron. So why then do the Greenlander Sagas seem relatively uninterested in ice? In this paper, I consider why the fragile and frightening dynamics of ice seem so absent from the thirteenth century literary accounts of the Norse Greenland settlements and explore how ice may have nonetheless less left behind its own markings, however secret or faint. By what non-representational floes, crystallizations, freezes, or thaws can human language register the speed, temperature, age, fragility, durability, sharpness, slipperiness, silence, and noisiness of ice when not directly describing it?

2. Leila K. Norako, Notre Dame de Namur University, “Vanishing Ice and The House of Fame: An Ecocritical Interrogation”

This talk considers the agency of ice in Chaucer’s The House of Fame. In the allegorical dream vision, the House of Fame sits upon a foundation of ice. The narrator, Geoffrey, climbs up a mountain to the base of the castle and describes the glacial foundation at some length. The names of famous persons are etched into its sides, and the narrator notices that at least one side has melted so much that the names are lost forever. The impermanence of these names seems to agitate the narrator, but he instantly reassures himself by observing that the House of Fame’s shadow protects the names on the opposite side of the foundation. Ice by its very nature, however, is liminal, and its liminality likely contributed to Chaucer’s decision to perch his House of Fame upon it. The palace sits, after all, “in myddes of the weye / betwixen” heaven, earth, and the sea — an allusion, perhaps, to the vaporous, solid, and liquid forms that water can take. The melting of the building’s glacial foundation, in all of its inexorability, consistently threatens its existence and the stories preserved in its walls. Like the Mississippi River described by Jeffrey Cohen in Prismatic Ecologies, ice is an “earth artist,” “its projects tak[ing] so long to execute that humans have a difficult time discerning their genius” (xix). I argue in this talk that the narrator Geoffrey struggles with this very limitation in human perception. He tries to comfort himself by seeing at least a portion of the foundation as permanent, but in doing so he fails to see – or perhaps chooses not to see – how much of human invention lies at the mercy of the natural world and its movements.

As such, even though this poem mentions it but briefly, ice remains the primary agential object in The House of Fame. And I argue that reading ice it in this way allows us to examine more accurately the implications of the poem’s persistent enjambment of the human and the non-human. The powerful presence of ice in The House of Fame reminds us that, while the poem concerns itself in vibrant ways with human stories and objects, there exists in tandem to the manmade a force that (however glacial its movements or its meltings) may ultimately get the last word. In order to highlight ice’s agential role in the poem, I will make regular use of images and videos of Icelandic glaciers. These glaciers, and the landscapes carved in their wake, stand as quiet, looming memorials to the power and the impermanence of ice, and my hope is that these images will encourage a reading of this poem that acknowledges the significance of ice in The House of Fame’s interpretive landscape.

3. David Coley, Simon Fraser University, “Ice as Parchment, Ice as Pen”

In his fourteenth-century translation of De proprietatibus rerum, John Trevisa defines cristalle [quartz] as “snowe or ise [that] is ymade harde in space of many ȝeres ... and torned into stoon nouȝt oonlich by vertu and strengþe of colde but more by erþelich vertue.” He further notes, “þis stoon is cleere, and so lettres and oþere þinges þat been ydo þerinne be yseie clereliche ynough.” For Chaucerians, Trevisa’s letters in petrified ice immediately recall The House of Fame’s “roche of yse” inscribed with “famous folkes names,” a “febel fundament” for Fame’s temple and an apt but unstable medium for written language.In the medieval imagination then, ice seems to have operated (at least in part) as a volatile but effective parchment, a site on which the lucidity of the written word strained against the essential impermanence of the text. It was a midpoint between the stone of Belshazzar’s temple and the water of a still pool, between the wall where Daniel once read Babylon’s doom and the ephemeral surface where John Keats would, centuries later, record his own sad end: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

Recently we have come to recognize ice not only as parchment but also, and fundamentally, as stylus, gouging glacial inscriptions into the land like the finger on Belshazzar’s temple wall. In our age of rising carbon levels and glacial retreat, our ability to read such tectonic calligraphy seems ever more urgent. How do we understand the inelegant scrawl of glacial moraine, the sudden puncta of glacial calving, the “rubbe and scrape” of advance and retreat? The glacial recession that Chaucer could never have foreseen in his “ofthowed” ice carves fresh writing into the earth at an ever increasing rate, leaving behind a dazzling calligraphy of stone and water. Are we, like Geffrey atop his ice boulder in The House of Fame, engaged in a new and sometimes bewildering dialogue with a visibly disappearing icescape? Are we belated paleographers of an icy, “roynish” hand? Or, more darkly still, are we more akin to the stunned Babylonians staring at the letters in the temple wall—Mane, Thecel, Phares—struggling to interpret these terrible glacial signs and the unwelcome truths that they may portend?

4. Jeremy DeAngelo, University of Connecticut, “Ice as Social Signifier” 

            Individuals in the Icelandic sagas often have names that overtly reference ice—Jǫkul, for example, or Frosti. However, these names are not distributed randomly among the characters; they invariably occur among figures such as giants, trolls and Sámi—groups which in the sagas are marked by their antisocial tendencies and existence on the margins of society. An association with ice, therefore, indicates a certain type in a medieval Icelandic context, one whose relationship with the colder elements guided the understanding of their character, for good or for ill. For mythological or legendary figures, their names’ invocation of the elements reinforced their chthonic nature. In the pseudohistorical sagas, however, a link to ice reflects the broad reality of the Scandinavian Peninsula, wherein the Sámi generally inhabited the colder, more northerly and internal regions relative to Norse settlement. The sagas often attribute the ability to survive in more extreme conditions to either magic, a bestial nature, or both, and Sámi characters’ chilly demeanors in the literature suggest these qualities. Yet it happens in the literature that these icy figures intermarry with the Norse, and their children inherit both their names and their qualities. These talents serve them well, yet also mark them as separate—hybrid figures whose antisocial tendencies and affinity with ice keep them from fully functioning in proper society. As characters in the literature of a people who themselves draw their identity from ice (Ís-lendingar), these figures indicate how the Icelanders saw themselves relative to the larger Norse world: set apart on account of their frigid environment, tenacious and irascible, yet stronger on account of their hardiness and hard-headedness. Ice, therefore, in medieval Icelandic literature serves as a useful social marker, one which indicates both one’s lineage and the behavior one should expect based upon it.

5. James L. Smith, University of Western Australia, “Touch of Frost”

Burning fire and chilling frost Both bite the body’s senses with a different kind of ‘fang’, As shown by how each makes us feel a different kind of pang.

                                      ~Titus Lucretius Carus, The Nature of Things (London: Penguin, 2007), 430, p. 48

In the thirteenth-century Grænlendinga saga, Leif Eriksson and the members of his expedition were warming to the newly discovered green land, for “there was no frost in winter, and the grass hardly withered.” Here, they imagined, was a home free from the deprivations of life’s inevitable extremes in the chill embrace of the Arctic Circle. In so doing, they generated an imagining redolent of affect and agriculture in equal measure. The medieval Norse explorers dreamt of a place in which, like all life in the cold, the onset of the ice could be survived, could be weathered. And yet, as many a polar explorer of the nineteenth century discovered to their cost, there is no escape from the cool embrace of the ice when human heat-making fails; the cold is an endless reminder of agential limitation. This paper seeks to explore the touch of frost as a subtle play of power and interdependency, non-human entanglement, and the limits of survival. Survival at the onset of winter makes little distinction between inner and outer space, for the confrontational piercing of human life with slow, gentle, violence occurs literally and figuratively.

The modelling of inner space, the interplay of coldness and warmth within the human heart, is a form of chill abstraction. In the Old Testament, Job is able to weather misfortune when “The waters are hardened like a stone, and the surface of the deep is congealed” because his heart does not succumb (Job 38:30). The tree of his spirit is able to survive through hardship until the ice melts and the fountains of fortune flow once more. Medieval frost is dew, the romantic essence of heavenly providence spread with favour across the earth, and yet it is hardened, its fluvial softness transformed to adamant and piercing new shapes. As the Trevisa translation of De Proprietatibus Rerum puts is, “Hore frost is no3t ellis but dewe Ifroren.” It, like life and fortune, has cycles. Regno becomes regnaui, which in turn becomes sum sine regno: a human life becomes chill when broken beneath the wheel of fortune. The heart, like flora in an icy climate, must seek to survive the chill of psychological winter. The parable of the human heart, in an act of synthesis with non-human interactivity, is shaped by the touch of frost.

RESPONDENT: Oddur Sigurðsson, Icelandic Meteorological Office

Driving Education: A Crash Course + An Army of Lovers: Sneak Preview of Aranye Fradenburg's STAYING ALIVE: A SURVIVAL MANUAL FOR THE LIBERAL ARTS

by EILEEN JOY

There are many different kinds of intelligence, and there will always be a few writers who don’t need to read Shakespeare in college, or game designers who don’t need economics courses to get rich. But a terrible narrowing of the mind and of mental experience is ongoing in our country, sometimes waved on by the very scientists who ought most of all to respect the mind’s powers. The philosopher Guillaume LeBlanc argues that philosophy should now understand itself as work performed on behalf of particular cultures and ecologies, producing a new ethos of the philosopher for whom the question of belonging to an ordinary world has become, not something to bracket or transcend, but centrally important. Understanding how ordinariness is produced, and critiquing self-evidence, remain crucial activities of cultural analysis, as does the defense of expertise; but it is not simply a matter of intellectuals going public. It is also a matter of experts deciphering the relationship of their work to the arts of thriving and surviving, and feeding the results of their analyses back into their work. And it is time to fight, not just for this or that way of thinking, but for the experience of mind itself, and its cultivation — for (the pleasures of) knowing, reasoning, investigating, analyzing, debating, loving, desiring, and reflecting.

~L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, "Living the Liberal Arts: An Argument for Embodied Learning Communities," in Staying Alive: A Survival Manual for the Liberal Arts

For a while now, since I was working on my dissertation in 2000-2001 [and in which I wanted to address the question of the future of the liberal arts in light of its many histories], I have been intensely interested in what is sometimes called "university studies," best described I think as critical self-reflections and public intellectual polemics on the state(s) of higher education by those who know it very well from firsthand experience, either as tenured professors, college administrators, adjunct instructors, and also graduate students (Aaron Bady springs most notably to mind in this latter category: see his collected writings at his zunguzungu blog at The New Inquiry), although occasionally critiques of the university also come from members of think tanks, mainstream journalism (cultural criticism), and the like. These reflections can be narrow-mindedly conservative (Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education spring to mind, as does David Horwitz's The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America) or more progressively liberal [yes, I am biased], such as Marc Bousquet's How the University Works [addresses labor inequities in higher ed], Derek Bok's Universities in the Marketplace [addresses the commercialization of the university and its disciplines], Christopher Newfield's Unmaking the Public University [addresses the important subject of unequal access to higher ed for Americans as a result of conservative campaigns to thwart the university's democratizing functions], and Benjamin Ginsberg's The Fall of the Faculty [addresses the detriments to higher ed that have been caused by the rise of "all-administrative" universities], just to name some of the more notable examples of the past 10 or so years. As readers of this blog and/or any of my own published work know,  I am highly partial to Bill Readings's The University in Ruins, not only for its highly trenchant critique of the ways in which the American university has become a "transnational bureaucratic corporation," thus disrupting and weakening the role of traditional humanistic disciplines, but also of how this ruinous situation might [perversely/positively] open new [utopic & post-historical] spaces "in which it is possible to think the notion of community otherwise," and "with an urgency that proceeds from the absence of the institutional forms (such as the nation-state), which have historically served to mask that question." In this scenario, we would give up the idea of "culture" [conceptualized narrowly in relation to specific groups] and also static [and increasingly fragmented] disciplines, and even a kind of static inter-disciplinarity, in favor of an ever-shifting disciplinary structure that would continuously "hold open the question of whether and how thoughts fit together." One might argue [and I will] that Readings's ultimate hope for the "university in ruins" as a space in which the question of "being-together" and disciplinarity itself would be permanently entangled and left purposefully open and unsettled has never really been put into serious practice. It would be too open-ended, of course, too experimental, risky, and perhaps, non-practical [and really messy in terms of administration]. Which is not to say it can't be done.

A lot has happened since Readings' book was published [posthumously] in 1996 -- one could say that his critique was dead-accurate and that the "ruinous" situation he sketched, especially in terms of the university's corporate-managerial structure and the concomitant assaults on the humanities, has intensified, and since the financial crises of 2008 onward, the idea [long-held and long-valued] that the university should be an important public [and publicly-funded] concern, especially for its vital role in securing various forms of social egalitarianism and a broad-based meritocracy for the greatest numbers of persons possible [not to mention, in order to enhance cognitive and technical innovations of all varieties, for the pure advancement of knowledge and practices of "making," regardless of cost-based "outcomes"], no longer appears to be either viable or what might be termed a "common concern." All across the country, states are slashing university budgets and expecting institutions of higher ed to figure out more and more ways to "pay for themselves," and to be "profitable" [whatever that might mean -- MOOCs are one prominent and lamentable outcome of this type of thinking]. This may be an over-simplification [because I can't do justice to all of the myriad examples in this blog post], but let's just say that the foregoing state of affairs has led to all sorts of jockeying within the university today to both winnow down and/or eliminate disciplines that appear non-utilitarian or to dress up traditionally philosophical disciplines [such as literary studies] in more utilitarian clothing. In addition, protocols of oversight and "accountability" have intensified to the point of leaving faculty little time and room to actually do the work they were hired to do: teach and research and mentor, and direct & innovate their own curricula and disciplinary collaborations. Most harmful of all, and in direct proportion to the budget-slashing maneuvers of state legislatures [and the subsequent lack of progressive federal amelioration of such], tuition and student debt levels are at unsustainably crippling levels, and the ranks of tenure-track faculty have shrunk to something around 30% of all teaching positions [say "hello" to the thoroughgoing adjunctification of higher ed].

The university system in the state of California has represented an important battleground in this current situation, partly because the state's economic woes have been so severe since 2008 [and more importantly, because of Gov. Jerry Brown's and UC President Mark Yudof's dismantling of the UC Master Plan, whereby all eligible California citizens had been entitled to a place within the University of California, regardless of means], but also because the state has long been internationally admired for its public research institutions [their quality but also their broad access] and also has a long and enduring history of faculty and student activism on its behalf [see, for recent examples, Aaron Bady's "Bartleby in the University of California: The Social Life of Disobedience," Michael Meranze and Christopher Newfield's blog Remaking the University,  Robert Samuels's blog Changing Universities, California Scholars for Academic Freedom, and I could go on -- there are so many examples, not to mention scores of organized protests, rallies, strikes, etc. over the past several years -- but I won't]. Aranye Fradenburg has long been an outspoken activist on behalf of the public humanities [and against administrative malfeasance in all of its guises], but she has been extremely busy since 2008 in helping to organize and lead critical and activist interventions within the UC system [she organized a faculty walkout at UC-Santa Barbara in 2009, has worked on behalf of the lecturers' union, UC-AFT, created "Saving UCSB," and among many other activities too numerous to mention here, is a tireless letter writer and public speaker on behalf of academic freedom, the value of the humanities, and the importance of open access to public higher ed]. Thus we are heartened to see that she has also devoted an entire monograph [an incredibly laborious venture] -- Staying Alive: A Survival Manual for the Liberal Arts -- to an insightful diagnosis of the various neoliberal and technocratic forces currently assailing and undermining the public university, and to a fierce polemic on behalf of the humanities as the critical site for fostering forms of artfulness critical to the future of our "being-together" in this world. And she has generously decided to publish it with a new start-up press, punctum books, because she agrees [thankfully, with all punctum authors and editors] that work within the humanities, and especially public intellectual work, needs to have the widest purchase possible upon the public commons and should not be kept locked behind corporatized paywalls. And in the spirit of collaboration that we certainly hold dear here at ITM [and also at BABEL], she has crafted the book to include "companion" essays from Donna Beth Ellard, Ruth Evans, Julie Orlemanski, and Daniel Remein [as well as a Preface by myself and an Afterword by Michael Snediker], so that the book is part-scholarly monograph, part-poetic-activist desiring-assemblage.

In some important respects, Staying Alive -- as a labor of public intellectual advocacy for the humanities -- does not represent a departure for Fradenburg's ouevre, although many in medieval studies [and beyond] associate her work primarily with Chaucer studies [especially in a certain psychoanalytic vein], and also, more broadly, with particular [and brilliant] theoretical explorations of historicism, psychoanalysis, sexuality, alterity/Otherness, temporality, and aesthetics [among other subjects]. But reading carefully, one can see that she has always been concerned with defining and valuing the work [and also the jouissance] of the liberal arts against the "order[s] of utility," with the important connections between [individual and group] desires and ethics, and with the connections between enjoyment, disciplin/arity, and the larger polis [indeed, her first book in 1991, City, Marriage, Tournament, attends to the latter]. In 1997 she published an essay in New Literary History, "'So that we may speak of them': Enjoying the Middle Ages," that she later expanded into the Epilogue for Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer (2002). Perversely [or not], while many in medieval [especially, Chaucer] studies have plumbed and re-plumbed this book for its invaluable insights into Chaucer's literary oeuvre [and historicism, more broadly], when I was working on my dissertation in 2000, the only chapters I read were the Introduction ["Sacrifice in Theory"] and the Epilogue ["Some Thoughts on the Humanities: Enjoying the Middle Ages"], because they were germane to my own work at the time in trying to craft defenses of intellectual-historical studies. In this Epilogue, Fradenburg discusses the importance of resisting, from within the humanities [and medieval studies, more particularly], the "utilitarian rhetorics that sustain the jouissance of capitalism," and she urges us to

take up . . . the question of the jouissance of the academy, rather then assuming it is our task to discipline jouissance out of the academy. For one thing, we cannot discipline jouissance out of the academy, because discipline is always permeated with enjoyment. So why give ground on our enjoyment?

Why, indeed? In fact, in her more recent forays into cognitive studies, animal behavioral research, neuroscience, evolutionary theory, biosemiotics, and the like [and as evidenced in recent publications such as her "Living Chaucer" essay in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2011)], Fradenburg has amassed an incredible body of scientific and other evidence for why we should not only not "give ground" on this enjoyment [with all of its positive and negative implications -- i.e., enjoyment is a messy affair but no less necessary for life as a result], but also for the ways in which living itself is an art and the humanities provide the deepest reservoir of the [non-utilitarian, excessive, ornamental] artfulness so necessary, not just for surviving, but for thriving in this world. Contrary to recent polemics that simply urge the humanities to become more scientistic or technology-focused, to demonstrate their utility or even trophy their uselessness, Staying Alive does something remarkably different: it argues for the humanism of a new scientific paradigm based on complexity theory and holistic and ecological approaches to knowledge-making. It urges us to take the further step of realizing not only that we can promote and enhance neuroplastic connectivity and social-emotional cognition, but also that the humanities have always already been doing so. “Nature always exceeds itself in its expressivity” -- which is to say artfulness is necessary for adaptation and innovation, for forging rich and varied relationships with other minds, bodies and things, and thus, again, for thriving — whether in the boardroom or the art gallery, the biology lab or the recording studio, the alley or the playground, the book or the dream. Bringing together psychoanalysis, science, aesthetics, and premodern literarature (from Virgil to Chaucer to Shakespeare), Fradenburg offers a bracing polemic against the technocrats of higher education and a vibrant new vision for the humanities as both living art and new life science. For me, especially, the book matters because -- even if not overtly -- it takes up and further exemplifies the necessity of Bill Readings's vision of the university as a critical site for play, for non-utilitarian experimentation, for keeping knowledge unsettled, and where, in Readings's words, "thinking is a shared process without identity or unity."

What Fradenburg's new [forthcoming] book also demonstrates -- along with the important body of work known as "university studies" that her book will soon join -- is that those of us who work within the humanities must commit some of our most valuable resources [primarily, our always-encroached-upon time] to academic activism, whether through letter writing, blog polemics, organized protests and strikes, collectivist agitation and intervention, mutual aid initiatives, and books such as these. We cannot just "bide our time" within the university, hoping things will get better, or even assuming they will [all "storms" pass is what many people seem to believe]. We have to seize hold of the university -- as an institution, but also as a public trust -- as our concern, and we must be willing to fight for that concern. As Julie Orlemanski writes in her contribution to the volume, "An Army of Lovers,"

Academic-activist writings not only deliver dispatches from the numerous battlegrounds of higher education. They also call upon those who care to read them -- those who might defend the institutional homes of speculation, imagination, and historical understanding. These writings are the communiques that circulate within the "army of lovers" and also pass beyond them, to unpresupposed outposts and new readers. . . . mobilizing reflections about learning in the present.

Staying Alive will be available at the end of this month, but in the meantime, we have made available the first chapter, "Driving Education: A Crash Course," and Julie Orlemanski's response to that chapter, "An Army of Lovers," HERE:

• L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, "Driving Education: A Crash Course"
• Julie Orlemanski, "An Army of Lovers"

Please circulate widely [and you can see the full Table of Contents for the book HERE, at the punctum books website].

Critical/Liberal/Arts 2 @The Graduate Center, CUNY

by EILEEN JOY

What are the new scenes or spaces of critical invention? What different faces might critique have? What does it feel like? What does it do? How does historical consciousness play a role in generating new forms, tools, or ideas? What does it mean to be “uncritical”? Is there an erotic hermeneutics, pace Sontag, or an eros of critique? How do we engage criticism and art and techne against the actuarial interests of the corporate university? Can we “afford” to nurture speculative creation, or pure science, in an age of austerity? Do delight, rapture, or the drift of daydreams have a role in criticism? Is there value in maintaining what separates the injunctions to critique and to create? How might our practices cross-pollinate the sciences and the fine arts? Or politics and aesthetics? Or the future and the past? 

I'm excited to announce that our program for the BABEL Working Group's 1-day symposium, to be held at The Graduate Center, CUNY [September 27th], Critical/Liberal/ Arts 2, has been finalized [co-hosted with great generosity by the Medieval Studies Certificate Program and the PhD Program in English @The Graduate Center, with great thanks, especially, to Steven Kruger and Glenn Burger]. This follows from Critical/Liberal/Arts 1, held at UC-Irvine this past April, and the proceedings from both will be published as a special issue of postmedieval, edited by Allan Mitchell, Julie Orlemanski, and Myra Seaman.

If you are, or will be, in the NYC area this coming September, you should join us for what promises to be an enlivening series of conversations and performances on the entangled relations between creativity, critique, activism, and the liberal arts [and you can pre-register HERE]. Speakers include medievalists [Ammiel Alcalay, Bruce Holsinger, Eleanor Johnson, and Allen W. Strouse], early modernists [Henry Turner, Michael Witmore], the Hollow Earth Society [Ethan Gould + Wythe Marschall], multimedia artists/new media + performance specialists [Jamie "Skye" Bianco, Una Chaudhuri, and Marina Zurkow], and a poethical pamphleteer [Eirik Steinhoff] -- and hopefully, by the end of the day, these so-called "disciplinary" markers will be complicated all to hell. The fact of the matter is, all of these speakers conduct nighttime, extraterritorial raids into various republics (digital humanities, poetry, filmmaking, novel writing, genetics, zoopolises, soft architecture, etc.]. Topics will include queer compositionism, sabotage poetry, fuzzy structuralism, survivalism, corporate personhood, the university, new critical vernaculars, post-Chaucer pilgrims, pedagogies of transmission, and MORE. See the full program HERE.

This promises to be a full week, with Steve Mentz also hosting "Oceanic New York" at St. John's University in Queens on Thursday, September 26th (featuring myself, JJC, Karl, Allan Mitchell, Jamie "Skye" Bianco, Marina Zurkow, G. Ganter, and Nancy Nowacek), and punctum records + punctum books will also be hosting a book/record release party, with live music from Taft Mashburn, on Saturday, Sep. 28th [details forthcoming].

Seating is LIMITED for the Critical/Liberal/Arts event, so be sure to pre-register, details about which are HERE.

Like a Radio Left On / On the Outskirts of Identical Cities: Living (with) Fradenburg

Figure 1. Aranye Fradenburg delivering her plenary address at the 1st Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, Austin, Texas [Nov. 2010; photo by Christine Neufeld]

by EILEEN JOY

Do we really mean to take shelter from our jouissance in the order of utility, to become "a branch of the service of goods," in the mistaken hope that the "human sciences" will be rewarded for doing so?

~L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, "Group Time, Catastrophe, Periodicity"

If we let ourselves become enthusiastic over it, psychoanalytic work can help contemporary medieval studies to an ethics that does not bind, nor bind itself to, the past as dead weight, but lets it loose in the historical signifiers that still trace their way through our passions.

~L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer 

We are beings who can neither live nor die without artful signification.

~L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, "The Liberal Arts of Psychoanalysis"

. . . the work is to keep moving, but also to keep living . . .

~Aranye Fradenburg, "(Dis)continuity: A History of Dreaming"

What enables us to risk change is the feeling that we are understood and (therefore) accompanied.

~L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, "Living Chaucer"
 
. . . obscure

forces are at work

like a radio left on

On the outskirts of

identical cities.

~Ben Lerner, "Doppler Elegies"

Like a radio left on, in the poet Ben Lerner's parlance, on the outskirts of identical cities -- and also, like the strains of a Lushlife Project downtempo "Budapest Eskimos" soundtrack emanating from a diamond mine -- Aranye Fradenburg's work has operated as a groovy and "obscure force" in medieval studies for the past 20 or so years as a powerful and palpably explicit influence upon work in Middle English literary [especially Chaucer] studies, especially those inflected by psychoanalytic and symptomatic and "discontinuist"/non-alteritist historicist approaches to the Middle Ages. Her work has also operated as a potent and insistent voice [not always fully registered or acknowledged as such in our field and beyond] on the "arts" of living, on eudaimonia [flourishing], on the importance of pleasure/enjoyment [in its lighter and darker valences], on sentience/sensation + the "feeling" arts, on techniques of living + care of the self, and most especially, on the "living on"-ness of the always-traveling, transitive, open-ended, and non-linear signifiers and processes of signification that enable [and sometimes disable] the inter-subjective formations between various actors, living and dead, past and present, so crucial to our desires, to our sufferings [passions], to our ability to affiliate with and relate to others, and thus, to living our [shared] lives, for better and worse. It should be mentioned, too, that one of the "obscure forces" that Lerner speaks of in his "Doppler Elegies" [in addition to death and catastrophe] is love, a subject which has played no small role in Fradenburg's intellectual, and I would also say, political-humanist concerns. One could go further and say that, like Lerner, Fradenburg has been our scholarly poet of the "obscure forces" at work, not only in our field, but in our lives.

Fradenburg has been a particular hero of mine for insisting, over and over again throughout her writings, that, in all times and places, we misunderstand ourselves, and therefore, unknowing -- and the self-fictionalizations [some constructive, some destructive] predicated upon that unknowing -- have to be taken into account, whether we are studying the past or just trying to understand ourselves and our own experiences. As she put it so eloquently in Sacrifice Your Love, with regard to medieval studies, we “cannot confine the work of knowing the Middle Ages to replicating, however hopelessly and/or heroically, medieval cultures’ self-understandings. We also should explore how medieval cultures, like all others, may have misunderstood themselves” [pp. 77-78]. And with regard to our own self-understandings, and in a way that is resonant with many of the discourses circulating in the university today under the aegis of object-oriented philosophies and various strains of post/humanist thought, Fradenburg wrote in the same book,

. . . the effect of subjectivity is produced by the interplay of insentience with sentience.
        The telescopes that help us see the stars, the buildings that house the shelters that are our bodies, are insentient; and yet we extend sentience through them. But the more we make the machines and products that extend subjectivity into the world, the more insentience is part of us, or we are part of it. Forces are at work within us that do not "mean" anything; parts of ourselves cannot account for themselves. The work cannot account for itself, or disclose anything about itself, or even be questioned. [p. 13]

This excerpt is part of a much longer and very complex discussion having to do with the alienation produced by labor, modes of production [scholarly and artistic], aesthetics, courtly love, desire, libidinal economies, the Law, enjoyment, sacrifice/loss, political ethics, and community, and I can't do justice to all of that here. In any case, Fradenburg's theoretical project in this book, especially with regard to, say, Chaucer studies and medieval chivalric literature and culture more broadly [in its broadest temporal dimensions, then to now], is well known and registered across so much scholarship that has been done since this book and under its influence. My own continual return(s) to the passages cited above have more to do with my own interest in and use of Fradenburg's thinking, which, of unconscious necessity or intention, is highly idiosyncratic and personal. So, for me, these passages have long operated as watch-phrases for my own work, where I have striven to always keep in mind the unavoidable blind spots and "obscure forces" of everyone's understanding of everything, including ourselves. Scholarship of medieval literature, or any literature, really, for me, becomes a valuable project of tracing productive errancies and sites of incoherence and crafting creative critical approaches that, in Eve Sedgwick's memorable formulation, aim to be "additive and accretive," desiring "to assemble and confer plenitude on an object [such as a text or textual object or author-object] that will then have resources to offer an inchoate self" ["Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading," in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, pp. 27-28]. This has something to do as well with what Bryan Reynolds has called a transversal poetics that defies “the authorities that reduce and contain meanings,” and that seeks to “understand and empower fugitive elements [in texts and other artifacts, and in particular spaces] insofar as doing so generates positive experiences” ["Transversal Poetics and Fugitive Explorations: Theaterspace, Paused Consciousness, Subjunctivity, and Macbeth," in Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations, pp. 1-26]. And this sort of work might be crucial for the future, if we agree with Frandeburg [and I do] that,

To be able to anticipate, plan, project a future or into a future, we have to not know for sure, because we have to suspend judgment even while exercising it, knowing that we don’t know (everything). Ethics—and ultimately psychoanalysis—emerges from a willing of this suspension, a paradoxical knowing of non-knowing. ["(Dis)continuity: A History of Dreaming," in The Post-Historical Middle Ages, ed. Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Frederico, p. 96]

I must admit that I was drawn to write this post because, partly due to my own personal project to spend some time over the next few years re-visiting Foucault's late writings on the "care of the self" and biopower [because of THIS, THIS, and THIS], I have been returning [a lot] recently to Fradenburg's 2002 book Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer, where I have been struck both by how apropos to our moment and compelling this book still is [10 years later, and gee, 10 years isn't that long ago, anyway, but we have a tendency to "forget" stuff all of the time in our scholarship] and also by how Fradenburg's entire oeuvre seems to continuously circle back [with important renovations of thought] to this earlier book's project to draw attention to the important inter-relations between embodiment and signification, between pleasure and virtue [where "virtue" is seen to have something to do with world-building], between subjectivity and Otherness, and between art and what she calls, in her essay "Living Chaucer," the "living process" [p. 64; see below for full citation]. It feels timely to me, therefore, to spend some time now thinking about Fradenburg's trajectory of thought over the past ten years or so, especially as it culminates, or expresses itself, in this essay.

I offer one cautionary note here, therefore, to say that I am not attempting in this blog post to offer a comprehensive account of Fradenburg's whole body of work, nor to assess all of its merits [of which there are many] in relation to the larger field of medieval studies. As with other blog posts I have written in the past, here I merely celebrate the originality and importance of a scholar who has urged me [successfully] to think, and also to feel, differently -- about my field, yes -- but more importantly, about the world in which I live. Over the years, I have come to value and to gather close to me, with a certain ardor, the work of scholars who have helped me, not just to think, but to live more creatively [more on which, below], and in this sense, Fradenburg joins Sara Ahmed, Zygmunt Bauman, Lauren Berlant, Jane Bennett, Leo Bersani, Kathleen Biddick, Judith Butler, John Caputo, Thomas Carlson, Iain Chambers, Jeffrey Cohen, Michel de Certeau, Deleuze and Guattari, Carolyn Dinshaw, Michel Foucault, James Earl, Cary Howie, George Kateb, Anna Klosowska, Jonathan Lear, Emmanuel Levinas, Michael Edward Moore, Martha Nussbaum, Bill Readings, Joan Retallack, Claude Romano, Eve Sedgwick, and Simone Weil as writers who always hover nearby in my study. This list is highly personal, of course [I admire and am influenced by many scholars beyond these, but these authors stand out for providing to me what, for lack of a better term, I will call my spiritual reservoir, or my traveling scholar-gypsy companions]. The work of some of the scholars in this list also stands out -- for me, anyway -- for their attention to and care for the role of the humanities and the university, and of creative thought more generally, in relation to personal and social life, and thus has also been crucial to me and others in relation to the projects of the BABEL Working Group. Fradenburg, along with Bennett, Nussbaum, and Readings, is particularly noteworthy in this regard. When reading Fradenburg closely, no matter what the specific texts or subjects under close scrutiny [Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, the Knight's Tale, Troilus and Criseyde, whatever], what she seems to always be talking about is something she says more explicitly in her essay, "Group Time: Catastrophe, Survival, Periodicity" [in Time and the Literary, ed. Karen Newman, Jay Clayton, and Marianne Hirsch], that "enjoyment is the matrix of knowledge, and knowledge is not diminished thereby." Further, "Interpretation and explanation are activities central to libidinal structuration and vice versa. . . . We thereby reclaim our technical work [the humanities] as the work of desire, and desire as that which makes the world" [p. 232]. I feel an important link here as well with the work of Jane Bennett, who has written so eloquently of the importance of enchantment and affective propulsions for ethical life [see, especially, her book The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, Ethics].

Fradenburg has become one of our most important advocates for the importance of the "liberal arts" [and of literature/the fine arts/creativity/confabulation/play, especially] to personal and more broadly social "thriving" [this goes way beyond medieval studies, I might add, which is why I also think she should be read more broadly outside of our field] and thus, Fradenburg's recent essay, "Living Chaucer," published in Studies in the Age of Chaucer [and originally presented as a plenary address at the 17th Biennial Meeting of the New Chaucer Society in Siena, Italy in 2009], feels like both the consummate culmination of her career's various theoretical trajectories thus far, while it also offers [within the context of her more recent forays into neuroscience and evolutionary biology] a striking and enlivening departure for a couple of reasons -- first, because she moves closer than she has in previous work to embracing the value and necessity of shared minds [and thus, for all of their precariousness and dangers, somatic-affective community-assemblages], and second, because she also articulates more forcefully than she has before that literature/language is not ONLY a signalling system that only-always defers/devolves to other signalling systems [which are therefore in a continual Derridean slippage that, perhaps, never admits of a Real, or is always pointing to the ways in which language can only ever be falling away from that Real -- blah blah blah, I'm so tired of/bored by these theories of lack/non-coincidence between language and everything else], but may actually have the power to change history, and even more so, possesses a presence that is not negligible with regard to how we are affected by the past [or even to how we understand and negotiate our "selves" and our experiences in the present; with respect to aesthetics, I am also reminded here of Hans Gumbrecht's beautiful little book, The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey]. As Fradenburg herself puts it in "Living Chaucer,"

undead life seems more apt a description of the signifier’s mode of existence (as Derrida himself thought) than does simple absence or nonexistence. I wrote in Sacrifice Your Love about this form of ‘‘being-as-signifier’’: given how susceptible we are to the signifier’s designs, there is more connectedness than we think between living subjects and dead letters. Nature’s signifiers vary in their realizations, but something, a shape, insists. [p. 44]

There is some resonance here with what Anna Klosowska writes in Queer Love in the Middle Ages, that,

all fiction corresponds to an absolute reality—not of existence, but of desire that calls fiction into being, performed by the authors and manuscript makers; and continuing desire for it performed by the readers, a desire that sustains the book’s material presence across the centuries. That desire is incorporated in an existence. It is the backbone of an identity. It is an essential part of the bundle of motives that lie behind all that the body does. A part essential because it is retrievable, but also because it is privileged: art reveals more of life than life does. [p. 7]

I am reminded of when I was at University College Dublin in June of 2009 for a 3-day seminar devoted to the work of Leo Bersani, and on the first day, when we were revisiting the span of his career's writings prior to Intimacies [reading Bersani "retrospectively"], at one point, I got extremely excited during the discussion of Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit's essay on Terence Malik's film The Thin Red Line [in their co-authored book Forms of Being], an essay I absolutely love and have made use of in my own scholarship [see HERE], and one of the seminar's participants said something to me that, in my memory of it, went something like this, "But, Eileen, why are you getting so excited about this? After all, we're talking about a text, and what we do is talk about texts, and this is not about life. You're acting like we're supposed to read Bersani for life." And I was like: um, we're NOT supposed to read Bersani -- and let's face it, theory more generally -- for LIFE? Fuck: how come no one TOLD me that? It was a funny moment [and one that, serendipitously, led to a marvelous friendship-bonding moment with Michael Snediker, who was also there], but also one that convinced me more than ever: um, yeah, theory is for life: DUH! We read theory -- whether Derrida, Foucault, Bersani, Jane Bennett, Graham Harman, Roland Barthes, Fradenburg, and I could go on -- for life: for LIFE, bitches! So I relate this anecdote to also say: Fradenburg's scholarship isn't just about Chaucer or medieval literature or even psychoanalytic approaches to literature more broadly; it's about life, it's about how we, in her own words,

need knowledge of how to do things every day in every way in our real environments; and we are not yet very close to eliminating the contingency and changefulness of living.  When it comes to talking, listening, courting, negotiating, playing basketball, playing the violin, making peace, leading an organization, the humanities teaches us how to live successfully—how to adapt to, and (re-)create, our circumstances, by seeing more keenly, hearing more polyphonically, interpreting more humbly, richly and carefully, speaking to each other more persuasively, and much, much more. ["The Liberal Arts of Psychoanalysis," The Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 39.4 (2011): 589-609]

Relationality, intersubjectivity, aliveness, resilience, care of the [confabulated] self and also of others, playfulness, healing, the arts of living, and thriving seem, increasingly, to be the key watchwords and concerns of Fradenburg's work, and at the same time, the so-called "literary" mode is still central to these concerns, such that,

Interpretation and relationality depend on one another because all relationships are unending processes of interpretation and expression, listening and signifying.  In turn, sentience assists relationality: we can’t thrive and probably can’t survive without minds open to possibility, capable of sensing and interpreting the tiniest shifts in, e.g., pitch and tone. ["The Liberal Arts of Psychoanalysis"]

Although it may seem, that in some of her recent writings, Fradenburg has been turning more toward psychoanalysis + cognitive studies and away from a concentrated focus on medieval literature, per se, her essay "Living Chaucer" tells a different story about a long and warm relationship with Chaucer in which the "literary friendship" Fradenburg feels for Chaucer "is an attachment his work actively solicits, to a degree and in ways unique to his corpus but consistent both with premodern and contemporary understandings of the signifier and its role in intersubjective, hence also political and social, process" ["Living Chaucer," p. 41]. Therefore, Chaucer's poetry is central to Fradenburg's thinking on something she has written eloquently about before in numerous pieces, and expressed in her recent essay "(Dis)Continuity: A History of Dreaming," where she writes that, "we all live in many different times; different times live on in us and our practices" [p. 88], and therefore, with regard to literature [Chaucer's poetry, for example] and its role in personal and social mental life, we might say, following Fradenburg, that it enables a "shared attention," which is a form of sociality productive of progressive change in history. Literature is also, by its very nature, playful, and thus crucial, as Fradenburg writes, to the sorts of becomings that enable important psychic transformations:

Play values experimentation. When we play, we are more open to the new, from within and without. We become ‘‘neophiles’’ and innovators, making active use of our imaginations. Playing and pretending are crucial to the becomings of living creatures, to adaptation and behavioral flexibility; . . . Play teaches ‘‘vital skills’’; it is transformative and transforming. We can neither thrive nor survive without it. And it is highly contagious, a powerful medium of affect transmission. ["Living Chaucer," p. 57]

This resonates with Joan Retallack's argument -- with which I am in hearty agreement -- that, “To become adult in our culture (which for most of us means to become compliantly productive) is . . . to be increasingly disabled for the kinds of humorous and dire, purposeful play that creates geometries of attention revelatory of silences in the terrifying tenses that elude official grammars” [The Poethical Wager, p. 62].

Perhaps the most important aspect of Fradenburg's "Living Chaucer" essay is its emphasis on the idea that authors, texts [and the textual objects enclosed and projected therein], and readers form somatic-affective [and thus, inter-subjective] assemblages and signifying networks over time, and what this means is,

Chaucer’s words ‘‘live on’’ because the patterns they create really do change our minds and bodies. I believe this viewpoint to be a helpful alternative to our perennial question about whether we are representing the past rightly. Whatever representations of the English past we fashion, they are all in part the result of changes wrought in us, consciously and nonconsciously, by living with Chaucer. The signifiers of the past are in us, whether we understand them ‘‘rightly’’ or not; we will never be certain what they mean, but we will certainly have been possessed by them. And our possession by (and of ) past signifiers further transforms their range of meanings. [p. 45]

Further, "symbols enable living process. Or, to put it another way, living is an art" [p. 45], and literature forms one very important component of what might be called shared sentience [something I argue for myself in work on reading vis-a-vis various object-oriented philosophies], one that would be [and this is the more implicit thrust of the essay, I believe] woefully impoverished and less able to transform itself in positive, open-ended ways, without poetry, without literature and other fine arts. Those of us who work in the humanities, it seems to me [and urged by Fradenburg's and others' thought], must never stop laboring and fighting to stress this point, which might also be put like this: Living is an art; the arts are crucial for living. Our scholarly work, also -- and this cannot be stressed enough -- is also an art, if we could just better grasp and practice this fact. We do not just study and write about the literary arts, but rather, extend and reinvent and multiply them in "our own words" [at least, I want to believe this and have written more about this HERE, HERE, and HERE].

"Living Chaucer" is extraordinary for the way in which it brings together neuroscience [with its concepts of neuroplasticity and mirror neurons], evolutionary/behavioral biology, studies of animal communication, psychoanalysis [Freud on mourning and melancholia, Winnicott on play], and medieval philosophy, among other subjects, to ultimately argue for literature, and Chaucer's poetry especially, as a form of therapeutic care and counter-melancholic "working through," enabled through a shared attention that is always about the process more so than the end, or finish, of anything. Chaucer himself, through his poetry, is a kind of "premodern psychologist" whose continual suspension of so-called final meanings creates what Fradenburg describes as a "friendly" liminal clearing in which so-called self-knowledge can really only be accessed communally, or in the company of good listener-conversationalists with a predisposition to welcome the Other [like Chaucer and his narrators!]. Through Chaucer's art, we undo our isolation and move closer to the sort of fellowship so crucial for living, and for thriving [together]. As Fradenburg herself puts it, in what for me is the most moving line of the essay, and worth bracketing here [twice! -- see above],

What enables us to risk change is the feeling that we are understood and (therefore) accompanied. [p. 60]

In the final analysis, as Fradenburg herself avers, play and shared attention are so important to so many species, including humans, that they may even be an end in themselves. We might also call this learning, or the university: the endless [playful, but also at times, sorrowful] processes we must commit ourselves to, with their open-ended [Chaucerian] mutliplicity of perspectives, and their cultivation of the [non-utilitarian] arts of life which may have more to do with personal and social well-being than we have previously imagined. For this, and many other reasons, Fradenburg's work hails us to this inter-temporal pedagogical-artistic project, and asks us, not just to innovate our scholarship accordingly, but to reclaim the humanities itself as the site of care and healing, and thus, of love itself, especially when we understand love [as I do], in Lauren Berlant's terms, as a form of "emotional time," where "it is possible to value floundering around with others whose attention-paying to what's happening is generous and makes liveness possible as a good, not a threat" [Lauren Berlant, "Starved," South Atlantic Quarterly 106.3 (2007): 440]. Fradenburg's work is itself that sort of generous attention-paying, by which we are enriched, and yes, enlivened.