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.

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[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.

New Critical Modes (postmedieval 2.3)

by J J Cohen

As announced and discussed here, here and here, Cary Howie and I are co-editing a special issue of postmedieval entitled New Critical Modes, to be published late next year. We thought you'd enjoy a preview of the essays that we are bringing together. Comments welcome.

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New Critical Modes

postmedieval 2.3 (2011)

ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen and Cary Howie

This issue examines and embodies some of the new critical modes that are emerging among contemporary medievalists. Critics have often been content to adopt the voice, citational practices, textual apparatuses, forums and ambit of those who trained them, leading to a great deal of continuity in published scholarship over the years. Others, however, have become restless with such modes and models, choosing to disseminate their work and perform its content differently. This special issue will examine new modes of writing, new media, and the very idea or possibility of critical novelty. Possible topics include the reinvention of scholarly and authoritative voice; the affective turn in critical practice; performativity and embodiment; amateurism; popular medievalisms; anachronism; and hybridity of critical investments, genres and identities.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction (Jeffrey Cohen and Cary Howie)
2. Rick Godden, “"Getting Medieval in Real Time”
3. Brantley Bryant and Carl Pyrdum, “On Medieval Blogging”
4. Catherine Brown, “The Writing on the Wall”
5. Eileen Joy, “Shafts or Freight Tunnels Constructed Between Objects that Otherwise Would Remain Quarantined in Private Vacuums: Chaucer’s Griselda and Lars von Trier’s Bess McNeill”
6. Dan Remein, “A Critical Poetics of Allure: 10 Antiphons for the Bringing-to-Appearance of the Place of Allure as a Complicity of Human And Non-Human Matter In Writing, Or, The Physis Of the Whale In Anglo-Saxon England”
7. Karmen MacKendrick, “Always Already New: The Possibilities of the Enfolded Instant”
8. Anna Klosowska, “Alcibiades and Sartre's Bad Faith”
9. Jeffrey Cohen, “An Abecedarium of Vertu”
10. Cary Howie “Uncritical”
11. Book Review Essay by Sharon Kinoshita

Abstracts of Essays

1. Jeffrey Cohen and Cary Howie

Introduction

2. Richard Godden

“Getting Medieval in Real Time”

From making it easier to collaborate and share work to making manuscripts available through digital imaging that once would have been only available through costly and time-consuming travel, the emergence of new technologies such as email, digital media, Facebook, and Twitter have radically re-shaped what it means to do academic work. This essay explores the timeliness of these new technologies. Firstly, by “timeliness” I do mean a sense of fortuitous timing. As an academic with a physical disability, the advent of email and electronic databases full of searchable journal articles could not have been more timely. Without tools like these, pursuing a PhD would have been far more laborious than it already was. But by “timeliness” I am also asking the following question: How do we describe the time of the academic? Using my personal experiences as a starting point, I consider the intersection of Disability Studies and recent work on time and temporality in order to provide the beginnings of an answer. Rather than conceiving the time of the academic as that of working in solitude in our own pockets of time, I suggest that we consider how the social capabilities of new technologies produce a sense of being-together, of working at the same time.

3. Brantley Bryant and Carl Pyrdum

“On Medieval Blogging”

It is no great stretch to say that Carl Pyrdum and Brantley Bryant run two of the Internet's most successful medieval interest blogs -- so long as one defines "successful medieval interest blogs" as "blogs read by people not typically interested in medieval things." Got Medieval and Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog, their respective endeavors, occupy a middle space between the academic middle ages and the rest of "teh internets," and in this paper, Carl and Brantley will attempt, through a collaborative mutual mock interview, to chart the dimensions and extent of this middle ground. Among the questions they will entertain are the following: 1) To what extent do the two blogs act as points of entry into the more serious academic medievalism on the web? And to what extent are they a barrier to entry? 2) How do the blogs manage to remain "in the middle" without becoming In the Middle or The Medieval Comedy Hour? In a sense, 3) Does their comedic discourse magnify or obscure their academic discourse? Over the next few months, Carl and Brantley intend to correspond via email about their blogs and about blogging generally, and the mock interview will be constructed out of these email exchanges. In other words, while the finished product will not be the transcript of any actual interview, it will take the form of one, a dramatized interaction between the two bloggers that attempts (with jokes!) to get at some meaningful truth about medieval blogging.

4. Catherine Brown

“The Writing on the Wall”

Imagine a graffito in Pompeii. Imagine it says this: Meet me here tomorrow and bring a stick this big with you. Since we’re imagining, it can say this in any language you like. What matters is that it says it, and you think, Here I am. Or: Imagine you’re at Belshazzar’s feast: “In the same hour there appeared fingers, as it were of the hand of a man, writing over against the candlestick upon the surface of the wall of the king's palace: and the king beheld the joints of the hand that wrote. Then was the king’s countenance changed, and his thoughts troubled him” (Daniel 5:5-6). Ephemeral writing as artifact and trope: the reading present articulated by figure and interpellation. And what is the reading present, anyway?

5. Eileen Joy
"Shafts or Freight Tunnels Constructed Between Objects that Otherwise Would Remain Quarantined in Private Vacuums: Chaucer’s Griselda and Lars von Trier’s Bess McNeill"

In their essay “Getting Post-Historical,” which serves as the introduction to their edited collection The Post-Historical Middle Ages, Sylvia Federico and Elizabeth Scala acknowledge that “historicism has become the Jamesonian ‘cultural dominant’ of our field,” and they call for a reexamination and redefinition of historicism’s dominant status, even suggesting that the Freudian, Marxist, and Lacanian approaches to the Real that have founded both the materialist and psychic historicist enterprises are ultimately inadequate to the task of a scholarship that might seek in medievaltexts a type of knowing “unavailable to their ‘original’ readers and beyond the intent of their writers” (pp. 1, 7).

My essay will entail a purposefully historically inappropriate (mis)reading of sacrificial ethics in the “lives” of the fictional characters (and queer saints of a sort) Griselda in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and Bess McNeill (played by Emily Watson) in Lars von Trier’s film Breaking the Waves. I will follow the thought of Walter Benjamin, in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, that the work of art possesses its own history, one that is not readily reducible to the time period in which it was produced nor to the intentions of its maker, and further, that the goal of criticism might be to apprehend the historicity of the artwork that is not part of historical life, per se. And this would be best accomplished by considering the artwork as an object among other objects, all arranged in a non-linear constellation that does not privilege the place of one work over another and which produces certain dialectical images that give to historical time a particular shock. The work of interpretation, in this scenario, is the thinking — necessarily creative and non-teleological — that gives rise to the constellation, which is also formed when temporally disparate objects are seen to be in tactile and affective proximity to each other. Cadging from Deleuze and Guattari, my essay will also argue that texts do not form images of the world, but rather, they assure the world’s deterritorialization, but only if we can properly shake ourselves loose from the hegemony of the ways in which we usually read the signifiers of these texts, and for which enterprise we must get out of history proper through a process of critical hallucination and what the philosopher Graham Harman calls “vicarious causation”: what happens when “objects [Griselda and Bess as textual and visual networks; language; filmic image] confront one another only by proxy, through sensual profiles found only on the interior of some other entity [the reader-viewer-scholar-me]”? Therefore, this paper also aims to show that the “side-by-side proximity of real and sensual objects is merely the occasion for a connection between a real object inside the intention [my desire to be absorbed by these objects] and another real object lying outside it. In this way, shafts or freight tunnels are constructed between objects that otherwise remain quarantined in private vacuums” (“Vicarious Causation,” Collapse : Philosophical Research and Development, vol. II, March 2007: pp. 184, 185).

6. Dan Remein

“A Critical Poetics Of Allure: 10 Antiphons For The Bringing-To Appearance Of The Place Of Allure As A Complicity Of Human And Non-Human Matter In Writing, Or, The Physis Of The Whale In Anglo-Saxon England”

A truly new critical mode in the humanities might be considered as an act with illocutionary effects resulting in actually new structural and formal alternatives for the human to certain tyrannies of thought which have perhaps contributed to the need for a volume on new critical modes in the first place. Such a new critical mode—perhaps most importantly within medieval studies—could no longer prohibit critical writing from the production of poesis as its primary orientation, and perhaps should, without giving up close reading, consider how to move beyond constative statement. I attempt to ask, with the critic Walter Benjamin not only of the attitude of one’s work towards the relations of production of the time, but also of the work’s place within them, in terms of technique—and how to intervene or alter these relations (“The Author as Producer”). To alter and not just describe such relations we should consider attempting to produce writing we would not know how to read, which does not mitigate the difficulty of reading it with supposedly transparent self-explanatory framing. Given the current important discussions of the ‘posthuman’ and the ‘posthumanities’ (within Postmedieval, for instance) as one possible site of a current attempt to alter the above-mentioned relations with increasingly pressing consequences, I have explored the possibility of a new critical mode in relationship to the question of how a still-human poetics can maintain a commitment to history, the human, finitude, secularity, et. al. while operating as a collaborator to, or in complicity with, non-human matter. This essay names the place of allure as the place of complicity between language, human-matter and non-human matter, and attends to this allure in an operation of writing in complicity with whale-bone from Anglo-Saxon period England and the Old English ‘Whale’ Physiologus poem from the Exeter Book.

7. Karmen MacKendrik

“Always Already New: The Possibilities of the Enfolded Instant”

Friedrich Nietzsche considered himself an inverse, generally taken to mean anti-, Platonist. But in the admittedly strong interpretation of Pierre Klossowski, the eternal return shows affinity with the thought of Neoplatonists Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa: for all, the newly emergent and the recurrent beyond origin curiously coincide; no thing, and no time, is only itself. Eckhart demands an infinite birth of an already-crucified God; Nicholas mutually enfolds all possibility and all actuality in a God who is neither simply (actually) a being nor not. And Klossowski’s sense of affirming the return demands that we affirm not only the “tremendous moment’ in which Nietzsche comes upon the thought, but also every possible mutation of that moment, because everything returns, every possibility is unfolded from any actuality. For all of these thinkers, a revelation appears as the astonishingly new which is precisely the same as the old without a first.

8. Anna Klosowska
“Alcibiades and Sartre's Bad Faith”

I juxtapose two canonical scenes of flirtation: Alcibiades's drunken confession in Plato’s Banquet, and Sartre's bitter unveiling of feminine artifice that serves as the illustration of bad faith, one of the key insights in Being and Nothingness. The two scenes of flirtation not only help define and sustain philosophical arguments but, as if bound to demonstrate the functioning of a deconstructive dynamic, also disrupt them. However, while Alcibiades is supposed to disrupt the banquet, Sartre's scene of flirtation belies his demonstration of bad faith. The scene, as Sartre records it, undoes Sartre's reading of it, and undermines the concept it is supposed to illustrate. Alcibiades scripts his confession as a dialogue, with stage directions and a sublime sense of comic pacing. His interruption in the Banquet is analogous to a commentary: it is both in (with respect to the structure) and of (with respect to the theme) the text that hosts it. And yet, it is distinct from its matrix: like a commentary, it is an incursive vein cross-secting the matrix. Sartre, meanwhile, creates a distance from the scene of café courtship as a third-person omniscient narrator. For Freud, shame is a proleptic twinge of pain that directs the ego away from a risky trajectory that may result in an even greater pain. While this description fits Sarte's vignette of bad faith, Alcibiades's story cannot be subsumed to it. I would argue that a different mechanism is in play. I analyze it closely, and propose it as an alternative to shame as a both a seductive and critical modality.

9. Jeffrey J. Cohen

“An Abecedarium of Vertu”

Inspired by ludic and deconstructive alphabet books for children (Chris Van Allsburg, The Z Was Zapped; Edward Gorey, The Gashlycrumb Tinies) and biblical, classical and medieval abecedarian poems (Psalm 118, the “ABC of Aristotle,” Chaucer’s “La Priere de Nostre Dame”), this essay explores the polysemantic Middle English word virtu. An assemblage rather than word, vertu brings together the life force of animals and flowers; sidereal radiation and pull; cognition and the brain at war with itself; communicative and translational devices employed by the humors to bend the body to their desires; chivalric virtue; materiality as a matter-energy flow. Although some of its meanings are spiritual and theological, vertu also yields a way for medieval texts to frame a secular or at least non-teleological world where the only constants are strivings for movement, newness, and change. Virtu is more than life-force: it is an aesthetic impulse inherent in materiality, a creativity or generativity with irresistible allure for human, but in excess of anything the merely human world or even the divine world can contain.

10. Cary Howie

“Uncritical”

This essay attempts to think an uncritical relationship to its--to our--objects. Specifically, what value could there be in reading uncritically, where this kind of uncritical reading would be understood in light of other practices of unsaying? An uncritical reader would not, in this way, escape criticism (understood in its various modes as dialogical, interpretative, professionally-based, evaluative, and generally invested, overtly or covertly, in authority) any more than, for example, the practitioner of medieval apophasis would escape affirmation. But the coordinates would shift: if my drive to affirm is shaped by the ultimate excess of its object (in a certain tradition, God; in another, the world) to each of these affirmations, so too might my drive to critique (to criticize: and notice the ugliness of these verbs) be shaped by the ultimate excess of its object to the process and procedures of criticism. The uncritical reader might attempt to give voice to something that criticism is too hoarse (or, perhaps, too busy speaking) to express, something uncaptured by criticism: namely, the sense in which objects, even and perhaps especially literary objects, elude our capture. To read uncritically would, in this way, be to read attentively, but where attention waits, where scholarly scrutiny goes a little unfocused, reaching out without grasping (or grasping many things at once, or grasping only to let go). If crisis designates, in at least one etymological register, a kind of separation, this kind of uncritical practice would be a bringing-together, not exactly a unification but, perhaps, a drawing-close, a binding, a becoming-unseparate. (And this is where uncritical reading and uncritical loving have something else in common.) There is no sense in which I can ever 'be' uncritical (or 'be' uncritically); I require you, or something in your place, to be uncritically 'with': the uncritical gesture is unthinkable--but here is another puzzle: what would unthinking amount to?--in isolation.

11. Book Review Essay by Sharon Kinoshita

New Critical Modes 3: Who Else?

by J J Cohen

First, my gratitude to everyone who contributed to the ongoing discussion about new critical modes here and here (and honestly, to anyone who has ever contributed to one of the many blog posts we do here on the subject, since it is one dear to most of us).

In the ongoing we discussion we heard many possibilities, but not many specific names of those who have created or are now fashioning such modes. A few mentioned so far: Carolyn Dinshaw; the Chaucer blogger; Rick Godden; Nicola Masciandaro; Dan Remein. I know I've done this only implicitly so far, but I'll be explicit: my co-bloggers Eileen Joy, Karl Steel, and Mary Kate Hurley all possess and artist's inclination to create the genre that conveys their argument rather than to cram an argument into generic exoskeletons.

There are many others who could be added. Jenna Mead made a strong argument that David Wallace is engaged in such a project in Premodern Places. Nicholas Howe. Myra Seaman and Holly Crocker, especially (but certainly not exclusively) via postmedieval. Anna Klosowska. Noreen Giffney and Michael O'Rourke. Who else?

New Critical Modes Part 2

by J J Cohen

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

• [Oceanic] Critical Modes

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

• Logophilia and Lucidity

• The Language that Locks Others Out

• Tous les sens

• Inapposite Art

• Stories of Stone (draft)

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

• Towards a Restless Medieval Studies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Oceanic] Critical Modes

[illustration: stone and water, by J J Cohen et famille]

by Jeffrey Cohen and Cary Howie

Cary Howie and I are co-editing a special issue of postmedieval (November 2011) with the inadequate working title of "New Critical Modes." We have some of the issue's structure already planned out, but we thought we'd share with you some of our notes back and forth about what we are trying to accomplish. We welcome any thoughts of your own on this topic, tied so intimately to much recent discussion here on the blog.

Please, comment.

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It also occurs to me that one of the things that tend to get swept under the rug every time anyone does an anthology on 'new' anything is a reflection on novelty itself; this could be what makes our project different--obviously in content but also in tone--from, say, the new philology or new historicism of twenty years ago. But who would be up for talking about the risks and rewards of novelty? Or, even, of its not just temporal but also semantic ambiguities? (Novelties for me will always be an advertising word on a summer ice cream truck: "Ice Cream Sandwiches /Popsicles / Novelties.")
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You know, I never get blocked in thinking about projects: usually just the opposite, I have too much to say or too big a vision and so wind up doing two or three things at once. But I have been a little blocked with New Critical Modes, and I think it is partly because I can't see clearly what the intersection of new media will be with new modes (and the new modes I am most interested in and that spur my wanting to do this volume are new affective modes, primarily) … Novelty, you say? I like that. It's funny, today I ran at 5 AM and it was so humid that -- with the music in my headphones too loud -- I went into a kind of trance like I sometimes do when I am way too tired. I began to think a lot about creativity, and about the relation of the newness to innovation (which means an in-folding of newness, right?). I was also thinking about how routine and habit are the nemeses innovation. I don't know if that is either here or there but it is a longwinded way of saying that we should absolutely think about novelty (as light as summer ice cream, absolutely, the antidote to the heaviness of reiteration?) -- if not as an essay (do you want to do an essay on it) then as part of our introduction. Homi Babha asked the question "How does newness enter the world?" and it has always kind of obsessed me.
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It was interesting to read your account of the block you've been experiencing around the intersection of new media and new forms of criticism. (Everywhere I walked in Montreal, there were 'trottoirs barrés' and 'rue barrées': blocked access, in that way, became a part of the texture of the city for me.) I've been experiencing something similar, primarily, I think, because I'm always wary of the 'state of the profession' panels at conferences, and the discussion of new media, as I fear it (perhaps unjustly), would threaten to become something of the sort. I'm also becoming less and less convinced that what I do is criticism in any sense--although what's the word for it, then? Could part of the problem (but problem says this too strongly; it's more like what you've called a block) be the working title of the issue? (For example, would something like Forms of Medievalism--just the first phrase to come to mind--provoke different kinds of responses?) … part of what intrigues me about this project--perhaps the main thing--is its potential to embody the fact that scholarly misfits (those who are felt, by themselves or others, to be not rigorous enough, not period-specific enough, not academic enough; who are felt under the sign of lack) are not lacking but, in fact, overflowing. To me, one of the best things we can do with this issue is to give voice to that excess and to try to convince others that there are worse things in the world than letting oneself get swept away.
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Those words have been really sticking with me, and they really strike a chord with me (even if I am cautious about loving my own missing fit too much, since at this point in time it has allowed me to be a full professor and chair of a department -- how can someone in those positions say that he doesn't feel at home in the field?) Anyway, it does make me think that the pseudo-rupture you identified as disingenuously lurking with scholarships that label themselves New might be a reason NOT to call the issue New Critical Modes. But what other title comes to mind? Misfit Modes? Scholarly Excess? "Misfit Modes, the Scholarly, and Excess"? Coming up with a title adequate to the task is a challenge, but is at the heart of the question of focus.
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I couldn’t agree more, Jeffrey, and one thing that suddenly strikes me, reading back on our exchanges (while trying not to make this too much of a meta-discussion), is that displacement runs through them. (Literally runs, in your case; in mine, it’s more likely to walk or drive.) What would it mean to be critically displaced? Not in the sense of yet another articulation of how impossible everything is, nor in the sense of a romanticism of the marginal (along the lines of “Hey, isn’t exile cool?”), but in the sense of wanting to acknowledge, formally and materially, how what we’re working with comes from elsewhere: our own bodies and words no less than the texts we claim to study. It’s also a question—for me at least—of a kind of adequatio between the things in the world that interest me and the form of my interest. To speak in a voice inflected, however obliquely, by the Middle Ages—and, let’s be frank, isn’t it still rare in critical discourse to acknowledge that anything between Augustine and Rousseau might have happened?—is to speak in a particular way, or in several, possibly innumerable, particular ways. The last thing I’d like to say before opening this up to the ITM community follows upon this: I was reading Jacques Rancière the other week and found myself struck (but you can use other words here, like ‘annoyed’) by the fact his authors are frequently the same damn authors that haunt so much of the critical idiom I have, for better or worse, inherited. I know that other folks—much further away geotemporally (so to speak) than my own middle America from twentieth-century France—have written passionately about the blind spots of these thinkers who have, perhaps not even in spite of themselves, remained French schoolboys. But it matters, and I think it bears repeating, that a critical discourse inflected by Boccaccio or Bonaventure (or the contemporary American young adult fiction I’m reading right now) not only can but must look different from something inflected by Flaubert and the other usual suspects. In fact, there’s a line in the novel I’m reading (P. E. Ryan’s Saints of Augustine; I found it on a remainder table) that expresses this situation concisely: “ ‘Yeah,’ Sam heard himself say from a great distance, as if he had an ocean between himself and his own voice” (190). I want to invite folks to give an account of the ocean that intervenes between any self and any voice, the ocean that also, crucially, keeps us afloat. Those waters are going to have a different texture, a different buoyancy, if they come at least in part from medieval sources.
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My final thought, and then this goes to ITM: I spent the last five days on the seacoast, the only region that ever feels (literally: the touch of salt wind on skin) like home. The ocean can keep us afloat, as you say, I know it anchors me … but in its tidal indifference (or at least its difference) its possibilities are lethal as well as sustaining. Hurricane Bill passed Maine so distantly as to be wholly invisible, but the waves the storm sent to record its passing crashed through parking lots, swept over rocks accustomed to being land not sea. I think of that girl swept to her death in Acadia, at Thunder Hole: a favorite place of my childhood. I know why it happened, why that family got too close, because it almost occurred in Ogunquit while we walked the Marginal Way. The waves smashing rocks captivated, called people closer and closer, and it was easy to forget the outcome of that beautiful force. The police sensibly closed the beach. I’ve blogged before about the ephemeral lithic sculptures that have proliferated on the southern Maine coast. When the waves receded, the ocean’s scoured edge was bare of the little monuments. My family erected some new ones, knowing these too wouldn’t last, knowing that most art cannot last, but beauty inhabits that fleetingness. Some of that allure comes from the history the standing stones carry, these seaside stonehenges, these unnecessary fragments of a language not English or French or Latin or some tongue washed away by the relentless years, but part of all these things. A different buoyancy, then: one that surfaces the past, and one that knows from the start its impermanence, forcefully offers an invitation to a world both for us and against our own.

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So we invite you, readers, to comment: what is the place of the medieval in what we have been calling new critical modes? Are the Middle Ages a source for novelty? Are you as weary as we are with desiccated critical voice? If you could edit a special issue of a fabulous new journal, what would you include?