Man is the Pasture of Being: Interlude on the Old Man Himself

by KARL STEEL

British Library, Royal MS 15 D II, 192v, Great Feast of God

Stop flinching! This one isn't that long.

If you've been following along, even hesitatingly, you know that I've been captured by the theme of "sky burial" throughout this second half of July. The first blogfruit of my research is here, on the medieval afterlife of the Babylonian king Evilmerodach; the second is here, on classical and late antique enthnography of the Persian and Central Asian practice of exposure of the dead. Together they constitute some 5500 words of brand-new research.

I realize that's a bit much, particularly for a group blog. And I realize that asking you to read this stuff may be asking you to work for me, for free. Sorry. Since my semester's starting in about a month, I can't really see slowing down (teaching will accomplish that, neatly); but I can save you from the bulk of what I wrote today, if you like: this is about 1100 words on, apologies, Martin Heidegger, where I go after his famous "Man is the Shepherd of Being." They're far from sympathetic. If you want to read it, click HERE, to go to my own website (www.medievalkarl.com). I can promise you not only Heidegger-wrasslin' -- of interest perhaps only to a tiny group -- but also a brief consideration of Elaine Tin Nyo's laudable, lifetime project to transform herself into sausage.

Next time I post here, I can promise MANDEVILLE + TIBET.

SCALE - SUBATOMIC

by KARL STEEL

My most exhilarating moment of BABEL14 was the "scale" plenary, pictured here:

We had 4 minutes each, banging through one paper after another. We kept to time, with more or, in my case, less dignity. I know myself to be a roughly 135/words a minute speaker. And I knew I had about 4 minutes and 15 seconds of stuff. Still, I started my paper on "subatomic" with too much excitement or too much of a sense of citizenship. Maybe I felt guilty about the extra 15 seconds. Zooming through the opening bit (with a pipsqueaked "I've read Karen Barad!"), I realized my error, applied the brakes, and slowed down gradually to ponderous solemnity as I approached my time's end.

This may have sounded deliberate. It wasn't.

Thanks to Jeffrey for inviting me to be a part of this, and thanks to the other presenters: it was a real pleasure to watch you work, and to join you in this vast working thing.

My paper follows. Remember: it's exhortatory.

---

It's not uncommon to think if we could just to get to the ground of things, we'd have the truth. I've read Karen Barad, and I can tell you that's not quite right. The more precise you get, the less certain. On the subatomic scale, and not only on that scale, we find not foundation, but indeterminacy, as yet unresolved into either wave or particle, where particular ways of engagement yield particular realities. Down there, and perhaps not only down there, epistemology and ontology collapse or feed into each other.

There's another, even less rigorous way to think of "subatomic," not one concerned with size but rather with distance and perspective. Things seem smaller when we're far away or when we're too big to notice them without effort. Up close, things seem bigger. Middle English scholars will know where I'm going with this: Chaucer's Troilus, killed before the walls of Troy, ends by looking down on "this litel spot of erthe," laughing at everyone who weeps for his death, because his spirit, now speeding through the eighth celestial sphere, knows this mutable world to be nothing but "blynde lust, the which that may nat laste."

Troilus, freed from earthly love and earthly affection, thinks he finally got it right. To him, the world has become tiny, and therefore insignificant. Actually: he's right, but not entirely. Compared to the smooth motion of the celestial spheres, compared even to the place, wherever that is, where Troilus will spend eternity, our earth is insignificant. From up there, it really is "nys but a faire" that "passeth soone as floures faire." It really is, from up there. And down here it's something quite different, which Troilus would know too if only he came back.

I'm more sympathetic to Tolstoy's Prince Andrei, who has a similar vision as he nearly slips into death while lying on the field of Austerlitz. He looks up and considers his hero, Napoleon, a "small insignificant man" compared to the "lofty, infinite sky." And yet he wants his life back, "which seemed so beautiful to him, because he now understood it so differently." Andrei also gets perspective, but not like Troilus. He's gotten not perspective but perspectives. He knows both sky and the world down here are true, both correct, both irreducibly important. And so on, we should say, at all scales, without limit.

The "subatomic" tempts us to it with the vain promise of foundation; or its smallness tempts us to mistake it for unimportant and ourselves, whatever we are, as the opposite. We scholars, but not only as scholars, let whatever concerns us occupy our whole attention. Our concern becomes our world. We let ourselves be captured by what others, sometimes our allies, assume to be just minutiae. They accuse us of losing track of the really important stuff, race, class, climate change, the god particle, language itself, evolutionary history, the whole nonhuman world and its weird times, and so on. Depending on whatever we're working on, they're absolutely right. And so are we, so long as we're not laughing at their little spot of earth. If you're feeling comfortable, too inclined to laugh, I suggest you change perspectives.

Let's not make Troilus's mistake.

Two book notes, and a note, on materialism and ecocritcism

by J J Cohen

[read Jonathan's Hsy's essential post Intersections: On Annoyances, Mistakes ... and Possibilities and work your way back through the rich discussion of diversity and medieval studies -- some of the best material we have published at ITM]

Anyone who reads ITM regularly cannot have missed that the material turn in contemporary criticism has been of great interest to those who blog here.  I recently attempted to articulate the stakes and possibilities of the new materialism as feminist, ecocritical practice in this post, derived from my NCS presentaion on "Magic Rocks." Medievalists have tended to be rather skeptical of the new materialisms, and I wonder if that hesitancy is not also why ecological approaches to literature and culture have not made the same inroads into the discipline as they have in, say, early modern studies. Medievalists possess plenty of scholarship on environmental history, but are still poor in ecotheory -- which is a shame, since this loose alliance of methodologies and spurs to thinking shares much with feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies, all of which have emphasized the fragility, non-universality and contradiction-rich depths of the category "human."

Today I want to call your attention to two excellent (but non-medievalist) new books at the intersections of ecotheory and the material turn, and I hope both will receive wide exposure. Material Ecocriticism is a superb collection edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (with whom I have frequently collaborated; their work, together as well as individual, models the best of what this convergence of fields offers). The volume includes beautiful essays by -- among many others -- Lowell Duckert, Catriona Sandilands, Simon Estok, Cheryll Glotfelty, Jane Bennett, Joni Adamson, Stacy Alaimo and Timothy Morton. I was honored to write its foreword, on storied matter (draft here). Bruno Latour blurbs the book (!)

And speaking of blurbs, I was also deeply pleased to compose an endorsement for Serpil Oppermann's New International Voices in Ecocriticism. Here's what I wrote:

A needed spur to a more globalized field, New International Voices in Ecocriticism presents a lucid argument for why the ecocritical future must be geographically and temporally capacious. Combining activism and environmental justice and a focus on materiality with ethical generosity, the essays collected in this book offer a compelling vision of ecocriticism as an interdisciplinary and transformative practice. Serpil Oppermann is to be commended for gathering so many fine, emergent voices in this indispensable forum, and for composing an introduction for the book that serves as a manifesto for work to come.

The book is well worth your time, especially because it globalizes ecocriticism in important ways and attends to the voices of those who will be the field's future.

Those are my two book notes. Now, a note on a note. Karl has recently written on his other site about a revision he made to an essay for a crazy edited collection that gathers together some medievalists, some early modernists, and some contemporary critics to envision an elemental ecocriticism. Karl notes: "the new materialist ecocriticisms urgently need to figure out some way to use their critique of the agent/object distinction to critique racism and they need to draw on the critics of racism to do so." First, I want to repeat what I wrote on Karl's FB page: YES. Second, I'd like to also point out that the index for Prismatic Ecology (a volume with much material ecocriticism within) has a substantial entry for race. I cannot say that race easily came to mind for all its contributors, with several draft essays skirting or bracketing race at moments when they should have foregrounded color, body, and justice. To the credit of the contributors, most (not all) took my editorial interventions seriously and included some significant and useful mediation on race, materiality and violence. These are some small steps towards an ecomaterialism that can speak of human specificities and the violences that undergird them rather than be content with simply demolishing the category human and thinking that enough.

Happy ecomaterial reading.

Whale Not Watching

by Karl Steel

I'm in Iceland for the New Chaucer Society Conference. Today's papers concluded with a whale watch, expressly framed by the excursion group as a strike against Iceland's commercial whaling. Currently only 4 other countries commercially whale: Iceland, Norway, Japan, and the Faroe Islands. As we heard, whaling is not some ancient Icelandic tradition, but rather dates only to the introduction of the harpoon gun, by a Norwegian, and the expansion of Norwegian and English whalers into Icelandic waters. After a ban in the early 20th century, whaling resumes in earnest shortly after WWII, and now, only some 3% of Icelanders eat whale regularly; the whale meat of Iceland, rather, serves Japan and tourists, who eat it, thinking that they're participating in heritage, like others, dripping with blood. We were encouraged to seek out restaurants displaying a BLUE WHALE STICKER, as these are explicitly whale friendly. I extend the same encouragement to you.

As the tour company itself reports, the whale watch wasn't a straightforward success. We saw a number of animals. From their list: Atlantic Puffin, Northern Fulmar, Northern Gannet, Storm Petrel, Kittiwake, Common Guillemot, Black Guillemot, Eider Duck, Lesser Black-Backed Gull, Manx Shearwater., Arctic skua, Great skua [terrible birds that live by theft!], and a couple pods of White-Beaked Dolphins. No cetaceans bigger than a dolphin, though: no Minke Whales and certainly no Orcas.

But, again, as the tour company explained, we were watching whales do what whales do, which sometimes  means not showing up for us at all. We knew the whales were out there; and we knew they were whales, for themselves, and not whales for us, when they didn't show themselves for us. This, then, was a whale watch better than most, because it forced us to a better, truer engagement with whales than the bay-as-menagerie or reservation.

Attendees at the ecomaterialism session earlier in the day agonized a bit over the withdrawn object of some strains of speculative materialism. Well, here's one model of the withdrawn object, present to us only in its absence, antipathy, or avoidance, but not removed from our ethical concern for all that. Because we should know that the whales are out there, even if not simply available to us, and, if we're doing things right, we should defend their right to keep themselves hidden from us, who are, so often, especially in Iceland, their destroyers.

(h/t Asa Mittman for the title)

‘By chance’ or ‘in itself’: Automatos and The Problem of Material Agency

Coney Island Fireworks

by KARL STEEL

First, see Jonathan on Collective Nouns, below, and Mary Kate's online survey here on alternative academic communities.

Here's a draft of my paper for the New Chaucer Society, which I'll be giving on Friday July 18th 11am session on "Ecomaterialism: Questions/Problems/Ideologies." I have all of five minutes. Not 100% confident in what follows, but, here goes.

This paper, a shortened and somewhat rethought version of a paper I gave at Kalamazoo2014, implicitly responds to criticism of the "faith," "mysticism," and even "panpsychism" of the new materialisms. Now, that charge may be fair, depending on who we're looking at or what we're looking for. Here, for example, is William Connolly on "creativity" in The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism:

Creative processes flow through and over us, and reflexivity doubles the creative adventure. Actions are thus not entirely controlled by preexisting intentions; rather the creative dimension helps to compose and refine intentions as they become consolidated in action. To articulate the creative dimension of freedom, then, is to insert a fundamental qualification or hesitation into the ideas of both the masterful agent and agency as the activation of intentions already there. The creative element is located somewhere between active and passive agency. When creative freedom is under way in an unsettled context we may find ourselves allowing or encouraging a new thought, desire, or strategy to crystallize out of the confusion and nest of proto-thoughts that precede it. An agent, individual or collective, can help to open the portals of creativity, but it cannot will that which is creative to come into being by intending the result before it arrives. Real creativity is thus tinged with uncertainty and mystery. (75)

I'm sympathetic to this. I get it, because it describes, especially, how writing works for me, and probably for you. Outline all you like, something new is going to happen when you're trying to assemble your actual words. It does feel mysterious, but still, the language of "mystery" or of a "tinge" smacks of mysticism, at least for those who are sniffing it out.

My own hesitation, however, would be with the "proto-thought," since that, catnip to the humanists, strikes me as just as mysterious, obscuring as it does the question of the location of thought or, especially, its presumptive non-materiality.

That is my angle, then: in the background of this piece, you might hear me throwing the "mysticism" charge back against the accusers, whose certainty in the difference between thinking human subjects/nonhuman objects strikes me as both an act of faith and an unwarranted limitation of their attention only to familiar scales of time and size.

Another caution: the 20-minute version at Kalamazoo had a lot of room for Aquinas and also, especially, to give queer theory its due in assailing the paternalism of an absolute split between agent and object. This paper, like the new materialisms in general, wouldn't have been possible without Butler and Irigaray.

Here we go:

---

The word “agency” gets a lot of use from New Materialists; Jane Bennett talks about “material agency,” and Karen Barad about the “agential object.” A 9am session tomorrow will ask “Should We Believe in the Agential Object?” And so on. One of the key purposes in using this word “agency,” I think, is to counter the faith that humans, or maybe some animals, are the only agential objects. For the new materialists, nonhuman objects aren’t only mechanical; they might surprise; they might respond; to use Derrida’s terminology, they might even have an excessive “responsibility,” rather than just a limited, predictable reactivity; in short, they—and us too—might exhibit some kind of choice and creativity.

“Some kind,” which is, admittedly, a bit hand-wavey, but deliberately so, to mark the way that the word “agency” acknowledges that actors without obvious political power, without much obvious choice, without obvious importance, and even without deliberation or subjectivity, can still resist, fight back, or make something new. Where they might do something in ways that the dominant agent couldn’t have accounted for. Where we can recognize actors that we would otherwise not notice, to “provincialize the human” and its scales of attention.

Given the conference, of course I’m going to argue that medieval thought has something to offer these discussions. Which we of course already know. I’ll focus on something small: the difficulties Aristotle’s word “automatos” gave some his medieval Latin translators.

Aristotle uses automatos, among other places, in Metaphysics VII.7, where it’s one of his three categories of causation: natural, artistic—the word is techne—and automaton. Techne is a familiar kind of agency to the humanist: the “active principle” is in the “soul” of the artist. “Natural comings to be,” on the other hand, “are the comings to be of those things which come to be by nature.” The tight mechanicity of this obvious, almost hilarious circular reasoning may be why Aristotle provided the third category, of automatic causation.

Automatic causation appears when things are produced “without seeds,” like insects, which come spontaneously from mud or dung, or when things happen without deliberation or by accident. So we have at least two meanings of automaton here, both of which reserve an agency outside both human or quasi-human deliberation and outside the circular causality of nature.

In one meaning, automatic agency seems to be self-generated, like “natural things…whose matter can be moved even by itself.” This agency seems to come from nowhere because it originates in the thing itself—think for example of the auto in autobiography—so that agent and patient are the same thing. Alternately, automatic agency may be a kind of non-agential activity, with only patients and no agents, as when—to use Aristotle’s example—a patient gets healthy regardless of what the physician does.

Unsurprisingly, automatos troubled some of Aristotle’s medieval translators: Michael Scot and Roger Bacon render it as “per se” (cited from here, 134) through or by itself, and William of Moerbecke, at times, as “a casu,” by chance (here and HA, 130). Self-generated causation is an action whose cause cannot be disentangled from its effect. One analogue might be Anselm’s attempt in Cur Deus Homo to save God from being compelled by a motive (see note 1 here). For Anselm, “God does nothing of necessity,” not even to avoid dishonor, “since nothing whatever can coerce or restrain him in his action.” Here cause and effect form a neat little knot, immanent to and closed on itself.

By contrast, random causation, “a casu,” is a kind of atheistic but also nonmechanistic, nonsolipsistic account of agency. It might be as random as something that’s simply senseless, a thing that just happens. Just as well, random causation might preserve space for a surprise, the hap, the adventure arriving from some unidentifiable elsewhere. This is an agency that interrupts predictable causality to bring something new into being. It’s an agency that frees an origin from some already known end, or it's an agency that piggy-backs on some deliberate intention.

This excessive or random causality may be the one way short of a divine fiat that agency can bring something new into being. More simply, it may be the only way agency can actually happen.

Thank you!

The Middle English Disputation between a Christian and a Jew: Materiality, or not.

by KARL STEEL

Just waving at the Gower conference from afar! Also, read Jeffrey doing his ecothing below!

Eric Corriel at LUMEN 2014

Because the field's so crowded, I'm reluctant to call the "Disputisoun bytwene a cristenmon and a jew" [Disputation between a Christian and a Jew, hereafter DCJ] one of the stranger Middle English poems; but it is a particularly weird one. Here's a recent summary:

[DCJ tells] how an English and a Jewish theologian disputed in vain at Paris. The Christian argues the Virgin Birth and the redemption through Christ's crucifixion and the Jew favors a God who has no son. In order to convince the Christian the Jew suggests he will prove the power of his religion by showing the Christian a vision of Christ on the cross. They travel to the Otherworld where the Christian proves the vision of the crucifixion to be a false one by confronting it with a consecrated host. The Jew admits the errors of his ways and converts to Christianity. At this point the Christian is identified as Sir Walter of Berwick, who was made a penitentiary by the pope.

Among these otherworld encounters are Arthur and his Round Table (!), a dinner with nuns, squires, and the recital of romances, and, finally, what turns out to be a fake crucifixion (a crucifiction?). [For another summary, see my comment to this 2008 blog post]

Luuk Houwen, whose summary I quote above, offers us one of the only articles on the DCJ, and, so far as I know, the only one published this century. I'm convinced by his argument, which is essentially an identification of its genre: the poem's not a romance, but a religious vision, developed from one of the many exempla designed to prove the sanctity of the Eucharistic Host.

Houwen, however, doesn't do much with the Jewishness of the disputant, and probably for good reason: Thomas of Cantimpré's exemplum, a likely source, features a contest between a heretic and a Christian; in another analog, from a Life of St Wolfram, it's pagans and a not-quite-yet Christian. The DCJ adds Arthur, the Nuns, and the other elements of what we might call a specifically British otherworld. But, apart from calling its figure of unbelief a Jew, it doesn't explicitly add anything to the tradition that's clearly about the Christian engagement with Judaism.

Still,some other differences from the analogs demand our attention. There's the Jew's similarity to Chaucer's Clerk of Orleans, in the Franklin's Tale, who similarly conjures up a chivalric entertainments:

he shewed hym, er he wente to sopeer,
Forestes, parkes ful of wilde deer;
Ther saugh he hertes with hir hornes hye,
The gretteste that evere were seyn with ye.
He saugh of hem an hondred slayn with houndes,
And somme with arwes blede of bittre woundes.
He saugh, whan voyded were thise wilde deer,
Thise fauconers upon a fair ryver,
That with hir haukes han the heron slayn.
tho saugh he knyghtes justyng in a playn;
And after this he dide hym swich plesaunce
That he hym shewed his lady on a daunce,
On which hymself he daunced, as hym thoughte.
And whan this maister that this magyk wroughte
Saugh it was tyme, he clapte his handes two,
And farewel! al oure revel was ago,
And yet remoeved they nevere out of the hous.

That's certainly a connection worth developing, perhaps having to do with the relationship between preachers, sorcerers, and storytellers; here, though, I'll just suggest that we put the poem in conversation with the medieval relationship between Jews and materiality, specifically, the way that medieval Christianity tended to insult Jews by associating them with materiality. For Christians, Jews were excessively literal, concerned only with brute facts and not with spiritual truths, stone-hearted, driven by instinct rather than choice, with bodies that were excessively corporeal: stinky, prone to bloody fluxes and--in the Siege of Jerusalem among others--dismemberment (see Steven Kruger's The Spectral Jew and Suzanne Conklin Akbari's Idols in the East). One of the goals of the new materialisms is, or should be, to drain the material insult of its force by, at once, recognizing the presumptively human/Christian/whatever as material too and the material as more agential or, at least, less foundational ("the ground of our discussion is" etc). More wobbly on the material side, less free on the human/etc side, with a serious reassessment of what we mean when we use the word "agency." Things like that.

That's important, but it's harder to implement in this case. What's strange in the DCJ is that the Jew isn't obviously associated with materiality, but with illusion; it's the Christian who wields the material object, the consecrated Host, that -- like the clap of the Orleans' Clerk--bursts the illusion apart, returning us to the world of dark, solid matter:

Whon he was schewed to the siht,
He barst þe Buyldynge so briht.
Bote was derk as the niht,
Heore sonne and heore mone.

If we just take the Jew as being made to stand in for the general unbeliever, that's not a problem, except, of course, for the general fact of its prejudice. But if we take the Jew seriously as a Jew in a Christian poem then we need to work harder.

Host desecration stories with Jewish desecrators, like the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, which Houwen cites, or several exempla in British Library, Royal 18.B.23, feature a kind of profane belief in the material sanctity of the Host. The Jews obtain a Host, by theft or purchase or deception, and then mistreat it until the Host reveals its truth. A sample, since BL Royal 18.B.23 isn't online. A Jew bets a Christian 20 pounds that his dog would eat a consecrated Host. The Christian accepts the bet, and then, by pretending to be sick, tricks a priest into slipping him the goods. When he extracts the uneaten Host from under his tongue and delivers it to the Jew, here's what happens:

Þan [the Jew] toke þe Hoste, þat was in þe purs, and cast it a-fore þe dogge. And a-noon þe dogge fled and wold haue renne owte of þe hous. Þan þe Iewe cached hym a3eyn and chereshed hym, and euermore he drewe a-bake. Þan þe Iewe saw þat he wold not for no cherishynge take itt, þan he bette hym. And anone þe dogge fell downe on all iiij knees and did as he couthe reuerence to þe Sacramente. Þan þe Iewe was wode wrouthe and toke a staffe and bette þe dogge, and toke þe dogge in is armes and put hym þer-to. And þe dogge felte þat he wold haue mad hym to haue eten itt. And sothely he stirte vp to is þrote and voried hym. 

Þan anoon þe Cristen man ranne to þe preeste þe wiche þat houseled hym, and told hym how it was and of þe dogge, suche an vnresonable beeste, how þat he did is dewe reuerence to Goddes bodie in þe forme of brede. 

So be þis meracle þou may be stered to beleue þer-on in þat, þat an vnresonable beeste do dud, þat neuer had techynge of holychurche. (130)

This isn't at all what happens in DCJ. Its Jew doesn't have any particular belief either way in the Host. He doesn't want to do things to it to prove that it's mere material. He's even, before its reveal, indifferent to it. Rather -- and this proposal is probably where I'll open discussion the next time I teach it -- the Jew in the DCJ champions visible immateriality, and the Christian invisible materiality. The DCJ isn't so much a dispute between materiality and its other (whether this is spirit, choice, free interpretation, immortal stability, &c) as it is between the falseness of visible things and the true materiality of invisible things. On the other side of (false) vision, we haven't arrived exactly at the realm of spirit, but at the one, true materiality of the Real Presence.

The trick, which I'll leave to my students, and to you, is to make this frankly rather dull reading more interesting.

[for more on/in the Vernon Manuscript, see here; and for a full TOC, here]

SNEAK PEEK: Preview of Materiality Sessions at #Kzoo2015

by JONATHAN HSY

Hey medievalists! You can now take a sneak peek of approved sessions for #Kzoo2015 (i.e., the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI, May 14-17, 2015). The sneak preview information is on this page; you can also directly view the sneak preview of sessions as a PDF.

One idea that emerged through some private discussions on Facebook was to think creatively about more dynamic and deliberate "cross-fertilization" across disciplines and subfields. Some of my Facebook friends picked up on a real interest in materiality at the 2014 conference. Through such virtual correspondence it has been noticed (for instance) that musicologists and literary scholars don't actually interact with each other as much as they could (should!) about the intertwined materiality of sound, text, and notation -- so it would be great to put our heads together to think about things like aurality, language, embodied performance, etc. In what other ways can we all move out of our various bailiwicks and "mix things up" in our sessions?

Here's a list of materiality-related sessions for #Kzoo2015. Full contact info is on this PDF.

It's a great slate of sessions. Think creatively! Consider sending in a proposal to a session that is outside your (sub)field or discipline or otherwise allows you to interact with new people! Perhaps a compelling (unofficial) "Materiality" thread can emerge from the conversations that transpire.

Sessions with materiality in title:

Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies (2): Material Iberia I: Devotional Objects, Devoted Bodies; Material Iberia II: Shaping Bodies in Literature and Art

Friends of the Saints (1): Material Engagements with the Friends of God in Post-Roman Europe (panel discussion)

Magistra (1): Mysticism and Materiality (panel)

Material Collective (1): Transgressive Materialities

Medieval Romance Society (3): Romance Materiality I–III: The (Im)materiality of the Book; Romancing the Material; The Material Afterlife

Mid-America Medieval Association [MAMA] (1): Economic and Material Collectivity and Exchange

Musicology at Kalamazoo (1): The Materiality of Music (panel)

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (1): Quantum Medievalisms (roundtable)

Societas Magica (1): Magic and Materiality

Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship [SMFS] (1): Gender and Materiality in the Middle Ages

Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages [SSDMA] (1): Disability and Material Cultures (roundtable)

Special Session: (Im)Materiality in English and Welsh Medieval Culture (1)

Special Session: When Objects Object: Misbehaving Materiality (1)

Sessions otherwise interested in materiality:

George Washington University Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute [GW MEMSI] (1): "Lost" (panel)

Grammar Rabble (1): Unsettled Marks: To #;()@?”:-*! . . . and Beyond! (roundtable)

Two points: Digital Piers; Marsilius of Padua and the problem of "agency"

Ghada Amer at Cheim + Read

by KARL STEEL

Two quick points:

ONE. First, if you're a medievalist, particularly a digital humanities medievalist, and you're not reading Angie Bennett Segler's Material Piers blog, you're making a terrible mistake.

Piers Plowman doesn't get a lot of love around these parts. I'm not sure any of us here have ever taught it. For that reason, alone, you should be reading Material Piers. You know, to expiate our guilt. Or at least my guilt.

Here's a sample:

At present, it’s relatively established that the Vernon [manuscript] cannot possibly  be dated to prior to 1395. Good, fine. No problem. That’s the fourteenth century. BUT, and for me this is a big “but,” the Vernon is SO MASSIVE that it seems pretty much insane to me to date it to any year.  The majority of the manuscript, along with its almost as large sister the Simeon, was copied by a single scribe!! A.I. Doyle estimates that even moving at his fastest he couldn’t have completed the pair of them in under  FOUR YEARS, and it may well have taken up to eight. On top of that, there is the lavish decoration scheme with borders, initials, gilding and two full cycles of miniatures. The idea that the manuscript was both started and completed in the fourteenth century borders on preposterous.

That, frankly, is why I prefer dating V to “ca. 1400.” Because the “circa” itself implies a possible range of time. And in the case of the Vernon, that range is incredibly important. But more than that, it acknowledges the imprecision in dating manuscripts altogether. “Ca. 1400″ allows us to think about the slipperiness of dating things belonging that far in the past and about the time it takes to hand-make a material-textual object, to bring it into being one folio, one line, one letter, one stroke at a time. So, unless a manuscript is clearly and definitively datable to a certain decade, I prefer to leave it with its ambiguous date.

And here's a chart. which you can understand if you click through to the blog!

Why am I demanding that you read this Material Piers post in particular? Because it offers you the chance to do a bit of digital humanities work yourself. Read the post; lend a hand; and join me in swimming in a Piers-and-everything-else manuscript. I'll be doing that myself this afternoon.

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TWO. The various so-called "new" materialisms tend to use the word "agency" a lot without doing much to figure out what the word actually means. My second Kalamazoo2014 paper, on spontaneous generation and "automatic" agency, tried to get directly at the problem by arguing, ultimately, that only a random break with mechanical causality can be recognized as truly agential. My solution has the posthuman advantage of moving questions of agency away from rationality and anthropomorphism, thereby avoiding the implicit humanizing at the center of many discussions of agency. It also has the dubious -- and predictable -- advantage of discovering an aporia at the agency's heart.

All this is by way of setting up a passage from Marsilius of Padua's Defensor Pacis:

This term "ownership" is used to refer to the human will or freedom in itself with its organic executive or motive power unimpeded. For it is through these that we are capable of certain acts and their opposites. It is for this reason too that man alone among the animals is said to have ownership or control of his acts; this control belongs to him by nature, it is not acquired through an act of will or choice. (II.12.16, p. 193)

Adhuc dicitur nomen dominii de humana voluntate seu libertate secundum se, cum ipsius executiva seu motiva organica potestate non impedita. Hiis enim possumus in actus aliquos et ipsorum oppositos. Propter quod eciam dicitur homo inter animalium cetera suorum actuum habere dominium; quod siquidem a natura inest homini, non voluntarie seu eleccione quesitum. (MGH 271)

The origin of human agency ("ownership of control of his acts") isn't human agency itself. Rather, it's inherent to humans, unchosen. Agency itself therefore is free from human choice at its root. Still, it's determined, somehow, by "nature." If the power of choice is instinctual, then it's hard to imagine that humans have "complete freedom" ("libertas," I think). This problem of the origin of agency is a problem, especially, for Marsilius, as he's well-known for arguing that "the supreme power resides in the body of the citizens [and not the Church], who make the laws, and choose the form of government, etc [and that t]he prince rules by the authority of the whole body of citizens": what is the origin of the people's will?

But the problem is also general to agency and to human agency especially, perhaps the paragon and model of agency in any discussion of the term. The problem of agency intersects with a host of other problems, of materialism, humanism, racism, and indeed the history of antisemitism.¹ It's a problem whether we're talking about rats or stones or garbage or the tedious Pauline differentiation between Christian spiritual reading and Jewish literal reading or, for that matter, the whole spirit versus matter binary that's inherent to all considerations of agency. For any of these, the power of agency simply doesn't seem to be reducible to any first cause. Otherwise, it wouldn't be agency but rather the beginning of another mechanical chain.

In short, any clear claim to agency strikes me as unwarranted. And the same goes for any scorn of materialisms or posthumanisms because their "discovery" of agency in nonhuman objects.

It's obviously ironic that I should end up so automatically in an identifiably deconstructive aporia. I'm very much back in Derrida's critique of the "auto" of autobiography in, for example, The Animal that Therefore I am, where he does his Derridean thing with the "ipseity, indeed sui-referential egoity, auto-affection and automotion, autokinesis, [and] autonomy" (65) of the presumptive presence of the self-generated automatic I, and with the pretense of "auto-motricity, a spontaneity that is capable of movement, of organizing itself and affecting itself, marking, tracing, and affecting itself with traces of its self" (49). You can imagine what happens to agency when Derrida finishes with it.

Maybe commentators can suggest another way forward?

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1 Or, for that matter, colonialism and its various justifications. See this new post from Corey Robin, on the dangers of presidential boredom, where he recalls Tocqueville's enthusiasm for the Opium War: "So at last the mobility of Europe has come to grips with Chinese immobility!" ^↩

Blaise of Parma (c. 1347-1416), the Doctor Diabolicus, a posthuman, materialist resource

by KARL STEEL

Doctor Devil. From Prize Comics #22.

First, have a look at BABEL'S Spring Fundraiser if you haven't yet. And look again even if you have. I can't emphasize enough how important BABEL has been to me.

Through Maaike van der Lugt's wonderful Le ver, le démon, et la vierge : les théories médiévales de la génération extraordinaire [the worm, the demon, and the virgin: medieval theories of extraordinary generation], whose only failing is utter indifference to the humble oyster, I've just discovered a late Italian thinker, Blaise of Parma (c. 1347-1416), who should become a key resource for posthuman materialist medievalists.

Judging by the Wikipedia and other encyclopedia entries, Blaise, aka, Blasius of Parma, Biagio Pelacini da Parma, Biagio Pelacini, or Blaise de Parma, is chiefly discussed for his work on optics and weights (for example, from Brian Lawn, or this article), which, to be fair, is where most of his fame rests. None however mentions what van der Lugt does, that his contemporaries called him the DOCTOR DIABOLICUS.

His first diabolic act? To befuddle strong advocates for periodization. The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy anoints him as "the first Renaissance psychologist," while Lawn, endorsing Vescovini's 1945 Studi sulla Prospettiva Medievale, rather calls Blaise "one of the most mature thinkers in philosophy of the middle ages." Given that the supposed renaissance break with medieval philosophy may be overstated (per this abstract), we can just suspend the question of whose thinker Blaise is.

Just kidding: he's medieval. Definitely, totally medieval.

And even as a medieval thinker, he stands out. Here's the Cambridge History paraphrasing one of Blaise's key ideas:

If one analyses the process of intellection as analogous to sense-perception, it becomes clear that the soul requires an object, which is simultaneously present and appropriately distanced. Distance, however, implies extension, and extension, matter, so that the object of intellectual is necessarily a material one. But since this applies to both external and internal objects, which may be recalled, any concept of intellect has to be represented in matter. Consequently, there is no intellectual operation which is not also a natural process through which matter is formed according to its specific potentiality, the only specificity being that the natural process of intellectual is followed by the assent or dissent of the soul, in which truth or error consists. From this materialistic theory of knowledge Blasius infers a necessarily materialistic concept of the soul, according to which the entire soul, including the intellect, is just a particular form, drawn out of the potentiality of matter and passing away with the dissolution of the body. (487, emphasis mine)

Here's the Latin: "ultima conclusio: quod anima intellectiva hominis sit educta de potentia materiae generabilis et corruptibilis, habet quilibet de plano concedere," from the 1974 edition of his Quaestiones de anima.

In 1396, Blaise had to recant these and several other beliefs, but somehow lived a full life, and without, it seems, his bones being disinterred and burnt (like Pietro d'Abano; van der Lugt, 181). Apart from these materialist arguments on the soul, per van der Lugt, Blaise also argued, in his 1385 treatise on the soul, that the Flood was just an old wives' tale, as all animals just reemerged after the flood receded, spontaneously, as -- unlike Aristotle, but like Avicenna -- he did not maintain any boundary that would reserve spontaneous generation only to the "imperfect" animals like gnats, bees, mice, eels, toads, and so forth; from this point, he argued as well that both humans and the rational soul could emerge spontaneously (and that therefore virgin births may be a natural rather than supernatural reality); and that -- contra Avicenna even -- there was no master creator in charge of things, as all forms emerge from the middle region of the air. While he finally endorses key Christian doctrine, he still does so reluctantly, observing that only doctrine and not reason lead him to orthodoxy.

Some key passages, then: "Nothing prevents this matter, so prepared by natural causes, from receiving a form which has the capacity to discern, to reason, which is commonly called the "intellective power" (nihil ergo prohibet quin materia illa, sic praeparata ex puris naturalibus, non recipiat formam quae habebit virtutem discernendi, sillogizandi etc., quae a vulgaribus intellectiva nominatur, qtd van der Lugt, 178 n206, trans based on van der Lugt's french trans.); or, from van der Lugt, "Pour Avicenne, toutes les formes existent selon un état séparé dans les intelligences pour être ensuite imprimées dans la matière ; Blaise de Parme soutient au contraire qu'aucune forme ne vient du dehors...Au lieu d'envisager la naissance d'animaux dans la boue, sur la viande putréfiée ou dans l'eau, Blaise la localise in media regione, c'est-à-dire dans la zone intermédiare de l'air" (179; "For Avicenna, all the forms exist according to a separate state in the intelligence to be then imprinted in matter; Blaise of Parma maintains, on the contrary, that no form comes from outside [a perfectly Aristotelian viewpoint against Avicenna's neoplatonism, as van der Lugt observes, but just wait] .. in place of envisioning the birth of animals in the mud, in rotting meat, or in the water, Blaise localizes the birth in the "middle region," that is, in the intermediary zone of air").

Van der Lugt says that his work remains mostly unedited (most importantly, his Questions on the Physics, at least per Joël Biard's 2009 article), and the one manuscript of his works that she cites is from the Vatican, so, at present unavailable online; but when/if his full body of work is completely edited, I think we'll discover --to put this very modestly--that he's a particularly useful thinker for materialists, medievalist and otherwise.

Finishing the Universe Halfway: On Reading Barad

by KARL STEEL

Last Winter, Michael O'Rourke asked me to contribute to a Rhizomes special issue on Karen Barad (list of contributors here). I hesitated for weeks, worried about whether I'd actually be able to do it well. Since my math peaked at pre-Calculus, anything I write about quantum physics is bound to be embarrassing, and the field attracts so many cranks. Given my training, how could I possibly not end up among them? Well, I did it, anyway, and beat the deadline by 24 hours by submitting the essay yesterday. I can only hope I don't merit a spot on the crank bench next to the Time Cube.

I wouldn't have been able to do this without the Quantum Medievalists and Sundry Associates, a group organized by Angie Bennett Segler, an NYU grad student doing really extraordinary Digital Humanities work on Piers Plowman. With regular members Shyama Rajendran, Ada Smailbegovic, Ashby Kinch, and especially Brandon Jones and Sandra Danilovic, we made our way, week-by-week, through the 500-odd pages of Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway, meeting via a Google Hangout every Wednesday to work out and in our confusion, hesitation, and enthusiasm. There were charts; there was math; there were internet outages; but we endured and we read the whole thing. We finished today, with 3 participants in various locations in New York, 1 in Illinois (?), and another in sunny Macedonia, on a street full of ironic (?) neo-Classical architecture.

Here's today's result (and a complete set here, on Angie's own page):

Though Barad remains undercited by the object-oriented ontologists, quantum mechanics is already being successfully colonized (?) engaged with (?) by the new materialists, especially by Stacy Alaimo's Bodily Natures, Vicki Kirby's Quantum Anthropologies, and most recently, by Timothy Morton. Žižek's Less Than Nothing gets it on the action, too, with its own chapter devoted to Bohr and Barad.

It's no wonder: any thoroughgoing disanthropocentric materialist has to rethink terms like nature, identity, cause, effect, representation, and agency, and the weird temporality of quantum mechanics offers ample rewards to narrative theorists, as we discuss in the video above.

At the same time, I titled my Rhizomes essay "Is a Quantum Mechanics Literary Studies Possible or Desirable?" I'm just not entirely convinced. It's not that I doubt the truth of Barad or the Bohrian quantum mechanics she champions, but rather that I remain very cautious about its use to people like me. Let's just say that postmedieval gave me some useful hesitation.

Here follows a preview of my essay's conclusion:

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The quantum phenomena Barad describes are virtually imperceptible on the scale at which a specifically literary scholarship operate and for the kinds of materials we investigate. Bohr observed that if the discontinuity of reality caused by Planck's constant had been larger, humans would never have thought they lived in a “classical” world (MUH 457 n42). Planck’s constant is what it is though, and humanities scholars, for the most part, do not feel themselves to be moving instantaneously across the absolute minimum of gaps with quantum leaps. The same problem applies to relativity: at typical human speeds, we get along fine with believing space and time to be constants. The humanities can (at least) generally operate with a “good-enough” picture of reality, because modern physics' precision far exceeds our needs. The best humanities teaching occurs at a relatively slow and imprecise level, pace the claims of promoters of MOOCs, and the apparatuses of literary investigation do not isolate the materials of our investigation with sufficient precision to discern or determine quantum effects. As Barad herself writes:

quantum behavior is difficult to observe because of the difficulty of shielding an object, especially a relatively large object, from interactions with its “environment,” which continually fluctuates in an erratic fashion in such a way that a superposition is “randomized” into a mixture “for all practical purposes (but not in principle)....one has to know how to identify an entanglement (e.g., where to look for correlations and how to measure them), and generally speaking, this is far from evident. (MUH 279)

It is extremely difficult, but increasingly not impossible, to observe quantum effects on a macroscopic scale (MUH 279; but see this), which is to say, on a more or less unassisted human sensory scale, or even just to observe multiple entangled particles, since every additional pair of entangled particles increases the complexity of the phenomena exponentially (for example, see here). It is hard to imagine these difficulties being overcome in a library, and even harder—though perhaps not impossible—to imagine the value of doing so.

In short, although I would prefer to be wrong about this, both the fundamental indeterminacy of reality and the generativity of knowledge will probably matter for literary criticism only either analogically, or to keep us from reductionist or relativistic errors, or will matter only by helping us develop more complex and correct accounts of agency, as Barad does in her analysis of the Calcuttan jute mill (MUH 24, 74, 44, and 94). Barad herself wrote an article whose noncontinuous structure, entangling Hamlet’s Denmark with the Denmark of Bohr and Heisenberg and with Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, aimed “to provide the reader with an opportunity to engage in an imaginative journey that is akin to how electrons experience the world” (244). Barad’s fascinating formal experiment sought to overturn the “overarching sense[s] of temporality, of continuity, in place” that would let us believe in our clear difference from what we study and our sense of historical progression that puts our objects of study only in the past and us in the present. The article’s structure is, however, a model or analog, inspired by quantum physics, but not an actual experience of entanglement or indeterminacy. To be still more specific: even if we were to isolate indeterminate complementary variables within the phenomena constituting book and scholar, our epistemological interaction with the literal material of a book will not do much to it that would affect our experience of the whole complex constituting it as book. And even if we did join ourselves with an apparatus capable of being marked by the literal material of some particular book in a way we could account for objectively, it would likely not matter much for our interpretation of its text.

That said, we could and should always extend our notion of the proper object of textual studies, and that said, when we make ontological claims, or claims about agency, or the character of time, as any scholar in the poshumanities must and as most humanities scholars do implicitly, we should have Barad in mind, at minimum to keep us from mistakes about the fundamental operations of reality. This is obviously no small matter. Having read the new materialists, we can no longer be sure about the fixity of the distinction between subject and object, with all the relations of dominion that implies, nor can we be sure that ethics requires self-awareness, whatever that is. We must abandon the world picture of classical physics, with its comforting assurances of our subjective separability from the world and our persistence in it (or even out of it!). We have arrived at this stage through Ian Bogost, Jane Bennett, Timothy Morton, and a thickening crowd of other thinkers, many included in this issue of Rhizomes. Barad needs to be read with the other new materialists, because her particular training gives ontologists “empirical support” for their systems, as Morton observes about quantum mechanics and object-oriented ontology,¹ and, more importantly, because Barad gives us the best currently available description of reality.

The question is whether we can make any use of it. Literature scholars, and perhaps not only us,² may be able to continue to get by without anything near the precision of quantum mechanics and still do our work as well as it could possibly be done. And, at the risk of reopening the rift between the sciences and the humanities, the kinds of accuracy required to describe the ongoing entanglement of matter in all its permutations may not have much to do with the kinds of accuracy we seek in the arts.

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<sup>1. Timothy Morton, “OOO and Quantum Theory,” Ecology Without Nature, July 27, 2013. Also see Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 144, on “giv[ing] deconstruction empirical traction,” and Quantum Entanglements,” 260, on “empirical evidence for hauntology.”↩

2. Biologists, for example, though not able to take advantage of quantum mechanics in any obvious way, have started to use it to understand photosynthesis and avian navigation, among other biological processes: Philip Ball, Physics of Life: The Dawn of Quantum Biology," Nature 474 (2011): 272–274.↩</sup>

Mattering, the Middle Voice, and Magnanimous Self-Donations: A Response to Jeffrey's "Queering the In/Organic"

by EILEEN JOY

I am for those who walk abreast with the whole earth,
Who inaugurate one to inaugurate all.
--Walt Whitman, "By Blue Ontario's Shore"

A few days ago, in his post "Queering the In/Organic," Jeffrey shared with us what he had preliminarily "worked out as entryway into why queer theory might not want to stop at the limit of biological life," which he will be speaking about when he makes a keynote address at a conference in Berlin later this month, "Queer Again? Power, Politics, and Ethics." I am keenly interested in Jeffrey's Berlin talk, and also in many of the discourses currently circulating in what some are referring to as the "new materialism," and which is also intimately related to older materialisms, philosophy/theory of science (Haraway, Latour, Serres, Elizabeth Grosz, Prigione, Stengers, etc.), network/system/assemblage theory (think: Latour, but also DeLanda, Deleuze and Guattari, Eugene Thacker, etc.), nomadic ethology (think: Deleuze and Guattari again, but also Rosi Braidotti, Iain Chambers), queer theory, the turn to affect, critical animal studies, object-oriented ontology, "thing" studies, studies in the anti- and post-human (especially those that take up cybernetics, distributed cognition, informatics, and the like, but I am thinking here also of Cary Wolfe's posthumanism), and in continental philosophy circles, speculative realism (i.e. Graham Harman's "guerrilla metaphysics").

**Just as a special side-note to all of this, I would like to also ask everyone to reflect on what is at stake--theoretically, politically, discipline-wise, etc.--when we refer to "new" -isms and "turns." How "new" is the "new materialism," anyway, and what is at stake in thinking of it as "new"? On this point in relation to how this has played out especially within feminist studies of gender, the body, etc., see Sara Ahmed, "Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the 'New Materialism'," European Journal of Women's Studies 15.1 (2008): 23-39. For the ways in which premodern discourses on materialism have not figured enough in contemporary discourses on the "new materialism," see also Kellie Robertson, "Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto," Exemplaria 22.2 (2010): 99-118.

Because Jeffrey graciously invited me to be one of nine plenary speakers at GW-MEMSI's upcoming conference, "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects in the Early Modern and Medieval Periods" [11-12 March 2011 @ George Washington Univ.], specifically to speak on ethics (along with Julian Yates), and at which conference the keynote talk will be given by political theorist Jane Bennett, whose recent book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke, 2010) Jeffrey also blogged about not too long ago (and which also figures in his recent post on the in/organic), I am very interested in Jeffrey's Berlin talk (especially because in the snippet he shared with us, Jeffrey gestured toward a "wonder-laden, ethical existence" that would partly hinge on a zōēpolitics that would "embrace the nonbiological, the inorganic"), and I am hoping that we can start a dialogue here relative to, as Karen Barad puts it, the "mattering" of matter. One of the real virtues in Jeffrey's notes thus far is his inquiry into what queer theory in particular can contribute to studies on the non/human and inorganic (and also into what considerations of the in/organic can do for queer theory). For one, it can help open avenues toward "unanticipated conjugations," although Jeffrey cautions that queer theory can also be, even when it is concerned with what has become abjectly sub-humanized and Othered, firmly anthropocentric; at the same time, per Jeffrey, maybe queer theory can also lay out a map of the ways in which the nonhuman is always lodged within the sexual. Following Noreen Giffney's and Myra Hird's essay collection Queering the Non/human (Ashgate, 2008), but also Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomneology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke, 2006), Jeffrey further wonders, "what politics of disorientation (to invoke Sara Ahmed) might a non/human queer theory achieve?" If, as Bennett argues in her new book, according to Jeffrey, that matter "possesses aesthetic, affective and practical agencies: the world unfolds through our alliances with a lively materialism, where we are one actant among many within a turbulent identity network," then Jeffrey is also asking us to consider [I think] how an alliance between queer theory and theories of a "vibrant" material world might lead to a new ethics, a new [inter-actant identity] politics.

This is no small question, no small provocation to thought, and also recalls me to Aranye Fradenburg's plenary lecture, "Living Chaucer," at the meeting of the New Chaucer Society in Siena this past July, where she asked us to consider the power of "territorial assemblage" in Chaucer's poetry as a site where so many actants, real and fictional, gather [and shape each other, cognitively, affectively] over time, and therefore gives rise to the question, "where does the self end and alterity begin?" We share with Chaucer, who is a sort of inter-subjective self-object (as we are also), an "affective companionship" and a "shared attention" to the dynamism of living processes through which all change, and therefore, radical hope, and maybe democracy, happens. Because I often play the "humanist" in these exchanges [because, for better or worse, I still think we need humanism, but of less anthropocentric and more self-critical varieties], I'm led to wonder about the critical importance of the human in all of this as, to cadge from David Gary Shaw, "a highly localized site of awareness," and I'm wondering then, also, about the possible benefits, but also dangers, of the human as the primary "filter" through which these "new materialisms" and "zōēpolitics" might come into being.

Also at the forefront of my mind while thinking about Jeffrey's post is a talk Jane Bennett gave at the Birbeck Institute of the Humanities in London this past May on "Walt Whitman's Solar Judgment" (audio-file available HERE), in which she performs a provocative riff on this passage from Whitman's poem, "By Blue Ontario's Shore":

. . . the poet is the equable man,
Not in him, but off from him, things are grotesque, eccentric, fail of their full returns,
Nothing out of its place is good, nothing in its place is bad,
He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion, neither more nor less,
He is the arbiter of the diverse, he is the key,
He is the equalizer of his age and land,
He supplies what wants supplying—he checks what wants checking,
In peace, out of him speaks the spirit of peace, large, rich, thrifty, building populous towns,
encouraging agriculture, arts, commerce, lighting the study of man, the Soul, health, immortality, government;
In war, he is the best backer of the war -- he fetches artillery as good as the engineer’s -- he can make every word he speaks draw blood;
The years straying toward infidelity, he withholds by his steady faith,
He is no arguer, he is judgment -- (Nature accepts him absolutely;)
He judges not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling round a helpless thing;
As he sees the farthest, he has the most faith,
His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things,
In the dispute on God and eternity he is silent,
He sees eternity less like a play with a prologue and denouement,
He sees eternity in men and women -- he does not see men and women as dreams or dots.

In short, Bennett makes the following arguments (and I'm summarizing wildly so as to not make an already-long post too much longer, but, um, who am I kidding?):

1. To be alive is to be continually discriminating between things and making judgments, and following Henri Bergson, perception itself is a kind of judgment, a focusing on some things at the expense of other things.

2. Judgment is therefore the bio-cultural act of discriminatory selection and moral judgment, historically, has been a subtraction accompanied by two particular images: a) the image of the cosmos as a more or less fixed order, and b) the image of the human as a responsible and sovereign subject.

3. Moral judgments, in particular, can actually be inethical when they are predicated on the idea of a sovereign human subject who is self-righteous and sees the world in black-and-white terms [and who also enjoys punishing others for supposedly violating the rigid and hierarchical "order" of the world].

4. But what if we turn to Whitman's idea of the poet's "solar judgment" ["He judges not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling around a helpless thing"]? How might this help us to mitigate judgment's historically inethical character? For one thing, in Whitman's conception, the poet receives without prejudice all sorts of bodies [animate and inanimate, men, women, animals, the sea, carriages, doors, cobblestones, chimneys, the grass, etc.], and he does so with a magnanimous, self-donating stance.

5. Objects/things actually speak to the poet: they are vocal actants that produce a "living, buried speech" [Whitman's phrase], and pace Bruno Latour, they are actants that contribute to the world in ways that exceed their roles as objects of perception. They possess, further, a vitality that is elided by the category descriptor "object."

6. In Whitman's conception, all things of the world [human and non-human, organic and inorganic] are non-hierarchized [horizontally arranged] co-participants in a world that vibrates with precious and vital potentialities [we might add here, also, that for Whitman, each person & object's "singularity" is precious and matters a great deal].

7. Solar judging cultivates the inorganic powers resident within all things [human and otherwise] in order to forge sympathetic links with the myriad bodies upon which one's gaze might/will fall. One might want to call this sympathy "love," but it is more impersonal and distancing than that term will allow [in Bennett's view--I actually disagree, but more on that later in a different post].

8. How would one actually enact Whitman's "solar judgment" [which is also, for Whitman anyway, an aesthetic practice as well as a life practice]? There are three possible ways: a) through poetry, the sound and sense of words, that would, in one mode at least, give the world back to itself in a non-heirarchized manner, where all things would vibrate together as co-actants, aesthetically "expressed," so to speak; b) through the poet's use of the "middle voice," in which he responds to a force outside of himself, but this responsiveness is neither passive receptivity nor willful embrace--it is somewhere in the middle and aims to capture the messy reciprocal coalescences of heterogeneous forces (think Andy Clark's distributed cognition); c) through the cultivation of an impersonal regard, that we would not call love, exactly, but which could be compared to Jesus's injunction in Luke 6:27-31 to "love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you," etc.

So, as one way of thinking through all of this in relation to Jeffrey's call for an enchanted zōēpolitics, one where thinking on the relation between the queer and the non/human would also aid us in seeing how the non/human is always already lodged deeply within the sexual (which is also to say, within bios), I thought I would also share with everyone here what I think were the most provocative questions posed to Jane Bennett from members of the audience at Birbeck [and I'll add some of my own elaborations upon those question as well and also add my own questions and worries]:

1. What is the importance of the "helpless" in the "helpless things" that Whitman's sun falls upon in a non-morally-judgmental way? What role might the term "helpless" play in Jeffrey's call for a zōēpolitics as well? If everything in the world, per Whitman and Bennett, is accorded a co-participatory, non-hierarchized, horizontal status, who and what is "helpless," who and what "helps," and in which situations? Does the human [especially as a magnanimous self-donater] have a privileged role in this situation between helpless and helper--I think likely it does, but what then, are its necessary limits, its important constraints? [And even if the human is always part-non/human, both in terms of its physiological "interior" but also in terms of its placement as an actant in various hybrid and distributed networks, it still maintains a privileged, if not sovereign, role in the world, and with this comes some responsibilities, I think, for the "helpless," but once you start categorizing what is and isn't "helpless," we can get into all sorts of problems, of course--what might some of those problem be, actually?].

2. Could Whitman's "solar judgment" and also the thinking Bennett crafts from Whitman's poetics run the risk of lapsing into a sort of religious philosophy? This brings me as well to some provocative questions Amy Hollywood raised in Siena at the meeting of the New Chaucer Society this past July, relative to the sessions organized around the thread on animals: is the supposedly incalcuable and irreducible non-human "call" (whether "animal" or something else) refusable [?], and if it is not, are we just re-instituting sacramental spaces (re-enchanting the woods, so to speak, re-installing gods)? As medievalists, can we ever really talk about secular ethics in relation to medieval texts and medieval history? How close does something like a vital, vibrant materialism come to a form, or forms, of mysticism? [For her part, Bennett thinks it is important, in our ethical calculations and politics, to take into account the incalculable nature of everything, which used to be God, but doesn't have to be; for Whitman, of course, although the poet declines to argue about God, he does of course believe in souls.]

3. What is the importance of the human as the experiencing/sensing/recording agent in all of this? How important is the vibrancy of the non/human world if there is not a human which is somehow experiencing that [receiving its "call" and also giving "voice" to it]? Sure, the world could [and will] go on without us and all sorts of things would experience/sense all sorts of other things without us being around to sense and record that, but more importantly, for me, is asking us to consider that when WE talk of formulating an ethics or politics that would try to absorb/record/take account of the vast networks of actants, human and non/human, organic and in/organic, in which we are enmeshed [and which are enmeshed in us], that we reflect that WE are the ones formulating and calculating, so somehow, humans have what I might call a special or unique role to play here. How do we best account for that role, and also set appropriate limits on it?

4. What is the periodicity/historicity of this "new materialism"? My initial thought in reaction to this question, which Bennett struggled a bit to answer, would be to refer everyone to Manuel De Landa's A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History [Zone Books, 2000] and Daniel Smail's On Deep History and the Brain [California, 2008]. But since we're "medievalists" around "these parts," this question is worth ruminating further, isn't it? What might be the possible future directions of our studies based upon what might be for some a desire for a new zōēpolitics and the ways in which we undertake our historiographical labors, which are a form of being responsive to, listening, recording, and "judging" what Julian Yates has recently referred to as the "call" of the post/human--to whit [from his contribution to the inaugural issue of postmedieval]:

The arrival, dissemination, and now normalization of the words ‘post-human’ or ‘post-humanism’ in literary, historical and cultural studies marks the addition of a new ‘actor’ or ‘actant’ to the assemblage of persons, machines, and the various parading of animal and plant remains employed to disseminate stories about the textual traces named ‘past.’ But what order of proposition or tropic operation is this ‘post-’ or ‘post-ing’ of the ‘human,’ this figural turning of the ‘human’ after or outside of itself? What is the nature of its call? What does the term activate?

5. What does it mean to call for "sympathetic" or "feeling" paths or linkages or connections between the human and the non/human? Emotions can, of course, produce material effects upon others [human and non/human, organic and in/organic], and what if the pathways or connections or "open lines" we want to construct between ourselves and other objects or self-objects are not beneficial to those other objects and self-objects, and may even be harmful to them? Bennett answered by asking: what kind of world do you want to live in--one in which humans would be better attuned to these lines of sympathy, or less attuned? She also averred that suffering, and instrumental use, is still going to happen, and some things will always be "living," as it were, at the expense of others [plus, we'll never get rid of evil]. This was a bit evasive on Bennett's part, but I don't think purposefully so--she was just struggling with the question. The questioner asked if perhaps we should admit, or allow, a gap that will always give the perceived object a space for non-interference that would also allow for the ultimate incalculability of the lines of communication [this reminds me a bit actually of the importance of the factor of undecidability in Derrida's thinking on justice, while at the same time justice always insists on a decision one way or another; otherwise nothing is ever decided, for good or ill]. For me, this was really the biggest and most important question of all that Bennett received: how shall we begin to adjudicate this question? At what point(s) do we recognize the places + spaces where our attention to what Bennett calls the vibrant matter of the world creates asymmetries of power, or in fact sallies forth from those asymmetries? In short, can the sovereign nature and status of the human really be dislodged in all this or are we just kidding ourselves on that count? Is ontological passivity [which I also have called "wonder" in the past] really possible, and if so, at what cost--to ourselves? to others?

Thank you for reading this far [if you did!]. My thanks also to Sara Ahmed who prompted, in private conversation, some of my thinking here. I look forward to any feedback, as I will be wrestling with these questions mightily between now and March [and beyond].