Medievalism + Trans-Medievalisms

by JONATHAN HSY

[There has been much bloggery at ITM about BABEL in Santa Barbara: see here, here, and here. I'd like to touch on a few BABEL-related matters here through a post with two keywords: Medievalism and Trans-Medievalisms.]

MEDIEVALISM

Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, eds. Emery & Utz (Brewer, 2014).

Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, edited by Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz (Boydell & Brewer, 2014) has just been released! My chapter on "Co-disciplinarity" reworks my earlier ITM posting after the BABEL conference in Boston in 2012. The editors kindly asked me to contribute a chapter after reading that blog post, and in the expanded/adapted chapter in this volume I turn to queer theory to think about the fluid and nonlinear approaches to temporality that discussions of medievalism invite. I also suggest how approaches to medievalism can create experimental spaces that unbind academic disciplines and domain-specific approaches to knowledge. The chapter (like my original ITM blog post) ends with a utopian call for us to work together across our respective bailiwicks and to open ourselves up to the risky, unanticipated possibilities that emerge in the process.

What makes me so very excited about Medievalism: Key Critical Terms is precisely networked quality of its chapters. Here's the blurb from the publisher's website (and click through to see the names of the contributors full table of contents):

The discipline of medievalism has produced a great deal of scholarship acknowledging the "makers" of the Middle Ages: those who re-discovered the period from 500 to 1500 by engaging with its cultural works, seeking inspiration from them, or fantasizing about them. Yet such approaches - organized by time period, geography, or theme - often lack an overarching critical framework. This volume aims to provide such a framework, by calling into question the problematic yet commonly accepted vocabulary used in Medievalism Studies. The contributions, by leading scholars in the field, define and exemplify in a lively and accessible style the essential terms used when speaking of the later reception of medieval culture. 

The terms: Archive, Authenticity, Authority, Christianity, Co-disciplinarity, Continuity, Feast, Genealogy, Gesture, Gothic, Heresy, Humor, Lingua, Love, Memory, Middle, Modernity, Monument, Myth, Play, Presentism, Primitive, Purity, Reenactment, Resonance, Simulacrum, Spectacle, Transfer, Trauma, Troubadour.

This volume in a certain way stands in for an entire networked community. The book has a lively Facebook page and many contributors in this volume have been actively involved in the "Medievalism" series at University of Rochester Press, Studies in Medievalism, and the medievalism studies community more broadly. Recent onferences such as The Middle Ages in the Modern World (MAMO) in St. Andrews in June 2013 (see my posting on ITM and Candace Barrington's posting on the Global Chaucers blog) and much more recently Medievalisms on the Move at Georgia Tech (October 2014) are just two examples of how medievalism studies is increasingly bringing many different kinds of people together in a shared space of exploration. *

Left: Karl Fugelso's "Continuity" features Dante in visual medieval and modern art.
Right: Carol Robinson's "Gesture" discusses medieval practices and contemporary ASL scholarship.

I'm learning so much from the other contributions in this volume, and I appreciate the surprising reconfigurations of knowledge and perception that emerge when we no longer "segregate" different kinds of media or artistic traditions into separate chapters. For instance, Karl Fugelso's chapter CONTINUITY showcases how medieval and modern visual traditions interlace over time through Dante. Carol Robinson's chapter GESTURE bridges medieval practices and contemporary scholarship on American Sign Language (ASL), concluding with a discussion of a nonspoken adaptation of "Gawain and Dame Ragnelle" by acclaimed Deaf storyteller Peter Cook.

TRANS-MEDIEVALISMS

My view from the moderator's chair. "Trans-Medievalisms." BABEL conference at UCSB, October 2014.

This question of how medieval material moves across media brings me to the BABEL conference in Santa Barbara. Candace Barrington and I organized a session on "Trans-Medievalisms," and we set out to consider what happens when "the Middle Ages" (whatever we mean by that term!) traverses cultures, languages, material forms, and media. Our call for proposals and/or manifesto was as follows:

What happens to the Western Middle Ages when it crosses into diverse, concurrent times, languages, and cultures? How does “medievalism” take shape in multiple spaces across the planet—including cultural habitats where the Western Middle Ages are no longer the “‘zero point’ of orientation” (to reroute a phrase from Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology)? What cultural work do “the Middle Ages” perform as they infuse modern-day modes of global media and cultural production—textual, visual, musical, performative, cinematic? Our session is inspirited by our work on the Global Chaucers project, a utopian scholarly endeavor that seeks to gather, back-translate, and analyze all non-English translations and adaptations of Chaucer’s work. Our scheming with scholars around the world has so far revealed Chaucerian adaptations in places as far-flung and interconnected as Latin America (Argentina, Bolivia), East Asia (China, Japan, Korea), Europe (Denmark, Flanders, Spain, Hungary), the Middle East (Israel, Iran), and Africa (Nigeria, South Africa), as well as works in re/invented languages (Esperanto, Neo-Latin).

For this session we aim to gather participants working on Chaucerian adaptation in non-English contexts or any aspect of medieval appropriation in “global” contemporary culture (however conceived). How might plurilingual, transoceanic, and intercultural orientations provoke new modes of engaging with the past? How can we create a dynamic, multi-site community of cross-temporal scholars and enthusiasts, a fluid collective that thrives across disciplines and borders? We welcome non-medievalists, amateurs, and enthusiasts, including creative work by poets, playwrights, musicians, and/or interpretive dancers. We highly encourage collaborative submissions.

The session resulted in four strikingly divergent yet enticingly intertwining presentations.

• Raúl Ariza-Barile: Chaucer’s Spanish Accent: Impossible Poetry? Raúl's paper offered a brief background of Chaucerian translation into Spanish, suggesting (among other things) how a careful consideration of Latin American contexts might shift our conversations about the aims and practices of modern translators; the presentation ended with a debut performance of his own translation of the opening lines of Chaucer's General Prologue into rhymed Spanish verse.

• Shyama Rajendran: The Impossibility of Locating The Ramayana. Shyama's presentation traced the movement of the ancient epic Ramayana across many cultural traditions and performance contexts beyond South Asia, attending to a plurality of reception histories across time and space; she ended with a careful consideration of the political implications of the Ramayana's narrow appropriation for the purposes of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India.

• Carol Robinson: Expressing Loathly Ladies—Explicitly Noncompliant. In this presentation, Carol featured the work of two of her former students who created a collaborative video adaptation of the Wife of Bath. Each student had recorded a dramatic monologue: one performance used ASL to engage with Deaf culture, relating the episode when the Wife is rendered deaf; a "political dramatization" by a queer student (in drag) incorporated contemporary debates about polygamy and marriage.

• Elaine Treharne: TEXT Technological Transformations: the Inexactitude of a Medieval Unreality. Elaine's talk suggested the possibility of cross-cultural comparative analysis across seemingly disparate contexts including medieval Western and East Asian (Chinese) texts. Her reflections not only considered the rich materiality of textual production but also suggested its importance as artistic performance.

These presentations richly showcased the heterogeneity of cultural/artistic/linguistic materials that we might call "medieval" (thinking expansively beyond the contours of Latin-speaking Europe). At the same time, these perspectives collectively invited us to think more creatively about what new modes of medieval appropriation and comparative analysis actually might enact and enable.

Medievalism studies has certainly "arrived" in the academy and it is also clearly breaking down the boundaries between what lies within and outside of institutional and traditional academic structures. The ITM blog is one such community among many, including other digital spaces like Medievally Speaking, Global Chaucers and the Medieval Electronic Multimedia Organization (MEMO). We're in a very exciting time for medievalism studies now and I hope that these networked communities will continue to thrive, grow, interconnect, and adapt.

[EDITED November 22, 2014] The next MAMO conference will be held in Lincoln, UK, from June 29-July 2, 2015. Deadline for the call for proposals is December 12 (see this site for the details)!

* NOTE: In our MAMO 2013 presentation, Candace and I drew upon our experience working with many collaborators on the Global Chaucers project. A roundtable and polyglot performance at the New Chaucer Society Congress in Reykjavík, Iceland, brought together scholars, translators, and poets (and scholar-translators and poet-translators!), and a chapter drawing from our various collaborations will appear in our "Global Chaucers" chapter in Gail Ashton's Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2015); more here.

Distemporality: Richard III and That Whole Leicester Car Park Thing

by JONATHAN HSY

Caption: "Markers are laid out for excavation in Leicester, as two reenactment knights look on." [Press Association image; found HERE collated by HuffPo]

Disinternment and Discovery

Hello ITM readers. It has been a while since I've posted here! So, yeah, this is basically a chance for me as a medievalist to chime in and say something about this whole Richard III thing before the "moment" passes. Unless you've been hiding in a cave / under a rock / whatever these days, you've probably heard of the unearthing of what appears to be the DNA-confirmed body of the medieval English monarch Richard III (see HERE); this king is most commonly imagined (via Shakespeare and other sources) as an immoral, scheming villain with a hunchback. The curved spine of the body -- discovered buried underneath a car park (parking lot) -- seems to confirm the identification.

Recently I've been thinking a lot about how notions of temporality (especially as developed in premodern literary studies) can further engage with conversations in disability studies, and I'd actually like to take "this Richard III moment" to think not so much about the king himself but a little something I'd like to call "distemporality." In this image above (with many similar ones online and in other media), we see a partially staged photo op: historical reenactors in "medieval" armor look on as the car park excavation begins. As far as I know this term hasn't really entered the critical lexicon in any coherent way (this term pops up in scholarship only idiosyncratically, in a rather ad hoc fashion), but I would say that a certain "distemporality" characterizes these types of cultural moments quite well. In a different context, Rebecca Schneider (discussing historian reenactments of Vietnam War art) identifies certain forms of reenactment as "[m]oments of dis-temporality, of uncanniness, of error, or of a return to sense occur in pauses ... or tiny details of interruptive anachronisms as the 'now' folds and multiplies -- even for [Howard] Zinn's 'brief flash'" (186). [1] This quotidian "snapshot" above -- a flashpoint humorously depicting a "culture clash" between everyday modern life and re-created nostalgia-inflused past -- visually conveys the distemporality effected by the entire "event" of Richard III's disinterment.

Distemporality, as I am thinking through the idea, is not just about temporal disruption per se: I'd like to use this concept to rethink everyday assumptions about how we move through time itself. If we more deeply unpack a notion of distemporality, we could say this involves attending more carefully to the co-operation of many different modes of transit and forms of motion through time and/as space. If queer temporality so often suggests a fluid motion across time -- flowing circuits of desire, contact, cross-identification etc. -- what happens if we attend to the profoundly uneven mechanics of motion itself, and reflect more closely upon the participation of co-agents to enable co-mobilities across time and space?

If this is all sounding too obscure, let me try to unpack this a bit more: The Richard III discovery -- often sensationalized as a disruptive, "game changing" encounter with the past (A "mind-blowing" discovery! See the video HERE) -- is, in my own mind, enacting a deep distemporality. The translated (transported) decomposing remains of a medieval body found underneath a modern car park -- a collective space for vehicles in transit -- at one grounds an event in stationary space while also evincing the potential of future motion and a manifold history of prior travels: multiple modes of motion in and through one shared space.

In other words, the "discovering" (dis-covering) of Richard III's body is simultaneously material and metaphorical (rather than a completely conceptual recovery or uncovering). In another admittedly quite disparate context, Jasbir Puar -- engaging with the temporal "flash points" of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida's time out of joint -- also cites Nilüfer Göle in reference to September 11 as "an exemplary incident which, in one moment, allows different temporalities to emerge, and with them, a range of issues hitherto suppressed" (qtd. at xvii and xvi). [2] The disinterred medieval body marks a profound disruption, a "history-making" moment that the popular media reports as having the potential to revise broad master narratives: rethinking the shifting perceptions of the monarch over time, both demonizing and apologetic (flip through the gallery HERE); providing an alternate timeline for the Reformation (end of the article HERE); or what you will. On a more immediate level, the fact is that this body's disinterment radically reconfigures social relations and lived space. The dis-covered (revealed, uncovered) body in the car park has cascading effects, obliging drivers and commuters find alternative sites and modes of transit. Richard III now "spills over" into media, online and social (the Richard III Society is going bonkers about this on Facebook, and check out the endless "Richard III parking violation" memes e.g. here and here). And, on a very material level, the disinterred Richard III physically transforms the local landscape (Leicester is, among other things, building new Richard III attraction across from the car park itself).

Distemporality entails necessary disjunctions and material differences between modes of living, attending not so much to "time out of joint" but a profoundly disjointed materiality to time itself (the many "riffs" that Derrida enacts upon this idea are illuminative. Even with all the varied translations and explications he provides for this one Shakespearean line, the corporeal element of the "joint" remains occluded: he readily marks this "joint" as referring to a door but can also potentially suggest a body). [3]

Perhaps the "discovery" is not so much an uncovering or recovery but rather a strategy of covering-differently. Re-construction of Richard III's face superimposed upon the skull (HERE with gallery HERE) resembles quite a few familiar premodern portraits, yet his features have been strikingly domesticated: he appears attractive, young, and "rehabilitated."

It is my impression that media coverage loves "the car park" angle (it always comes up that he was discovered there!) because of the rhetorical and cognitive effect that very site creates: this sense of a collision, explosion, or "clash" between a mundane modern space and an extraordinary medieval body -- and an unexpected sensational contact between times. But it's not that the modern space just gives us new (or renewed) access to the materiality of the past; this dismodern body actively reconfigures modern materiality as well.

Getting closer? Richard III excavation in major news coverage (articles HERE and HERE)

Accessing Richard III

I've had discussions with medievalists who have said that this whole "Richard III thing" -- especially the whole obsession with the car park discovery, excavation, and transformative sense of history -- resonates with a Middle English text known as St. Erkenwald: in this text, construction work on the "New Werke" in the "metropol" and "mayster-town" of London unearths the tomb of a pagan judge, and much solemnity occurs. Karl (see HERE) has already written in rich and nuanced ways about this poem as a narrative that (among other things) features discovered body from a prior age that radically reconfigures time and community. If I had the time/energy, I would say more about this too -- but in this discussion I'd like to pivot the question of how we move through time to access Richard III himself.

As I see the media coverage of this story, I must admit that something that irks me -- identifying as a medievalist here -- and it's the tendency for Richard III to be referenced as one of "Shakespeare's" kings. (You can take practically any article about the Richard III hullaballoo and find it a challenge not find some reference to Shakespeare in it somewhere!) Due the imaginative power the Bard holds in the popular imagination, there's a palpable sense that this late medieval monarch is always/already filtered through an formative early modern representational lens -- and so much of the discussion about accessing the "real" Richard III effectively "digs itself out" from underneath layers and layers of Shakespearean mediation. In all the talk about "rehabilitating" Richard III (with all its uncomfortable implications for his alleged deformity and the social meanings attached to his forms of somatic difference), we can't access a truly "medieval" Richard III  -- even if we have the body. [4] Our access to Richard III (always-already) acknowledges -- in dutiful, obligatory, perhaps even perfunctory ways -- the disruptive and intervening presence of the influential Shakespearean manifestation.

Some performances of Shakespeare's "Richard III." Only relatively recently has this role been inhabited by disabled actors and/or actors using prosthetic devices. Clockwise from left: Antony Sher (RSC, 1984); Kevin Spacey (Old Vic, London, 2011); Henry Holden (Spoon Theater, New York, 2007).

Transtemporal Embodiment

The discovery of Richard III's body and "what it all means" will continue for some time. Just to end, I'd like to briefly consider the implications this has for reorienting how we think about Shakespeare's "Richard III" and its the very material consequences that the king's body might have for disability and performance. Scholarship about Shakespeare's Richard III that engages with disability studies is becoming increasingly common. Katherine Schaap Williams, for instance, offers a very engaging first gambit (available HERE for everyone at Disability Studies Quarterly, an open access journal). [5] She offers astute readings of crucial passages in the play that refer to the maligned king's deformity and remarkable modes of embodiment, all the while, "with deliberate anachronism," adapting Lennard Davis' notion of the "dismodern subject" (which Davis developed within a 19th-century historical context). But to approaching the Shakespearean work as a performative bridge between performance and disability studies, we could say that this play -- no matter who inhabits the role -- will always feature multiple temporalities at play in single body: the present performance, early modern language, medieval king -- and we can pay more attention to how these temporalities collide or co-inhabit shared space. In performance, temporalities move unevenly and via disparate means. In these images above, we gain some hint of how performances can mobilize quirky, discordant assemblages of temporally-marked signs concurrently -- including a conspicuous clash between the use of "period" costume with disruptively anachronistic prosthetics like modern crutches or futuristic technologies.

Rather than a queer "touch" across time, the dis-covery of Richard III's body helps us attend to how temporalities move (slide, bounce, connect, and shuffle): we can think about how they not only engage in modes of rearrangement but also jostle together and collaborate in an unpredictable dance. To adapt Puar from a different context, we can think in terms of "spatial, temporal, and corporeal convergences, implosions, and rearrangements" (205), inhabiting a world in which temporalities "interpenetrate, swirl together, and transmit affects and effects to each other" (205). [6] Times, in other words, are anything but static: they enact co-movements that register as awkward, intimate, explosive, beautiful, or all of the above.

[1] Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York: Routledge, 2011.
[2] Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
[3] "A disjointed or disadjusted now, 'out of joint,' a disjointed now that always risks maintaining nothing together in the assured conjunction of some context whose border would still be determinable" (1). Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuff. Routledge, 1996 (orig. publ. Spectres de Marx, Editions Gailée, 1993); door hinge reading on p. 20.
[4] (And depending on how much faith you place in DNA analysis, there could still be an "if"...)
[5] Katherine Schaap Williams, "Enabling Richard: The Rhetoric of Disability in Richard III." Disability Studies Quarterly 29, 4 (2009); full text HERE.
[6] I deliberately adapt the original quotation here. Puar refers to "representational economies, within which bodies [my emphasis] interpenetrate, swirl together, and transmit affects and effects to one another" (205).

Feeding the Dogs

Images by Saiman Chow. Source, without words.

by KARL STEEL

In comments in the post below, Ryan Judkins reminds me that:

during the curee, the dogs were usually fed on the innards of the deer, including the stomach, lungs (if they be hot) and the intestines, after they'd been washed, usually chopped up and all mixed together with blood and bread.

How to Make a Human talks about this too:

Humans’ mastery over their hunting animals is even more apparent in techniques that prevented dogs from killing or freely eating the prey. Dogs were allowed to slow, harry, and corner prey, while humans were meant to deliver the killing blow. Hunting rules required that the field butchery reserve a portion of the prey for the dogs, but they also required that the dogs eat only at their master’s command. In practical terms, the restrictions preserved the bulk of the carcass for the human hunters while ensuring that the dogs received the positive reinforcement of a reward. At the same time, to restrict dogs’ actions in hunting, restrain them from the kill, and permit them to eat only with human permission ensured that neither the dogs’ violence nor their necessity to human hunting might call human mastery into question. The ritual protection of human mastery encompassed even carrion birds, which were left the scraps from the carcass; as the Middle English Tristrem puts it, “þe rauen he 3aue his Ʒiftes, / Sat on þe fourched tre” (to the raven he gave his gifts, and set them on the forked branch; 502–3). The ravens now became beneficiaries of the hunters’ largesse, their appetite appropriated by a ritual that indicates that the control not only of violence but also of meat-eating concerned humans (64-65).

Judkins' forthcoming JEGP article on the royal hunt stresses the community around the breaking of the deer carcass, in which servants and colleagues, whether human or animal, receive their due. More and more, I'm slipping away from my strong paranoid reading of human mastery (see above!) and sliding towards readings like Judkins', which consider affects other than anxiety and cruelty. Love, familiarity, conscientious attention to particular appetites, shared joy: these matter too. 

This isn't something as simple as a switch from negative to positive affect. Things are more complicated. Think of this brief encounter in Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation:

Each boar had his own little perversion the man had to do to get the boar turned on so he could collect the semen. Some of them were just things like the boar wanted to have his dandruff scratched while they were collecting him. (Pigs have big flaky dandruff all over their backs.) The other things the man had to do were a lot more intimate. He might have to hold the boar's penis in exactly the right way. There was one boar, he hold me, who wanted to have his butt hole played with. "I have to stick my finger in his butt, he just really loves that," he told me. Then he got all red in the face (103).

Grandin aptly calls this section "How to Make a Pig Fall in Love." Like all love, things can go awry. Our face might go red, maybe because the pig doesn't love us anymore, or maybe because we're a bit embarrassed. When intimacies that can hardly be named find their way into the public eye, things can be a bit disgusting or embarrassing for the guardians of human exclusivity. For more on love's weirdness, see my post below, and also see Dominic Pettman's Human Error, 77-101, which discusses the films Zoo and Tierische Liebe (Animal Love) as well as Haraway's dog love in When Species Meet and J. A. Baker's The Peregine to track love's strangeness, how it can entail, don't forget, "monomania, projective narcissism, and so on," a "familiar libidinal economy, involving the kind of struggles around difference and recognition that can lead to passive-aggressive sulking because of perceived miscommunication" (95).

I have this in mind because I've just read Kathy Rudy's Loving Animals: Towards a New Animal Advocacy. Rudy, a dog lover, says that "the task of coming out as gay was a piece of cake compared to coming out as--what?" She observes "there is not an adequate name for the kind of life I lead, the way my desires organize themselves around animals, especially dogs" (35), that "it's not so much that I am no longer a lesbian...it's that the binary of gay and straight no longer has anything to do with me. My preference these days is canine" (41). For more on this kind of love, we might look to "Michael Field" and their love for and through Whym Chow: perhaps start here and here.

Rudy cooks for her dogs. One loves any kind of meat, another needs a lot more food than you'd think to look at her, and another, Duncan, a yellow lab mix, goes nuts for oatmeal and scrambled eggs (when I told my wife, Alison, about this, she cried "he's a breakfast dog!"). Rudy's learned a lot more about her dogs by feeding them; it's another way to "talk" to the dogs, to build affection and knowledge, another way to render "their subjectivity more visible" (184). She's made a better love between them, which is to say, this queer animal lover is making love to them in a new, better way.

Feeding animals, eating with them--as Cuthbert did with his horse, you remember--makes us companions, a word Haraway often uses in When Species Meet. And companionship can be very intimate indeed. The scholar of How to Make a Human would claim that this is just bad faith: after all, look at Chaucer's Prioress, so deeply sad about her dogs and mice, but still happy to feed her dogs roast meat. Charity begins and ends at home, says the old me. The scholar I am now isn't so sure, and Rudy's partially to thank for that. Because becoming companions (or concarnians, as I say in AVMEO) with animals might mean something's not quite clicked with your human relations. It isn't just hypocritical humanism. To be sure, animal companionship isn't necessarily a better love; it's just, perhaps, a love that disorients you from the community of humans. It's a weird love, like any love, but weirder than most because it lacks the veneer of (human) normalcy.

After all, isn't the Prioress a bit camp, what with her silly romance name, her (arguably) bad French accent, her fancy wimple, by which I mean, aren't the Prioress and her dogs a bit queer?

I have in mind dog-feedings, like the one Judkins describes above. Or Yvain and his lion sharing meals when the lion may be the only one who knows who Yvain really is. Or even the willingness among the philosophers (of all people, generally the most obstinately human)--Albert the Great, Thomas of Cantimpré, Vincent of Beauvais--to repeat Pliny's observation that certain cuts of deer meat disgust dogs, unless (as Vincent says), they're especially hungry. Or Richard Wyche's fifteenth-century account of his religious persecution, where amid his tortures, he "asked the bishop to have my horse taken to his stable, and I gave what I had in my purse to the man leading it there" (trans. Christopher G. Bradley, PMLA 127.3 (2012): 630 [626-42]). Yes, Richard asks this because the horse, a special kind of transportation machine, needs sustenance, but I have to think he asks also because he likes his horse, and he, a religious man (of all people &c.), remembers it, even with execution looming, with nothing mattering for eternity, we would think, but his imperiled soul.

So the shared affect of a meals draws my attention. The love the hunters and the dogs share matters, even as we must not forget the dismembered carcass of the deer around which this affect clusters.

One more thought on the queer love of dogs: if this particular project continues (and it could, if someone's looking for a Kalamazoo paper to fill a slot?), think of the stories of knights who love hunting and disdain the love of women...until they're forced to grow up. Guigemar, for example, but we could come up with dozens more. Think of how queer that love is, particularly when read with the compulsory erotics whose force draws the knight out of his pleasures with his horses, hounds, and hawks, and into his human, only human maturity.

(for more stuff on zoophilia, see James Goebel's excellent musings over at "A Geology of Borders")

Curiosity, Mars/Venus, and Chaucer

by JONATHAN HSY

ABOVE: Chaucer's A Treatise on the Astrolabe, which the Oxford English Dictionary cites as providing one of the first attestations of "curiosité" in English. From the Kelmscott Chaucer (William Morris, 1864), illus. Edward Burne-Jones. BELOW: NASA's "Curiosity" Rover, on Mars. [My mashup of images from here and here (see entry dated 09.16.10).]

The fact that there's a NASA robotic rover traversing Mars -- and that it bears the name "Curiosity" -- makes me, well, more than a little bit curious to follow the story (and the pop culture tangents, memes, and obsessions it generates). I marvel at the awesomeness of the scientists who helped launch, direct, and land this rover  -- including that one Mission Control staffer with the rockin' star-themed mohawk. It's also quite fun to track the trajectories of the very cleverly personified "Curiosity" on twitter, who tweets photos and sporadic bursts of narrative in an engaging first-person voice (see the MarsCuriosity twitter feed). [1] I happen to find all this buzz so distractingly exciting, and given the current media obsession over this Martian rover it seems quite fitting that NASA settled on the name "Curiosity" for this mission. While previously launched NASA rovers were given names like "Spirit" and "Opportunity" -- abstract nouns that transform scientific missions into allegories of human triumph and ingenuity -- "Curiosity" carries a qualitatively different type of emotional impact, suggesting not so much grandiose ideals as pleasure and interest in the new. In my mind, this name "Curiosity" suggests that a scientific mission with clear objectives and measurable outcomes is ultimately grounded in -- and continues to generate -- an unmeasurable sense of wonder and enthusiasm. Rather than implying idle pursuits, the name "Curiosity" encapsulates something much more profound: it suggests the creative potential of our communal and unending fascination with "the new."

The name of the rover also makes me -- a true Chaucerian at heart -- want to reflect for a moment upon one of the earliest appearances of the word "curiosité" in English: in particular, its usage at the final few lines (envoy) of Chaucer's so-called "Complaint of Venus." [2] In this work, the poet masterfully adapts a French lyric by Oton de Graunson and he ends with this claim (tongue in cheek of course): "Syth rym in Englissh hath such skarsete" Chaucer can barely manage to "folow word by word the curiosité / Of Graunson, flour of hem that make in Fraunce" (80-82). In this post -- mostly as a thought experiment -- I'd like to consider these (related) questions: 1. What exactly does "curiosité" mean for Chaucer at this moment in the poem? and 2. How might a medieval understanding of the word "curiosité" change how we understand the poet, or (more broadly) how we think about the art and science of translation?

The term "curiosité," first of all, needs a bit of unpacking, as its meaning and usage have shifted considerably over time. In Middle English as well as in its modern usage, the word can connote a general sense of "inquisitiveness" -- and in a medieval spiritual sense of excessive interest in worldly things, it could (in some contexts) be used pejoratively. [3] But to medieval people - as the Middle English Dictionary citation of this very line from Chaucer indicates - "curiosité" could also entail an aesthetic quality as well: a sense of "skilled or clever workmanship, elegance (of workmanship), beauty (of a work of art)" - see quotations listed in def. 1(b). [4] A related sense of the word suggests an attention to detail: the Oxford English Dictionary's first attestation of "curiosité" as a personality trait, i.e. "careful attention to detail; scrupulousness; exactness, accuracy," comes (curiously enough) from Chaucer's masterpiece of translation-and-technical-writing, A Treatise on the Astrolabe: "To knowe the degree of the sonne by thy diet, for a maner curiosite" [Cambr. Dd.3.53] (def. I.2). Technical precision is indeed a virtue that nicely informs both the work of medieval poets as well as NASA scientists. In glancing through these MED and OED definitions, I wonder if these different senses of the word "curiosité" are really as disparate as they might appear. My sense is that Chaucer's "curiosité" implies poetic translation requires not only a skilled attention to detail but also a roving desire, pleasure, and joy in non goal-oriented exploration. [5]

Mobilizing and instilling curiosity is something that many of us hope to do as teachers. In my undergraduate Chaucer course, I always starts with a judicious sampling of his lyrics, a dream vision or two, selected Canterbury Tales, and ends with some prose works (including the Treatise on the Astrolabe -- yes! Chaucer and his son Lewis were very curious about the cosmos!). In this progression, the "Complaint of Venus" appears very early on -- and I feel it's a good starting point as any for thinking about how an English Chaucer positions himself his relationship to French (Continental) peers. What I always try get students interested in (some times more successfully than others!) is all the extra stuff that Chaucer does with the French text that exceeds any "mere" translation of source material. Most conspicuously: Graunson's verses praise a woman; the corresponding Chaucerian lines praise a man. Here's Graunson: "Il a en lui beauté, bonté, et grace / Plus que nulz homs ne saroit deviser ... Onques ne vy si plaisant jeune dame / De toutes gens avoir si noble fame ..." [There is in her beauty, goodness, and grace / More than any man could devise ... Never have I seen such a happy young lady / To have such a noble name from all people] (9-10, 14-15). And here's Chaucer: "In him is bounte, wysdom, governaunce, / Wel more than any mannes wit can geese ... Thereto so wel hath formed him Nature / That I am his for ever, I him assure" (9-10, 14-15) [6] I usually ask my students something along these lines: What is Chaucer "up to" in changing the gender framework in his translation?

Chaucer's gender-bending gambit here usually opens up to some sort of discussion (in my experience anyway) of how an artist creates (or inhabits) a "new" voice through poetic translation. If we see Chaucer scripting the first-person lyric speaker as a woman, then what's happening is something along the lines of "I'm imagining a new life for this poem in English by also imagining I'm a woman." I'd say Chaucer effectively re-orients the geospatial coordinates of this poem through this re-gendering topos. To put it another way, Chaucer enacts a lyric trope (turn, twist, device) -- and when the rhyme-word "curiosité" appears near the end of the envoy, these lines re-route the entire lyric utterance toward a new audience not in France but in England. [8] Chaucer of course is never "faithful" in his translations (any so-called "derivative" text can never be a perfect reincarnation of the "source"), and this re-routed trajectory of "Venus" shows how even the most technically precise translation -- one that adheres to the rigorous standards of rhyme, meter, and form -- can simultaneously be roving and exploratory. I'd venture to say that the envoy's invocation of "curiosité" activates the dual resonance of the word as attention to detail and expansive wandering. In the poem's transmutation of gendered positioning, the poet demonstrates that translation is never "straight," a linear path from point A to point B. If anything, poetic translation charts circuitous orbits that are awesome, beautiful, scientific, exploratory, and (shall we say?) bi-curious.

[1] If we want to push things further, could we say that the CuriosityRover twitter feed constructs an enthusiastic, episodic, and disorienting first-person account of travel - much like the work attributed to one medieval traveler, Sir John Mandeville?

[2] I say "so-called" because the speaker in "Complaint of Mars" expressly invokes Venus as the addressee (second line), but the speaker in "Complaint of Venus" never identifies "Mars" by name. (It is fun to think - for the purposes of this discussion - that this poem could actually be an address to Mars!)

[3] On curiositas as a spiritual (and affective) concept, see Jamie Taylor, "Curiositas, Desire, and the Book of Margery Kempe." Mediaevalia 31, 1 (July 2011): 106-122.

[4] John Gower also claims his Confessio Amantis lacks "curiosite" (artful skill), despite the conspicuous coexistence of virtuoso Latin elegaic verses and Middle English couplets in his text; see Diane Watt, Amoral Gower: Language, Sex, and Politics (U Minnesota P, 2003), p. 57.

[5] Side note: Does (Chaucerian) "curiosité" function differently in a scientific manual vs. in a literary work?

[7] French citations and translations here follow University of Pennsylvania, French MS 15, ed.  James Wimsatt [I; MS #30].

[8] The idea that courtly lyric is a message "sent" to a particular audience in one place or another makes some sense given that Chaucer was not only a poet but a frequent, bi-directional Channel-crosser; in his role as a diplomatic envoy he was sent on missions to France and other locations the Continent. See Craig Bertolet, "Chaucer's Envoys and the Poet-Diplomat," The Chaucer Review 33 (1998): 66-89.

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].

Queering the In/Organic

by J J Cohen

I need to stop tinkering with the theoretical frame for my Berlin keynote and start filling in the missing evidence. It's one of those endeavors where I have far too much to say and could blather ad infinitum, so here is what I've worked out as entryway into why queer theory might not want to stop at the limit of biological life.

It's in process and will mutate, but: what do you think?

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The queer roams an extensive, still burgeoning range. In 2007 a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly asked if queer theory is now “After Sex?” but this interrogative was really a declaration: about how complex time is (can we really be “post” anything?), and about how messy, uncategorizable and omnipresent sex is.[i] In his contribution to the issue Michael Moon quoted his younger brother Tony, stating that sex is “sort of everywhere, like the weather”: it’s environment, shape, a bright color.[ii] Sexuality, in other words, isn’t easily separable from that which isn’t sex, prompting Janet Halley and Andrew Parker to ask “Does the very distinction between the sexual and the nonsexual matter to queer thinking and, if so, when, where, and how?”[iii] In his contribution to the issue Joseph Litvak writes “It is not just that the imperial ambitions of so much queer theory seem to render the question [of what isn’t queer] almost unanswerable. The problem is less that queer theory makes ‘everything about sex’ than that it lodges the ‘nonsexual’ firmly within the ‘sexual.’”[iv] That inherent impurity is a productive problem to possess.

As a verb, as an action, queer’s possibilities for unanticipated conjugations are limitless. Yet the queer often harbors a recurring and perhaps inescapable limit: anthropocentricity, an unfolding of the world from a human point of view rather than a questioning from the start of how the human comes to be made, of why the category should so dominate that the universe arranges itself around its small form. Don’t get me wrong: the queer often touches upon those who have been abjected into the category of the subhuman, the monstrous, those violently denied the possibility of a livable life, a grievable death.[v] Those who have been reduced to such bare existence may have had their humanity stolen, but we can not doubt that the precondition to a more ethical political system is that the dehumanized must be granted the fuller identity and attendant rights that every human being merits. I’m not talking right now of humans who have been animalized or objectified, but of the animals and objects which were never human from the start. These are the exclusions through which the human emerges as a bounded and purified category; these nonhuman abjections are the limners of human identity, as well as constant reminders of human insufficiency, fragility, and lack of autonomy. Let’s slightly alter Halley and Parker’s query and ask “Does the very distinction between the human and the nonhuman matter to queer thinking and, if so, when, where, and how?” To play with Litvak’s observation about how sex inheres within the nonsexual, what if queer theory were to lodge the nonhuman firmly within the sexual?

The nonhuman – or, as Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird write the term, the non/human: what is its place within queer theory, or what politics of disorientation (to invoke Sara Ahmed) might a non/human queer theory achieve? Giffney and Hird use the slash mark in non/human to be “strategic” and “precise,” performing lexigraphically the inseparability of each term from the other, their inherent instability, “the impossibility of applying a hermetic seal to the distinction between – however temporary and shifting – what gets to count as Human and nonhuman.”[vi] Giffney and Hird’s Queering the Non/Human, a collaborative imagining of queer posthumanism, brings together essays on dogs, werewolves, Christ’s body, antichrist, doll sex, ecology, death drive, green bunnies and cadavers to resist the anthronormativity intrinsic to anthropocentrism. The “cut” that this slash in non/human enacts could be glossed by Karen Barad’s “Queer Causation and the Ethics of Mattering,” where she writes of the brittlestar, a star-fish like creature that possesses no eyes because it is itself a total visual system wrought of skeletal crystal. Any broken piece of the brittlestar becomes another organism, another creature that confounds our all too human notions of perception and lived experience. Barad writes:

Ethics is not simply about the subsequent consequences of our ways of interacting with the world, as if effect followed cause in a linear chain of events, but rather ethics is about mattering, about the entangled materialisations we help enact and are a part of bringing about, including new configurations, new subjectivities, new possibilities – even the smallest cut matters.[vii]

The smallest cut to the smallest creature matters in a doubled sense: creates and possesses significance. Critical animal studies therefore has insisted that animals be considered outside their dependencies upon human definition, making the field one of our most promising modes for practicing post- or anti-humanism. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadic ethology, Rosi Braidotti has argued that the animal is to be “taken in its radical immanence as a body that can do a great a deal, as a field of forces, a quantity of speed and intensity, and a cluster of capabilities,” opening the way to a “bioegalitarian ethics.”[viii] I’m wondering, though, if we can substitute for animal what Braidotti calls “inorganic others” and still have what she calls a “posthuman bodily materialism,” one in which the forces, intensities, and potentialities belong to a nonbiological body, belong to, say, a rock. Can we have a zōē-egalitarian ethics, where zōē indicates not just bare or animal life (Agamben) but a life force that animates all materiality, without caring whether it’s made from carbon and possesses DNA? Can we dream instead of a biopolitics a zōēpolitics that embraces the nonbiological, the inorganic?

As Karen Barad observed, mattering is an active, ethical process. In her recent book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Jane Bennett has argued that the “quarantines of matter and life encourage us to ignore the vitality of matter and the lively powers of material formations” (vii). Matter, Bennett insists, 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. In Bennett’s account ethics is relational in ways that exceed the merely human, constituting a “complex set of relays between moral contents, aesthetic-affective styles, and public moods” lived out within a “landscape of affect.” Affect here denotes an impersonal, nonsubjective yet vivacious materiality (xii-xiii) -- the living stuff of which we are made and by which we are surrounded. Life then becomes a “restless activeness, a destructive-creative force-presence that does not fully coincide with any specific body” (54).[ix] This “impersonal life” (4) can speak only in borrowed words, perhaps, but the recognition of its vitality, a cognizance that matter possesses agency, story, a biography or maybe a zoegraphy, is essential to our leading of a wonder-laden, ethical existence (18, 54).

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[i] On temporality and the question of “After Sex?” Halley and Parker write: “one of the contributors wanted after to signify a decisive loss or relinquishment of sex, queer theory, or temps perdues. Crisp distinctions between before and after appealed to no one. Instead, the essays multiplied the meanings of “After Sex?” and sent the potential linearity of that question (“Now that sex is over, what comes after it?”) around a Möbius strip (“In sex, what am I after?”) in order to make it possible, again and again, for everything that is posterior to precede ... While no one denied that succession can and does occur … our authors were much more interested in posing questions about simultaneity, multiple temporalities, and overlapping regimes of social practice, thought, and analysis.” “Introduction,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106:3 (2007): 421-32, quotation at 424.
[ii] Michael Moon, “Do You Smoke? Or, Is There Life? After Sex?” South Atlantic Quarterly 106:3 (2007): 533-42, quotation at 542.
[iii] “Introduction,” 422.
[iv] Joseph Litvak, “Glad to Be Unhappy,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106:3 (2007): 523-31, quotation at 525-26.
[v] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).
[vi] “Introduction,” Queering the Non/Human, ed. Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008) 1-16, quotation at 5. Their slash (in the words of one perceptive reviewer) is meant to convey “not a comparison of human and non-human, but rather to avoid such binaristic dead ends” (Shamira A. Meghani, “Queer Theory and Sexualities,” The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory [2010] 1-23, at 19).
[vii] Karen Barad, “Queer Causation and the Ethics of Mattering,” Queering the Non/Human, ed. Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008) 311-36, quotation at 336.
[viii] Rosi Braidotti, “Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others,” PMLA 124.2 (2009) 526-32, quotation at 528. Braidotti likewise insists that we rethink the “old hierarchy that privileged bios (discursive, intelligent, social life) over zōē (brutal ‘animal’ life),” arguing for zoe as “generative vitality … a major transversal force that cuts across and connects previously segregated domains” (530). On these two kinds of life being “irreducibly indistinct,” see Karl Steel, “Briefly, on the Animal Sacer” (http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2010/07/briefly-on-animal-sacer-curse-anyone.html) and Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) 315-17, 324-33.
[ix] Bennett is following Deleuze and Guattari here in glossing the “great Alive” as a “pure immanence,” as matter-movement, a “vitality proper not to any individual” (54); see A Thousand Plateaus 407.