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).

We Feel Fine: An Exploration of Human Emotions, in Six Movements

Jonathan Harris is a web artist who has created some online art projects that I think are really exciting vis-a-vis some of our ongoing conversations here regarding "being human" and "humanisms" [with an emphasis on the plural]. This is how his own own online autobiography describes his work:

One part computer science, one part anthropology, and one part visual art, his work seeks to explore and understand the human world through the artifacts people leave behind on the Web. He has made projects about human emotion, human desire, modern mythology, science, news, and language, and created the world's largest time capsule.

One project of Harris's, on which he collaborated with Stanford University professor of computational mathematics Sepandar Kamvar, has become a particular obsession of mine and the students enrolled in my senior seminar on post/human literatures. It's titled We Feel Fine: An Explorating of Human Emotions, in Six Movements, and this is how Jonathan Harris describes it:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

To give you a foretaste, here is how the first movement, "Madness," works [in Jonathan Harris's words]:

Madness, the first movement, opens with a wildly swarming mass of around 1,500 particles, emanating from the center of the screen and then careening outwards, bouncing off walls and reacting to the behavior of the mouse. Each particle represents a single feeling, posted by a single individual. The color of each particle corresponds to the tone of the feeling inside – happy positive feelings are bright yellow, sad negative feelings are dark blue, angry feelings are bright red, calm feelings are pale green, and so on. The size of each particle represents the length of the sentence contained within. Circular particles are sentences. Rectangular particles contain pictures.

Any particle can be clicked at any time, revealing the sentence and/or photograph inside, along with any information about the sentence's author. As the particles careen around the screen, they lose speed and eventually freeze as they approach the mouse cursor, allowing them to be captured and clicked. As the particles approach the We Feel Fine heart in the bottom left corner of the screen, they become attracted to the heart and swarm around it, drawing the eye. As the mouse passes over the heart, a menu appears, revealing access to the other five movements of We Feel Fine.

The Madness movement, with its network of many tiny colorful particles, was designed to echo the human world. Seen from afar, Madness presents a massive number of individual particles, each colored and sized uniquely, each flying wildly around the screen, proclaiming its own individuality. At this level, Madness presents a bird's eye view of humanity – like standing atop a skyscraper and peering down at the street. People bustle to and fro, darting in and out of shops, hailing taxis, falling in love, laughing, handling personal crises. From the skyscraper, the people below are like ants – their words cannot be heard, their facial features cannot be seen, and the notion of individuality is hard to recognize. At this level, each particle seems insignificant. Were one particle to disappear, one would hardly notice. However, once a particle is clicked, it explodes into its constituent letters, which then form its sentence, and that particle becomes the center of attention. At this moment, the viewer sees the open sentence as the only one that matters. Like people first seen from afar and then encountered in person, the open particles attain an individuality and depth of character that is striking when compared to their relative insignificance in the skyscraper view.

If you follow the link to We Feel Fine above and start playing around with it, you will quickly get hooked, I promise. To see a short video where Jonathan Harris explains his work, go here:

Jonathan Harris: The Web's Secret Stories

Universe, an even more recent project, is described by Harris this way:

Whether we live in a city, where the night sky bleeds orange with the glow of cars and buildings, or whether we live in the country, where the night sky is pitch black, punctured by myriad tiny points of light, we have all, on a dark night, tilted our head back and looked up. Most of us can spot the North Star, the big dipper, and the three-star belt of Orion the Hunter. With some more practice, we can see Pisces, Pegasus, and the Gemini twins. Each night, the great stories of ancient Greek mythology are played out in the sky — Perseus rescues Andromeda from the sea monster; Orion faces the roaring bull; Zeus battles Cronos for control of Mount Olympus. Most of us know the sky holds these great myths, immortalized as constellations. Slightly less well known are the newer constellations, largely added in the 18th and 19th centuries. These more modern constellations reflect a different sort of mythology — a commemoration of art and science, expressed through star groups representing technical inventions like the microscope, the triangle, the compass, the level, and the easel.

As humans, we have a long history of projecting our great stories into the night sky. This leads us to wonder: if we were to make new constellations today, what would they be? If we were to paint new pictures in the sky, what would they depict? These questions form the inspiration for Universe, which explores the notions of modern mythology and contemporary constellations. It is easy to think that the world today is devoid of mythology. We obsess over celebrities, music, movies, fashion and trends, changing madly from one moment to the next, causing our heroes and idols to come and go so quickly that no consistent mythology can take root. Especially for those who don't practice religion, it can seem there is nothing bigger in which to believe, that there is no shared experience that unites the human world, no common stories to guide us. Because of this, we are said to feel a great emptiness.

We can imagine that people first made constellations to humanize the sky, to make the infinite darkness seem less foreboding. Now that we live in cities of light, bathed in the glow of televisions, headlights, shops, signs, and streetlamps, our battle with darkness seems to be won. But the things that darkness represents — the unknown, the unconquered, and the endless — live on as ever, and we continue to need mythology to help us reconcile that which science and technology cannot answer. So, what is the mythology of today? What are the great stories? What are the great journeys? Who are the heroes and villains? When we step back and look at life, what are its overarching themes? We could ask a panel of experts, or as before, we could leave it to a few ambitious astronomers. But those approaches no longer seem right. Even as we participate in the human world, each of us experiences life differently. We have our own interests, perspectives, opinions, tastes and beliefs. We have our own heroes, our own favorite stories, our own rituals and traditions. In many ways, what we have today are personal mythologies, practiced by a world of individuals.

Universe is a system that supports the exploration of personal mythology, allowing each of us to find our own constellations, based on our own interests and curiosities. Everyone's path through Universe is different, just as everyone's path through life is different. Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world's contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife. Universe opens with a color-shifting aurora borealis, at the center of which is a moon, and through which thousands of stars slowly move. Each star has a specific counterpart in the physical world — a news story, a quote, an image, a person, a company, a team, a place — and moving the cursor across the star field causes different stars to connect, forming constellations. Any constellation can be selected, making it the center of the universe, and sending everything else into its orbit.

Universe is divided into nine "Stages", titled: Stars, Shapes, Secrets, Stories, Statements, Snapshots, Superstars, Settings, and Time. Stars presents a cryptic star field; Shapes causes constellation outlines to emerge; Secrets extracts the most salient single words and presents them to scale; Stories extracts the sagas and events; Statements extracts the things people said; Snapshots extracts images; Superstars extracts the people, places, companies, teams, and organizations; Settings shows geographical distribution; Time shows how the universe has evolved over hours, days, months, and years. In the top left corner is a search box, which can be used to specify the scope of the current universe. The scope can be as broad as "2007", as recent as "Today", as precise as "Vermont on August 27, 2006", or as open-ended as "War", "Climate Change" or "Happiness". The exact parameters of each universe are entirely up to the viewer, and unexpected paths unfold with exploration.

Universe does not suggest a single shared mythology. Instead, it provides a tool to explore many personal mythologies. Based on the chosen path of the viewer, Universe presents the most salient stories, statements and snapshots, as found in global news coverage from thousands of sources. Through this process of guided discovery, patterns start to emerge. Certain stories show up again and again, and they become our great sagas. Certain people start to shape the news, and they become our heroes and villains. Certain single words rise from the chatter, and they become our epic themes.

In Universe, as in reality, everything is connected. No event happens in isolation. No company exists in a vacuum. No person lives alone. Whereas news is often presented as a series of unrelated static events, Universe strives to show the broader narrative that contains those events. The only way to begin to see the mythic nature of today's world is to surface its connections, patterns, and themes. When this happens, we begin to see common threads — myths, really — twisting through the stream of information.

I share this with everyone today because Myra Seaman [College of Charleston] and I are working on a National Endowment for the Humanities "Faculty Humanities Workshop" grant [to be submitted in late September] that would allow us to create a collaborative "reading" and "workshop" group between our two campuses comprised of scholars working in the premodern humanities [mainly in ancient world and medieval studies, with coverage of both western and eastern areas], cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, experimental physics, philosophy of evolutionary science, robotics, and computational biology [chimp and human genome sequencing], and to also include both visual and literary artists. The idea will be to use the grant money to extend the work of the BABEL Working Group's "premodern to modern humanisms" project into the area of faculty and cross-disciplinary curricular development, with the task, as always, of seeking to explore together, however possible, "new humanisms" and "new post/humanisms" that would embrace new collaborations between scientists, humanists, and artists. It strikes me that Jonathan Harris's work would fit perfectly with our project and we will likely make it part of our bibliography. It's positively addictive--follow all the links above and you will have some fun plus much food for thought.

Enjoy!

"The Romans created time machines that we still inhabit."

So states Denis Feeney in the Chronicle of Higher Education (7/13/07). According to the article, Feeney traces the permutations of the classical calendar from "synchronization" ("events are elaborately correlated backward, forward, and sideways") to the "horizon between myth and history" ("an imaginary boundary which can be activated to reflect relative movement," creating the elasticity in dating the founding of Rome and "deep nostalgia among Romans for a past golden age") and finally to

the Roman consular year and other indigenous time charts that preceded the Julian calendar, and shows how Caesar's new system, grounded in astronomy (how can something be grounded in the astral, wonders JJC), altered the world overnight -- January 1, 46 BC. When told that the constellation of Lyre would rise days into the new year, Cicero was amused. "Yes, by decree," joked the orator.

More information on the book here.

without Tools he is Nothing, with Tools he is all

In a recent New Yorker essay, Steven Shapin reviews a new book by the British historian of military and industrial technology David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 [Oxford UP, 2007], which offers what Shapin terms a "vigorous assault" on the commonly-held assumption that supposedly "new" technologies are the driving force in historical progress and change. In short, in Edgerton's view,

no one is very good at predicting technological futures; new and old technologies coexist; and technological significance and technological novelty are rarely the same--indeed, a given technology's grip on our awareness is often in inverse relationship to its significance in our lives. Above all . . . we are wrong to associate technology solely with invention, and . . . should think of it, rather, as evolving through use.

By way of example, Edgerton discusses the military technologies developed and utilized in World War II, such as the Germans' V-2 rockets [immortalized in Thomas Pynchon's "A screaming comes across the sky"] and American atomic bombs. According to Edgerton, Germany's investment in the V-2 project was "economically and mlitarily irrational" and "more people died producing it than died from being hit by it." Further, "the destructive power of all the V-2s produced amounted to less than could be achieved by a single raid on a city by the RAF." Similarly, Edgerton believes an American investment in more B-29 bombers and tanks could have outperformed the hydrogen bomb [I myself am still trying to absorb this supposed "fact," especially since there is a certain symbolic victory over the so-called "enemy" when a singular weapon, such as the H-bomb, regardless of the waste--human, economic, and otherwise--involved in producing it, can produce such sublime terror and instantaneous widespread destruction]. According to Edgerton, one of the forms of technology that really pulled its weight in World War II [if you are doing the math of: money/human effort "in" against military gains "out"] were things like horse-powered transport. At the beginning of 1945, the German Wermacht had 1.2 million horses, and even today in Afghanistan, the American Special Forces have learned how important horses are for navigating the difficult terrain, and in Darfur, as we are all too well aware, the Janjaweed militia have been executing their genocide, with ferocity, mounted on horses. Shapin offers as his own example of "mixed" technologies, the execution of Saddam Hussein--by hanging ["a technology of judicial killing that goes back to the ancient Persian empire"]--for the modern-style nerve-gas bombing of the Kurdish town of Halabja. Another example he provides, whereby an "old" technology replaces a "new" one, is the condom: "The emergence of AIDS caused condom sales to more than double between the early nineteen-eighties and the mid-nineties. And, for the first time, the old technology of the condom enjoyed an advantage previously monopolized by the new technology of the pill: it could be freely talked about in polite society."

As regards technologies that never took off but could have vastly improved our lives, Shapin reminds us of how, in 1897, Manhattan "started to equip itself with an island-wide system of underground pneumatic tubes, which soon extended from 125th Street as far as the Brooklyn General Post Office," although ultimately, the telegraph and the telephone flourished at the expense of the tubes. But, Shapin surmises, what if these pneumatic tubes could have been improved upon over a century's worth of innovation? "A man working on Eighty-sixth Street could send a scribbled note, chocolates, and a pair of earrings to his girlfriend on Wall Street. To have left your wallet at home could be a mistake remedied in seconds." According to Shapin,

Edgerton calls the tendency to overrate the impact of dramatic new technologies [Apple's new iPhone, anyone?] "futurism." Few things, it turns out, are as passe as past futures. In the mid-twentieth century, a world was promised in which nuclear power would provide electricity "too cheap to meter," eliminating pollution, forestalling energy crises, and alleviating world poverty; hypersonic civil air travel would whip masses of us around the globe in an hour or two; permanent settlements would be established not just on the moon but on the planets; nuclear weapons would put an end to war. And so it goes.

Some readers here might recall a post I made a few weeks ago, just before leaving St. Louis to return to Conway, South Carolina [where I spend my summers], about an art exhibit I viewed at the Saint Louis Art Museum devoted to the stunning monumental paintings of Angelina Gualdoni, whose work is preoccupied with capturing modernist and futurist architecture post-abandonment and post-decay. One of her series of paintings concerns the 1999 demise of the Horizons Pavilion in Future World at Walt Disney's Epcot Center. Horizons featured a series of dioramas depicting imagined futures, including underwater cities and a space colony; these once-popular fantasies grew outmoded and embarrassing to their makers in just a few decades. [If you haven't already, read MKH's lovely meditation on her own adolescent fascination with futurism and the Epcot Center here.] Of this group of paintings, Gualdoni wrote,

I painted the demolition event as a slow inevitable, as if the building had given way to release its fluid miasma, the fruition of unmet expectations. As the building was demolished its guts oozed and dripped and the minimal building became organic, inverting the dichotomy of lush, organic life versus static architecture.

Shapin also reminds us that "[o]ur obsession with innovation . . . blinds us to how much of technology is focused on keeping things the same. The dikes of Holland maintain the integrity of the nation, and great ingenuity goes into preserving and improving them," and we are "going to need a lot more, and more powerful, technologies of conservation: not just the technologies of levees and barriers against the ocean but technologies to maintain the supply of potable water, breathable air, and arable soil; technologies to maintain as much biodiversity as we can or want to maintain; technologies to preserve and renew our crumbling Victorian legacies of infrastructure (sewers, rail beds, roads, and bridges); technologies to stabilize and prevent the dispersal of radioactive waste."

In his essay's conclusion, Shapin notes that, for most of us, how technology works is not what interests us: "As users, we typically want our technology to be a black box; we don't want to be bothered with adjusting it, monitoring it, repairing it, or knowing about its inner workings. A sure sign of the success of a technology is that we scarcely think of it as technology at all." But it ultimately turns out that things--gadgets, tools, what-have-you--are very important in our lives, even when we are not thinking about them very much or how they work.

So all of this got me thinking: as medievalists, can we take note anywhere in our global present, of technologies that are still highly useful in a "modern" way, yet are also "premodern"? Also, is there any technology in your own life which is "old" but which you could not live without, yet hardly even think upon? For me, it would be the 1940s percolator that I bought at the Vietnam Veterans thrift store in Richmond, Virginia round about 1988. It cost 25 cents and it makes the best cup of coffee I have ever tasted. Has anyone noticed, too, that all of a sudden, percolators [but newer, shinier models] are making a comeback? Even Target is selling them, and I've tried one or two new models, and the coffee is too weak. Also, in 1992, I typed my entire M.F.A. thesis on an antique manual Corona typewriter that my sister bought for me in an antiques store in Boston. Of course, computers were readily available to me, but I wanted the "authenticity" of the typewriter, imaging myself some kind of Jack Kerouac--in this case, I was thinking about the technology too much, and yes, I suffered for my "art" as a result.

[title of this post is a quotation from Thomas Carlyle, essayist par excellence]

UPDATE: Another question I just thought of, also, might be: are there any "passe past futures" that we can think of that were "dreamed" in the Middle Ages? Was Stonehenge, perhaps, one of these?