McCain: I'm an old codger. I don't like this new Internets stuff. I prefer things from a long, long time ago, like Greg Carrier's article at In The Middle on Medieval Disability. Greg gives an excellent overview of that emerging field of historical inquiry.So ... McCain gets the medieval vote?
by J J CohenHalf engineering, half a work of art;The poem begins with a citation from Hamlet, including the only line from Shakespeare I quote regularly ("Very like a whale"), then moves to a riff on Caliban's passionate vision of his island's beauty -- references that are not surprising, I suppose, considering that Disch's book of SF criticism is entitled The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of. "The Clouds" concludes with some words that have been spinning around my head since I read them:
A human orrery that duplicates
The simple motions of the lungs and heart.
But turn it upside down and it becomes
Confetti circling in a paperweight.
You: you are the cloud I never name,Read the whole poem, and Margaret Soltan's meditation on it.
The language that I cannot learn, the game,
I neither lose nor altogether win;
Illusion of another world above
The world beneath, outside the world within.
I squint, I blink — but still I see you, love.
Even in [Chaucer's] writing, characteristics that seem anomalous—familiarity with many languages, ability to slide from tradition to tradition, witty scepticism and self-deprecating comedy, and insider/outsider perspectives—also point away from the standard assumptions of a normal fourteenth-century Christian in England. By a series of recontextualizations and other forms of rabbinic-style interrogations of the text of the man and his poetry, this book points to a new way of reading Chaucer as a kind of “Fuzzy Jew” even more than as a Marrano or Crypto-Jew, whether he was actually one or not ... this midrashic reading explores the way Chaucer constructs a performative self that once conceals and reveals itself as other, takes head-on the problem of anti-Jewishness as a mental as well as moral or spiritual disease, and looks at the strategies of the schlemiel persona in classical, medieval and rabbinic contexts.There is more, but my quotation gives you the gist of what A New Midrashic Reading of Geoffrey Chaucer: His Life and Works is all about. And I don't think I've ever seen "schlemiel" and "Chaucer" next to each other like that. I'm not saying there is anything inherently wrong with such a "midrashic" reading, or even in seeing Chaucer as a "fuzzy Jew" (other than "Fuzzy wuzzy was a Jew" is now going through my head). After all, I once argued that Margery Kempe is Jew-ish. Yet the book really does go to far. It's terrific at making evident Norman Simm's deep knowledge of Midrash, and his grasp of Chaucer's life and works is often impressive ... but this is not a highly theorized enterprise. The book derives its critical momentum from parallels that aren't exactly suggestive, and don't exactly lead to conclusions. Here is a typical statement:
Chaucer ... imbibed, informally from his parents, the neighboring and visiting 'foreigners' around the docks of London, some other essential rhetorical and aesthetic presumptions. These were at first probably extremely vague and inchoate, more 'feelings' and somatic responses to the rhythmns of language and thought and emotional expression, and only later, when he began to travel to the Continent di he begin to pick up more specific directions, or at least hints, as to a rabbinical and kabbalistic set of principles, though. again, he may not have ever thought of them in any specific forms (427).Okay, then. Fuzzy Jews are filled with "fears, rage, and self-hatred" (460) because of their forced cultural doubleness, says Simms. But maybe they are so angry because they've been entrapped in a transhistorical identity?
by J J Cohen
by J J CohenOur experience of time depends upon the growth of entropy. You can't imagine a person looking around and saying, "Time is flowing in the wrong direction," because your sense of time is due to entropy increasing. . . . This feeling that we're moving through time has to do with the fact that as we live, we feed on entropy. . . . Time exists without entropy, but entropy is what gives time its special character.Entropy is for Carroll what gives time its "appearance of forward motion," its "directionality, the distinction between past and future." Entropy is also the guarantor that time moves in one direction only, and is not (despite all our searches for lost time in imagining time machines and time travel in our speculative fiction) reversible.
Figure 1. Eurydice, no. 13, by Bracha EttingerWhat is neither here nor there, now nor then? What resides or occurs in the in-between, and what is its meaning or purpose? And what is the meaning or purpose of the edges that mark the liminality of both this in-between, and the phenomena on either side of it? What are the rhythms, speeds, contours or densities of the in-between? What affects, sensations or movements do edges evoke? Can the in-between be known, can we dwell there - or do we only ever traverse this phenomenon, pass through or pass over? Do edges draw a clear line in the proverbial sand, or do they rather shift like the waves of sands across a desert? "The in-between" and "edges" are clearly related phenomena, in that they both raise questions about the limits of binary systems of classification and the identity of things as discrete and separate entities. But what is the nature of this relation? How do the phenomena of the in-between and edges support one another, challenge one another, or even form the condition of possibility for one another?In-betweennesses, or what Michael O'Rourke recently called inter-betweenities [not to be necessarily conflated with the liminalities of certain cultural anthropologies of past decades], are decidedly "in the air" of current intellectual discourse. With the Anglo-Latin and Old English narratives of the eighth-century Mercian hermit-saint Guthlac as my touchstone texts, and in relation to thinking the location of sex & gender, I want to focus in particular on:
a. all of the anxieties that circulate in the texts over restlessness, unsettledness, and vagrancy, as well as over the world's mutability: in Felix this mainly occurs in relation to Guthlac's decision to become a monk in order to get away from the "whirling waves" of the world, whereas in the Old English Guthlac A, we have the demons figured as actual vagrant homesteaders who have been dis-placed by Guthlac and who warn Guthlac that he has chosen a kind of animal life;Following and elaborating upon some questions Karl S. asked me relative to this project, we might ask: What is the sex of Guthlac and his demons in flight? the sex of Guthlac and his sister under the sign of Guthlac’s prohibition to deny himself the light of her face? the sex of Guthlac and his sister in the face of their Father after death? Does the sex of Guthlac’s sister put his masculinity into play? Does his warrior masculinity secure his hermit sexuality against free play, and if so, how does a live-in “brother” complicate Guthlac’s hermit sexuality? What are the genders of Guthlac and his sister, by which we might mean: what do they desire? what are they thought to desire? how are we supposed to desire them? how does their Father desire them? How does their being offered to our desire [and/or to God's] contour their gender? or ours? Is there any voluptuousness about their (delayed) desire to be with each other?
b. Guthlac’s night-time flight, when a multiplicity [or what Bracha Ettinger would call a “severality”] of demons bind and drag his body through brackish fens and brambles, freezing skies, and down to the jaws of Hell, and in which flight, as Jeffrey Cohen has written, the demons are “swarming ‘molecules’ of alterity that refuse organization into molar wholes . . . [who] persecute Guthlac with an ardor that equals the saint’s own, an intensity of desire that ties them forever to his self-definition despite the distance and difference that his celibacy seeks to maintain” [Medieval Identity Machines, p. 149]. I’m interested in the ways in which Guthlac gives himself to be dragged in what Cary Howie has called an act of traherence that “never quite gets free of what it ostensibly emerges from,” and still following Howie’s thought, I’m interested in how Guthlac and his demons flying together through Middle Anglian and other space form a queer ontology, “an erotic participation through which they become not identical but singularly shared and mutually, messily incompleted” [Claustrophilia, p. 7]. This might also be a queer phenomenology, in Sara Ahmed’s terms [in Queer Phenomenology], where Guthlac and his demons together, in voluptuous flight, form an “oblique angle in relation to that which is given” (where “that which is given” might be the closed, hard, immoveable, and masculine—sexed but sexless—body of the saint who is always already dead);
c. his “companion”/”serving-thane”/”brother” Beccel who mourns him—but whose presence [and therefore, also, his friendship] is suppressed until the end of the narrative;
d. the prohibition Guthlac establishes to never be with his sister in life so that they can be together in death: in Felix, he tells Beccel that “in this life” he “avoided her aspect” so that “in eternity” they might see one another “in the presence of our Father in eternal joys”; in the Old English Guthlac B, he tells his companion that he “denied” himself the “light of her face” so that they might “meet again” in “heavenly glory” before the “face of the Eternal Judge”
The Matrix speaks to a strangeness in me, as well as that of an intimate other irreducible to what, in later phallic constructions, will form the basis of identifications and rejections, incorporations and expulsions that mark and create boundaries and identities for discrete territorialized subjects by whom such porousness or breaching of boundaries can only be experienced as perversion. [“The Red Cow Effect,” p. 87]Medieval authors and medieval saints would have had no such language nor conception of prenatal symbolic matrixial borderspaces, but my hunch is that a lot of what is going on in the Guthlac [and other hagiographic] narratives—in terms of Guthlac’s despair over the “storm-tossed” unsettledness of a world that won’t stand still [which despair drives him to become a monk to begin with], his desire for a barren hermitage that will pull him even beyond the limits of the monastery [which is itself finally too restless, too “several” for Guthlac], his need to prove himself against swarming demons, the invisibility of his serving-companion until it is necessary to have a witness for his death, and his banishment of his sister, especially—all speak to a deep-rooted set of phallocentric aversions to the supposed “perversion” of the “breaching of boundaries,” and to what Ettinger calls the “conductible affectivity” of matrixial sexual difference, “which gives voice to the affected body-psyche co-emerging with the other and the world” [Pollock, p. 3].
by J J Cohen
by J J CohenSuch research tends to establish that determinations caused by the social structure, however important, are not alone in influencing the content of myths. We must also to take into account half-physiological, half-psychological factors … We should pay more attention to certain basic emotional reactions and clusters that sometimes exist only as potentialities in human beings, but that correspond to phenomena explicitly and commonly observed throughout the rest of nature. (81)
Stones – and not only they but also roots, shells, wings, and every cipher and construction in nature – help to give us an idea of the proportions and laws of that general beauty about which we can only conjecture and in comparison with which human beauty must be merely one recipe among many others … In stones the beauty common to all the kingdoms seems vague, even diffuse, to man, a being lacking in density (2-3)
[These ‘monsters’] somehow announce the coming, in the distant future, of a species that makes mistakes … They presage new powers, imperfect but creative … They seem to be manifestations of what I have ventured to call a natural fantasy … a lasting and inalienable collusion between this series of fertile abortions and their ultimate beneficiary (82-84).
by J J CohenI suggest in this book that provocation to romance writing is the same as the provocation to history: they grow out of the same cultural need and intend to do the same cultural work ... I am writing about a political process [state formation] and its connection with literary innovation ... I intend ... to deal directly with the pressures on modes of representation that are correlative to changes in the structure of political power.
In a review of David Denby’s “Great Books” (1996), the film critic’s account of how he returned to college, immersing himself in Columbia’s core curriculum, Vendler wrote, ‘Seeing the Columbia course use Dante and Conrad as moral examples is rather like seeing someone use a piece of embroidery for a dishrag with no acknowledgment of the difference between hand-woven silk and a kitchen towel.’ In 2001, again in The New Republic, her main venue in recent years, Vendler took the critic James Fenton to task for his interpretation of Robert Frost’s 1942 poem ‘The Gift Outright,’ a version of which was recited by the aging poet at the Kennedy inauguration in 1961. Fenton, in her view, had imposed a mistaken interpretation on a poem as much ‘about marriage as about colonials becoming Americans,’ because ‘his politics has wrenched him into misreading it.’ (Some argued Vendler herself was misreading the poem by choosing to ignore its subject matter.) ["The Closest Reader"]Most scholars of the Middle Ages will likely find their sympathies drawn more to Robert Stein, James Fenton, and David Denby than to Helen Vendler. Medievalists work in a discipline that stresses historical circumstance so heavily that it is difficult for us as critics to be satisfied with the Vendler-like "impassioned aesthete who pays minute attention to the structures and words that are a poet’s genetic code" (Donadio, “The Closest Reader”) without an anchoring movement into determinative history. The return to beauty, so trumpeted in the contemporary-focused humanities after the publication of Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just, has failed to recruit many participants among medievalists, who seem constitutionally incapable of detaching formal and aesthetic analysis from a social and cultural context. How we understand the relation of the text or artwork’s past to our present interpretive moment may differ widely: we may argue that the medieval is much like our own times (the Middle Ages as threshold of the Same), or we may hold that the period is vastly different from the present (the Middle Ages as chastely Other), or we may even deploy words like extimité (“intimate alterity”) to stress that simultaneity of both modes. Yet in all cases history potentially predetermines the meaning within the form: context produces art, which remains historically bound and therefore rather inert.
by J J Cohen
by EILEEN JOYI was just reading a book that you might find interesting. It's by a medieval historian, Daniel Smails, and is titled On Deep History and the Brain. Your theme of the posthuman has some clear associations with what he is doing. He argues that each cultural epoch has a specific psychotropic or neurochemical profile. He interprets institutions and social practices in the light of their effect on the affective ecology of a given culture. He thus describes the neolithic revolution as "a new neurophysiological ecosystem, a field of evolutionary adaptation in which the sorts of customs and habits that generate new neural configurations or alter brain-body states could evolve in unpredictable ways." The current epoch is generating such a flood of rapidly changing psychotropic technologies that it could alter our conception of the human in ways that we are only just beginning to understand. He concedes less to the inertial effect of adaptive evolutionary motivational structures than I think one should, but it is exhilarating to see affective neuroscience brought into suggestive relation with elementary principles of human socio-political interaction (Boehm on dominance relations) and to see both used to delineate specific cultural ecologies, even if in only a preliminary way. He argues, for instance, that the whole phase since the medieval period can be interpreted as a "tectonic shift away from teletropic mechanisms manipulated by ruling elites toward a new order in which the teletropies of dominance were replaced by the growing range of autotropic mechanisms available on an increasingly unregulated market" (186). Anyway, I imagine you would find it stimulating. (Teletropic mechanisms are external devices geared toward creating specific affective states in others, for example, the random violence of early medieval castellans designed to generate submissive states of depressive stress in others. Autotropic mechanisms are substances or practices we engage in for the sake of altering our own internal chemistry, for instance, the development, in the eighteenth century, of a luxury economy based on caffeine, tobacco, chocolate, distilled spirits, and reading.)Smail wants us to give up the "short chronology" of a mainly Judeo-Christian world-historical temporality in favor of a "deeper" history that might take account of, say, one hundred thousand years or so, and which would NOT take humans and human culture as its main focus [this is a kind of reverse notion to the question Jeffrey posed in his "The World Without Us" post regarding whether or not medieval persons ever took it upon themselves, in their literary and other arts, to imagine a future without humans--now, how about imaging a past without humans?]. In his article "In the Grip of a Sacred History" [The American Historical Review, vol. 110, no. 5 (Dec. 2005)], Smail argues,
If history is biography—if the study of history, to be satisfying, requires us to make contact with the thoughts and psyches of people with names—then there is little point in advocating a deep history of humankind. But if history is also the study of the structures and patterns that shape the human experience, if acts such as handling a flint arrowhead or tracing one's mitochondrial family tree back to a small African valley can fulfill our desire for wonder, then the exclusion of humanity's deep history cannot be so easily explained. Puzzling over this exclusion, the archaeologist Glyn Daniel once wrote: "Why do historians in a general way pay so little attention to this fourth division of the study of the human past; while recognizing ancient history do they not give more recognition to prehistory? ... Historians are taking a long time to integrate prehistory into their general view of man." That was in 1962. Since then, the call for interdisciplinarity has encouraged historians to approach the past through tools provided by other disciplines. However, this interdisciplinarity has not yet been extended to the fields that constitute the realm of paleoanthropology. Deep history, for all intents and purposes, is still prehistory—a term, as Mott Greene has noted, that modern historians have been reluctant to let drop. "To abandon prehistory," he says, "would be to postulate continuity between the biological descent of hominids and the 'ascent of civilization' of the abstract 'mankind' of humanistic historical writing. Prehistory is a buffer zone."In his recent New York Times review of Smails's book On Deep History and the Brain, Alexander Star writes,
Historians by and large take biology and the deep past for granted: natural selection endowed our ancestors with their impressive bodies and brains, and then got out of the way. These days, it’s chiefly nonhistorians like Jared Diamond and Tim Flannery who seek to trace the long arc of the species and write macrohistory in a scientific key. Smail, who teaches medieval history at Harvard, would like his peers to join their company. If historians have become accustomed to studying midwives and peasants, the marginal and often illiterate members of recent societies, why shouldn’t they extend their curiosity to the most peripheral human subjects of all — the prehistoric? Even today, Smail laments, the curriculum is shaped by the prejudice that history began only when our ancestors started to write or to farm or to think of themselves as actors in a grand pageant of historical change. The presumption is curiously convenient. In the schema of “sacred history,” history began with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden — that is, in Asia, a few thousand years before Christ. In the modern schema, history begins in much the same place, at much the same time. “The sacred was deftly translated into a secular key,” Smail writes, as “the Garden of Eden became the irrigated fields of Mesopotamia and the creation of man was reconfigured as the rise of civilization.”Of course, what Smails may not be familiar with is that there is at least one other medievalist [Jeffrey] who has taught courses that are attentive to the cultural constructions of time and to pre-history. Jeffrey will correct me if I'm wrong, but I know he has taught at least one course on the construction [and theories] of time as well as another on the aboriginal/primitive in history, and one can only imagine that he is plotting another syllabus already around the coordinates of his "weight of the past" project. Now, if we put a Cohen and a a Smail into a time machine together [or into a Dr. Who phone booth], where do you think they would end up?
