Kathleen Coyne Kelly on Karen Barad

by KATHLEEN COYNE KELLY

Hi, Karl here. Kathleen Coyne Kelly emailed me a long comment on my Barad blog post that I think merits frontpaging. Here it is:

I am finishing up Barad’s MUH , and am happy to see Karl’s thoughtful analysis. I also was struggling with the problem of scale—what is “measured,” or intra-acted with on the level of the photon, and how that translates to the macro level, where we reside. As I read Barad’s analysis of ultrasound technology, I wondered if we needed such a big hammer as quantum theory to hit that nail. Throughout, I wondered if we “needed” the confirmation of science for our own posthuman, new materialist projects.

But I was reading Barad with a particular goal in mind: how to account for the agency of things in a text. Imaginary things in a fictional world. So: Barad philosophizes that the “primary ontological units” are not things, but phenomena, which she defines as “dynamic topological refigurings/entanglements/relationalities/(re)articulations of the world.” And “the primary semantic units” are not words, but “material-discursive practices through which (ontic and semantic) boundaries are constituted” (141).  In other words, phenomena are not isolated, discrete, and static bits and pieces of the world (objects) to be apprehended (by subjects). Rather, phenomena are lively intra-actions of matter and discourse. Following Foucault, Barad defines discourse as “not what is said [but] . . . that which constrains and enables what can be said. Discursive practices defines what counts as meaningful statements” (146).  Since Descartes, Barad argues, we have binarized matter and discourse when in actuality they are entangled; their lively entanglement worlds the world. Phenomena and material-discursive practices make up what Barad, after Donna Haraway, calls natureculture. Our material-discursive practices work to constitute boundaries between and among phenomena—phenomena are “cut” into bits and pieces that we then call things. We create boundaries where there are none—such boundaries are, in effect, the “meaningful statements” that constitute our experiences in/of the world.

Barad and other new materialists offer literary scholars a way to think beyond representationalism: that is, they offer a way to contemplate things on their own terms rather than as signifiers. Better than rather than: alongside of, in addition to. A literary text is but a representation (and a representation is a mirror for some, a mediator for others, and all that we can know for still others), and, within that textual phenomenon are other phenomena—the notation or citation or description of what we call things. If we attempt to attend to those things in themselves (instead of turning them into signifiers—second “nature” to most of us), we might just get a sense of their lively, entangled matterliness. By saying so, I am not rejecting representationalism (though some new materialists do); rather, I would argue that representations matter: they are phenomena with effects. And quite enmeshed in causality. The literary scholar identifies, close-reads, critiques, and/or explores representations; let us do the same with respect to representationalism by taking up the challenge of thinking outside of signifying. Rather than approaching representationality and materiality as mutually exclusive or opposed, I would rather explore how we have historically disentangled the two, determining, for example, that imaginary things in fictional texts are only representations, when clearly human history suggests otherwise: imaginary things have reach and extension (a crucial attribute of an object) into time and space.

Realist philosopher Alexius Meinong (1853-1920), who speculated about intending non-existent objects (and was roundly denounced by Bertrand Russell et al.), would say that Excalibur does not  exist , but this does not mean that there “is” no Excalibur—it belongs to the (tautological) class of non-existent objects (Microsoft Word automatically capitalizes Excalibur—a recognition that it “is”!) More evidence for is-ness: scholars write about Excalibur, directors make films about Excalibur, a factory in China churns out plastic “replicas” of Excalibur, and I own an ashtray pinched from the (epiphenomenal) Excalibar in Tintagel. And Excalibur “is” now safely in the hands of Arthur Uther Pendragon (aka John Timothy Rothwell), neo-druid and eco-activist. That’s a lot of agential extension.

But here’s the problem: don’t we already know what I just said? We know the history of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (fiction, with a big signifying thing in it that also “is”); we understand how the U.S. constitution and its amendments “extend” into our world (manifesto, with quite material results); we all have had the experience of watching a film and desiring, say, a pair of Nazgûl silver boots, or a Quidditch broom (oh, ok, I have)—desired the materialization of an imaginary thing. And sometimes we get them!

Would love to hear your thoughts. I’m revising an article on Arthurian things/souvenirs right now. My epigraph: “It depends on what the meaning of the words ‘is’ is.” (Bill Clinton, during his 1998 grand jury testimony on the Monica Lewinsky affair.)

"But what does that have to do with us birds?"

by KARL STEEL

First things: register now for the BABEL Working Group's 1-day symposium, to be held at The Graduate Center, CUNY on Sept 27.

Now, my CUNY colleague Brian Thill (Bronx Community College, CUNY) just published an extraordinary essay at The Atlantic called "Fake Birds on Film: The nature of unspecial effects, an Object Lesson." In any given Hollywood film, you're likely to spot computer-generated birds, and just as likely, you'll find that they're being used to set off the enormous scale of some enormous chunk of human or alien or wizard architecture. Why are they there, and why do we tend to see them at a distance? It's not just that putting them in the foreground would be more difficult or expensive (perhaps costing even "one million dollars"). It's also this:

Fake birds are important for their collective energy and motion, as objects meant to possess a vague kind of dynamic, living, animal presence, but they're entirely unimportant in any close-up or individualized sense. It's not the individual creature that has any standing or value, but the notion of the flock, of "Nature," as set-dressing in cackling, aggregate form: philosophically unimportant as fellow living things, but cinematically (aesthetically) essential in the frame, functioning in much the same way that filmed images of clouds and rolling waves are supposed to. They're shorthand for an emaciated natural world, a minor nature, beautifully and even lovingly rendered, but always subordinated to the comings and goings of man, the living object who matters.

Denatured birds are a perfect cinematic trope for an age that chiefly comprehends the non-human world as a site of throwaway resource extraction, while also romanticizing it with cheap spectacle. On one level, their background presence in the scene seems natural and lends the semblance of a casual authenticity or verisimilitude to the scene, without being obvious or intrusive about it (seriously, how many of us would ordinarily even register their presence, much less dwell on it?). But this presence is framed in an unthinking and reactionary way that reinforces an actual indifference toward and lack of interest in any genuine relationship with the non-human natural world. The world is ultimately just an inconvenient obstacle to stories of humankind's travails.

An aside before I go on: Thill also goes on to talk about birds striking windows. One easy way to prevent this: Collidescape window coating. You're welcome.

Thill's piece reminded me of a never-written paper I'd worked out years ago in conversation with Martin Foys. It was to be on the birds of the Bayeux "tapestry" (really an embroidery, an important correction for feminist, and not merely pedantic, reasons: see 86-87 here).

The "Tapestry" is thick with nonhuman animals. Several do what they do just for humans, either for practical or symbolic reasons. Very early on, we have a hunt; when warriors dine, they dine on meat; when they ride, they ride horses; and many of the animals in the upper and lower registers illustrate fables. Only sheer interpretative cussedness would let us say these animals don't figure anything.

But the many other marginal animals, human and otherwise, for example, here, shouldn't lead us so easily into the interpretative temptation.


Humanities academics tend assume that what we read has to make some kind of sense, which means it has to be for us in some way (for a brief treatment, see the discussion of what we could call the "promise of intelligibility" from here, 27). Following that assumption would give us the Embroidery's animals, to recall Thill, as "always subordinated to the comings and goings of man, the living object who matters."

And following similar assumptions, as medievalists in particular, would lead us just to historicize the animals, most of whom are birds. We might ask whether the birds were embroidered from living models or just copied from other art? We now know the answer, more or less, and we know something similar about the horses too. This is satisfying work. People like answers.

We can also look to relevant historiography for more birds. For example, from the Song of the Battle of Hastings (Carmen de Hastingae Proelio), dated to 1067:

O what uproar suddenly arose from that place, as seamen sought their oars and knights their weapons. Thence, sounding and resounding, a thousand trumpets blared different calls.  ... drums filled the air with the bellowings of bulls.  ... The earth shook, heaven quivered, and the stunned sea lay wonder-stricken. The beasts fled, and the birds and fish as well [Quadrupedes fugiunt, piscis auisque simul, l. 95], for indeed a hundred and fifty thousand conflicting voices struck the firmament. (translation quoted from here, 79, Richard Brilliant, "Making Sounds Visible in the Bayeux Tapestry)

Or, for more swarming birds, from Rollo's prophetic dream of political unity in the Deeds of the Dukes of Normandy (Gesta Normannorum Ducum), "While he was still on the top of the mountain, he also saw its foot surrounded by thousands of birds of different kinds and colours. Their left wings, however, were red all over, and they spread out so far and wide that his eyes, however clear and sharply focused, could not see the end of the flock" (translation quoted from here, 147, Dan Terkla, "From Hasting to Hastings and Beyond: Inexorable Inevitability on the Bayeux Tapestry").

All these historical birds are for humans. They might as well be flying around something CGI'd and majestic.

Almost as an aside, though, Gale R. Owen-Crocker's "Squawk talk: Commentary by birds in the Bayeux Tapestry?" offers us another way. She does all the expected interpretative stuff--and there's nothing wrong with that--but then balks, happily, when she considers the birds roosting on the roof of Westminster Abbey here (upper left hand corner):

 

"Birds of ill-omen?" suggests one writer (180). Or, as Owen-Crocker proposes:

The Abbey is the most splendid building in the Tapestry, blessed by the hand of God; but to birds it is merely a habitat. The birds’ irreverence for what humans hold most sacred is amusing....In this respect they are the most immediate audience of the main frame of the Tapestry. They variously express curiosity, horror, fear, admiration, imitation and indifference to achievements, and they sometimes diverge from the serious business with a witticism or an idiosyncratic reaction.

Indifference! I like that. The temptation now would be to don our gloomy robes of Heideggerian reverence, like this:

Just as it is a part of our unshieldedness that the familiar things fade away under the predominance of objectness, so also our nature's safety demands the rescue of things from mere objectness. The rescue consists in this, that things, within the widest orbit of the whole draft, can be at rest within themselves, which means that they can rest without restriction within one another. Indeed, it may well be that the turning of our unshieldedness into worldly existence within the world's inner space must begin with this, that we turn the transient and therefore preliminary character of object-things away from the inner and invisible region of the merely producing consciousness and toward the true interior of the heart's space, and there allow it to rise invisibly. ("What are Poets For," 127)

Do that, and we go slack before what we insist must be mystery. It's certainly better than assuming that all the animals are just decorative, and probably something to be remembered by anyone who's merrily solving interpretative puzzles.

But the world in all its fluctuating variety isn't a church. The mystery isn't that there's some invisible true interior, but rather that things are up to their own business, and they probably don't know what they do better than we do. After all, they, like us, comprise a lot of other things, all themselves up to their own business, and they probably don't know &c.

So, a fully secular world is one with many, many worlds. And some are only for the birds.

The birds, indifferent, do their avian thing on a wholly difference scale than ours, with a wholly different set of interests. So far as they're concerned, we and the stuff we build are for them. If they could thank us for the cathedral, they probably wouldn't. They're as ungrateful for us as we are for them.

If they serve any purpose at all, the many animals of the Tapestry that have nothing to do with its history function as a kind of memento vivere. They remind us of how much is going on here that has nothing to do with us. Again, if they have a purpose at all, it's to take down the central register's pretensions. It thinks it's showing us a world-shattering event. And it is, for people.

But if we get over ourselves a bit, we might hear cawed out, "Sure, William's now King of England. But what does that have to do with us?"

Critical/Liberal/Arts 2 @The Graduate Center, CUNY

by EILEEN JOY

What are the new scenes or spaces of critical invention? What different faces might critique have? What does it feel like? What does it do? How does historical consciousness play a role in generating new forms, tools, or ideas? What does it mean to be “uncritical”? Is there an erotic hermeneutics, pace Sontag, or an eros of critique? How do we engage criticism and art and techne against the actuarial interests of the corporate university? Can we “afford” to nurture speculative creation, or pure science, in an age of austerity? Do delight, rapture, or the drift of daydreams have a role in criticism? Is there value in maintaining what separates the injunctions to critique and to create? How might our practices cross-pollinate the sciences and the fine arts? Or politics and aesthetics? Or the future and the past? 

I'm excited to announce that our program for the BABEL Working Group's 1-day symposium, to be held at The Graduate Center, CUNY [September 27th], Critical/Liberal/ Arts 2, has been finalized [co-hosted with great generosity by the Medieval Studies Certificate Program and the PhD Program in English @The Graduate Center, with great thanks, especially, to Steven Kruger and Glenn Burger]. This follows from Critical/Liberal/Arts 1, held at UC-Irvine this past April, and the proceedings from both will be published as a special issue of postmedieval, edited by Allan Mitchell, Julie Orlemanski, and Myra Seaman.

If you are, or will be, in the NYC area this coming September, you should join us for what promises to be an enlivening series of conversations and performances on the entangled relations between creativity, critique, activism, and the liberal arts [and you can pre-register HERE]. Speakers include medievalists [Ammiel Alcalay, Bruce Holsinger, Eleanor Johnson, and Allen W. Strouse], early modernists [Henry Turner, Michael Witmore], the Hollow Earth Society [Ethan Gould + Wythe Marschall], multimedia artists/new media + performance specialists [Jamie "Skye" Bianco, Una Chaudhuri, and Marina Zurkow], and a poethical pamphleteer [Eirik Steinhoff] -- and hopefully, by the end of the day, these so-called "disciplinary" markers will be complicated all to hell. The fact of the matter is, all of these speakers conduct nighttime, extraterritorial raids into various republics (digital humanities, poetry, filmmaking, novel writing, genetics, zoopolises, soft architecture, etc.]. Topics will include queer compositionism, sabotage poetry, fuzzy structuralism, survivalism, corporate personhood, the university, new critical vernaculars, post-Chaucer pilgrims, pedagogies of transmission, and MORE. See the full program HERE.

This promises to be a full week, with Steve Mentz also hosting "Oceanic New York" at St. John's University in Queens on Thursday, September 26th (featuring myself, JJC, Karl, Allan Mitchell, Jamie "Skye" Bianco, Marina Zurkow, G. Ganter, and Nancy Nowacek), and punctum records + punctum books will also be hosting a book/record release party, with live music from Taft Mashburn, on Saturday, Sep. 28th [details forthcoming].

Seating is LIMITED for the Critical/Liberal/Arts event, so be sure to pre-register, details about which are HERE.

The Love that Dare Not Bark its Name / Bedroom Dogs in Medieval Badges

by KARL STEEL

(Lead lid from mirror case: Tristan and Iseult receiving the love potion, King Marc on the right, and Husdent, Tristan's dog, underneath. Inscription: MARCVIS TRISTREM:ISOVOC +ME:PORTERA:DE:IOIE:MEM:FAWDRA:IE:SVRIE:NE:ME (Kunera object 13968) For another Tristan and Iseult and Dog scene, see Kunera 03713)


First read this post on What's the Worst Thing You Can Do To Shakespeare?, if you haven't already.

Nearly 7 years ago (!) I wrote something like the following:

In the Middle English Ser Tristrem, as in many other versions of the story, Tristan and Iseult fall in love because of a magic potion. In an odd, funny touch, Tristan's dog, Hodain, also has a taste of the love potion. Here's what happens:

Tristrem in schip lay
With Ysonde ich night;
Play miri he may
With that worthli wight
In boure night and day.
Al blithe was the knight,
He might with hir play.
That wist Brengwain the bright
As tho.
Thai loved with al her might
And Hodain dede also.  (1684-94)

[Tristan lay in the ship with Iseult every night; playing merrily with that worthy lady in her chamber night and day. The knight was entirely pleased that he could have sex with her. So knew Branwen the Bright also. They loved with all their might, and Husdent did also]

Maybe this isn't where you expected the scene to end. If we like, we can just read it as "And Husdent loved them too," because dogs are paradigmatically the loyal animal. Except Husdent, being a dog, hardly needs a potion to be loyal.

He needs the potion for some kind of extra kick:

An hounde ther was biside
That was ycleped Hodain;
The coupe he licked that tide
Tho doun it sett Bringwain.
Thai loved al in lide (see 2(a))
And therof were thai fain.
Togider thai gun abide
In joie and ek in pain
For thought.
In ivel time, to sain,
The drink was ywrought.(1673-84)

[There was also a dog there named Husdent, who licked the cup as soon as Branwen set it up. They all loved each other and were pleased with that. Together they remained, in joy and also in pain, which is to be regretted (see note 1681 here). In an evil time, that is, the potion was made]

This scene may be about loyalty, and the varieties of love too: Tristan and Iseult love each other (erotically) and love each other (as allies), and their love cleaves them together even while it cleaves them from court. Likewise with the dog, maybe, forming a menage à trois, or, if we count Branwen and Tristan's friend Governal, a menage à cinq, a group attracted by the gravity of a massive globule of erotic love and amicitia, friendship.

That's a unembarrassing, apologetic reading, but I'm emboldened by the embarrassment of a recent editor ("even more important is the blatant absurdity of including Hodain in the sentence about the ardor of their love") to take the scene, if you'll pardon the language, straight.

Our editor, Alan Lupack, thinks it's parodic, like the rest of Sir Tristrem, what with its uncourtly attention to warriors banging their heads into things. And maybe it is.

But it's also about recognition: we've maybe all had a dog's cold nose meet us where we'd rather be left alone. It's also about the way that love loves where it loves, not because its object loves back (certainly not in the love between Mark and Tristan), not because its object is the right species ("what is it you see in me?" "Well...you're human. There's that."),¹ but for some strange extra incognizable quality, beyond calculation. As we all know from reading Pearl, love needs grace, which means that love needs that monstrous extra something that just doesn't fit.

Because if it adds up perfectly, it might be perfect alignment of demographic variables that catalyzes an Internet date, or it might be a tax writeoff, but it's hardly worth being called love.

This is why any good depiction of Tristan and Iseult needs the dog too. Husdent's a sign of loyalty, of Tristan's sylvan or even wild masculinity (as Husdent's such an able hunter), but he's also a sign of the excess of love, the bit that won't stay, roll over, or play dead.

The dog's also a sign of interior, private space. As Kathleen Walker-Meikle tells us, little dogs are appropriate for well-off women, nuns, and scholars, people who didn't get out in the world that much, at least compared to warriors and dogged hunters. They're as much a sign of being inside as, say, a couch or a reading desk. Getting into Iseult's pants, so to speak, thus also means getting into Iseult's chambers, even if by means of a shaggy go-between. Hence the presence of the dog.

Which is why, I suggest, dogs show up in medieval erotic scenes not infrequently, at least so far as I can tell from an initial search of the Kunera database of medieval badges. Like this one:


Lead pin. "Lady of Vergi: well with copulating couple on one side and man watching and pointing and dog drinking on the other side" Inscription: :A: M: O: V: R: S (backwards) [Belgium, Unknown Date. (Kunera 06865) (see also Kunera object 00611).

The dog's nose knows its place. Look to your bottoms, lovers.

---

(for introducing me to the Kunera database and for an excellent argument, thanks to Ann Marie Rasmussen, "Moving Beyond Sexuality in Medieval Sexual Badges," in From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe, ed. E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken (U of Notre Dame P, 2013), 221-47). For more on badges, see The Medieval Badges Foundation.

And I know I'm not the first person to come up with my title.

^{1. Thanks to my wife, Alison Kinney, for this idea. She's working on an enormous project that's, in part, about just this point. ↩}

What's the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare?

by J J Cohen

The chance to get to know Julian Yates over the past few years has been a special pleasure for me, as well as challenge to some productive new avenues of thought. I've admired Error Misuse Failure since I read it several years ago (it's a prescient book), and I followed Julian's work through the intriguing essays that followed. I'd noticed a burgeoning ecological interest in his scholarship, and so when it came time to put together Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green I naturally invited him to contribute. He's come to GW twice, as part of our Animal Vegetable Mineral conference, and in a celebration / interrogation of Karl's book. And then there is Ecomaterialism and Speculative Medievalisms and Elemental Ecocriticism, and he and I have put together a seminar on "Object-Oriented Environs" for the SAA and ... well, that's a lot. But like all the people whose intellect I admire and friendship I value, he has an ability to keep making things new, to reveal the unexpected in what seemed too familiar. He's also a beautiful writer, has a hilarious sense of humor (I have a picture of him with a stuffed monkey atop his head I could share), and pretends never to tire of my tea-and-marmalade jokes.

Julian was kind enough to send me an advance copy of his latest book, a work co-authored with Richard Burt called What's the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare? Because I'm in Writing Lockdown right now I haven't been able to sit and devour the whole thing as I yearn to do, but I've made quite an inroad and: it's really great. It challenges many recent orthodoxies in the field, especially around history of the book, and offers some bracing models for how (multi)media works.

Palgrave Macmillan has granted the blog permission to publish an excerpt from the book, so I offer the beginning of chapter one below. My apologies for any formatting errors; it was not easy text to import. Enjoy!

C H A P T E R 1

What’s the Worst Thing You

Can Do to Shakespeare?

It is yours to reade him. And there we hope, to your divers capacities, you willfinde enough, both to draw, and hold you: for his wit can no more lie hid, then itcould be lost. Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe: And if then you doenot like him, surely you are in some manifest danger, not to vnderstand him. Andso we leaue you to other of his Friends, whom if you need, can bee your guides: ifyou neede them not, you can leade your selues, and others. And such Readers wewish him.— John Heminge and Henrie Condell“To the great Variety of Readers”— The First Folio (1623)1

BEFORE, OR PERHAPS AFTER, ALL, THE WORST thing you can do to Shakespeare is

not to read him. Here, at the envoi cum media launch that was the First Folio,

John Heminge and Henrie Condell offer an economy of reading that threatens

the putative reader/buyer with the “manifest danger” that “unreadability” might

conjure. This rhetorical unreadability that reflects on you stands surety against a

literal, prosaic nonreading of the book that would render it a media nonevent.

Against this eventuality, Heminge and Condell recruit the “great variety of readers,”

“from the most able” “to him that can but spell.” For it is upon our “capacities”

(heads and purses) that the “fate of Bookes depends.” As “readers,” then, we

are recruited to become the biocultural “wetware,” the life- in- death preservers,

that this book and the defunct “Shakespeare” require to prosper, to go mobile,

to survive, to sur- vivre— living on, in, with, and through our successive acts.2 We

become, in effect, the biosemiotic motor that enables “Shakespeare” to go viral,

and thereby we make it possible for certain kinds of critical operations to count

institutionally as doing something (worth doing).

Our aim in this book is to open a space to think the unreadability Heminge and

Condell deploy as a phenomenon, a specter, that has been haunting Renaissance

and Shakespeare studies for some time now— and that has been conscripted to do

all sorts of work, as the Folio attests. We would like to pick up their modeling of

readers as “wetware,” the living component to media platforms, and think about

what the labor of (not) reading entails.3 Their sales pitch discloses the linkages

between text, media, and reader that constitute the phenomenon that was, is,

and will be “Shakespeare,” reorienting us from the sense that a “play” or “plays”

exist in the world as some self- identical entity, to the plays as a mobile, conflicting,

conflicted, and partially time- bound set of practices. What happens then,

we ask, if we proceed on the assumption that historical fields of study such as

“Shakespeare” or “Renaissance drama” as well as school curricula, professional

Shakespeare theaters, the film industry, and media libraries (on and offline) refer

not to a series of agreed- upon texts or performances but instead, as Heminge

and Condell imply, a series of differently distributed fetish communities, each of

which tunes itself to the shifting auratics of its chosen ritual objects as they are

variously mediated— from manuscript to quarto to folio, on and off and back to

the stage, the movie theater, and the home entertainment system— the ontology

of the thing we study waxing and waning, constantly picking up and dropping

actants as it goes?4 The distribution of readers into different fields of study (performance,

theater history, criticism, theater production, and so on) comes to

constitute not a happy holism but a series of discontinuous and only sometimes

intersecting conversations or crowds that converge on variously mediatized forms

of Shakespearean texts. The “Shakespeare industry,” so it turns out, refers not

merely to an elaborated infrastructure but to the industry of so very many readers

and purveyors, whose vital juices the Bard requires to keep on flowing.

In this model, the labor of all such fetishists (ourselves included) stands in

reciprocal relation to the past labors of reading, living, and dying that our work

posits as “past.” It is by our labors that readings and texts continue to circulate

and continue also to recruit readers or readers become scrollers or whatever word

issues forth from the latest medium in order to designate the activity of its users.5

So what, we ask, would it mean to deactivate this reciprocity and dwell within the

figural or stunt unreadability that Heminge and Condell deploy in order to fund

their own launch of the First Folio as a facsimile of an archive, a Shakespearean

impression that, dear reader, it is for us to recognize? What would it entail to opt

out and do no “work” today but instead to allow the machine to idle and to allow

the specter of not reading, of unreadability, to ramify?

By posing unreadability as a question we seek to interrupt the prevailing economies

for managing the relation between reading and not reading in our various

critical acts and so impede a return to business as usual. The structure of a question

pertains for unreadability does not exist per se as a positivity but only as a

shifting, partial effect of the process of reading itself. It might be said to unfold

at the junctures or limits, as they are drawn, between reaction and response, the

dead and the living, the automaticity of the machine and the immanence of the

organism, and to resist the ontologizing of those limits. We regard unreadability

as the uninvited guest to the surplus of “life” certain texts and authors are granted

by their translation to successive media platforms and their sponsorship by such

a great variety of readers. In this sense, the proliferation of textual aids that offer

to pull you back up the “cliff ” or “spark” life in some dead text constitutes a

community of friendly readers become textual backups to see off the specter of literal not reading.

Finishing the Universe Halfway: On Reading Barad

by KARL STEEL

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here follows a preview of my essay's conclusion:

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

"Trading Tongues" is HERE!

by JONATHAN HSY

I’m pleased to announce that today is the official release date of my book, Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature (Ohio State University Press, 2013). It is the most recent addition to the series “Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture” (ed. Ethan Knapp), where KARL’s book also appeared.

This book has been a long time coming. It began a decade ago (!) as a dissertation project about merchant culture in medieval London but it gradually transformed into a broader exploration of the social dynamics of travel, polyglot literary identities, and languages in motion.

Here’s the description from the OSU Press website:

Trading Tongues offers fresh approaches to the multilingualism of major early English authors like Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Margery Kempe, and William Caxton, and lesser-known figures like French lyricist Charles d’Orléans. Juxtaposing literary works with contemporaneous Latin and French civic records, mixed-language merchant miscellanies, and bilingual phrasebooks, Jonathan Hsy illustrates how languages commingled in late medieval and early modern cities. Chaucer, a customs official for the Port of London, infused English poetry with French and Latin merchant jargon, and London merchants incorporated Latin and vernacular verse forms into trilingual account books.

Hsy examines how writers working in English, Latin, and French (and combinations thereof) theorized the rich contours of polyglot identity. In a range of genres—from multilingual lyrics, poems about urban life, and autobiographical narratives—writers found venues to consider their own linguistic capacities and to develop new modes of conceiving language contact and exchange. Interweaving close readings of medieval texts with insights from sociolinguistics and postcolonial theory, Trading Tongues not only illuminates how multilingual identities were expressed in the past; it generates new ways of thinking about cultural contact and language crossings in our own time.

And here are a few lovely blurbs:

“Hsy’s development of the concept ‘translingual’—emphasizing the capacity for languages within the same space to interact, to influence, and to transform each other through networks of exchange— is visionary. Trading Tongues is poised to make a significant contribution both to linguistic studies of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in England and to the study of Middle English literature.” — Christopher Cannon, New York University

“Trading Tongues is accomplished, intelligent, and assiduous. Hsy provides some excellent and original close readings of multilingual texts; I particularly admire his chapter on London merchants, and his final discussion of a Charles d’Orléans ballade is superbly interesting. The research is strong, the style elegant and well-turned, and the quality of argument high.” —Ardis Butterfield, Yale University

You can read excerpts from the book (contents, introduction, first chapter, and index) on the OSU Press website (top left corner of page)—and you can search and preview other parts of the book on Amazon.

Many people—including my colleagues, my co-bloggers and ITM readers, and other people (online and in real life)—have played a role in shaping this project. I hope those of you with interests in translation studies, comparative literature, historical linguistics (among other things) will find this worth your while!

Networks & Neighbors: Exciting New Journal in Early Medieval Studies

by EILEEN JOY

Given postmedieval's recent issue on Medieval Mobilities, and our interests here at In The Middle in actor-network theory, post-human studies, collaborative scholarship, global history, and scholarship of a certain creative-narrativistic bent, I'm thrilled to announce that punctum books has recently joined hands with Networks and Neighbours, a new international collective of historians (initially, from the UK, Brazil, and Israel) dedicated to "the networking poetics of life in early medieval studies." They hosted their first international symposium at the University of Leeds just this past June on "Early Medieval Correlations," concerned with varying types of interconnectivity in the early Middle Ages [the next symposium, in 2014, will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil] -- and I would note that the diversity of presenters (from universities in the UK, Brazil, Belgium, Spain, Israel, Hungary, and Austria) at their first symposium is really noteworthy for a gathering in the UK in early medieval studies.

They have inaugurated an open-access journal of the same name, Networks and Neighbors, which aims, in the words of the editors,

to promote the study of how people and communities interacted within and without their own world and localities in the Early Middle Ages. Our ultimate discourse is amenable to intellectual events that emerge from N&N but inceptively we set out with the view that if texts present directed meaning because they are sets of signifiers and our minds are developed so as to expect, anticipate and subsequently comprehend complex information through sets, or networks, of ideas, then we can argue that it is the respective, local topology of a past situation, or rather of its functional and malleable discourses, that can provide the modern ‘reader,’ or historian, with the framework through which s/he can write a story of the past.   

We maintain that identity and meaning were not determined by fixed sets and integers, but by a complex network of interrelated signs. In practice, this suggests that a single person within their personal world could have travelled within various worlds and realities, identifying with various neighbours at even single overlapping points of identity; one did not encounter another as a fixed category, either of ‘self’ or ‘other’. Therefore, by ‘network’ we do not mean a fixed identifier, a singularizing category, but refer to the complex ways that individuals, groups, institutions et cetera constructed self-considered, coherent and singular existences from the multiplicity of mental activity, perceptions, ideas, and the varying confrontation with images, physical and non-human being, languages, sounds, senses, ‘discourses’ and all else that was life in the period.  This, then, is how we would like to make sense of the concepts of ‘continuity’ and ‘change’, particularly as they happened ‘on the ground.’

The editorial board of N&N consists of established leaders in the field as well as emerging young scholars working in early medieval studies, who wish to advance early medieval scholarship in radical directions and towards truly alternative ways of thinking and engaging the early medieval past.   

The editors (Michael J. Kelly, Tim Barnwell, Jason R. Berg, and Richard Broome) welcome anyone interested in the serious reconsideration, revisiting and re-presenting (via text, image or sound) of the historical sources, patterns, inventions, representations and historiographies about early medieval worlds to submit a piece to N&N. You can contact them at: 

networksandneighbours@gmail.com

And stay tuned to their website HERE for forthcoming CFPs. The journal will be available in both open-access and affordable print editions. Medieval studies needs more journals such as this one [there is, I really believe, more exciting work being undertaken in medieval studies right now than there are outlets in which that work can appear, and without overlong lag times, and the fact that this journal concentrates on EARLY medieval *historical* studies is like ... an extra bonus!].

The Future We Want: Field Change / Discipline Change

a guest post by ANNE F. HARRIS and KAREN EILEEN OVERBEY

Below, as a special preview of an upcoming Oliphaunt / punctum collaboration, you will find an extraordinary essay that originates in a special GW MEMSI Kalamazoo roundtable, The Future We Want: A Collaboration.  The session included the following presentations, all of which were creative and inspirational:

Field Change / Discipline ChangeKaren Overbey, Tufts Univ./Material Collective, and Anne F. Harris, DePauw Univ./Material CollectiveInstitutional Change / Paradigm ChangeL. O. Aranye Fradenburg, Univ. of California–Santa Barbara, and Eileen A. Joy, BABEL Working GroupTime Change / Mode ChangeWill Stockton, Clemson Univ., and Allan Mitchell, Univ. of VictoriaWorld Change / Sea ChangeLowell Duckert, West Virginia Univ., and Steve Mentz, St. John’s Univ., New YorkVoice Change / Language ChangeChris Piuma, Univ. of Toronto, and Jonathan Hsy, George Washington Univ.Collective Change / Mood ChangeJulie Orlemanski, Boston College, and Julian Yates, Univ. of Delaware

A slightly expanded version of these presentations will be published this fall as part of an Oliphaunt / punctum books project, a "tête-bêche" with "The Future We Want" printed on one side and, when you flip it and start from the other side, a series of manifestoes from last year's BABEL panel. Enjoy!

* * * 

LUSH ETHICS

Anne F. Harris and Karen Eileen Overbey

I. The Future We Want: Field Change/Discipline Change 

We want a collective future.

This is a material moment, and we want a material future. A lush future, a future of exploded views and inner lives of objects, a future of abundant encounters with the material and natural worlds, a future of touching objects that touch us back. A collective future, a collaboration with things.

We want to call out, through the discipline of Art History, to the field of medieval studies, and, further, to the endeavor of the Humanities, in this material moment, when the objects of medieval studies are more than ever in our sights.  We need a field change: a change in our field of view, our field of vision, our visual field. If we perceive differently, we will conceive differently. Objects have hurtled through history to get here, why keep them still now? In the flat ontology of the future we want, objects keep moving: through juxtaposition, association, attention.

This can be our project: articulations of objecthood; descriptions of the interconnectedness of things. The deep and vital networks and circulations and operations. The aesthetics of ontology.

What would that look like? In an art history of flat ontology, for a start, a classical or neoclassical ideal of beauty would not determine a hierarchy of objects, styles, representations, histories. Beauty would come from being, rather than from relativism. We could then take our time with surfaces and with substances, teasing out and amplifying the charm, the allure, of material.  In the aesthetics of ontology all materials matter; all materials have our attention, we can attend to all materials.  And so our aesthetics would enlarge our sense of ‘beauty’ to compass the revelation of the workings and beings of any artwork. Any object. Oh! 

For some, there may be a fear that aesthetics is distance, that to aestheticize is to make distant, shimmering; to hold off, to gaze at and even evaluate, and so to separate, to distinguish ourselves from our objects. But this is perhaps a definition of ‘aesthetics’ beholden to 18th- and 19th-century philosophy, in which the arts inhabit a special realm, set off from ‘regular’ experience, distinct especially from the mundane, just beyond the reach of average perception; this is aesthetics entwined with morality, and with teleology.  In the future we want, aesthetics is intimacy: beauty is close and possible and not rare; it makes us pay attention, displace ourselves, look at manuscript, cross, cup, toaster with possibility. This is an understanding of ‘aesthetic’ at once very medieval and very modern: resonant with Ian Bogost’s Object Lessons, (http://objectsobjectsobjects.com/) and also with Aquinas’s “animated sensory pleasures (animales delectationes),” in which we take delight in our physical and mental interactions with objects.^[1] In medieval thought, as Mary Carruthers explains, “‘aesthetic’ meant ‘knowledge acquired through sensory experiences’”, and while human-made artefacts did have special status, it was more like the “ludic play space recognized by modern anthropology and psychology” than like the distant realm of Enlightenment and Romantic aesthetics.^[2]

And so our aesthetics inhabit this play space to engage sensation and knowledge, to pay attention to material possibility, to be intimate with objects. But in this intimacy, this attention, we must not occlude the alien differentness, the wonder and strangeness of the art object. That strangeness, its being-beyond-interpretation, is what entices us.

Here, for example [Fig. 1]: a visual field, an object. The Lothar Cross, given by the Ottonian Emperor to the church at Aachen just before the year 1000. This luxe crux gemmata is 50 cm high, an oak core covered in gold and silver gilt sheets, encrusted with 102 gems and 35 pearls, and further decorated with gold filigree and cloisonné enamel. The Cross’s splendid workmanship, expensive materials, and Ottonian patronage were certainly as important as its religious meaning when it was affixed to a tall pole and carried in the public drama of liturgical processions.^[3] At the center of the cross, where we might expect to find an image of Christ, is a sardonyx Augustan cameo, which we could (and which we have) read in relation to tenth-century imperial ideologies, spolia, and appropriation. More of the stones here are reused Classical gems, perhaps chosen for their historic or semiotic valence: an amethyst carved with the Three Graces, an onyx lion. Now, though, in the intimate play of a materialist ontology, we propose to see the strangeness: not the sure ideology, but the hesitation; not the power but the plea. A jewel is rare and demanding, but it is the result of geological imperfections; a cross affirms splendor and power, but a cross also asks for intercession and salvation.

So we can change our field of vision, discipline ourselves to look more materially. When we look at the object, and not only at the image (crux gemmata, emperor, lion, Romanitas) we see that most stones were set to highlight their color and their size, their lush materiality rather than their iconographic meaning; they play a visual rhythm along the four arms of the cross. Iridescent blue teardrops at each terminal, and at the base of each blue stone a pearl; paired green squares at the interior angles of the cross arms; two sets of double rows of symmetrical dots along the length, remarkably consistent in size and shape. We can start to trace the tendrils of the filigree, to think with the object: the delicate strands of beaded gold wire, laid curled and queued to breathe in the spaces between the gems. The effects of movement and depth when one tendril drapes across another. The barely-visible daubs of solder (gold, to be sure, but less pure, with a slightly different melting point to adhere the filigree to the plane of gold plate). The uneven edges of the bezels, tamped close around the gems with tiny hammers, or pressed by careful fingers.

To look more materially, at first, is to look more closely. A close looking, in pace with the close reading of a text. To look, if not innocently, then not all-knowingly, either. In an art history of flat ontology, we will seek the mundane within the rare: the point where the tendril of the filigree does not accomplish its curl, where the band around the gem is crooked, where the gesture-to-make became tedious, where the matter is predictable. Does this “humanize” the object? Make the gleaming gem susceptible to human faltering? Our ontology is flat, let’s turn the table: human faltering gathers around a gleaming gem. An art history of flat ontology doesn’t humanize the object, it collapses the rare into the mundane, it fuses human gesture with the object’s becoming, the human’s becoming (from emperor to museum director to viewer) with the object’s gesture (the Lothar Cross processed thousands of time before it was stilled by the museum). Close looking doesn’t reveal things to valorize them: it upends them, it disintegrates the whole for its parts, oscillating between present materiality, past gesture, future desire. At some point, in some way we want to attend to, the Lothar Cross is equally ordinary and extraordinary.

More closely, and from a shifted perspective [Fig. 2], we see that the gem settings are architectonic, miniature domed drums and arcades, a tiny landscape evoking (perhaps) the splendor of the City of Heaven. Reading this way, iconographically, we take the Cross’s surface in all at once; we take its meaning. But if we linger, if we luxuriate in that very medieval pleasure of the “multifocal perspective”, we can feel the dizzying shifts of scale and illusion and distortion, the push and pull of “minificence and magnificence,” the wonder of material play.^[4] Here we falter, we fall, into what Ian Bogost might call the “native logic” of the object.^[5]

We look again [Fig. 3] letting the stones and gold lead us, both intimate and strange. We then notice that some stones are drilled for beading, perhaps once part of Byzantine jewelry; the gems engraved with figures of Roman gods or animals are set upside down or sideways, resisting figural readings.^[6] The intention isn’t towards meaning, it’s towards form: that drilled pearl can no longer be seen for the necklace it might once have been a part of, now you see it for its luster in a new luxury, you see it in its own lushness. Symbolism-as-intention is tricky here, too, when we know that some of these stones are post-medieval replacements, and nineteenth-century repairs. This is an object that to some degree resists iconography and narratology, and so resists much of art history’s modern methods. What does it mean for art history to think about meaning beyond a single or originary moment of creation, beyond a first, or second, reception? As we move away from that originary point of creation, meaning and being start to intersect in new ways. The meaning is no longer simply what the original maker or user intended; it will be what you intend, what you attend to. Being asserts itself over meaning: the Cross survived, the pearl clung on, it is here and that is the new starting point.

Materiality, as Michael Ann Holly writes, “is that which halts transparency.”^[7] It stops us seeing through, seeing past, the object to something else, to something beyond or besides. It keeps us focused, it slows us down and makes us play, gives us pleasure.  We will rediscipline our eye to look more closely, more materially, to admit play and pleasure, and to be moved in and by the object.

So:  our future is a shift in our field of vision, in the field of play for and with objects.

II. The Boon and Bother of Lushness

The field of play of art history has always been drawn by and to objects. You can see why.

Fantastic things whose materiality calls out. The responses of human interlocutors have never stopped changing, framed by liturgy, antiquarianism, connoisseurship, iconography, social history..., always carving out a new future they want with and from the objects. Every interpretive frame is a “future we want.” The frame is how we now present our works of art to the future: the frame is now the means of transference, claiming ontological status for any object as art. The frame will change (always), but it will be there (always). The French and English Academies reveled in the frame: Poussin prized it, Derrida pried it open.^[8] But think, now, of medieval works of art unbounded by frames, no means of transference save accident and personal desire, only indications (no certitudes) of meaning. They don’t exist. And so we frame and re-frame medieval objects: with the medieval practices of liturgy and devotion, with the rarity of antiquarianism, with the knowing eye of connoisseurship, with the medieval texts that sustain iconography, with the political mission of social history. The future we want is the next frame, the frame of reference we can next share (and debate): feminism, sexuality, queer theory, post-colonialism, eco-criticism... The frame is the object’s network: we think we might dispense with it, get “back” to the “original” work, but any return is itself framed. Medieval texts are presented as the surest context, but materiality precedes and outlasts context: the gems pre-existed the cross by millions of years, and they will persist long after the cross has come undone. Frames (physical, digital, interpretive) are part of flat ontology - they are flattening agents.  Different frames elicit different meanings, but let’s consider how they shift being, too.  Medieval objects are not immutable, their ontology can shift. It’s how they got here in the first place: tree to wood to cross, mineral to suture to jewel. Let’s hold on to the frame, let’s keep making our means of transference to the object, let’s keep the object moving, let’s keep moving with the object.

Object oriented ontology creates a vigorous field of play, one that makes for optimistic declarations: one in which we can revel in the material agency of the object, in which we can turn to our objects and see them do things. What is a hammer when it’s not hammering? What is a cross when it’s not processing (or blessing or saving or frightening)? What is the work of art when it is not meaning something? It is gem pressed into gold, cameo found and reinserted; it does light and color, it embodies texture and rarity - it makes us want a future whose material possibility makes us gasp. Lurking under, hovering over, is a metaphor, a possibly dematerialized future, but for now the material holds us fast; we fasten it to a frame and hold on.

Lushness has been the boon and bother of art history, it is that aspect of materiality around which the field changes; material, form, luster, texture, gleam, color, illusion -- lushness is one of the qualities we try to frame. It is feared (think of Bernard of Clairvaux fighting the allure of image). It is administered (think of Suger assuring himself that he was seeing through the gems). It is measured (formalisms, iconographies, semiotics... Commandments). The Calf, lest we forget, was golden. We try to control lush materiality, and our resulting pleasure. The pleasure that comes from gleam and color, touch and texture.  Why is pleasure so unnerving? Why does it become an ethical dilemma? Is it because we are overwhelmed by the agency of the object in our moments of pleasure? Because wonder might be more about the force of the object than about our possession of it?  

Bernard’s aesthetic asceticism gives us one of the best description of the thrill of images, and the condemnation of pleasure from lushness. The sensual seduction and harsh sanctimoniousness of the Apology makes even the act of reading it an ethical exercise. He lets lushness languish in gorgeous word, sight and sound (“pulchre lucentia, canore mulcentia, suave olentia, dulce sapientia, tactu placentia”) before calling it all shit (“ut stercora”)^[9]. What delight did Bernard take in stripping delight of its delightfulness? The question is put not in terms of vindictiveness, but rather, precisely, in terms of pleasure: his word play seizes on the material forms of language and makes them dance - “deformis formositas/formosa deformitas” quoth he. He dips his quill deep into the stuff of his words, tracing letters and shifting endings, before he seeks to abolish the materiality altogether. He knows his stuff: in detail and precision, he mocks color and texture and form, and he derides viewers’ helpless attraction to beauty. Then he lowers the ethical hammer: “The church adorns her stones in gold, and abandons her naked sons.”^[10] You can feel chastened reading Bernard. Of course he’s right: bread before baubles, food before fantasy. But who is he to tell anyone that their pleasure at beauty is empty? Who are we to do so? Or not do so? Thus, the dilemma.

But even Bernard can’t stay in it too long, even Bernard needs resolution, frames: “Assentio,” he says in response to Psalm 26:8’s declaration “Lord, I have loved the beauty of your house.” He agrees that churches should be adorned, because the good that material opulence might do for the “simple and devout” outweighs the power it gives the “vain and avaricious.” Appeal, pertinence, usefulness - those are Bernard’s frames for lushness and they are still very much in use today to curtail or justify the beauty of materiality. You can be sympathetic to Bernard: he was overwrought at the lushness of wrought things because he understood their allure and agency. You can be aggravated with him: his attempts to strip lushness of its place in spirituality results in a moralization of beauty and form that creates hierarchies (monastic elites and devout simpletons) and divides. For us -- for the future we want -- these can be breached by the aesthetics of flat ontology.

Because the material will out: the wonder of Augustus’s lush cameo freaks out the center of the Lothar cross. In the future we want, lushness is vibrant: it unnerves us with pleasure, it blurs the boundary of discipline and desire, it acts on us. We want this play, this field of riotous blooming, this fertility. We want to stay longer in the conundrum of lushness: its ability to nurture but not to feed, how it moves us in its stillness. We want to consider Jane Bennett’s “shift from epistemology to ontology.”^[11] The future we want is on a material trajectory of perpetual becoming, how objects come to be, how they are at any given time, and we with them.

III. Struggles at hand. The ethical project of art history

This is a way of engaging a long history of (as Maura Nolan has recently written) sensation and asethetics, from Augustine and Aquinas to Adorno and Elkins.^[12] And in this project, texts should not be our only primary sources. Objects themselves, and art objects especially, in their very made-ness, their facture, in their uneasy difference from the natural world (even if that difference is only the frame, the setting of a pearl into a hammered gold bezel), disclose the depth and the varieties of human-object networks and assemblages. 

In all this close looking, this luxuriating in lushness, this pleasure, beauty, and ekphrasis, we find ourselves taking up some rather old-fashioned art historical methods. And we find ourselves sympathetic to the demands of formalists and connoisseurs that we see artwork for itself. It’s easy to see the affinity here: the artist and art critic Roger Fry (1866-1934), for example, championed the autonomy of the visual ecounter with art, apart from literary and historical knowledge, and described the specific formal elements of artworks -- especially “plasticity” -- that grip the viewer and provoke the aesthetic experience.^[13]  Giovanni Morelli (1816-1891), Bernard Berenson (1865-1959), and other connoisseurs wrote lovingly and persuasively of specific details of paintings and sculptures. Bernson even described the aesthetic experience as a loss of boundary between viewer and object:

In visual art the aesthetic moment is that fleeting instant, so brief as to be almost timeless, when the spectator is at one with the work of art he is looking at.... He ceases to be his ordinary self, and the picture or building, statue, landscape, or aesthetic actuality is no longer outside himself. The two become one entity; time and space are abolished and the spectator is possessed by one awareness.^[14]

 And for Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945), art was a visual language, a distinct mode of knowledge: the agency of the work itself acted through formal and stylistic means.

Such possibility, in these ideas, for our materialist project, for the future we want! But we are uncomfortable, too, with this legacy. Because connoisseurship and nineteenth-century formalism wrought command of objects, and teleologies of style and masters. Because aesthetics was most often transhistorical and absolute.  Uncomfortable because our opening to objectness and materiality and lushness seems also to reopen an old disciplinary wound, the tension between aesthetics and structuralism.^[15]

And so this future that we want troubles us, and in realizing it we must attend to this tension: do we have to give up the care for the liberal democratic subject nurtured by the hermeneutic projects of iconography, feminism, marxism, and postcolonialism? Over the last forty or so years, by exploring how we know objects, by exploring their meaning, function, and use-value to patrons, makers, and beholders, art history described the workings of power and the inequities of representation. This has given us a political and ethical project in art history, one that we value, inhabit, and want to defend.

Can our lush object-oriented future be an ethical one, too?

To  think about the ethics of beauty and materiality we can look not only to Bennett and Bogost and Harman and Latour, but also to our medieval objects-in-themselves, which had their own ethical power and moral presence. Medieval beholders knew, as we do, the power of art-objects to elevate the human spirit. So much of the medieval encounter with things was revelatory. Abbot Suger knew it when he wrote of the transformative power of precious stones:

Thus, when -- out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God -- the loveliness of the many-colored gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me that I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner. [De Administatione, XXXIII][16]

The mystics -- Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, Mechthild and Hadewijch and Margery Kempe -- knew, too, that looking at objects (and touching them, stroking them, losing yourself to them) could save your soul. And all kinds of devout beholders kissed manuscripts, fondled statues, tucked tiny relics into their clothing and jewelry to keep them close, intimate. Medieval devotional objects, as Caroline Walker Bynum reminds us, are not merely symbols, indexes, or icons, but the immediate presence of the holy.^[17] That presence was in relics, of course, but it was also palpable in things like gemstones, which were formed through mysterious cosmic processes, and often had celestial origins. Objects like the jewelled Lothar Cross were efficacious and miraculous because of their materiality, not despite it, and the encounter with them depended on the sensory experience. Medieval objects -- at least, these devotional objects -- were not simply instrumentalized by medieval beholders, but were understood as essentially embedded in networks, in assemblages, of icon, human, divine, nature, and material.

Yet we cannot account only for the religious objects and the devotional networks. If we are to take seriously an aesthetics of ontology, we can’t limit our vision (or our pleasure) to religious objects any more than to a canon of “masterworks.” If “beauty” is loosened from some of its Kantian disinterest -- which tends to separate “art” from artefact and “beautiful” from utilitarian^[18] -- then we can grapple with a problem we love: what is beautiful about medieval objects beside/beyond/outside their religious import? Sure: some of their particular materiality tugs at modern/postmodern notional beauty and visual pleasure. But there is also the beauty of survival. The impossibility of medieval objects, for us: the fascination of their very present ontology. The Beowulf manuscript in the fire, the Stafforshire Hoard underground, the Ghent altarpiece in a salt mine. That survival doesn’t have to be unique: the Saxo-Norman crucible [Fig. 4], the clay lamp, the cooking pot. The mundane survives, too. How to attend to these objects? We can think of thirsty throats, cold fingers, and hungry mouths - we can see the beauty in that survival, in the persistence of presence, long after usefulness is gone and purpose is moot.^[19]

The aesthetics of ontology begin with materiality: we can attend to the material at hand. We can marvel at the emergence, manipulation, and survival of the clay. We can think about use, but in the stillness of a the museum, presence prevails. The aesthetics of flat ontology see the lushness of the clay cup. Of course, flat does not mean equal: we are not seeking to valorize clay to claim it as gold. We are asking for attention, for a future that attends to the power of the material, whether it be clay or gold.  If the fundamental tenet of identity politics, of the political project of historicism, is visibility, can we turn that to making objects -- of all sorts -- visible? Can we value that, alongside the recovery of the muted voices of female embroiderers, alongside the exposure of violence in racial or class representation? Can the aesthetic act of description be an ethical practice?

 Because -- oh! -- that is the future we want: an ethical relationship with objects that still allows for lushness.

IV. Struggles await. Identity Politics

Oh! That is the future we want: an ethical relationship with objects that still allows for lushness.

And so we ask what to do with lushness and its attendant decadence? The problem with lushness is that, usually, someone owns the lush object and wields its power. But might our pleasure dislodge unique ownership? Is there an element of pleasure that takes possession of the object of pleasure? Do we mock Protestantism and Puritanism and their mistrust of the material world? Easy. Harder to mock Marx and class consciousness. Harder to make it “all right” to prioritize the lushness of the Lothar Cross when there’s a starving pilgrim nearby. So let’s not. People have their own materiality, which can be strategized as identity politics. We have to confront the anxiety about object oriented ontology and post-humanism and eco-criticism displacing/replacing human subjects. But it’s the belief that we are autonomous subjects wielding dependent objects that we want to break down.  We’re going to have to let our guard down as we move towards the collective future we want. We’re going to have let ourselves, and everybody else, feel pleasure, feel the power of pleasure. Moments of enjoyment can become moments of resistance to singular ownership and hierarchy.

Bogost points out that we’ve worked hard for a long time to articulate an ethical relationship to each other, and lately to animals and the environment.^[20] But, as surrounded with things as we are, as encased in objects as we’ve become, we have just begun to articulate, and maybe formulate, an ethical relationship with objects. We want to be provoked to articulate an ethical approach to things. To experience how actants (be they cross, gold, Lothar, pilgrim, or the memory of Augustus as a really great emperor) are the builders of the collective reality.  Can you fight social injustice by loving the Lothar Cross?  You can’t do it through the Cross as an object; you have to give up on yourself as the wielder of stuff to make things right. But remember, start to see: the pilgrim does her own looking and savoring outside of what you think is right. Each viewer is an actant in the ever-shifting experience of lushness guided by material, sense, perception, and response. These precepts of the aesthetics of ontology precede, and perpetually recede from, the concerns of epistemology. They will not attend to iconography, liturgy, or symbolism. They will group around the pilgrim, feel her tiredness and warmth, her thirst and relief, the dryness of her hands as her fingers reach for the cool touch of the cross or the crucible. Gather with her in wonder. We, the art historians, the gathered here today, are the latest actants in the trajectory of this Cross, we hurtle forth with it for a little while, building collectives along the way - that’s the future we want.

***

Ultimately, our call for the future (of our field, our discipline, our humanities endeavor) is not simply for a return to “materiality,” or a “new” materialism, in relation to specific representations or objects. It is rather a call to treat the objects of medieval studies (the artworks, the texts, the artefacts, the histories, the people) with compassion. To see them in their native logics, their strangeness, their ontological beauty. Materiality is not a trend or a fashion or a mode; it is an ethical system, and it should inform our collective future. That’s the future we want.

Figure Captions:

Figure 1: The Lothar Cross, jeweled side (“Front”), c. 1000, gold, gilt silver and gems over a wood core, 49.8 cm x 38.8 cm x 2.3 cm. Cathedral Treasury, Aachen, photo by Ann Münchnow, photo ©: Domkapitel Aachen.

Figure 2:  The Lothar Cross, oblique view of jewels and filigree. Cathdral Treasury, Aachen, photo ©: Domkapitel Aachen.

Figure 3: The Lothar Cross, detail view of jewels and filigree. Cathdral Treasury, Aachen, photo ©: Domkapitel Aachen.

Figure 4: Saxo-Norman Crucible, mid 11th-mid 12th century, ceramic; earthenware, H 78 mm; DM (rim) 103 mm. Museum of London #13175.

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^[1] Aquinas’s discussion of these “animated pleasures” appears in his commentary on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, in Sententia Ethicae 3; see Mary Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 71.

^[2] Carruthers, 17.

^[3] For excellent recent work on the Cross, see Eliza Garrison, Ottonian Imperial Art and Portraiture: The Artistic Patronage of Otto III and Henry II (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012).

^[4] On “minificence and magnificence”, and the pleasures of puzzlement in medieval artefacts (both text and image), see Carruthers 151-155, 172-175, and 187-193.

^[5] Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology; or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012)

^[6] A recent study of these and other “misplaced” engraved stones is Genevra Kornbluth, “Roman Intaglios Oddly Set: the Transformative Power of the Metalwork Mount,” in “Gems of Heaven’: Recent Research on Engraved Gemstones in Late Antiquity, c. AD 200-600,” ed. Chris Entwistle and Noël Adams, British Museum Research Publication 177 (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 2011): 248-256.

^[7] Michael Ann Holly, in “Notes From the Field: Materiality,” Art Bulletin 95 (2013): 10-37 (16).

^[8] Paul Duro, The Academy and the Limits of Painting in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Duro discusses Poussin’s letter to his friend Chantelou, in which the artist champions the use of the frame, on pp. 180ff. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987), especially “The Parergon,” 37-82.

^[9] http://www.binetti.ru/bernardus/14.shtml  “we [monks like Bernard who] deem things that gleam with beauty, soothe with sound, please with smell, temper with sweetness, lighten with touch, as shit.” [A.H. translation]

^[10] “Suos lapides induit auro, et suos filios nudos deserit.”

^[11] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter; a Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 3.

^[12] Maura Nolan, “Medieval Sensation and Modern Aesthetics: Aquinas, Adorno, Chaucer,” Minnesota Review 80 (2013): 145-158.

^[13] See Roger Fry, Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1926), especially Chapter 1, “Some Questions in Esthetics” (1-44).

^[14] Bernard Berenson, Aesthetics and History (London: Constable, 1950), quoted in Michael Ann Holly, “The Melancholy Art,” Art Bulletin 89/1 (2007): 7-17 (7).

^[15] For a recent explorations of this divide, see Francis Halsall, “Making and matching: aesthetic judgement and art historical knowledge,” Journal of Art Historiography 7 (2012): 1-17. The gap between personal, “subjective” writing about art and “traditional” art historical scholarship is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in T.J. Clark’s lovely book, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), a meditation on his relationship with two paintings by Poussin.  

[16] De administratione, trans. Erwin Panofksy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 63-65.

^[17] See Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011), 101-121.

^[18] A good discussion of this is Ivan Gaskell, “Beauty,” in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Schiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 267-280.

^[19]  The Museum of London’s collection includes over 150 pieces of hand-shaped Anglo-Saxon and Early Medieval ceramic, many of them catalogued here: http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/ceramics/pages/category.asp?cat_id=693&page=1

^[20] Bogost, 74.