Postcard from Cozumel

Just back from a trip around the western Caribbean -- not scholarly, of course, but it was impossible to resist the lure of Mayan ruins on Cozumel. We toured a site called San Gervasio, named not -- as you might expect from that "San" -- after a saint, but instead in lasting memory of the man who ruined the ruins.

In the days before the conquistadors, Cozumel had been a thriving pilgrimage site, especially for young women. Smallpox and other diseases so decimated its population that the island was essentially abandoned until the nineteenth century brought a new wave of settlers from the mainland. "San Gervasio" is an area in the island's interior that was christened by its new owner with his own name: he thought so highly of himself that he added that saintly descriptor, and used the land as a ranch. The Mayan temple complex he blew to pieces with dynamite, seeking a wealth these architectures did not hide. Now a national park, the area is protected by the Mexican government as a heritage site. Gervasio's descendants are fighting to regain the land.

Archaeologists are carefully reconstructing the Mayan complex, so upon tumbled mounds stone pillars and walls are rising again. To walk through this landscape of shattered steps and fragmented structures is to feel not the melancholy of some lost past, but the life of these stones in the present. Unlike Stonehenge, with its circumscriptive walkway system that separates its megaliths from the time into which they intrude but a time which they do not seem to inhabit, at San Gervasio few barriers prevent you from treading where you wish, from exploring whatever odd nooks strike your fancy. The small teams of excavators and construction laborers may give you a bored glance if you intrude upon some space where they are working, but otherwise you are as much a part of the scenery for them as the iguanas and palms. Most striking in these ruins are the remains of walls with bright red handprints upon them, the lasting trace of lives which touched them centuries ago and left no other story.

My son Alexander even found something among the smashed rocks: a circular piece of ancient white that is either the remnant of a broken dish or a fragment of a skull. This is the same kid who discovered a Neolithic flint axe in Hyde Park. In this case, however, he has made himself so nervous about the possibility of a curse inhering in the bone that he won't talk about his find at all.

Ruins and Poetry: Beowulf and Bethlehem Steel

I’ve spent the last few days in Buffalo, New York, which some of my readers from Old English in New York will know is where my father’s family originates. I end up on the shores of Lake Erie at least twice a year now – and it’s a place I’ve come to think of as a kind of home.

About a week ago, in Boston with some of my dearest of friends, I finally saw the movie Beowulf. There are a number of very worthy blog-reviews, and more traditional reviews as well; however, I’ve been reticent to add my voice to the growing number. I saw the movie. I felt vaguely embarrassed as my friends asked me if THAT was what I studied. I cringed as the dialogue and speeches I love were destroyed by lines that no Anglo-Saxon warrior would ever say. I felt betrayed at the blatant sexuality and the use of women in the poem, the way they weren’t granted so much as a point of view, the way even those who had an opinion didn't ever fight back. No, I didn’t like this movie. It didn’t show me the poem I love, and it didn’t show me the gravitas I have come to cherish in my Anglo-Saxon verse.

And then, on the way to a family day-after-Thanksgiving gathering I caught sight of something familiar. The old Bethlehem steel factories live on the outskirts of Buffalo in a town called Lackawanna. Parts are owned by a foreign company – Mittal. Those parts are kept up, have been rebuilt even in the five years I’ve been coming back to Buffalo. The majority of the buildings, however, are modern ruins, growing vast fields of tall grasses inside the hollowed out sections of old structures, gated and barb-wired, a darkened wasteland sitting on the banks of Lake Erie. I don’t know the history of Bethlehem steel – at least, I do not know it intimately. It seems to be caught up in greed, exploitation, and the pain both cause in people who never see the profits of their labor, the ugliness of its moral stance written in grey slag on the beachfront. Nick Howe wrote eloquently in Across an Inland Sea that, unlike its northern neighbor Toronto, Buffalo will never be a city of “heritage”: a past one accepts without moral, or more likely, aesthetic embarrassment...a useable past for interior decorators (38). Buffalo is made of something tougher, less pliable, but perhaps (if one can make such a claim) more real. Again, borrowing from Howe’s elegant description: “Looking at the world from a city in decline keeps you from believing too many of the claims other places make about their futures. And it teaches you to value those intact ruins which were once someone else’s city of the future” (38).

Yet rising above these ruins now are the turbines that form part of what is called “Steel Winds” – an effort (I hope not final) to make the area which has for so long been home to the carcass of a giant productive once more. From an article in the Buffalo News, this line particularly struck me:

Fate has not forsaken us. It gave us a stiff wind blowing off Lake Erie. It left us a vast lakeside stretch of befouled land unsuitable for human habitation — but perfect for the mammoth wind turbines that no one wants to live near.

Fate here isn't anything that Beowulf and company would have recognized -- as we so often do in this age, fortune is blamed only for the good that falls to humans, and is said to be absent when we taste only of the bad. Boethian references aside, it is strange to see Fate invoked in this context...and stranger still as I wonder about what Fate--or more appropriately in this context, Wyrd--has done with the Beowulf I find beautiful, but that millions will now see as an adventure story where Pride is the Enemy, and the Sins of the Father echo in progeny born from the bodies of women objectified.

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, in The Monsters and the Critics, a line that's been troubling me as I've written and re-written my dissertation prospectus these past few weeks.

Beowulf is not a “primitive poem;” it is a late one, using the materials (then still plentiful) preserved from a day already changing and passing, a time that has now for ever vanished, swallowed in oblivion; using them for a new purpose, with a wider sweep of the imagination, if with a less bitter and concentrated force. When new Beowulf was already antiquarian, in a good sense, and it now produces a singular effect. For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart that sorrows have which are both poignant and remote. If the funeral of Beowulf moved once like the echo of an ancient dirge, far-off and hopeless, it is now to us like memory brought over the hills, an echo of an echo. There is not much poetry in the world like this...

Tolkien's point on the wider sweep of imagination aside, I think there's something in the assertion that Beowulf uses materials "preserved from a day already changing and passing" to bring down though generations the story we claim we know. Put together from pieces of a fragmented past, "Beowulf" is a poem we know, perhaps, only by its reputation -- we know it by what we've been left. We know the figurative landscape of the poem: the story of a hero, the monsters he fights and the death he dies doing it. We guess at the tone of the poem, of its seriousness and its strength, but we can only ever make an educated guess at its contemporary reception or use -- and the educated guess is still inflected by chance, however slight.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I think our interpretation of Beowulf is far more like bricolage than we are perhaps sometimes willing to admit. Neil Gaiman, in an article about the movie that I actually managed to read in its entirety (and I will read all of those blog reviews in greater detail - Prof. Noakes has a great list of them compiled at Unlocked Wordhoard, I've just not had time to work through all of it!), says of his first reading of Beowulf : "And I thought, this is a great story. It's got serious monsters in it and dragon fighting at the end. That's when I fell in love with it."

He fell in love with it based on those monsters Tolkien tried so hard to lift beyond what demeaning (and demanding) critics might say about them. Sitting with my high-school age cousin this weekend as I helped her work out the answers to her AP homework questions on the poem, I realized that Beowulf is a ruin in this day and age -- a structure whose original purpose is lost and broken, a structure that might hold meaning but doesn't hold a concrete use for the majority of those dwelling in the present day (the metaphysical musings on ruins, however, is another matter). All my eloquence about the poem's structure and beauty weren't of interest, wouldn't move my cousin to love the poem in the way I do, any more than it could her classmates, or any more than it did for me my senior year of high school. I didn't love Beowulf until someone -- Gillian Overing, in my first Old English class -- told me a story I could understand, a story I wanted to know more about. And at the end of the day, all my philology work and theoretical readings and deep study of the Middle Ages aside, here's what I think matters abotu Beowulf -- the movie and the poem: from the wreckage of the past, the burned remnants of manuscript and centuries of bored English majors, Neil Gaiman found a story he could tell, one to try to move other people to engage this work of the distant past. It wasn't the most well-executed story, and as a film it was just sad in places. But that's what we risk when we resurrect the past in the form of new media and new stories - we risk that this time will fail too, that the wreckage will only be added to, that our work will remain a ruin.

Driving by the Steel Winds turbines today on my way into the city, towering over the wreckage of the steel plant which used to be at the heart of the city's economic life, I also realized something else. There's a grace in the slender turbines which rise above the industrial waste of the past: there's a future here, a future of renewable energy resources. A future that's more than the past it is built on, and perhaps even a future that has learned from the history written in the unliveable land. And as with the Steel Winds, so with Beowulf: we cannot escape that Anglo-Saxon England was a violent and unforgiving place to live, a place where women were used (and horribly) as means to political ends, a place where feuds might obliterate whole peoples.

But it was much, much more than that too. Maybe there's something yet to learn from this Beowulf, beyond Angelina Jolie's nudity and Beowulf's bad lines. Maybe it can speak to something more than the sum of the parts of the past it inherited. Maybe its resurrection at this cultural moment is itself of value. And maybe we're too close -- temporally, spiritually -- to see this movie for what it might be: another performance of a poem whose ending has not been written yet.



The black and white photos on this page were taken by Kendall Anderson and can be found on this photoblog.

cross posted at Old English in New York

Medieval Studies, Unsettled Subjectivity, and the Thousand Tiny Itinerants of Saint Guthlac's Body

Figure 1. St. Guthlac en route to Crowland

At the prodding of Craig Dionne, an early modernist and editor of the book, Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, who is also currently editing a special issue of Early Modern Culture on "Vagrant Subjects," I recently read the brilliant book by Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England, which has prompted me to think about how we, in early medieval studies especially, might start wrapping our brains around the problem of how to account for the "low" or "mobile" subjectivity of medieval persons who might have been the "working" or "displaced" or "vagrant" or other type of "poor" in early English culture. It is the understanding of many in early modern studies that the project simply wouldn't be possible in our field, partly because the type of exploitive commodification more prevalent in the economies of early modern England [and beyond] had not yet emerged, and partly because, well, you know . . . there is no subjectivity in early English literature that can be readily accessed and analyzed [such that we might also ruminate not only "low" subjectivity but also the ways in which more privileged classes might have appropriated that subjectivity for their own aesthetic and social ends].

I am just returned from the annual meeting of the Midwest MLA [in Cleveland, Ohio] where I participated on a panel on this very subject with Martin Shichtman [medievalist who most recently has written on the cultural capital of the Arthur myth in medieval England and also on depictions of the Middle Ages in contemporary film], Craig Dionne, and Joseph Csicsila [co-editor, with Craig, of the Journal of Narrative Theory, and a Twain scholar], and let's just say we had many heated discussions [um, arguments] about this over multiple beers and martinis [with the help, thank god, on the medievalist side, of Laurie Finke and Christine Neufeld]. As someone who thinks and writes a lot about Old English literature, especially in relation to the question of what constitutes or "counts as" a [somehow inviolable or sacred or "human"] "person" in Anglo-Saxon England, I think the more recent discussions in early modern studies on vagrancy, mobility, low subjectivity/low aesthetics, and the working/displaced poor provide an excellent point of departure for how we might consider these same categories in early English history and literature. The best book thus far that hits very close to these themes, in my mind, is David Gary Shaw's Necessary Conjunctions: The Social Self in Medieval England, a book I've plugged so many times on this blog I think I've lost count [but go here for one of those plugs].

For myself, I've decided to approach the question, first, by way of Fumerton's book; second, by way of Jeffrey's deleuzoguattarian approach to the Old English and Anglo-Latin Guthlac narratives, "The Solitude of Saint Guthlac," which forms a chapter in his book Medieval Identity Machines; and third, by way of recent work in post-colonial and deleuzoguattarian-inflected cultural studies on "embodied others" and "nomadic ethics" [by Sara Ahmed and Rosi Braidotti, respectively, with some work by Iain Chambers on migrancy and identity thrown in for the heck of it]. I don't know where I am ultimately going with all of this, except that I plan to make this a primary writing project over the next year or so and will be presenting different stages of my thinking, vis-a-vis the Guthlac narratives, at conferences and in other venues over the next eight or so months, partly in relation to the other question that's been nagging me for a while now: is a queer Old English literary studies possible, and if so, what would it look like? In any case, I share with you here a draft of the brief talk I gave in Cleveland, "The Thousand Tiny Itinerants of Saint Guthlac's Body," and any suggestions for further reading, thinking, etc. would be greatly appreciated.

The Thousand Tiny Itinerants of Saint Guthlac’s Body

If we consider the great binary aggregates, such as the sexes or classes, it is evident that they also cross over into molecular assemblages of a different nature, and that there is also a double reciprocal dependency between them. For the two sexes imply a multiplicity of molecular combinations bringing into play not only the man in the woman and the woman in the man, but the relation of each to the animal, the plant, etc.: a thousand tiny sexes. And social classes themselves imply “masses” that do not have the same kind of movement, distribution, or objectives and do not wage the same kind of struggle. . . . Yes classes are indeed fashioned from masses; they crystallize them. And masses are constantly flowing or leaking from classes.
—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

In her book Unsettled, Patricia Fumerton explores the literal (material) as well as the literary (metaphorical) status of the itinerant laborer in early modern England in order to, in her words, trace “the emergence of a new kind of secular subjectivity in the period, one that was not solely God-based but that could . . . sense a more modern notion of singularity and disconnection.”[1] While this subject, in Fumerton’s view, would always be “socially determined, and in this sense, ‘subjected’ . . . the notion of such a subject also posits the possibility of a ‘free’ individual or detached self, even in the case of its actual or felt impossibility.”[2] But in order to map “the topography of lowly mobile workers,” we have to “liberate our thinking from the insistent critical dialectic . . . of ‘low’ versus ‘high,’ ‘margin’ versus ‘center,’” because

[t]his sometimes nuanced but ultimately dead-end dialectic is dependent on a placed universe (that is, one in which the voices of the low must be measured relative to the voices of those who have a “place” in society). But to truly understand the “low,” we must track them in their own space—a spaciousness of itinerancy, fragmentation, disconnection and multiplicity that produces a very different topographical mapping of societal relations than those determined by place.[3]

Fumerton is especially interested in investigating “the extent to which the straightforward ‘facts’ of lower-class mobility might result in a subjective interiorization of unsettledness,” or what she terms “unsettled subjectivity.”[4] And she is also interested in how this subjectivity is represented—in the public legal records (the official “clerk-ly” narrative), in the private journals of the landless seaman Edward Barlow (the “low” autobiography, as it were), and perhaps most importantly, in the “lowly street literature” of broadside street ballads centering on the lives of seaman which offered to their “lowly” audiences both the assurances of “placed constancy” as well as “inconsistency and unsettledness at ‘no cost.’” Ultimately, these ballads marketed “multifarious, dispersed, and provisional identities” and “point us to a future study of lowly street literature [the spacious voices] . . . of early modern England, as much as to a new class of unmoored and global workers.”[5]

It is partly my aim here to say that the so-called modern romanticization of itinerant or wayward identity as a form of freedom, as well as the interiorization of “unsettledness,” is not by any means uniquely modern, although the Anglo-Saxon period from which I draw my thinking will not readily reveal to us a mobile working class of itinerant wage laborers such as the button-makers and tinkers who populated early modern England, much less private journals kept by the “lowly” denizens of these ranks. Indeed, pretty much the entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature can be considered, for the most part, as the remnants of a “high” or “official” culture, and that means also, a culture that was decidedly not secular. Which is not to say there is no way to track what might be called the figuration of low subjectivity (the Old English elegies Wanderer and Seafarer, or saints’ legends like Mary of Egypt, certainly provide good places to start)—only that when we do find it, we have to understand that it is always constructed, always appropriated, always literary. Nevertheless, in the Anglo-Latin and Old English narratives of the life of the eighth-century Mercian Saint Guthlac (674?-714) we have a figure who possesses a certain contemporaneous versimilitude, and who also battles demons that, in one regard, are merely stand-ins for the lowly Celtic or British fen dwellers whom Guthlac displaces when he decides to transpose himself from aristocratic warrior to Christian monk and then to hermit saint—all of which requires moving from the interior circles of Mercian-Anglian political power through the regula and doxa of Christian monasticism to an abandoned earthwork on a small island (Crowland) in the swampy frontier land between East Anglia and Mercia. This is the geography of the “midlands” where, in the narratives of the saint’s life, Guthlac’s body is subjected to continual assault by “terrible and strange old fiends” who are also the former “inhabitants” of “settlements” where Guthlac now lives (Guthlac A: ll. 140-41).[6] At one point, in the Anglo-Latin Life, the conflation between devils and “Britons” (who may themselves be stand-ins for the Welsh with whom Mercia was continually tilting against) is made starkly clear when, in a troubled dream, Guthlac confronts a host of demons in the form of “British troops” (Brittanicaque agmina) whose “barbarous speech” (strimulentas loquelas) he recognizes from having once lived as a prisoner-exile among them. In his dream, these “British”-appearing demons lift him in the air on the “sharp points” of their spears, at which point God causes them to vanish (Life, sec. XXXIV).[7]

In his essay “The Solitude of Guthlac,” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is concerned with showing how, “[t]hrough Guthlac’s body,” there “courses a specifically eighth-century formulation of Anglo-Saxon unity constructed against a British inferiority, a fantasy of corporate integrity with vast colonialist utility for contemporary Mercia.” At the same time, however, “Guthlac never quite achieves the celibate solitude for which he yearns, for the saint is throughout his life persecuted by a throng of demons who lift him, unwilling, into their own identity machines, into their own perverse becomings.”[8] In Cohen’s mind, the Guthlac legends have been “inscribed by their Mercian emergence with a dual trajectory, an inward movement toward self-definition via the envaluation of homogeneity and an outward vector of dilation and assimilation.”[9] As Cohen notes,

the tribute list known as the Tribal Hidage . . . depicts Mercia as a land amalgamated from much smaller units (regiones, kingdoms, tribes), some consisting of several thousand households, like Hwicce, and others containing only a few hundred. . . . Cohesion was attempted coercively, juridically, apostolically, ideologically. Mercian kings obliged subject rulers to provide labor, materializing a sense of corporateness and shared territory via a call to defense against outsiders. The building of fortifications like Offa’s Dyke can therefore be seen as instrumental to the project of building an ambitious ethnic and political collectivity.[10]

This was an enforced collectivity, one that may have circumscribed certain limits upon the movements of un-domiciled individuals. Anglo-Saxon law codes of the ninth through eleventh centuries make this very clear, and further study of their proscriptions concerning domicile and travel, and who is a “foreigner,” would lend a deeper historicization to Fumerton’s analysis of the mobile poor in early modern England.

Ultimately, in Cohen’s words, “[p]ossible bodies never exist in a pure state, can never escape the markings of history even as they struggle against historical constraint. Only through concrete relations with time and with the material world do bodies of any kind ever become solid,” and desire—whether the desire of a saint to remain celibate and untouched and unpenetrated or the desire of a demon to penetrate that celibate body—pace Deleuze Guattari, is always a “volatile, ‘molecular’ phenomenon that can never be fully caught into anthropomorphic representation,” as well as a “perpetual motion of shifting contiguities.” [11] This body encloses and disperses, as it were, a thousand tiny sexes, which “constantly construct and dismantle themselves in the course of their communication, as they cross over and into each other, beyond, or before a certain threshold.”[12] Indeed, in the Anglo-Latin account written by Felix, there is one arresting and extended scene which strikingly illustrates the horror of the mixing of thousands of bodies as well as the inevitability of their schizoid inter-penetrations: intent on disturbing Guthlac while he is praying in his barrow, a multiplicity of demons (so thick that the “whole space of the skies” is darkened with their “dusky” and “cloud-like” shapes) enters shrieking through the floor-holes, doorway joints, and spaces in the “wattleworks” of Guthlac’s lowly home where they bind him and carry him “through the wildest part of the fen,” then drag him “through the dense thickets of brambles, tearing his limbs and all his body.” They then wing him “through the cloudy stretches of the freezing skies,” where even more squadrons, or thunderstorms, of demons are met, all of whom then drag Guthlac down to the “jaws of hell” (Life, Sec. XXXI). As Cohen writes, “the demonic invasion of Guthlac’s cell stages an encounter between a saint who, although an amalgam of disparate pieces himself, has unified these fragments into a totality, and a swarm of demons who resist any settled harmony, any figuring of the body as stable,” and at this “nexus where sameness seeks to obliterate difference, at this place of suture where a saintly Anglo-Saxon face is produced, Guthlac temporarily disperses himself across his own demons,” who, through Felix’s descriptions of them as both amorphous clouds but also as “great heads” and “scabby thighs” and “swollen ankles” and “fierce eyes” and “horse’s teeth” and “throats vomiting flames,” are “multiplicity enfleshed, molecular and conjunctive.”[13]

Ultimately, as Cohen argues, when “Guthlac is read with his fiends rather than against them, when monster, man, fen, beorg, church, nation, text, God, hell are mapped as pieces of an identity machine consisting of ‘provisional linkages of elements, fragments, flows, of disparate status and substance: ideas, things—human, inhuman, and inanimate,’ then Guthlac becomes something other than the saint who ascends to a celestial throne to escape time and change.” For Guthlac—whoever he might be or of what or whom he may be composed—“is the assemblage formed by a sacred body battling demons who are bound, like him, to an intense and contagious desire for a fenland beorg, who are bound to an audience who are in turn bound to them.”[14] This also raises the question, for me, of how the Guthlac narratives function(ed) as art for, regardless of their possibly regulative and disciplinary and ideological intentions rooted in a politics of Christo-nationalist place, they open a path to the sensorium of the unregulated, displaced, and wildly mobile “flows” and “intensities” of the extreme, transformational processes of what Deleuze and Guattari termed “de-territorialization,” in which, I would argue, reader, author, and text together form a “becoming-world, carried out in such a way that it becomes imperceptible itself, asignifying, makes its rupture, its own line of flight, follows its ‘aparallel evolution’ through to the end.”[15]

Although the hermetic life is one in which a hard and closed singularity is prized over a loose and open multiplicity, Guthlac’s hermitage is not possible without adopting the habitus of those who, historically, have been multiply displaced and un-housed across the landscape of a middle-land that is itself always migrating (from, for example, the arable farmsteads of the post-Roman period to the labyrinth of black streams and reed beds of Guthlac’s time to the drained green plains of today). These are the migrants and exiles who, always on the move and perhaps legally undomiciled, become the strangers and foreigners, the impressed laborers but also the “illegals” (the “devils”). Strikingly, in the Old English poetic version of the legend (where the watery and cave-like barrow of the Latin narrative has been transposed into a desolate and hidden mountaintop), this is made explicitly clear when the poet tells us that Guthlac’s hermitage is a “secret place” (dygle stow, l. 215) where God once allowed the “fiends” to live when, “tired from their wanderings, the accursed came to rest for a stolen moment” (Guthlac A: ll. 212-13). And in the first extended confrontational exchanges between Guthlac and “exiled kinsmen” (wræcmæcgas, l. 263), certain “spokesmen” for the “fiends” excoriate Guthlac for wresting their “home” (ham, l. 271) from them, and also warn him that he has chosen an impossible and even animal life, one in which no one will ever give him sustenance (Guthlac A: ll. 273-78). In its descriptions of the demons, who are also displaced kinsmen, the language of the Old English Guthlac A slides back and forth between the idea of Guthlac’s harassers as apparitions from an otherworldly hell whom God appoints as the saint’s torturers and as exiles recently evicted from their marginal dwellings who appear on their own initiative to claim their landholding rights and to warn Guthlac of the hardship of the e/stranged life (their life) he has chosen.

To be a saint living in the wilderness—to be Guthlac—is to be literally strange in the sense that Sara Ahmed gives to that term in her discussion of the relationship between identity, belonging, and home in her book Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, where she writes that, in the construction of the figure of the migrant, historically, “the strangers are the ones who, in leaving the home of the nation, are the bodies out of place in the everyday world they inhabit, and in the communities in which they come to live.”[16] And the “drama” of the stranger, following the thinking of Iain Chambers, is one in which the stranger is “cut off from their homelands of tradition” and becomes an “emblem” or “figure” that “draws our attention to the urgencies of our time: a presence that questions our present.”[17] But it is Ahmed’s feeling that “to take the figure of the stranger as simply present is to overlook and forget the very relationships of social antagonism that produce the stranger as a figure in the first place,” and this view finally “fetishizes” the stranger, in much the same way, I would argue, that the authors of the Guthlac narratives and Guthlac himself, as a fictional character, fetishizes the demons and outcast “Britons” who haunt and torture him. This ultimately produces what Ahmed terms an “ontology” of the stranger “as given in and to the world,” and finally “conceals how ‘the stranger’ comes into being through the marking out of inhabitable spaces, bodies and terrains of knowledge. To talk of the migrant [then,] is not sufficient. It cannot deal with the complexities of the histories, not only of the displacement of peoples, but the demarcation of places and spaces of belongings” or “dwellings.”[18]

Here, then, is where I see the possibility of beginning to suture some lines of thought from Fumerton’s account of “unsettled” or “lowly” or “landless” subjectivity in early modern England—which also gestures toward the possibility of considering the “lowly modern subject” of global capitalism—back to the “incorporated” and utlah (“outlaw”) bodies and minds of a more God-based Anglo-Saxon England and forward to the work of Ahmed, Rosi Bradotti, Iain Chambers, and others on nomadic subjectivity and ethics in a late, transnational capitalist culture. Such suturing of these disparate discourses into what I would call a “deep” or “long” history might be necessary if we believe that what Braidotti calls the “embodied and embedded” nature of subjects is directly proportional to the ability of those bodies to aim for affirmative and joyful and not nihilistic and destructive processes of becoming, and if we believe further, in Braidotti’s words, that the “capacity to endure is collective, it is to be shared,” and further, “[i]t is held together by narratives, stories, exchanges, shared emotions and affects. It is neither equal to itself nor does it guarantee self-perpetuation.”[19] Or, in the words of Virginia Woolf in her novel The Waves (and thinking again of Guthlac merging with his demons), “But when we sit together, close . . . we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an insubstantial territory.”[20]

Endnotes

[1] Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. xiii.
[2] Fumerton, Unsettled, p. xiii.
[3] Fumerton, Unsettled, pp. xiii–xiv.
[4] Fumerton, Unsettled, pp. xviii.
[5] Fumerton, Unsettled, pp. xxi.
[6] Citations of Guthlac A are from Jane Roberts, ed., The Guthlac Poems of the Exeter Book (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). Translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
[7] All citations of the Anglo-Latin Life are from Bertram Colgrave, ed. and trans., Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956). All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
[8] Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “The Solitude of Guthlac,” Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 117 [116–53].
[9] Cohen, “The Solitude of Guthlac,” p. 121.
[10] Cohen, “The Solitude of Guthlac,” p. 145.
[11] Cohen, “The Solitude of Guthlac,” pp. 141, 147, 148.
[12] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 33.
[13] Cohen, “The Solitude of Guthlac,” pp. 150, 151.
[14] Cohen, “The Solitude of Guthlac,” p. 152.
[15] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 11.
[16] Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 78.
[17] Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 6.
[18] Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 79.
[19] Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity Press, 2006), pp. 160, 199.
[20] Virginia Woolf, The Waves (London: Grafton, 1977), p. 11.

A weight has lifted

Last night I gave the Holloway Lecture at McDaniel College. Those of you who have been reading its fragments here at ITM know that "The Weight of the Past" is a rapid tour that commences in deep time, where ages are registered by the lives of rocks rather than the duration of organisms, and lingers over the interaction of pieces of distant history with medieval worlds. The talk's temporal trajectory endsmore than 10,000 years hence, in the Department of Energy's attempt to think beyond the extinction of English and of the USA. Nothing too ambitious.

The Holloway Lecture is a big deal on the McDaniel campus, involving a dinner at the President's House and a formal talk attended by just about anyone with a connection to the place. Every college should have an annual humanities event like this one. I could see immediately the good work it does in solidifying intellectual community.

My lecture went very well, helped in part by the extraordinary hospitality of Kathy Mangan and Becky Davis, as well as the contagious enthusiasm of a large group of students and faculty. Technology has recently turned against me: in the last month I have laundered my cell phone, lost my laptop to a thief, and had the navigator device in my car attempt to strand me at a distant farm. I was afraid that my parade of PowerPoint images would combust the moment I hit the PLAY button, but fortunately we were able to gaze at Barber Rock, nuclear warning architectures, Neolithic tombs, and even Albus Dumbledore. I don't usually use projected images when I deliver a talk, but this one really required them. The hushed darkness also gave a solemnity to the proceedings that was broken only occasionally by my famously bad jokes.

McDaniel College is bucolic, architecturally beautiful, an intense but nurturing place for students and faculty alike. I truly enjoyed my time there. The students are ardent blog readers, and knew many a post from ITM. They also love the Chaucer blog. I was asked many times during my visit to reveal the identity of tits author. I stated that I will die first -- and (in the absence of a very large bribe) I will.

I was so wired after the lecture that I didn't climb into bed until past midnight. I arose at 5.15, hit the road ... and spent two and a half hours in traffic, a particle in the wave of insane people who commute to Washington and Baltimore from the exurbs every day. I arrived at GW just in time to hear my colleague Gil Harris give a brilliant introduction to Stephen Greenblatt (did you know that Greenblatt performed with the troupe who became Monty Python, and is mentioned [as dead] in one of their classic skits?). Greenblatt gave an extraordinary talk about his collaboration with contemporary playwright Charles Mee. They have reimagined Shakespeare's lost play Cardenio, using the process of staging and translating that work to theorize cultural mobility -- and even imagining what "mobility studies" might be.

Thanks, ITM readers, bloggers, and commentators, for all your support and suggestions as I refined my ideas. The lecture would not have been nearly as good were it not for the community that congregates here.

(PS The image above is Augustine banishing a heretic, which I used in my talk as an image of what Augustine tends to do to annoying heterogeneity in his materials. The talk was also in part about winged demons and their gigantic progeny, so the illustration performed double duty.)

Tuesday Morning and Translation

One of the blogs I subscribe to is the Words Without Borders blog, and today, a quick perusal of their website before I went to teach yielded two things I wanted to share with you all here at ITM.

First: I'm not the only person feeling inspired by Forster. Christopher Merrill has a post on the University of Iowa's writing program which he calls "Only Connect". An excerpt:

Literature works by subterranean means. Ideas migrate at the speed of thought, which for a writer in the act of composition means the speed of sound—syllable by syllable—if not the speed of light. And literary exchanges have the merit of launching new ideas into the cultural discourse.

This connects so well with some of the Deleuze and Guattari I've been reading over the past few weeks -- these rhizome networks of literature. One of the things I think, increasingly, is important, is the work of not simply literary critics, but truly literary scholars. Put differently: I don't think I'll ever understand The Wanderer as well as I did when I tried, after many years of writing about the poem, to actually write the poem, via translation.

Second: I had never heard of Doris Koreva until this morning. One of her poems, translated here, expresses for me the relationship between what Allen Mandelbaum called, in his Chelmaxioms "the-Reader and the-Read." The lines I found most intriguing:

The reader casts his shadow over the poem.

and

All possibilities bloom in language,
the mind hears but what it wants to
or what it fears.

Such hope for language -- for communication -- but simultaneously, such fear. However, Koreva suggests something in her poem I've always felt, though I don't think it made sense to me until this morning: Is there something about literature -- the writing or composition of text -- that is inherently hopeful? A leap of faith, even: faith in language, perhaps, but moreover -- faith in the possibility of communication?

cross posted at OEinNY

What would Chaucer watch?

If Chaucer owned a television set, what would he watch?

Nothing, of course. He had no electricity. And even if he did have power, his house had no outlets. And, even without a writer's strike, there were no shows. You had to read stuff in boring manuscripts that didn't attempt to flog snack foods and laxatives every ten minutes.

But if you want a merrier answer to that philosophical question, check out the back-to-life Chaucer blog. Though personally I believe Chaucer would have watched Curb Your Enthusiasm.

PS This perfectly apropos image brought to you by Eileen Joy, Myra J. Seaman, Kimberly K. Bell and Mary K. Ramsey, whose book is coming out soon.

Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror

My copy of Bruce's book arrived today (thanks, Bruce!) and I am truly looking forward to reading it. Has anyone else picked it up yet? Here is the description from the Prickly Paradigm website:

Far from an unfortunate cliché, medievalism has become a dominant paradigm for comprehending the identity and motivations of America’s perceived enemy in the War on Terror. Yet as Bruce Holsinger argues here, this cloying post-9/11 rhetoric has served to obscure the more intricate ideological machinations of neomedievalism, the global idiom of the non-state actor: NGOs, transnational corporate militias, and terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and al Qaeda. While International Relations theorists promote neomedievalism as a model for understanding emergent modes of global sovereignty, neoconservatives exploit its conceptual slipperiness for tactical ends. Holsinger concludes with a careful parsing of the Bush administration’s Torture Memos, which enlist neomedievalism’s model of feudal sovereignty toward the abrogation of human rights.

As mentioned on ITM last year.

Dissertation Fragments Part I: Horizons, or Two False Starts and an Abstract

So as a part of my ongoing dissertation prospectus work is preparation for a talk I’m giving at Wake Forest in late November. I’ve been invited back by my undergraduate advisers (and continuing mentors!) Gillian Overing and Gale Sigal to speak to the Medieval Studies group – a group including professors and grad students from a wide variety of disciplines, including English, French, History, Italian, etc. I am, needless to say, incredibly pleased to be giving this talk – it’ll be a lovely homecoming, and I’ll even get to sit in on Dr. Overing’s Old English class. That should bring back some memories! It’s intimidating, to be sure: it is my very first “real” academic talk, invited and everything. However, it’s also comforting: Profs. Overing and Sigal read my undergraduate honors thesis. Whatever I say in this talk (which is now taking solid form in preparation for a workshop this evening), it can’t be more embarrassing, or less intelligible, than my 36 page aria on a 115 line poem, titled: The Exile and the Other: Male Voice and Psychological Landscaping in the Wanderer. My undergraduate masterpiece would be reworked a number of times in the following years, but the 2004 version will always be my favorite -- and the longest -- of its iterations.

By way of new beginnings, then, as I enter the stage of my career that begins with the end of my orals reading and ends in the scariest place on earth, I offer some first, discarded fragments that underlie the central idea of my talk (and also my dissertation), which will be titled: "On the Horizons of History: Writing (and Rewriting) Anglo-Saxon Collectivities." To show where I've ended up in more concrete terms -- and as to provide a preview of coming attractions -- I've also included the abstract I sent to Wake as a kind of advance warning. Part II of this series will, in all probability, be sections from the talk itself (suggestions for format welcome).

Think of these fragments as meditations, or perhaps as interconnected musings. Try not to think of them as the past I’ve tried to repress. Because really, that’s just so linear...



I: A Place to Believe In

In the introduction to the collection of essays in A Place to Believe In, Clare Lees and Gillian Overing introduce the work of “gathering” that the essays perform in what they call a “meditation” on “the idea of Northumbria and its horizons, whether historical, cultural, or geographic” (7). Using the definition envisioned by Michael Casey’s “How to Get from Space to Place,” they define horizons as the [foundations] which “form the perceptual basis of boundaries [that] are themselves spatiotemporal in status. To be in perceptual field is to be encompassed by edges that are neither strictly spatial—we cannot map a horizon (even if we can draw it)—nor strictly temporal” (43, cited in Overing and Lees 8-9). In their thoughts on space, place and time in the Northumbrian landscape, Lees and Overing engage with the “crossroads” which place represents; indeed, the work of the authors in the collection are located “at the intersection of land and sea, or of space and belief; at the coming together of physical spaces and the bodies that inhabit and co-create them; and last but by no means least, at the juncture of past and present” (26). The horizon becomes a symbol of the possibility of continuity, perhaps even coexistence, in the present of memories, objects and writings of and from the past. The horizon, then, has much in common with a liminal space—“the horizon is porous, its boundaries shifting” (24). In the context of place, this interpretation allows Overing and Lees to imagine their own coexistence with Anglo-Saxon past which they can quite literally see, surrounding them in the landscape that encompasses Yeavering, Bamburgh and Lindisfarne. The concept of time, however, is more difficult. Alternate times—and Other histories—persist, but the horizons of history cannot help but function differently from those of the Northumbrian Landscape.

II: Order of the First Chaos

In the first calens of Ovid’s Fasti, another type of horizon might be considered, in the figure of Janus. Janus is the two-headed god of gateways (I.65). However, Janus also delimits a boundary: his most vital role is as not only the god of gateways, but also as the god of the first Chaos. When he was first formed, “yon lucid air and the three other bodies, fire, water, earth, were huddled all in one.” (I.105-6). He looks both forward and backward at the same time, and thus he looks forward to the coming year, and backward to the year which has already passed. The conception of time laid out by Janus is cyclical—the order of each calendrical year both precedes and follows itself as a kind of promise of stability in the observation of months and celebrations. However, because he is the god that the “ancients called Chaos” (I.65), the dual sight of Janus serves not simply to demarcate the boundaries of the repeating calendrical year, but as a perpetual reminder that order is preceded by chaos, and that chaos is perhaps still present beneath order’s thin veneer. Significantly, Janus, née Chaos, also serves as the protector of order. “All things are closed and opened” by his hand; he asserts and he avers that “the guardianship of this vast universe is in my hands alone, and none but me can rule the wheeling pole” (I.118-120). Order is quite literally in the hands of Chaos, and the calendrical year offers but a flimsy stability at best.

III: Horizons of History (an abstract)

My current project, tentatively titled Horizons of History, examines what might happen if we think of an “Anglo-Saxon England” with fluid boundaries – embracing the possibility of a semi-permeable, ever-changing horizon as both boundary and event, forming networks of written “collectivities” that are not confined to a single historical period or outlook. Engaging with the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, Bruno Latour, and Deleuze and Guattari, I wish to rethink the ways in which we conceptualize an “Anglo-Saxon” period via a sustained reading of historiographical material written on both sides of the Norman Conquest. My focus in this paper will be two-fold. First, it will serve as an outline and preliminary defense of the topic of my dissertation – positing both the possibility of a “Long Anglo-Saxon Period” in the Middle Ages, and examining what is at stake in thinking of the period in this fashion. The second part of the talk will offer an overview of how I see this horizon of history functioning the in the political/poetic corpus, focusing specifically on the Old English Orosius and Beowulf.

_______

Works Cited

Lees, Clare and Gillian Overing (eds.). A Place to Believe In (Penn State: Philadelphia, 2006).
Ovid. The Fasti. (can't recall the edition)

Cross-posted at Old English in New York.

On the Market

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote the post below, and then upon further consideration (i.e., the strong suggestions of certain wise people I married), I decided to hold off posting this until I had a job of my own. Well, I got that, but other people don't just yet, and it is, once again, the most dreadful time of the year. Come back, old post, let you and your years-old links be resurrected!

====

I have a little TINY SHRINER contribution here, all links on the job market, for the many of us who find ourselves caught up in the hunt. From Wormtalk and Slugspeak we get the (hilarious) complaint that the MLA interview process and the processes of culling that lead to it "probably could not be worse if you hired Dr. Evil, Stanley Fish, Newt Gingrich, Sideshow Bob and Stalin to put together a process that is simultaneously bureaucratic and subject to the whims of insane people, tedious and capricious, utterly stressful and incredibly boring." The Ancrene Wiseass declares, contra conventional wisdom, "using clothes and jewelry as props to help you pretend to be someone you're not in a job interview is a very bad idea." Given my resistance to getting a "real" hair cut for MLA (i.e., one not done in haste in my own bathroom, straining somehow to get the back of my head right without lopping off an ear), I'm highly sympathetic. Jodi Dean offers hints in poisoning your chances: wearing sweatpants to your job talk (I suppose this means I have to retire my tweed sweats?), and this, too, "Answer[ing] questions during the office interviews with one word. This makes you seem mysterious. When asked about your research agenda, stare blankly at your interlocutor. If pressed, talk only about your dissertation until your interlocutor falls asleep." Oso Raro, at Slaves of Academe appalls me (with his details) and thrills me (with his style) about the job hunt, one of a set,
"The Voluptuous Horror of the Academic Job Market (Part One): The Beauty Secrets of Searching," where he describes the "racism, colorism, potential GLBT issues, as well as plain old unpleasant revelation of fear and intolerance" that's (apparently) all too common in the hiring process and suggests that certain offers should be met by "pack[ing] it up now and open[ing] a hot dog stand in Finland, cause dollface, you will be eaten ALIVE!" On a related note, Slouching Towards Extimacy likens the acculturation to the academy to boot camp, which I imagine rings true especially for anyone (like me) who's the first member of their family to go to college:

We are willing to undergo an incredibly lengthy, often alienating and disorienting, and sometimes very mysterious process of 'professionalization' to get into that office behind closed doors in 'the academy,' and while it’s true that we don’t have to do pushups or shoot anyone, it’s also true that we are willing to pay a significant amount of money for the privilege. And we may very learn that we can, in fact, put up with just about anything in order to hang onto our developing senses of professional identity.

I'm sure there are tens if not hundreds of other guides to and stories of the market and becoming an academic: I encourage our readers to throw up a few more links, and share their own stories, below.
==

Here I am in the present, with a few of my worst moments from last year. If I remember correctly, one school wanted someone who covered England 900-1300. That's the job for me! I do trilingual England. Well, they wanted, as became apparent only during the interview, an Old English person, and they found it merely a lagniappe that I did French. Nowhere in my material did I lie by claiming any ability in Old English, but, well, I faked it in front of a committee of, I kid you not, 10 people. "How would you teach Old English?" "Oh, well...I'd start with the riddles and work my way toward longer pieces" (thinking, too obviously, so I could have time to learn the goddamn language). "We have a very strong interest in Old English here. It's a year-long course." "Huh. Wow. Seriously?"

At another interview, I talked about a class in Warriors (!) I wanted to teach that would run from, oh, the Aeneid to Coriolanus. The Early Modernist in the room got a bit excited because he just loves the play. Me too, I gush, and I burst with my favorite line in it: "Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him!" I may have added an extra "kill." Or two. No doubt my slavering red-faced excitement helped me lose the job.

Someone elsewhere asked me how I'd teach the hunting scene in SGGK, because, you know, I'm an expert on animals. Now that I've finally taught it, I know, but then, I just mumbled something about Dinshaw and just waited to slip away. At another, they spoke of the community service component of tenure, and all I could offer was my work on the grad student union at Columbia and, er, this blog, because ITM saves the world. !!

Your turn if you want it.

Fightin' Binaries? Part II, Briefly, and a look into the classroom

For the interested: a few weeks back, I posed this question:

I'm troubled...because when push comes to shove, the spurned women of medieval romance often resort to accusations of, well, let's not call it sodomy, but they never (?) select a charge from any of the other medieval ways of being or not being sexual. Is there, in other words, a binary at work?"

Yesterday, while teaching "Lanval," I put the same question to my students. Apparently, they had drawn from the same well as JJC (who wrote in the comment thread, "I would wonder a little more about the genre specificity of certain definitions of sexuality"), as this is what they proposed:

• it's part of the definition of a knight to be of sexual service to someone. If he's refusing a woman, especially the presumptively best woman there is (Guinevere), then he must be serving something else, i.e., well-hung/well-dressed young nobles/servants. This answer could be refined somewhat, as the great polarity in romance is not male-female but noble and (the generally unrepresented) ignoble: so why not accuse the knight of loving a burger's burgher's daughter? (But on this, see the comment on class, below)
  
• With that in mind, they arrived at an even better solution: why don't spurned women accuse knights of being secret hermits or monks or otherwise bound to one of the many 12th-13th c. set of sexual codes? Because in a romance or a lai, that would be a compliment. Good answer, and duh (!) for me.

Unfortunately, we didn't get to the question of why the rape accusation (e.g., the Potiphar's wife story) becomes a sodomy accusation (or, as Lanval hears it, a prostitution accusation, that is, an attack on his class rather than an attack on his "sexuality"). But we did determine why Guinevere publicly charges Lanval not with sodomy but with attempting to seduce her and (the worse crime perhaps) dismissing her beauty: most practically, she should go with the charge that's easier to prove; but there's also a sense in which the "Vallez avez bien afeitiez" attacks the homosociality of the Arthurian court itself. The men really do prefer to hang out with other (well-dressed) men: notice the crowds around Gawain and Arthur's irritation when he's compelled to talk to his wife. Thus Lanval isn't the only guilty party here, and it's possible that while the sodomy charge might be privately embarrassing for Lanval, it's not a hanging offense so far as the court itself is concerned. I might have, but didn't, allude to squirrelly way of conservatives with Larry Craig, Jeff Gannon (and his customers), Matt Sanchez (and his customers), or Ted Haggard...

Waiting for "The Weight of the Past" to be Past

My Holloway lecture draws near. I think I'd be less nervous about the event if it weren't for the fact that a past lecture in this series was given by Steven Knapp, the literary theorist and new president of GW (who says a PhD in English won't get you places?). Just before Knapp was Jerome McGann. Jane Tompkins and John Barth have given the Holloway, too.

I've even made it into the Carroll County Times News Briefs, just under "2 flown to shock trauma after crash" and just above "Contestants sought for Miss Carroll pageant."

Here, for those who are interested, are some of the questions I will be addressing on Tuesday. If you can't make the road trip to Westminster, MD, you'll have a second chance: I'll be giving a more theory-heavy version of the talk at the University of Pennsylvania in March, sponsored by Theorizing. Though in the past I have been a relentlessly low tech lecturer, this talk is image heavy ... another worry, as I attempt to re-master my forgotten skills at PowerPoint.

The landscape of medieval Britain included, just as it does today, intrusions of the ancient past: the fossilized remains of prehistoric animals, Neolithic architectures like Avebury and Stonehenge, barrows and graves, the ruins of forgotten habitations. I'd like to explore the stories medieval people dreamed to give meaning to these remnants of lost worlds. I will raise and attempt to answer a series of related questions: How did medieval people understand the inhuman gap of time that separated them from fossils, megaliths, and their own moment in history? Can the distant past communicate in a language of its own? Or can it be heard only as translated into a contemporary language, an impoverished kind of listening? Can we know what structures like Avebury or stories like tales of the prophet Merlin meant to their authors? How do we treat time capsules like stone circles, burial mounds, or bodies recovered in bogs? As holy? As quarries for ordinary uses? As museum exhibits? What is sacred about the past, or does reverence impede understanding? Is a body buried with artifacts a message to the future, a letter to an uncertain receiver, or a gift sent to lost gods never to be opened by human hands? What of a text describing a vanished life? An imagined life? Can the past speak to us directly, or does it require a mediator, a necromancer, a Merlin? Must that which is history end as Merlin does: entombed forever in silent stone, the victim of his own inability to comprehend the workings of the world he inhabited? Can the distant past retain a vitality that is something more than a revenant's graveyard existence?

The Loving Hope of Working Groups and Humanist Desiring-Revolutions

Figure 1. An exile in Afuera, the Outside [still image from Code 46, dir. Michael Winterbottom]

When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that is really a door. —Simone Weil

In the spirit, not of meta-blogging, but of decentralized blogging, I thought I would highlight here some very interesting weblog posts and comments that have been unfolding, intra-textually and intra-otherwise, between two of my favorite new graduate student blogs: wraetlic and daniadean. I want to do this, partly because these two bloggers [Daniel Remein and Sarah, respectively] have engaged recently in a dialogue across each other’s weblogs that I find fascinating and stimulating, but also because some of what they are thinking and writing about converges nicely with an essay I have been knee-deep in now for about four weeks on the “state of the field” of Anglo-Saxon studies, “Goodbye to All That: The State of My Own Personal Field of Schizoid Anglo-Saxon Studies” [which will be appearing in The Heroic Age, Issue 11, forthcoming any day now], which is also to say: Dan and Sarah are helping me to close in on the completion of what has been for me a very painful essay to write. And without knowing it (I assume), Dan and Sarah have also been hitting on a subject that has been a central preoccupation of my friend and colleague Michael Moore in his work in medieval and later forms of humanism: the importance of personal freedom—a preoccupation that has crept into my own thinking and given me some pause when trying to consider what the chief end of the humanities should be.

I want to jump off from what are the two most recent blog posts at wraetlic and daniadean [and those who are interested can explore earlier posts on their own], “individuals, marx, and the loving hope of weblogs” and “on the redefinition of terms,” respectively. In “individuals, marx, and the loving hope of weblogs,” Dan highlights comments from a recent talk he heard at the University of Pittsburgh by Lindsay Waters [of Harvard University Press], who apparently lamented the fact that, by today’s standards, scholars such as Edward Said and Paul DeMan would have never survived, but thanks to their involvement in working groups they were able to produce important work early in their career. Waters apparently praised the virtues of work done communally, especially for “the general end of fostering truly innovative work in the name of a radical hope which is needed in the face of despair in this country,” but at the same time, he noted that, “it seems there is a shift to return to considering a ‘subject’ or an ‘individual’ in the face of the despair produced by the internal colonization of the American empire.” And this reminded Dan of a talk he heard given by Gayatri Spivak last year, where she talked about the turn to reading & aesthetics in her work, and told the graduate students, in Dan’s words, as best as he can paraphrase it from his notes and memory:

Suspend yourself in the text. You do not know how to read . . . . People do work, and it is good work or it is bad work, they impose a political reading on a text without reading it and what do you have, you have a wasted life as a kind of practice of reinforcing some semblance of individuality.

Ultimately, as Dan puts it, Waters concluded his talk by affirming that “the subject” is

still a viable concern of American poetry and why the “I” can be a dramatic and contested staging in a contemporary poem in an attempt to deal with life and take on power that can’t be taken on effectively [otherwise]. He acknowledges a sort of productive tension between the individual and the community as key to producing work that can foster a radical hope.

In Dan’s mind, the private and public aspects of intellectual work might come to a sort of crisis, especially in terms of “property” and “means of production.” In some of his conversations with Sarah, he has been

prompted to ask why the workings of an individual mind in isolation is expected to produce the work of the intellectual, and if this is not symptomatic of a general sense of “private” property which holds back a kind of radical communalism of thought which might allow for a radically more productive kind of academic work. I ask this only with much anxiety, as, to be honest, while I benefit immensely from In The Middle, Babel, [etc.]—these places and people in fact make possible for me thinking and feeling as intellectual and ethical labor which I could never imagine in isolation—actually surrendering my work to an Other is frightening experience. . . . But, I cannot help but wonder seriously, very seriously, at the merits of rethinking how and why we value the work of the individual. We test individual students. Individual minds must on their own come up with the ideas that we take refuge in Affective Communities of readers and colleagues in order to accomplish. And, a Marxist critique of access to the means of academic production, and private ownership of academic material, may be one untimely way of thinking about this, however uncomfortable.

Dan is also concerned [and rightly so, I think] to question our recent collective interest [shall we call it an obsession, even?] in temporality, most especially in futurity and its so-called radical hope, and he is worried that futurity “can only result in a kind of Religious Humanist project when what is at stake is the disciplining of bodies and state power itself”—by which I believe Dan means we have a “here and now” problem to tackle, never mind the future [although, admittedly, what is wrong now can only be corrected with the idea that, say, fixing texts or lives in a material way now opens those texts and lives to better futures, i.e., to the right to a livable life, in Judith Butler’s terms, to which the possibility of having a viable future is paramount]. What Dan seems to be ultimately hoping for in his post is that somehow there could be a reconciliation between theories of futurity [à la Derrida, Caputo et alia’s future-to-come] and the radical anti-futurist critique of an Edelman or a Bersani [although, as always, I personally loathe to conflate these two thinkers, because I think Bersani could almost be called mystic in his orientation, especially in his work after Homos—think: his ideas of ontological passivity and exceeding ourselves to become more part of the whole/world, “we are neither present in the world nor absent from it,” and the fact that his work could be called loving, whereas Edelman’s, purposefully hyperbolic or not, is, um, hateful?]. Further, Dan asks, “Can futurity and the excitement in the spirit of negative critique be commensurate? Can there be a futurity without an unfounded religious hope and religious notion of time?”

The most important part of Dan’s post, for me, comes at the end:

Can I be “for” the future or not—ethically, do I need to decide? What is a subject? Can we want one? Why? Radical hope seems to both need the individual AND a radical communalism. It seems that what might emerge as a possibility from all of this, not as an answer to the dilemma, but as a way of thinking though it—is to get out of thinking about economics, and instead think about Love. . . . While we cannot simply insist something is true for the hell of it, we do need to trust our feelings. A student in a seminar I am in recently accused Dinshaw of simply repeating a bunch of pop-culture sentimentality about the past—I think this person is wrong, but I do think that the risk of sentimentality is eminent and priceless. I think that to start negotiating this problem, we need to feel for each other. . . . affect may take us beyond economy in the problem of sharing ideas and work, in the problem of negotiating the individual and collective in thinking the future on utopian terms, in a radically secularized way.

In her post, “on the redefinition of terms,” Sarah makes some eloquent points regarding not being too hasty in giving up certain terms, “like faith” or “god,” that have not necessarily been exhausted of their radical potential just because, historically, they have been primarily grounded in religion [which in Dan’s mind is always suspect for the ways in which it disciplines bodies and minds and communities of such]. But responding more directly to Dan’s ideas regarding futurity, Sarah turns the discussion toward the practice of history, and writes,

i also think that the need to work at anchoring things historically, to continually look towards death, can become almost like a certain kind of faith. so, what i argue . . . is in some ways a call for certain modes of “time without time” or “history without history.” i think that allowing for this mental-metaphorical space in which two mutually exclusive things can exist in the same place at the same time is hugely important for creative thought, but forcing it to be unquestioningly temporal or eschatological isn't a limitation that seems productive to impose there. so i think that we should be able to remember, always, that history will end, and even that our lives will end, that other lives have ended. but we should also sometimes, temporarily, be able to simultaneously believe that time has stopped, or reversed, or become irrelevant, that history is entirely paratactic, that we will never die and that others have not died. this is, for me, a terrifically profound (and i think not irresponsible) mode of hoping. i want to add as well . . . that this all sounds terribly individual, but i don't think that's a limitation i want here either. on the contrary, it seems like this sort of “suspension of disbelief” allows for the formation of certain kinds of communities of thought that are temporarily less bogged down by the trappings of everyday or even (often) critical language. this is a poetic relationship . . . .

I read these comments and I marvel at their intelligence and their desire. I believe that Dan is on to something when he points to what might be called the “crisis” that inheres in the tug and pull between individualities and communities, especially as regards intellectual labors within the humanities, although I’ve always believed Zygmunt Bauman summed it up best when he wrote that society has “always stood in ambiguous relation to individual autonomy: it was, simultaneously its enemy and its sine qua non condition” [Liquid Modernity, p. 40]. While it is certainly true that the academy typically rewards the work of supposedly heroic individuals who forge their works in the “smithies” of their individual “souls” [to crib from James Joyce], obviously all intellectual work, published and otherwise, is rooted in “disciplinary” [in both senses of the term] intellectual communities, without which, nothing at all could be thought or would be allowed to emerge [and here we should remember Foucault’s words in “The Discourse on Language”: “A discipline is not the sum total of all the truths that may be uttered concerning something; it is not even the total of all that may be accepted, by virtue of some principle of coherence and systematization, concerning some given fact or proposition. . . . Within its own limits, every discipline recognizes true and false propositions, but it repulses a whole teratology of learning”].

Which is not to say that something is not “sick” at the heart of scholarly production within the humanities, as it stands and is assessed now, for these intellectual communities are often competitive and pit scholars against each other in various battles of wits and somebody’s “father” always awaits toppling. And then there is simply the issue of the kind of geographic, institutional, etc. isolation that, for some, becomes the ground of scholarly labors. But we have to also try to understand the important difference between competition and dissensus: the first is always negative [in my mind], and the second essential for (re)productive discourse and work, for opening the path toward Foucault’s teratologies of learning. This will, of necessity, pose a burden to certain individuals who must be willing to give birth to monstrous thought, but I also think this is where certain “working groups” [including BABEL, of course] can play a radical part as regards the often vexed relationship between creative individuals and communities that are founded on some sort of principle or belief structure. I think there can be a successful envisioning [and putting into practice] of what Joshua Glenn, writing for n+1, has called an “anti-utopian heterotopia where we’d have a project in common besides selling our commodified labor,” and where where misfit thinkers and dreamers could not just collaborate, but actually live and strive together in joyful and passionate disharmony/dissensus [“The Argonaut Folly”].

The idea would never be to collectively agree on anything, but to actually passionately disagree on all sorts of things, while also being committed to “being-together,” where, pace, Bill Readings, “thinking is a shared process without identity or unity. Thought beside itself perhaps” (The University in Ruins, p. 192). This “being-together”—affectively, joyously, passionately—would be the only possible route, in my mind, toward the kind of schizoid desiring-revolution that Deleuze and Guttari argued for so passionately in their collaborative work, where desire itself, when it lights out for the territories elsewhere other than the more Oedpalized regions of Family, Institution, Nation, etc., unleashes, in the words of one of their translators, “schizzes-flows—forces that escape coding, scramble the codes, and flee in all directions: orphans (no daddy-mommy-me), atheists (no beliefs), and nomads (no habits, no territories)” [Mark Seem, “Introduction,” Anti-Oedipus, p. xxi]. Further, Seem writes [of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis]:

Once we forget about our egos a non-neurotic form of politics becomes possible, where singularity and collectivity are no longer at odds with each other, and where collective expressions of desire are possible. Such a politics does not seek to regiment individuals according to a totalitarian systems of norms, but to de-normalize and de-individualize through a multiplicity of new, collective arrangements against power. Its goal is the transformation of human relationships in a struggle against power. And it urges militant groups, as well as lone individuals, to analyze and fight against the effects of power that subjugate them. [“Introduction,” Anti-Oedipus, p. xxi]

Desire, which at its most basic level, is a kind of connection-machine, is deeply striated by the future: to say that it is about the present [the now], or about some kind of current satisfaction, altogether misses the point of desire’s affective propulsion: it is a process of becoming-something-else [even Edelman’s sinthomosexual has to want something; even the act of throwing someone off a cliff makes a demand on a future]. But if Sarah is right, and history can be seen as tending toward ends and deaths while simultaneously being grasped [artistically, I imagine] as having “stopped, or reversed, or become irrelevant,” as “entirely paratactic,” such that “we will never die and that others have not [yet] died,” then perhaps futurity could function, in this scenario, as both negative critique [everything is dead already, all is oblivion] and utopia [nothing has happened yet, all is potential]. What is the productive fiction that could be created between these two poles [one, perhaps, objective-historical, the other subjective-artistic]?

To Dan’s point that “affect may take us beyond economy in the problem of sharing ideas and work, in the problem of negotiating the individual and collective in thinking the future on utopian terms, in a radically secularized way,” I would only say here that this also accords well with Deleuze and Guttari’s idea of libidinal economies, which, in Foucault’s words, “[p]refer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems,” and which require “de-individualization” [“Preface,” Anti-Oedipus, p. xiii-xiv]. There will always be the problem, though, of individual freedom, which, I must say, I worry about a lot, mainly in the terms set forth by the political theorist George Kateb in his essay “The Idea of Individual Infinitude,” where he writes that, “One’s understanding is indispensable to the completeness of the world; one’s words are necessary. One’s life is transitory, but one’s mind deserves immortality. It has touched reality and become real” [The Hedgehog Review 7.2 (Summer 2005): 49], and also by Edith Wyschogrod who, in her essay, “Memory, History, Revelation,” writes that, “the dead other cannot be incorporated into my interpretive framework, or into any system of signs—but rather as an excess that opens the dimension of the more, of an unincorporable infinite” [Memory and History in Christianity and Judaism, ed. Michael A. Signer (Notre Dame, 2001), p. 32]. So, while I am mindful of Foucault’s cautions, “the individual is the product of power” and “do not be enamored of power,” I can’t help but also feel that Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-revolution is one in which, albeit it deconstructs the molar subject in favor of molecular flows, nevertheless permits, in the words of Ivan Illich, “the evolution of a life-style and of a political system which give priority to the protection, the maximum use, and the enjoyment of the one resource that is almost equally distributed among all people: personal energy under personal control” [Tools for Conviviality, pp. 12-13].

So now I see this post is very long, and I my thoughts are scattered. But what I am trying to say here, especially to Dan, is that, yes, I think it is possible what he imagines: that we could have an affective intellectual community that would both protect the individual’s right [and yes, it is a right] to what might be called a “free” and “singular” creativity, while it would also construct a site of, in Readings’ words, “dependency rather than emancipation,” because we are, “bluntly speaking, addicted to others,” and there is “no freeing ourselves from the sense of the social bond, precisely because we do not come to the end of it; we can never totally know, finally and exhaustively judge, the others to which we are bound.” But most importantly, this would be a “community of dissensus that presupposes nothing in common” and “would not be dedicated to either the project of full self-understanding (autonomy) or to a communicational consensus as to the nature of its unity. Rather, it would seek to make its heteronomy, its differences, more complex” (The University in Ruins, p. 190). But there would have to be a site, too, a locus, where this community of dissensus would gather (for Readings, it’s the post-historical University)—a location they would have in common, a home—or, following Levinas in Totality and Infinity, a being-at-home-with-themselves which could be carried outside, such that the “location” becomes a type of wandering [“we must be rooted in the absence of place,” to cadge from Simone Weil].


For me, the contemporary [and by backward extension, the historical] University-proper ceases to be such a site, at least in its form of brick and stone buildings and manicured green spaces and conventional classrooms rooted to particular geographies. I think we will need to imagine many working groups into being as new “floating sites” for a post-historical “floating University” that would privilege affective community over any one line of thought or disciplinary dogma and where everything would be in continual, joyous, desiring “shift,” where the line between art and everything else would be difficult to draw, and where friendship and amity would be our politics. And if this means risking the charge of sentimentalism, I can only say, have you got something better I should want to live for instead of love?

Exemplaria news

The blurb at the bottom of this post was passed along to me by the new publishers of Exemplaria. I place it here suspecting that many ITM readers will be interested in the free issue offer.

Exemplaria has been extraordinarily successful, pushing at the cutting edge of medieval studies for two decades. The journal has become such a desirable place to publish that the waiting time from acceptance to print has been as high as two years. Fortunately, the journal will now appear three times a year, spurring a quicker dissemination of work.

The journal owes its vigor to the extraordinary Al Shoaf, who along with the late Julian Wasserman founded Exemplaria. Though I knew him as a salutary force in medieval studies long before he invited me to become affiliated with Exemplaria, as a member of the Advisory Board for the past five years I've been impressed at what he accomplishes. Al will be stepping down as editor in 2010. In anticipation of this event, three new editors have been appointed: Tison Pugh of the University of Central Florida, Elizabeth Scala of the University of Texas-Austin, and Patricia Clare Ingham of Indiana University. They join James Paxson of the University of Florida for what Al Shoaf has described as "what must be the 'dream team' of journal editors in Medieval Studies for the next generation."

Next May, at the International Medieval Studies Congress in Kalamazoo, Exemplaria celebrates its twentieth year and twentieth volume by hosting a panel to introduce the new editors. We here at ITM wish all four of them well, and look forward to next two decades of this journal.

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Exemplaria – A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Exemplaria is a key force in medieval literary studies. 2007 special issues have been ‘In Honor of Sheila Delany’ and ‘Movie Medievalism’ and key articles include:

• Dante and Frederick II: The Poetry of History, Roger Dragonetti

• Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and the Prioress’s Tale, Louise O Fradenburg

• Augustine as Addict: Sex and Texts in the Confessions, John M Bowers

• Knighting the Classical Hero: Homo/Hetero Affectivity in Eneas, William Burgwinkle

• Medieval Snuff Drama, Jody Enders

• All’s Well That Ends: Closure, Hypertext, and the Missing End of the Bayeux Tapestry, Martin K Foys

• Sovereign Power and Bare Life in Poetry by François Villon, Robert Mills

For more information visit www.maney.co.uk/journals/exm
To view FREE sample content online visit www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/exm
For a one month FREE TRIAL of Exemplaria, please contact Emily Simpson at Maney Publishing (e.simpson@maney.co.uk)