I'm a Pleasure Seeker, Looking for the Real Thing: We're All Presentists Now

Figure 1. A GeoTimeSpiral

by EILEEN JOY

[titled cadged from "Funplex" by the B-52's]

Consider this a timely post on the International Medieval Congress at Leeds from just this past week [7-10 July] and a belated post on the BABEL Working Group's Kalamazoo Congress panel, "What Is the Place of the Present in Medieval Studies?" [8-10 May]. I attended many great sessions at Leeds, including three of the four panels organized by Asa Simon Mittman and Debra Higgs Strickland on "The Unnatural World" [which featured really memorable papers on medieval monsters and monstrosity by Asa, Susan Kim, Eomann O Carrigain, Craig Davis, Patricia Aakhus, and Heather Blurton, among others]; a roundtable organized by the Society for Feminist Medieval Scholarship on whether or not it would be possible to locate a "feminist poetics" or aesthetic of the female body in the texts of the Middle Ages [a question posed by Beth Robertson the year before, and from what I could tell from the roundtable's discussants, apparently either unanswerable or conducive to a lot of discomfort as to what constitutes either "feminist" or "female," textual, aesthetic, or bodily--although Ruth Evans raised here the provocative possibility of approaching the question through some current narratives on aesthetics and singularity as well as through the philosophy of alterity: for example, through Derek Attridge's The Singularity of Literature and through the work of Badiou, respectively]; and an excellent session on the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book Riddles, which included a really good paper by a graduate student at Trinity College, Alice Jorgensen, that analyzed tropes of pain and violence in the Riddles concerned with tools and other utilitarian objects [such as pens and keys] through the lens of Elaine Scarry's work in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. I also attended one of two sessions devoted to "Englishness and the Sea," where Jeffrey's colleague Jonathan Hsy gave a wonderful paper on the fluidity and un/homeliness of linguistic "travels" [on land and sea] in Margery Kempe, and in this same session Kathy Lavezzo delineated a new inter-between space of post-coloniality for us: the "sludge" of the English channel into which Arthur and Gawain wade in the alliterative Morte Arthure. And in a session sponsored by the [new] Institute for Mediaeval Studies at St. Andrew's, I heard a fantastic paper by one of Clare Lees's students at Kings College London, Josh Davies, "Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." One session that really stood out for the fact of all three papers being so excellent was the session sponsored by the Society for the Study of Homosexuality in the Middle Ages, "Queer Landscapes," with papers by Dominic Janes, Albrecht Diem, and Lara Farina. Lara's paper, "Touching Landscapes," was especially memorable for raising the provocative question of how it is, after so many years of visual and picture theory, we do not yet have a theory of the visual that also incorporates a theory of touch: what does it mean to see with touch, while touching, or as touch [and really, can we even have a visual theory that is not embodied?], and further, how does touch, in certain contexts, undo certain objects [bodies, but also buildings, landscapes, etc.] that threaten within the visual field? In what ways did medieval persons inhabit a practice of reading that was visual-tactile and how can we read the sites of seeing-touching within medieval texts?

But it has to be said, the one session that really kind of grabbed and got me [and which I can't shake off] was the one organized by Tom Prendergast, "Does Medievalism Have a Past?" in which Stephanie Trigg delivered the amazing talk, "When Is the Medieval? Medievalism as a Critique of Periodization." It has to be stated here that since Stephanie and Tom are currently at work together on a book on medievalism, both her talk and his ["Medievalism and the Naked Truth"] were, as they themselves noted, co-productions. Stephanie's talk was one of those great bomb-throwing [and also highly entertaining] affairs, and sitting in the very back I noted the body language and furious scribbling in notebooks all around me that connoted some discomfort in the audience with Stephanie's and Tom's arguments. In short, Stephanie opened with the attention-grabbing argument that, while some will always be at pains to distinguish "real" medieval studies [of a decidedly historicist bent and which apparently is "serious" and "difficult"] from "medievalism" [of a decidedly more presentist bent and which is supposedly "pleasurable" and therefore "too easy"], all of medieval studies is "medievalism," and cadging from Bruno Latour, "we have never been medieval."

In one form or another, all of us working within medieval studies are practicing some form of "medievalism" [in which--let's face it--there is always "serious" labor and also pleasure: is anyone really a medievalist who wasn't drawn, libidinally, to the subject, and is there any work within our field that hasn't come at some amount of physical and psychic cost?], although we might like to believe otherwise, when, for instance, we consider ourselves scholars of only the "hard-edged alterity" of the past, and which some of us labor mightily to move out from under the aegis of the present or any past that supposedly comes "after" the Middle Ages.

In order to offer one avenue for escaping the trap of thinking about history only through teleologically linear narratives that don't allow room for what Stephanie described as post-historical reflection, Stephanie began with a discussion of Jeffrey's thinking in his book Medieval Identity Machines [in his chapter "Time's Machines"] on the need for medieval studies to incorporate critical temporality studies [such as the work of Latour, Manuel Delanda, Rita Felski, Elizabeth Grosz, etc.] and a better understanding of nonlinear dynamics into its work, in order to, as Jeffrey writes in his book,

discover how time might be thought beyond some of its conventional parameters, outside of reduction into monologic history, . . . outside of enchainment into progress narratives, with their "ever upwards" movement of evolutionary betterment and abandonment of the past for a predestined, superior future, and outside of linearization, the weary process through which a past is not encountered for its own possibilities, but either distanced as mere antecedent or explored only to understand better the present and render predictable the future. [pp. 2-3]

Stephanie also noted the importance of Jeffrey's insistence on "thinking time" in relation to corporality and "movements of becoming over the immobilities of being" [Jeffrey's words in Medieval Identity Machines, p. 3], and she described an amazing [under-noticed] moment in Malory's Morte d'Arthur [in the Book of Sir Tristram], where, during a banquet after a tournament [in which tournament Lancelot had placed women's clothing over his armor], the knight whom Lancelot defeated, Dinadin, appears [after having been knocked off his horse and dragged into the forest by Lancelot's men to be forcibly stripped of his armor and then dressed in women's clothing], occasioning Guenevere to laugh so hard that she falls down [as if she were "ded"]. Stephanie did not explicate or interpret this scene so much as she noted the ways in which it marked a moment of atemporality [or maybe of "out-of-jointness"?] within Malory's text that might beg certain questions: what to do with such an anomalous moment that is, quite explicitly, about the movement and affect of bodies and which, by its unexpected and strange nature within the context of this particular text/world, disrupts the "regular" time of the narrative? [I might note here that Stephanie herself, in order to dramatize the temporal dis-jointedness of such a moment, orchestrated her own fall behind the podium: medieval studies has now officially gone "slapstick"--it was great! How can anyone not love this woman?]

Stephanie then drew our attention to the polytemporality of Bruno Latour's spiral time, which is analogous, I might add, to Bergson's conception of time as duration: this is not time that can be neatly divided nor segmented, and events are continually moving/flowing along certain lines in which matter, space, and consciousness are inherent in time and vice versa, and to "fix" a moment of the past at a particular point, in the same manner that a lepidopterist might pin a dead butterfly to a piece of cardboard, is essentially a futile exercise in "capturing" the past. More important, how do we capture history in flight--all the ways, as Stephanie put it, that the medieval and the modern are moving in all directions, up and down, north and south, east and west, forward and backward, along time's spirals?

When one of the audience members confessed that it made her really uncomfortable when she read the Kalamazoo 2009 call for papers and saw that there was a session on the Harry Potter books [with the codicil that she loved the books but she wasn't sure they were a proper subject for medieval studies], Tom Prendergast raised the question of responsibility: although the Harry Potter books may have only a very tangential relationship to the Middle Ages, isn't it partly our responsibility to determine what that relationship might be and why it matters? This immediately connected with a point I was already somewhat anxious to make: that medievalism--although it often seems to be about movies and fantasy novels and children's literature and Victorian poetry and other cultural productions that take the Middle Ages as their subject--can also be deadly serious in its choice of subject matter that is often the very opposite of "entertaining"; for example, in BABEL members Steve Guthrie's and Michael Moore's work on the Bush White House torture memos and medieval law, or Daniel Kline's work on the Bush White House's Lancastrian and Derridean pretensions [go here for more on the book that contains these essays]. It seemed to me then [at the Leeds session] and now in our present moment when human [and other] rights are under terrible assault in a country--the United States--that calls itself an historical democracy and that supposedly believes in historical due processes of law, and which has no problem calling its enemies "medieval," that medieval studies has a great responsibility, indeed, and one that must never forget its location in the [troubling and troubled] present.

When John Ganim told me later in the evening that he had sidelined the comments he had prepared for the roundtable [following Tom's and Stephanie's session], "Futures for Medievalism: A Roundtable Discussion" [featuring John, Larry Scanlon, Anke Bernau, David Matthews, Andrew Lynch, Tom Prendergast, and Jenna Mead], in order to re-raise my point about a medieval studies [which is also always medievalism] having a responsibility to take on certain "deadly serious" political subjects [wow--thanks, John], apparently the general discussion drifted toward that worn-out chestnut I've heard time and time again: we can try, but no one is ever really listening to us [the medievalists], anyway, so wouldn't that be a colossal [and frustrating] waste of time? Isn't it always? I was immediately reminded of Steve Guthrie's comments, in his remarks for BABEL's Kalamazoo roundtable, "What Is the Place of the Present in Medieval Studies?", that it is not a question of whether or not medievalists can do a better [or worse] job at this than anyone else [investigative reporters, perhaps?], but rather a matter of us acting "as if." Here is how Steve put it more precisely:

. . . . good scholarship has predictive power, and predictive power may just save us from the present catastrophe, if we’re willing to exercise it and anyone is willing to listen. Our record is not good, but we must behave as if. So the question, for the survival of the Constitution (see Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception) and maybe the species, to the extent that that outcome is in the hands of medievalists — and we might as well take it on; no one else is doing a very good job — is not whether medievalists ought to write about Abu Ghraib but whether the presentist approach or the pastist is more likely to save us from our present circumstances.

A good pastist depends on the agenda of the period, and on the question of torture there are no flags waving in the published record. There is plenty to make sense of, but only in the presence of a motivating question — a hunch — drawn from now. The published record is there if you have an idea of the pattern to look for. So the useful medievalist is like I. F. Stone, the independent Washington reporter who for decades published his influential weekly newsletter by starting with a question or a scent, combing the papers and wire services, and putting two and two together. The person who does it best now is Noam Chomsky. It’s investigative journalism at the level of scholarship. Its purpose is to salvage the present in the name of the future.

Think of this in reverse: scholarship at the level of investigative journalism. So let me substitute “investigative medievalism” for “critical interrogation.” The difference is important to me. It’s the difference between feeling like I.F. Stone and feeling like Donald Rumsfeld. That substitution in place, I’m all for presentism. It boils down to this: We start with the present because that’s where the bodies are buried.

But even just the phrase "as if" has such forceful power for me--it would not be an exaggeration to say [confess] here that there has never been another reason or cause for which I myself have expended so many personal and scholarly labors as I have for "as if." I have never understood those who make the argument--no matter the disagreement or subject at hand--that one should not do a particular thing if the outcome can generally be assured [or safely predicted] to be, again, generally non-consequential. Whether we are talking about love or intellectual work [or even a general predisposition that we might adopt toward the world], I cannot see that we have any other choice but to proceed "as if" things could be better if only we were to believe they might be emended, recuperated, attended to, saved, ameliorated, healed, touched, moved, affected, changed, etc. by our labors--labors, moreover, rooted in a fierce attention to and regard for others, wherever they might be, past, present, or future. This has something to do as well with something I know I have [perhaps annoyingly] quoted here again and again from my friend Michael Moore's essay, "Wolves, Outlaws, and Enemy Combatants," where he argued that,

Displays of hatred have been common in recent years, thriving in a moral atmosphere of decline. Nationalism has formed the crucial backdrop to the legal atavism and return to more primitive forms of law . . . . The attempt to preserve a humane culture and to assert our rights or our love of the right, should not be left in the hands of a distant state, since these are qualities of the virtuous life. One should highlight the possibility of friendship and the connections between friendship, liberty, and joy. It is by no means easy to orient oneself during a period such as this one. While pondering the theme of this essay, I went on retreat in the monastery of Maria Laach (Monasterium Sanctae Mariae ad Lacum). Walking the paths lined with ancient beech trees or sitting in the quiet of the old liturgical library, I found that the topic troubled my thoughts. It seemed like a violation of the peace of the monastery to study torture and terrorism inside the walls, and yet those walls gave my reflections a hopeful and dignified frame.

We have been given the world as a setting in which to practice virtue and to attain self-knowledge; we are also bidden to study the world and the human tradition. Only this can open the prospect of contemplative happiness, "to which the whole of political life seems directed." In periods of disturbance and change, personal constancy and discussions with like-minded friends become more important. If we can remain true to our friends, then new paths will appear . . . .

I would draw attention here to Michael's invocation of friendship as a political project of intellectual life, and I would only add that, when told that our work, as medievalists, may have no impact on the so-called "real world," that we must remember that we do this work [by which I mean a medievalism concerned with the present] together with others who are bound to us in the present--whom we may [must] call our friends--and that, again together, we are leaving records, testimonies, and witnesses to this present. This is ethical work, it is political, it is affective [both libidinal and pleasurable], and it matters. It is what we leave behind in the space of the "as if" it were otherwise.

I think the remarks provided by the panelists on BABEL's Kalamazoo panel in May, although they [temporally] preceded Tom's and Stephanie's in Leeds just this past week, provide a terrific and beautiful [and yes I use too many superlatives, shoot me] response [or maybe it's a preamble] to Stephanie's and Tom's call for a more polytemporal approach to our studies, and for a field that would better recognize the interrelated labors and pleasures of its [mutual] work. I will leave everyone with some snippets from those remarks, and for those who would like to read the more full texts of that session, you can access those here:

To think temporality otherwise; to discern in our Now the living traces of multiple pasts (even the United States carries within it the burden and the possibility of medieval pasts); to recognize that time is so complex that futures can curve to sink their teeth deep into histories long passed; to touch these times and to love them: that’s the place of the present in medieval studies. Such emplacedness challenges us to reconceptualize the Middle Ages and history more generally, to think them outside of the points of view that have hardened around them and seem true – but only because we’ve repeated them for so long. Such congealing into doctrine says more about our reverence for imagined pasts and our fear of unstable futures than about the Middle Ages. Doctrinaire modes of analysis strive to encapsulate this geotemporal expanse, to still into a museum display. A more restless approach will grant the medieval its life in the present. [Jeffrey J. Cohen]

. . . it seems to me, those working on the premodern past and those working on the postmodern present (or post-postmodern, if you wish) share much more than we might commonly recognize or acknowledge. What might it be like for both groups to practice a historicism that brings the past and the present, premodern and postmodern, alongside each other in a rich heterogeneity, that stresses a temporality and spatiality that is coincidental, affective, and performative rather than stabilizingly teleological, segmented, or hierarchized? In terms of sexuality and gender, for example, such an encounter between past and present would seek to uncover in the premodern that which is in excess to the discourses of modern heteronormativity. If, as Christopher Nealon has recently noted of current queer critique, “we need to read sexuality as historical, that is, as made out of found materials, secondhand,” then I think the premodern, with its diversity of gender and sexualities, competing and interwoven models of virgin, virago, good wife, chaste marriage, chivalric masculinity, clerical celibate, etc., can provide a powerfully heterogeneous set of “found materials” to bring alongside the present. Such a historicization, focused on what cannot be assimilated to the logic of a repetition that is conducive to periodization and stabilized identities, enacts its own logic of the beside, necessarily and profoundly engaging with the present as it attempts to move, in Lee Edelman’s words, into “the space where ‘we’ are not.” Such a richly and self-consciously performative historicization of past and present could help instantiate how both past and present (not just the present, as Edelman would have it), are “project[s] whose time never comes and therefore [are] always now.” [Glenn Burger]

. . . what I would like to suggest is that the present should function in medieval studies not only to bring new theories and histories to bear on the past, but more importantly, as the site of potential transformation. Here, I want to refer to Elizabeth Grosz’s marvelous book, The Nick of Time. Drawing on Nietzsche, Grosz argues that “what history gives us is the possibility of being untimely, of placing ourselves outside the constraints, the limitations, and blinkers of the present. This is precisely what it means to write for a future that the present cannot recognize; to develop, to cultivate the untimely, the out-of-place and the out-of-step. This access to the out-of-step can come only from the past and a certain uncomfortableness, a dis-ease, in the present” (117). This notion of untimeliness as the goal of historical work, by which she means the dislocation of the present, seems to me to argue for a present in medieval studies that cannot hold. In other words, I think that many of us on this panel today would consider our work in medieval studies to serve as a kind of intervention in the present. In my own recent work, I am explicitly interested in the ways in which the medieval past can dislodge our heteronormative present and help us to imagine a “world not normatively organized around heterosexuality,” in the words of Michael Warner. In fact, Warner thinks this effort of imagination is nearly impossible, but I would argue, alà Grosz, that we can cultivate an untimely sense of our own present through the study of the past, even as we study that same past through modern theories and especially in conjunction with contemporary political events. The role of the present in my fantasy of medieval studies is to serve as the discomfiting position from which we write and speak with the knowledge that our present cannot be detached from the medieval past. [Karma Lochrie]

One peculiar trait of literature is its proclivity for endless temporal regeneration: the “I” of the lyric, for example, is re-activated, bound to the reader, no matter the distance of that reader from the historical moment of composition; it is an essential component of lyric form that it lives again, with each new voicing, in more than a superficial way. As a phenomenon, what do we do with this subject, part textual artifact of the medieval century, part contemporary reader? I do know that our current dominant modes of literary criticism are not well equipped to handle that disjunction, burying it beneath History. I think bringing to bear our critical faculties on the immediacy of that phenomenological moment should occupy us as vigorously and seriously as the application of endless social and historical contexts. [Andrew Scheil]

I hope I will be forgiven for such a long post, but the subject is one that has long obsessed, and will continue to obsess me, as well as the BABEL Working Group, for a long time to come.

EDIT [@ 10:00 p.m.] I have just noticed that Stephanie Trigg has also posted some of her own thoughts on the session she shared with Tom Prendergast here, and her anecdote about a response from a reader on a book chapter on medievalism that she and Tom have co-authored, where the reviewer wrote that, "the most important element of being a medievalist is not medievalism (entrancing as it may be), but the Middle Ages themselves, embodied in what we have left from the past: words, texts, buildings, paintings, tapestries, books and so on," immediately reminded me of another point I meant to share in this post, stemming from a conversation I had with Clare Lees, Diane Watt, and Lara Farina when we were together at Leeds about the censorious nature of Anglo-Saxon studies toward modernist approaches to its subject matter. There is nothing more forbidding, I don't think, than an Anglo-Saxonist telling you what you are not supposed to be doing in your scholarship and sometimes I think I chose the field out of some kind of unconscious masochism [but I hope not]. In any case, Lara Farina [who is not an Anglo-Saxonist, in the strict sense of that term, but who has written on Old English texts] pointed out that the university is the one place in which a kind of critical freedom to scholarly self-definition is of central importance [and where that self-definition must also be safeguarded]: isn't one of the very hallmarks of a university its supposed openness as regards the pursuit of knowledge? This point is so banal I can't believe we have to defend it at this late date, or perhaps "this late date" is precisely the problem, and this is why Derrida had to remind us, in "The University Without Condition," that the university constitutes the site of "the principal right to say everything, even if it be under the heading of fiction and the experimentation of knowledge, and the right to say it publicly, to publish it." And this we can't forget.

CORRECTION [7/15 @ 8:30 pm] Alice Jorgensen is NOT a graduate student at Trinity College, Dublin but a professor there. My apologies.

Two Posts of Interest to ITM Readers

by J J Cohen

... mainly because they touch upon conversations that have unfolded here: John Walter on Composing with the Mnemonic Image, and Greg Carrier on Disabled Histories.

EDIT Make that three posts. Thanks, Steve!

WOOFING AND WEEPING: The State of Research, or No One Knows But God

by KARL STEEL

First, like Mary Kate, I want to call attention to a Kzoo 2009 session, sponsored by the Medieval Club of New York, and chaired by me:

ANIMALS AND ETHICS
In much of his late work, Jacques Derrida characterized the question of the animal as "not one question among others" but the question that "represents the limit upon which all the great question are formed and determined, as well as all the concepts that attempt to delimit what is ‘proper to man,’ the essence and future of humanity, ethics, politics, law, ‘human rights,’ ‘crimes against humanity. ‘genocide,’ etc." The humanism that utterly divides humans from animals is a legacy of the Christian Middle Ages; consequently, the Middle Ages is an ideal site for exploring the development of the modern concept of the human. It is also, however, a place in which other possibilities for human/animal relationship might be discovered. When and where is anthropocentrism suspended? Such moments might be discovered in hunting practices, chivalry, various literary texts--Chaucer's Squire's Tale, Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain, traditions of the "hairy saint"--and medieval theology and philosophy (from either Christian or non-Christian traditions), all of which might productively be used to think through, for example, the phenomenological ethics of Ralph Acampora, the assemblages of humans, animals, and objects in Deleuze and Guattari, and even perhaps the responsibility promoted by Levinas, despite his indifference to the question of animals.

On with the show! Several weeks ago, I discussed stumbling upon the weeping of animals in Ava's version of the 15 Signs of the Last Judgment. In response to Eileen's request that I clarify my interest in this scene, I wrote (slightly edited):

Given the profound anthropocentricism of sacred history--since however much God or Creation matters, God and Creation matter only insofar as they serve humankind--any acknowledgment of other lives is always in excess of what is required. Animal life should not rate; after all, they have no share in the afterlife, there's no friendship possible with them, they can be the recipient of only indirect duties, &c. I think here of Heidegger's conviction that animals, in their total captivation in their world and thus their total inability to relate to the future, can only "perish," that they cannot die [since writing this, I've discovered some roots of Heidegarrian animal thinking in Schopenhauer, who wrote "indeed the brutes do not properly speaking feel death" and "between the brute and the external world there is nothing, but between us and the external world there is always our thought about it"]

Yet in Ava we have several stanzas concerned solely with disruptions to animal life. We can conceive of these stages of the 15 signs as a systematic undoing of creation (hence the fish first, then fowl, then beasts of the field), and hence as moving in a trajectory towards the human. Nevertheless, Ava--and I hope not only Ava--marks the suffering of animals as a particular suffering in creation. It's not simply that the mountains are falling, the seas turning to blood, freshwater is turning bitter, and all the other business from John's Apocalypse.

Instead, in excess of what is strictly necessary for her project, which nowhere else pays much attention to animals, Ava acknowledges the lives and deaths and passions of animals. And she acknowledges the relations of animals with each other. Her acknowledgment does not redeem animals, but I'd say that the fact that animals cannot be redeemed increases the interest. We might say that we see zoē--mere life--and "animal sacer" given what they should lack: a voice, a sadness, rage, a death that matters, even at the very moment when their deaths, in a sense, matter least of all (since they're not being sacrificed anymore to human appetite or instrumentality). And we might say that this is not "given" but is rather revealed. At the very moment humans pass into redemption, at the very moment when their lives are marked for eternity as the only lives that 'really matter,' we see--maybe!--the catastrophe of human indifference to animal life. Sacrificed life, a life only as means, speaks and reveals itself as what it was all along, as life, as an end in itself, but only at the moment of its destruction. This is the one moment, the only moment, when animal life is for itself.

To this I'll add that we see a grief that cannot be sacrificed. Whatever the fear of humans during the last 15 days, their fear will be exchanged for something, whether heaven or hell; but whatever the fear--or love, in fact--of animals, they ultimately get nothing for it. Certainly the fear of animals has been put on display for humans, since, insofar as it astonishes humans, since insofar as it's being expressed in a particular genre with a particular purpose, it is being sacrificed to the generation of proper human piety; but this is not all there is. My argument--and this, I hope, begins to answer Nicola's complicated comment on the previous post--may include: a) that animals are shown to experience more fully than humans the injustice of the end of hope and dread; b) that animals do in fact get closer than humans to the Great Impossibility, namely, the experience of their own deaths, since, after all, humans, even in dying, leap over their own deaths into eternal life.

I knew that the fifteen signs were a medieval Christian commonplace, but I was also nervous that Ava's attention to animals would be the only place animals received any notice. Time spent with William W. Heist's The Fifteen Signs before Doomsday (Michigan State College Press, 1952) and in the meagerness of Brooklyn College's library (would whoever moved The Prick of Conscience please put it back where it belongs?) dispersed all my worries. Here's some of what I discovered:

• Heist argues that the Irish Saltair na Rann is the most important source for the transmission of the 15 signs: there are a few references to animals in it, but as I can't even fake Old Irish, and since Heist offers his translation as provisional, I'm just marking this wellspring and moving on;
• the pseudo-Bede, from the PL (provided in Heist, with a translation): "Quarta die pisces et omnes belluae marinae, et congregabuntur super aquas, et dabunt voces et gemitus, quarum significationem nemo scit nisi Deus." "On the fourth day the fishes and all the sea monsters will both gather together upon the waters and give forth voices and groans, whose meaning no one knows but God." (25);
• Peter Damian's De novissimis et Antichristo (warning: PDF): "The sign of the fourth day: all the monsters and all things that live in the water of the sea will be gathered together upon the sea, roaring and bellowing back and forth as though in contest; and men will not know what they are singing or what they are thinking, but only God will know, by whom all live that His purpose may be fulfilled. These four signs are of the sea, and the next three signs are of the air and ether. The sign of the fifth day: flying creatures of all heaven will assemble in the fields, every kind in its order; these birds will be speaking and weeping together, fearing the coming of the Judge...The sign of the ninth day: all the stones, both small and great, will be split into four parts, and each part will strike the other part, and no man will understand that sound, but only God [this included in the quotation because I thought it might interest Jeffrey]....The sign of the twelfth day: all the beasts of the earth will come from the woods and mountains to the fields roaring and bellowing, not eating and not drinking" (Heist trans, 28).

As I expected, the 15 signs appear frequently in Middle English, and the four or five references that I've examined so far tend to include references to animals. Two examples. In the "Quindecim Signa ante diem Judicii" (ed. in Furnivall, Hymns to the Virgin and Christ EETS OS 23, 118-25) all creation cries out:

"The ix day, wondyr hytt ys,
As the prophecy tellyth hytt I wys:
Thatt all þynge schall speke þan,
And cry in erthe aftyr þe steuyn off man,
And be-mone hem self in owr sy3th
Ryth as þey speke myth" (ll. 100-105)

To forestall any memory work by medieval drama specialists: I did find the reference in the Chester "Antichrist's Prophets," where one of the Expositor's several references to animals runs "All manner of beastes shall rore and crye / and neyther eate nor drynke" (ll. 321-4)

Now, if you're still with me, I want to point out that animals are not the only grieving elements of creation. In an Anglo-Norman version, "the stars fall from heaven and run about the earth like lightning; they shed tears and run under the mountain; they turn black and plunge into the abyss....the moon turns to blood, descends, and tries to run into the sea....all the rivers speak and cry to God for mercy" (28-29, Heist's summary: I haven't examined the original yet). However, my research so far suggests that crying stars and pleading rivers are less common compared to crying and pleading animals. Surely it's easier to imagine an animal crying than a star; and most traditions of the 15 Signs do not include weeping stars, which surely matters in an eschatological tradition whose content remained--remarkably?--stable throughout its life. I'm justified, then, in concentrating on animals, but, at the same time, I thought some of our posthuman ITMers might want to know about the stars, just as they might want to know about the "battling rocks" (debellabunt petrae adinvicem) of pseudo-Bede.

We'll see where this takes me! Hopefully to Kzoo 2009. Suggestions and comments are, of course, encouraged.

(creative common image from here, from flickr user ChinchillaVilla)

John McCain on Greg Carrier on Medieval Disability at ITM

by J J Cohen

What, that title wasn't self explanatory? Here's a quote from an, umm, presidential debate at Progressive Historians:

McCain: I'm an old codger. I don't like this new Internets stuff. I prefer things from a long, long time ago, like Greg Carrier's article at In The Middle on Medieval Disability. Greg gives an excellent overview of that emerging field of historical inquiry.

So ... McCain gets the medieval vote?

(Thanks, Jeremy Young, for noticing us)

Orrery / Confetti Paperweight

by J J Cohen

Speculative fiction writer Thomas Disch committed suicide on July 4. His last entry at his LiveJournal site is eerily mundane, about the difficulties of living in a city where $5 pizza slices constitute a bargain. That final post has garnered 111 responses so far, many along the lines of #110: "Your book Camp Concentration made my 14th year livable, bearable, doable ... You never knew, and might not have cared had you known, but your role in my life was profound and necessary."

I first read about Disch's death on Boing Boing. This morning I learned that as well as a novelist, children's book author (The Brave Little Toaster) and literary critic, he was a poet: see the beautiful post on "The Clouds" at University Diaries. I take the title of my ITM post from some of his lines about the suspension of the human between feat and miracle, clouds and earth:

Half engineering, half a work of art;
A human orrery that duplicates
The simple motions of the lungs and heart.
But turn it upside down and it becomes
Confetti circling in a paperweight.

The poem begins with a citation from Hamlet, including the only line from Shakespeare I quote regularly ("Very like a whale"), then moves to a riff on Caliban's passionate vision of his island's beauty -- references that are not surprising, I suppose, considering that Disch's book of SF criticism is entitled The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of. "The Clouds" concludes with some words that have been spinning around my head since I read them:

You: you are the cloud I never name,
The language that I cannot learn, the game,
I neither lose nor altogether win;
Illusion of another world above
The world beneath, outside the world within.
I squint, I blink — but still I see you, love.

Read the whole poem, and Margaret Soltan's meditation on it.

Marginally Medieval, More Medieval and Most Medieval

by Mary Kate Hurley

It just occurred to me that in my complete preoccupation with a chapter on Orosius in my dissertation (of which you shall all hear more soon), I have not yet had occasion to point your browsers and minds to a few things.

First, the Marginally Medieval:
Readers might remember that I was involved in the Graduate Translation Conference at Columbia this Spring. I'm pleased to report that the Keynote Conversation between US Poet Laureate Charles Simic and Professor Michael Scammell is now available online as a podcast. It was a fascinating event, one I'd highly recommend listening to. And as though Simic and Scammell aren't reason enough to listen, you can hear me ask a question at the end of the recording!

And now, getting a little More Medieval:
Way back in January, I mentioned that I was writing an essay for the Old English Newsletter on blogging and academia. You can now read the article in its entirety at OEN.org.

Finally -- for the Most Medieval of my Miscellaneous Notes today:
On a whim, I decided to propose a special session for the 2008 Kalamazoo Conference. If you turn to page 27 of the 2009 call for Papers for the Western Michigan University International Medieval Congress, you'll find a session called "Beyond Geography: New Work on the Old English Orosius." I hope to find other folks interested in this crazy text, so if you know anyone working on the Orosius, send them my way! If you've ever even had a vague interest in writing on it -- consider this your big chance!

Now, you should go and read the REAL medieval content, by Jeffrey on the Franklyn's Tale and Eileen on Guthlac and gender.

The Strangest Chaucer Book I Have Ever Read

by J J Cohen

So how could I not read a book with a description like this one?

Even in [Chaucer's] writing, characteristics that seem anomalous—familiarity with many languages, ability to slide from tradition to tradition, witty scepticism and self-deprecating comedy, and insider/outsider perspectives—also point away from the standard assumptions of a normal fourteenth-century Christian in England. By a series of recontextualizations and other forms of rabbinic-style interrogations of the text of the man and his poetry, this book points to a new way of reading Chaucer as a kind of “Fuzzy Jew” even more than as a Marrano or Crypto-Jew, whether he was actually one or not ... this midrashic reading explores the way Chaucer constructs a performative self that once conceals and reveals itself as other, takes head-on the problem of anti-Jewishness as a mental as well as moral or spiritual disease, and looks at the strategies of the schlemiel persona in classical, medieval and rabbinic contexts.

There is more, but my quotation gives you the gist of what A New Midrashic Reading of Geoffrey Chaucer: His Life and Works is all about. And I don't think I've ever seen "schlemiel" and "Chaucer" next to each other like that. I'm not saying there is anything inherently wrong with such a "midrashic" reading, or even in seeing Chaucer as a "fuzzy Jew" (other than "Fuzzy wuzzy was a Jew" is now going through my head). After all, I once argued that Margery Kempe is Jew-ish. Yet the book really does go to far. It's terrific at making evident Norman Simm's deep knowledge of Midrash, and his grasp of Chaucer's life and works is often impressive ... but this is not a highly theorized enterprise. The book derives its critical momentum from parallels that aren't exactly suggestive, and don't exactly lead to conclusions. Here is a typical statement:

Chaucer ... imbibed, informally from his parents, the neighboring and visiting 'foreigners' around the docks of London, some other essential rhetorical and aesthetic presumptions. These were at first probably extremely vague and inchoate, more 'feelings' and somatic responses to the rhythmns of language and thought and emotional expression, and only later, when he began to travel to the Continent di he begin to pick up more specific directions, or at least hints, as to a rabbinical and kabbalistic set of principles, though. again, he may not have ever thought of them in any specific forms (427).

Okay, then. Fuzzy Jews are filled with "fears, rage, and self-hatred" (460) because of their forced cultural doubleness, says Simms. But maybe they are so angry because they've been entrapped in a transhistorical identity?

[thanks, Karl, for bringing this book to my attention]

An Eccentric Theory about the Franklin's Tale

by J J Cohen

So I'm presenting this paper at NCS in Swansea -- where, according to the weather gadget in my iPhone, it has been 55 degrees and raining since May.

Offered in a session on "The Politics of Memory," my presentation's point of departure is a favorite book of mine, the anthropologist Richard Price's The Convict and the Colonel: A Story of Colonialism and Resistance in the Caribbean. Combining the personal with the archival, interviews with text, the present with the past, narrative with images, the book is a lucid -- and for me, absolutely entrancing -- examination of how a contemporary way of life can be distanced into a living past.
Through processes he calls variously postcarding, museumfication, patrimonialization, and folklorization, Price maps how Martinique's "traditional culture" was frozen into revered objects and texts, thereby estranging that culture from those who actually live it, invent with it, change it. Fascinated by Martinique since his first visited the island in 1962, and a part-year resident who lived through many of the changes he describes, Price has created a métissage of a book that performs the vitality he seeks to unearth (he speaks of collective, "subterranean" memories at 172; cf. 60) beneath official versions of the past: versions of history in which colonial struggle and atrocities like slavery are forgotten, vanish as lives that bear their traces are stilled into museum displays -- a transformation into uninhabited, uninhabitable spaces that denies the possibility of coevalness, continuity and endurance.

The Convict and the Colonel focuses on Médard Aribot, an artist who in 1925 participated in collective resistance against France's heavy-handed, ongoing colonialism and was exiled to Devil's Island as a result. Médard's father was African, and he grew up on an island where slavery (reinstituted by Napoleon) was "a living and vivid memory" (61). After his return to Martinique, Médard built a colorful house, a "gingerbreaded jewel of bricolage" where he dwelled for some time, but that fell eventually into ruin. Fifty years later, when Price was living on the island, the power of Médard's story "seemed tangible to rural Martiniquans," since the world they inhabited was still "hemmed in by sufficiently palpable (post)colonial structures" for them to feel that his struggle remained their own (172). Passing the site of the crumbled dwelling reminded local people of that important moment of resistance, especially as France was then transforming the island "from a producer economy to a heavily assisted welfare-based consumer economy" (xiii), prelude to its eventual fate as engine of a tourism machine. In 1987, the dilapidated structure was renovated to render its freshly painted walls and newly paved walkways a picturesque roadside attraction. Dubbed "The House of the Convict," no special history was attached to the rebuilt structure beyond its status as an object incarnating an earlier, more pastoral way of life -- vague emblem of lost days. Postcards with the seabound boulder known as Diamond Rock looming behind the empty dwelling began to circulate: the house, evacuated of its anticolonial history, was as lovely to gaze upon as the local flora surrounding its quaint architectural flourishes, the azure sea stretching behind. The house became, like the dark monolith and the blue water that formed its backdrop, an image without a past.

Price is interested in what happens to people who find themselves deprived through such aestheticization of their own past, a history obliterated into "official folklore" (173). What present is left open to the Martiniquans who find their lives estranged from a contemporaneity defined as modern and French? What is lost to this demand to assimilate culturally, linguistically, cognitively? What happens when local history is absorbed into an "amorphous, atemporal period of 'before'"(xi) in order to allow this transformation to proceed unquestioned? What future remains after a people's lived time is materialized as artifacts or as an archive that can be consumed by others rather than "actively produced" (183) within an ongoing present, when "everyday lives are turned into folklore before their very eyes"(186)? Is it possible to outlive your own modernity, and who gains through this temporal displacement?

This overview is, I realize, a long preamble of a tale. Yet I believe it directly relevant to how medieval English authors, including Chaucer, treated Wales and the Welsh. Here were a people sharing an island with the English, sharing a history and a contemporaneity. Yet English writers were content to employ "England" as a synonym for "Britain," a pars pro toto that from vantage points sufficiently distant from London is as reductive as it is galling. This English synecdochic practice had good precedent, especially from the twelfth-century onwards: Henry of Huntingdon wrote of "the most celebrated of islands, formerly called Albion, later Britain, now England" (Historia Anglorum 1.13), while the poet Wace transformed Geoffrey of Monmouth's regum Britanniae [kings of Britain] into regents ki Engleterre primes tindrent ["who were the first rulers of England," Roman de Brut 4].

Chaucer inhabited a polyglot, culturally restless archipelago, yet the island from which he writes appears in his work as a diminished geography that held diversity mainly in its past. His attenuated vision of Britain reveals an essential component of his Englishness: participation in a long tradition of passing over in silence the vitality and contemporary heterogeneity of the isles, imaging that the only modernity Britain can possess is singular and English.

The Wife of Bath's Tale, his single Arthurian narrative, implies that a hero tied intimately tied to Welsh nationalism is out of date. The regal warrior who in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s seminal narration conquered most of the known world becomes as insubstantial as the elves and fairies who once populated Britain but have since dwindled to their vanishing point. The Britons (that is, the Welsh) are aligned -- like the fairies and elves who become their magical doppelgangers -- with the “olde dayes” of the island, with the stillness of ancient history, with folklore rather than national narrative.

Chaucer's only avowedly "Celtic" narrative is the Franklin's Tale. Like all examples from this very English genre of writing, this “Breton lai” claims origin not on the island of Britain but from its near homonym, Brittany. This small feat of geographical acrobatics, familiar from Marie de France and a whole subgenre of English romances such as Sir Orfeo, makes it seem as if the story arrives from a direct line of communication between England and a mystical place across the channel, dooming nearby Wales and a potentially multicultural Britain to an oblivion of silence.

So, Chaucer ignores the non-English inhabitants with whom he shares his island by placing the action of the Franklin's Tale in Brittany rather than proximate Wales. This displaced setting seems especially perverse given that the names of the protagonists (Aurelius, Arveragus, and perhaps Dorigen) are taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, a profoundly influential text that provided the island a rich, pre-English history. With its resplendent envisioning of Arthur, Geoffrey’s History was also central to contemporary Welsh nationalism. Like all the Canterbury tales set abroad, however, the "speech and customs” of the characters in the Franklin’s Tale are (as John Bowers has observed) “thoroughly anglicized," as if the Bretons were Londoners and all the world England. When the knight Arveragus travels abroad to hone his chivalry, he goes to “Engelond, that cleped was eek Briteyne” (810), silently granting as primordial fact an equivalence of island and nation for which only England would argue.

And here is the eccentric -- or, at least, very difficult to prove -- part of my theory. The Franklin's Tale has typically been understood through reference to its primary source, Boccaccio's Filocolo -- as well it should be, since much of the story patently derives from that narrative. Yet the tale announces itself as the work of "old gentil Britouns ... rymeyed in hir firste Briton tonge" (709, 711), a narrative that the Franklin keeps "in remembraunce." I've already indicated that Breton "layes" are not necessarily all that "Celtic," representing more an English attempt at what Richard Price called museumfication, folklorizing, and postcarding -- one that involves playing up the magic of the temporally anterior culture. Such enchantment acknowledges that this world -- as charming and as beautiful and as dangerously alluring as it may shine -- that this nostalgia-tinged and now estranged world is resolutely premodern. Its time is that of the undifferentiated, amorphous, nonhistorical past, a period that has come to its disenchanted terminus, and can now be delectated only as "remembraunce."

The Franklin worries that he cannot add the expected "colours" (723, rhetorical ornamentation) to the Britoun narrative living in his memory, and that his performance will be "bare and pleyn" (720). The story he tells, however, is worse than sparse: it is subtractive, transporting Geoffrey of Monmouth's characters out of their British context completely, and fitting them into an Italian story that is not their own. Yet in a way Geoffrey's story returns, a kind of "subterranean memory" in the tale.

In the picture postcards from Martinique described by Richard Price, Médard's house (colonial history transported, decontextualized, and reinvented as a colorful remnant of forgotten past used to make render the present scenic) is haunted in background by the looming form of vast, dark Diamond Rock. Likewise the Franklin's Breton lai (Geoffrey of Monmouth transported, decontextualized, and reinvented to give a rather English story the patina of enchanted history while denying that past vitality, even meaning) is haunted by vast and looming lithic forms, the "grisly feendly rokkes blake" that so obsess Dorigen, the lai's heroine. Her anxiety, her fear that absolutely transfixes her is that these rocks will dash the happy life she enjoys with her husband Arveragus to pieces, will prevent him from returning from the errantry that brings him to England. "But wolde God that alle thise rokkes blake / Were sonken into helle!" she exclaims (891-2): her wish is that these stones that impinge upon her worried present with stark reminders of violence and death ("An hundred thousand bodyes of mankynde / Han rokkes slayn," 877-8) would sink below her field of vision, could be forgotten.

Thus the clerk Aurelius's hopeless task of making these rocks be swallowed into the oblivious sea ... a task that he performs with a book-derived magic that seems (erupting as it does from a tome-lined study that in many ways seems like Chaucer's own place of writing) like a recipe for composing a Breton lai ("He shewed hym, er he wente to sopeer, / Forestes, parkes ful of wilde deer ..."). This enchantment is easily dismissed for more mundane concerns, like dinner ("he clapte his handes two / And farewel! Al oure revel was ago"). It is also a spellbinding that can easily be disenchanted, since it has such a clear terminus, such a clear boundary ... since in its very application to the vanishing of the rocks it may involve nothing more than consulting a table of tides ("tables Tolletanes ... ful wel corrected").

Yet the rocks that may or may not dematerialize bring something more to the story, I would argue, than is evident at a first glance. Aurelius is, after all, a British king intimately connected in Geoffrey of Monmouth to the transporting to Britain of huge rocks: it is to satisfy this monarch that Merlin moves Stonehenge from Ireland to Salisbury Plain. There the towering circle of stones is supposed to commemorate feternally the victory of the Britons against the invading Saxons. Said to possess curative powers, these rocks do not destroy life, but give to those who have perished in battle an enduring and living memory. They materialize in the present an anticolonial history, while bringing into that present other stories (tales of giants and Africa and Ireland). How interesting, then, to find Geoffrey's chorea gigantum, Stonehenge, transformed into "grisly rokkes blake" limning the coast of Brittany, menacing the romantic dreams of a Chaucerian heroine, a perturbing backdrop to what should have been a pleasantly English tale.

The Future is Entropy

by J J Cohen

Via the Edge, here is Sean Carroll on the arrow of time:

Our experience of time depends upon the growth of entropy. You can't imagine a person looking around and saying, "Time is flowing in the wrong direction," because your sense of time is due to entropy increasing. . . . This feeling that we're moving through time has to do with the fact that as we live, we feed on entropy. . . . Time exists without entropy, but entropy is what gives time its special character.

Entropy is for Carroll what gives time its "appearance of forward motion," its "directionality, the distinction between past and future." Entropy is also the guarantor that time moves in one direction only, and is not (despite all our searches for lost time in imagining time machines and time travel in our speculative fiction) reversible.

The long and the short of it for medievalists: fieldwork in your area of study is not going to be possible. On the positive side, though, Carroll's work also suggests that this universe may be a fragment of an infinitely larger multiverse -- one in which, for example, you are not a graduate student locked in a dank archive for the summer but the actual ruler of the Angevin empire. Think of that as you are coughing at all the dust on that parchment you're scrutinizing.

As for me, I'm in my office right now, because I've agreed to evaluate THREE tenure and promotion dossiers this summer. The only thing that gets me through this chore is knowing that in some other universe within this multiverse some other Jeffrey J. Cohen is worshiped as a living god and resides on a perpetually sunny beach.

Now go read Eileen's very smart post.

Gender Trouble [Again], and Again

Figure 1. Eurydice, no. 13, by Bracha Ettinger

by EILEEN JOY

Now that I am actually en route to Leeds, I am hoping everyone will indulge me if I share my thinking again for the roundtable, organized by Clare Lees and the Gender and Medieval Studies Group, on "Locating Gender in the Middle Ages." Taking Karl's and Jeffrey's comments into account and also having my brain blown to bits [metaphor, just a metaphor] by Bracha Ettinger's The Matrixial Borderspace, which Noreen Giffney made me read under threat of pain of [oh, never mind, I wanted to read it, but I still blame her for the initial suggestion, and the book is so crazy that I'm dying to talk to anyone, anyone at all, about it], I've reworked my comments and share them here. While I am in Leeds, please talk amongst yourselves about the matrixial borderspace, and of course, send me any suggestions for revision.

I. The Question of Sexual Difference/Unsettledness/Crossings

By way of setting what I would call the threshold from where I begin to set out [to travel in a certain direction and along certain lines] to think about gender and its location(s), with Judith Butler, in Undoing Gender, I agree that the terms “sexual difference,” “gender,” and “sexuality” have come into conflict with one another, and currently, feminist studies are often viewed as having to do with gender whereas queer studies are viewed as having to do with sex and sexuality [and we might ask, what kinds of critico-theoretical as well as more practically political problems does this cause for us?]; still following Butler, who is following Irigiray, I am interested in an ethics “which is not one that follows from sexual difference but is a question that is posed by the very terms of sexual difference itself: how to cross this otherness? How to cross it without crossing it, without domesticating its terms? How to remain attuned to what remains permanently unsettled about the question?” [p. 177]; this is especially important for premodern studies, I think, when we understand, again in Butler’s terms, that “the question of sexual difference” is a question “whose irresolution forms a certain historical trajectory”; finally, we must keep in mind that one of the problems sexual difference poses is “the permanent difficulty of determining where the biological, the psychic, the discursive, the social begin and end” [p. 185]. Sexual difference is therefore “neither fully given nor fully constructed, but partially both,” and it possesses “psychic, somatic, and social dimensions that are never quite collapsible into one another but are not for that reason ultimately distinct.” I’m interested, too, in what I think is the important question posed by Butler: is sexual difference, “not a thing, not a fact, nor a presupposition, but rather a demand for rearticulation that never quite vanishes—but also never quite appears?” [p. 186]. If so [and, yes, I think so], then the question of sexual difference must always remain “open, troubling, unresolved, propitious” [p. 192].

II. Inter-betweenities/A Thousand Tiny Sexes/An Immanent Gender?

In the journal PhaenEx’s recent call for essays, the editors ask for papers on the “in-between”:

What is neither here nor there, now nor then? What resides or occurs in the in-between, and what is its meaning or purpose? And what is the meaning or purpose of the edges that mark the liminality of both this in-between, and the phenomena on either side of it? What are the rhythms, speeds, contours or densities of the in-between? What affects, sensations or movements do edges evoke? Can the in-between be known, can we dwell there - or do we only ever traverse this phenomenon, pass through or pass over? Do edges draw a clear line in the proverbial sand, or do they rather shift like the waves of sands across a desert? "The in-between" and "edges" are clearly related phenomena, in that they both raise questions about the limits of binary systems of classification and the identity of things as discrete and separate entities. But what is the nature of this relation? How do the phenomena of the in-between and edges support one another, challenge one another, or even form the condition of possibility for one another?

In-betweennesses, or what Michael O'Rourke recently called inter-betweenities [not to be necessarily conflated with the liminalities of certain cultural anthropologies of past decades], are decidedly "in the air" of current intellectual discourse. With the Anglo-Latin and Old English narratives of the eighth-century Mercian hermit-saint Guthlac as my touchstone texts, and in relation to thinking the location of sex & gender, I want to focus in particular on:

a. all of the anxieties that circulate in the texts over restlessness, unsettledness, and vagrancy, as well as over the world's mutability: in Felix this mainly occurs in relation to Guthlac's decision to become a monk in order to get away from the "whirling waves" of the world, whereas in the Old English Guthlac A, we have the demons figured as actual vagrant homesteaders who have been dis-placed by Guthlac and who warn Guthlac that he has chosen a kind of animal life;

b. Guthlac’s night-time flight, when a multiplicity [or what Bracha Ettinger would call a “severality”] of demons bind and drag his body through brackish fens and brambles, freezing skies, and down to the jaws of Hell, and in which flight, as Jeffrey Cohen has written, the demons are “swarming ‘molecules’ of alterity that refuse organization into molar wholes . . . [who] persecute Guthlac with an ardor that equals the saint’s own, an intensity of desire that ties them forever to his self-definition despite the distance and difference that his celibacy seeks to maintain” [Medieval Identity Machines, p. 149]. I’m interested in the ways in which Guthlac gives himself to be dragged in what Cary Howie has called an act of traherence that “never quite gets free of what it ostensibly emerges from,” and still following Howie’s thought, I’m interested in how Guthlac and his demons flying together through Middle Anglian and other space form a queer ontology, “an erotic participation through which they become not identical but singularly shared and mutually, messily incompleted” [Claustrophilia, p. 7]. This might also be a queer phenomenology, in Sara Ahmed’s terms [in Queer Phenomenology], where Guthlac and his demons together, in voluptuous flight, form an “oblique angle in relation to that which is given” (where “that which is given” might be the closed, hard, immoveable, and masculine—sexed but sexless—body of the saint who is always already dead);

c. his “companion”/”serving-thane”/”brother” Beccel who mourns him—but whose presence [and therefore, also, his friendship] is suppressed until the end of the narrative;

d. the prohibition Guthlac establishes to never be with his sister in life so that they can be together in death: in Felix, he tells Beccel that “in this life” he “avoided her aspect” so that “in eternity” they might see one another “in the presence of our Father in eternal joys”; in the Old English Guthlac B, he tells his companion that he “denied” himself the “light of her face” so that they might “meet again” in “heavenly glory” before the “face of the Eternal Judge”

Following and elaborating upon some questions Karl S. asked me relative to this project, we might ask: What is the sex of Guthlac and his demons in flight? the sex of Guthlac and his sister under the sign of Guthlac’s prohibition to deny himself the light of her face? the sex of Guthlac and his sister in the face of their Father after death? Does the sex of Guthlac’s sister put his masculinity into play? Does his warrior masculinity secure his hermit sexuality against free play, and if so, how does a live-in “brother” complicate Guthlac’s hermit sexuality? What are the genders of Guthlac and his sister, by which we might mean: what do they desire? what are they thought to desire? how are we supposed to desire them? how does their Father desire them? How does their being offered to our desire [and/or to God's] contour their gender? or ours? Is there any voluptuousness about their (delayed) desire to be with each other?

I want to ask, further, if it is possible to think about how sexual difference [between Guthlac and his demons, between Guthlac and Beccel, between Guthlac and his sister, between Guthlac and his sister and Father] in these texts is posed as a type of chiasm, or a series of inter-betweenities, within which certain “affects, sensations, and movements” are evoked and also “crossed." I want to explore how, in Deleuze’s terms, gender, as well as “a life,” is always “everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through and that are measured by given lived objects: an immanent [gender] carrying with it the events or singularities that are merely actualized in subjects and objects. This indefinite [gender] does not itself have moments, close as they may be to one another, but only between-times, between-moments; it doesn’t just come about or come after but offers the immensity of an empty time where one sees the event yet to come and already happened, in the absolute of an immediate consciousness. . . . One [gender] is always the index of a multiplicity” [“Immanence: A Life”].

III. The Matrixial Borderspace

Speaking of multiplicity (and also cautioning myself, thanks to Jeffrey Cohen’s caution that gender may not be as capacious or immense or temporally empty as Deleuze’s “life”), I want to conclude these half-formed thoughts here by briefly mentioning the work of Bracha Ettinger, a psychoanalyst and feminist theorist, whose idea of a matrixial borderspace—a symbolic prenatal space of inter-relations that is gendered feminine—might offer some interesting avenues for locating gender in medieval texts as a site of encounter “occurring at shared borderspaces between several co-affecting partial subjectivities that are never entirely fused or totally lost, but share and process, within an always-already minimal difference, elements of each unknown other” [Griselda Pollock, "Intro," The Matrixial Borderspace, p. 3]. In the matrixial dimension, subjectivity is conceived of as “the co-poesis of ‘I and the non-I’,” and “an originary feminine” preexists Oedipal, phallic gendering structures, “yet the affects and imprints of the encounter with it [again, prenatal] (for what will later be both sexes) will be sexuating: generative of erotic, libidinal, desiring effects”—this is an “utterly sensual space . . . composed of at least two temporalities and complexes of repetition and restaging” [Pollock, p. 15]. In Ettinger’s own words,

The Matrix speaks to a strangeness in me, as well as that of an intimate other irreducible to what, in later phallic constructions, will form the basis of identifications and rejections, incorporations and expulsions that mark and create boundaries and identities for discrete territorialized subjects by whom such porousness or breaching of boundaries can only be experienced as perversion. [“The Red Cow Effect,” p. 87]

Medieval authors and medieval saints would have had no such language nor conception of prenatal symbolic matrixial borderspaces, but my hunch is that a lot of what is going on in the Guthlac [and other hagiographic] narratives—in terms of Guthlac’s despair over the “storm-tossed” unsettledness of a world that won’t stand still [which despair drives him to become a monk to begin with], his desire for a barren hermitage that will pull him even beyond the limits of the monastery [which is itself finally too restless, too “several” for Guthlac], his need to prove himself against swarming demons, the invisibility of his serving-companion until it is necessary to have a witness for his death, and his banishment of his sister, especially—all speak to a deep-rooted set of phallocentric aversions to the supposed “perversion” of the “breaching of boundaries,” and to what Ettinger calls the “conductible affectivity” of matrixial sexual difference, “which gives voice to the affected body-psyche co-emerging with the other and the world” [Pollock, p. 3].

Memories of July 4 Past

by J J Cohen

Most years I'm in the UK on July 4. Last year it was with family, the best trip we ever took together. July 4 included punting on the Cam courtesy of Liza, lunch at the Eagle Pub, an unexpected rendition of the national anthem, and (when we made it back to the flat that the evening) the London Eye in red, white and blue.

All of us are missing that time in London today.

[photo: Liza, Wendy and Katherine a-punting. Two of these three became very wet on this boat trip. That's my shoe in the lower right corner.]

"Touching the Past" at GW: Nov. 7 2008

by J J Cohen

ITM readers in or near DC, mark your calendars: on Friday November 7 the newly formed GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute (GW MEMSI) will sponsor its first symposium, "Touching the Past." Four scholars will be presenting on the theme: Peggy McCracken, Eileen Joy, Julian Yates, and Carolyn Dinshaw.

The event is free and welcomes anyone who would like to attend. Details in the early autumn.

PS: I'm also pleased to announce that GW MEMSI will be sponsoring a panel at Kalamazoo 2009: "How to Get the Medieval Studies You Want: Institutional Perspectives." Presenting at this round table will be Bonnie Wheeler, Stephanie Trigg, Carolyn Dinshaw, Ethan Knapp, Malcolm Litchfield, and the ubiquitous Eileen Joy.

Roger Caillois among the Nonhumans

by J J Cohen

[rocky image at left captured by Michel Corboz]

This is Part II of the post instigated here. The essay on inhuman art of which it will form a portion will eventually be published here. Congratulations to Eileen for successfully placing the volume in the promising new series, "Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture" [edited by Ethan Knapp and sponsored by Ohio State University Press].

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Theorizing the interface between humans and their others, especially animals, has proven an especially rich critical topic in the past decade. The work of scholars like Steve Baker, Jacques Derrida, Susan Crane, N. Katherine Hayles, Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird, Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway, Alphonso Lingis, Karl Steel, Julian Yates, Jonathan Gil Harris, Bruno Latour and Cary Wolfe has stressed the tenuousness of any line that would segregate the human from the nonhuman. Just as valuable to this multidisciplinary investigation, I would argue, is the eclectic work of Roger Caillois. Connected in complicated ways to Andre Breton and French surrealism, Caillois’s friendships read like a Who’s Who of francophone theory. He was introduced to Georges Bataille by Jacques Lacan. With Bataille and Michel Leiris he founded the influential College of Sociology in 1938. When Bataille determined that a secret society he had formed (Acéphale) needed to cement its membership around an act of human sacrifice, and when someone (possibly the perennially depressed Leiris) volunteered as victim, Bataille -- it has been suggested -- attempted to convince Caillois to be the executioner. Needless to say, the sacrifice did not take place: Roger Caillois was the kind of scholar by nature ambivalent towards any group desiring his membership. Indeed, this reticence goes a long way towards explaining why his work remains relatively neglected while that of almost everyone who moved through his intellectual circle has proven influential in the world of theory. There is something anomalous about Caillois, both as a person and as a writer.

I became interested in Caillois's work through the reverence shown him by the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, feminist reinterpreter of Lacan and Deleuze, theorizer of boundaries as space of becoming. Caillois is useful for thinking the world from a non-anthropomorphic point of view. He devoted his life to exploring such mysteries as why stones are such accomplished artists and why animal mimicry doesn't actually imitate anything. He never wanted to keep uncertainty in place simply out of reverence. Famously, he broke with the Surrealists when Andre Breton refused to cut open a Mexican jumping bean. Caillois thought it ridiculous to argue that the bean's secret interior ought to be preserved simply to keep a sense of mystery intact. Yet Caillois also insisted that a place exists within science for art.

Claudine Frank, Caillois's recent editor and translator, makes two statements about his early intellectual projects that well summarize his promise for a renewed humanism: that "he was always seeking out new monsters" ("Introduction," Edge of Surrealism), and that he was engaged in composing a kind of "reverie" that could engender a "subversive, revolutionary New Science," interrogating rather than dismissing the imaginative and the fantastic. These projects involved the displacement of homo sapiens from an assumed centrality, discovering the alien within the unraveling contours of the human -- and the human within insects, octopi, butterflies, agates, inhuman architectures, the workings of the cosmos. "Man is a unique case only in his own eyes," Caillois observes in his provocative essay "The Praying Mantis: From Biology to Psychoanalysis" (c.1934). Here he takes as his starting point the eternal fascination men betray with the femme fatale of the insect world, the mantis who beheads her partner as a prelude to mating. Caillois acknowledges that this recurring interest may derive simply from "some obscure sense of identification" elicited by the insect's "remarkably anthropomorphic form" (73). Yet he is not satisfied by a principle of simple projection, as if by detailing the function of the mantis within male fantasies the insect's uncanniness would then stand explained. There exists in the praying mantis, he writes, an innate lyricism (Edge of Surrealism 74, 78), an irreducible superfluity. Even when decapitated, the mantis is capable of walking, mating, laying eggs, even feigning rigor mortis to escape impending danger. Attempting to describe this acephalous body having sex, living its life, and imitating a cadaver leads Caillois to observe of his own convoluted language: “I am deliberately expressing myself in a roundabout way as it is so difficult, I think, both for language to express and for the mind to grasp that the mantis, when dead, should be capable of simulating death” (79). He finds a similar impulse to lyricism (or “objective lyrical value”) in almost all scientific writing about the insect, an impulse that overcomes habitual “professional dryness” (78) and swiftly carries writers out of their scientific lexicons and deep into poetry.

The mantis offers no comfortable lessons about the anthropomorphism of insects: its lyricism is not a human projection, but a fact of its being, a cosmic given that it shares across boundaries with other human and nonhuman bodies:

Such research tends to establish that determinations caused by the social structure, however important, are not alone in influencing the content of myths. We must also to take into account half-physiological, half-psychological factors … We should pay more attention to certain basic emotional reactions and clusters that sometimes exist only as potentialities in human beings, but that correspond to phenomena explicitly and commonly observed throughout the rest of nature. (81)

The mantis thereby suggests the entomonous residue infecting the human, breaching the barrier between Cartesian subject and nonhuman environment. It becomes proof of what Caillois calls "the systematic overdetermination of the universe" (76) – quite a burden for a small bug to bear. By refusing allegory, by refusing contextualization into mere human meaning, the praying mantis restores danger to the object under scientific scrutiny, allowing that the act of contemplation itself immediately trespasses the distinction between observer and observed, rendering them inextricable.

Caillois develops these themes further in "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia," an essay likewise exploring the intimacy of the insectal. Caillois's work here proved instrumental for the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan as he formed his notion of the Mirror Stage. Against those Darwinians who see in every attribute of an animal its evolutionary use value, Caillois develops an anti-utilitarian argument in which the spatial and the corporeal interpenetrate. Mimicry, the vertiginous displacement of environment onto body, is for Caillois not a survival strategy but an unnecessary surplus, a "dangerous luxury." Predators are seldom deceived, he observes, when their prey adopt attributes of the space they inhabit, such as when a butterfly imitates a twig or a beetle disguises itself as a pebble. Most animals hunt by smell, not sight: "numerous remains of mimetic insects are found in the stomach of predators." Many inedible creatures imitate their environments needlessly (96-97). Mimicry -- whether animals becoming their worlds, or humans imitating their surroundings magically or aesthetically – is a succumbing of body and subject to the "lure of space" (99). This "dispossession" of the privilege of being one's own center spells the death of the autonomous subject, as self is scattered across landscape and landscape intermixes with self. Caillois gives a literary example, Gustave Flaubert's rendition of the desert-dwelling Saint Antony. The hermit rapturously witnesses the "interpenetration of the three natural kingdoms" [vegetal, animal, geological] and "disperse[s] himself everywhere, to be within everything" (101). Elizabeth Grosz writes in summation that what Caillois has identified is "a certain structural, anatomical, or behavioral superabundance, perhaps it is the very superfluity of life over and above the survival needs of the organism." This superfluity of life is, by another name, art.

Later in life this surrealist biologist argued that art is not possessed only by humans or by animals: art is a superfluous beauty that is fashioned by geology as well as by hands. The Writing of Stones is a stunningly illustrated tour of nonhuman art: lithic sculptures offered for no particular audience to admire, the petrification of a universal impulse to produce beyond utility, a union of the human with geological phenomena that had seemed until Caillois looked so intently upon them to be the inert. He finds in marble, amethyst, jaspers, limestone and agates an aesthetic formed of “surprising resemblance” to human art, a resemblance “at once improbable and natural” (The Writing of Stones 1), a resemblance better described as a commonality. This “intrinsic, infallible, immediate beauty, answerable to no one” and possessed indestructibly by certain rocky formations he describes as the “promise and the foundation” of human beauty:

Stones – and not only they but also roots, shells, wings, and every cipher and construction in nature – help to give us an idea of the proportions and laws of that general beauty about which we can only conjecture and in comparison with which human beauty must be merely one recipe among many others … In stones the beauty common to all the kingdoms seems vague, even diffuse, to man, a being lacking in density (2-3)

Humans may resist beholding in the colors, textures, and resemblances of stones the colors, textures, and resemblances of their own art, the “endless variation” of cosmic phenomena as evident in fern fronds and mollusk shells as eruptions of quartz and Rothko canvases. Humans may resist seeing in themselves and in their works architectures of beauty that connect them to the cosmic, the microscopic, the inanimate, connect them to “works executed by no one” (13), connect them to “the aesthetics of the universe” (3). Yet despite this disavowal something exists within “imperturbable stone which neither feels nor knows” (75) that in its excess of pattern, color, harmony and form triggers “something we might describe as the lapidary” that fills us with “wonder and desire” (3). Often we answer such lapidary pull by becoming collaborators with stone – most famously, when early modern artists painted scenes from Orlando Furioso or the Divine Comedy on pieces of marble that provided naturally occurring backgrounds of forests, ruins, and flames.

Interested as he is with art within stone, Caillois does not mention the stoneworks that would seem the ultimate expression of such alliance: menhirs, dolmens, and vast arrays like Avebury. Stonehenge, for example, may be in part a human version of the naturally occurring standing stones of the Preseli Mountains in Wales. Here dolerite can be found in the form of rectangular pillars, seemingly rough-hewn by some primal architect, sometimes appearing to have been positioned as an orderly line of monoliths. The stones tower over an expansive landscape of grass, lichen-encrusted boulders that appear to have smashed by giants, and springs that according to local myths possess curative powers. These bluestones of the Preseli Mountains were the source of the earliest oldest stones erected at Stonehenge, 250 miles away. The archeologist Geoffrey Wainwright calls the bluestones “a natural monument” of columns and pillars and has found ample evidence that they were venerated in Neolithic times, often through the inscription of artwork on their surfaces. Something about the formations so inspired their beholders that they transported eighty or so monoliths, each weighing up to four tons, through an almost inconceivable amount of effort to distant Salisbury plain. Nature’s exorbitance called forth a human response that was just as excessive. The Preseli bluestones are an artwork wrought through the shifting of the landscape over vast spans of time, the expenditure of gravitational and climatic energies; Stonehenge is an artwork wrought through the release of energy in sinew and muscle, but something more than a simple imitation of a natural original. Both cases seem the product of ongoing and restless forces that effloresce into enduring forms; human or not, both are worlds wrought in stone.

Caillois stresses throughout his analysis that even though this art seems embedded within what is dead, immobile, and unchanging, what in fact fascinates is the active connection between stone and world, evident in the unbearably slow formation of its artwork, and evident as well in the participation it demands from its environment – including the human observer. Gazing upon a sheet of scaled jasper he writes “Even while I am reducing things to their chemical constituents I cannot help descrying swathes of arctic light shining meagerly on inky lichens, struggling vegetation exhausted by rough winds and burned by frost” (64). Such reverie is not human projection, but a participation across kingdoms (animal, mineral) activated by the beauty common to both. Sometimes in stone we behold forms once living: wispy fossil tracing of leaves, petrified bones of animals whose ancient bulk troubles the imagination to body forth again. Sometimes we behold natural resemblances to such recurring forms. Often we witness the preservation of a past that did not endure: “life’s mistakes, to remind nature of its monsters, its botched jobs, its blind alleys” (81). Or perhaps in this abortive past we behold a future that includes ourselves, observers made of more stone-stuff than we care to acknowledge:

[These ‘monsters’] somehow announce the coming, in the distant future, of a species that makes mistakes … They presage new powers, imperfect but creative … They seem to be manifestations of what I have ventured to call a natural fantasy … a lasting and inalienable collusion between this series of fertile abortions and their ultimate beneficiary (82-84).

Roger Caillois has been accused of pessimism, even misanthropy: “a kind of indifference toward what is human.” More accurately, what Caillois attempted was to view the world through a less anthropocentric lens, one in which stones and artists share a common impulse towards the production of beauty, one in which humans and rocks share secret affinities. As the heir to nature’s creative experiments, Caillois, wrote, man must “recognize, among the daunting mass of nature’s ventures, those which, though they did not succeed, opened up for him, through their very failure, a glorious way ahead” (84) – one in which animals, rocks, and homo sapiens bear in their forms and substance the imprint not of some divine maker, not of an intelligent design, but of an art-making “universal syntax” (104) that sometimes through its conjunctions commits artistic errors, births monsters … and sometimes through these same recurring processes animates an imperfect world with a beauty more than human.

Caillois is famous for his meditations on the sex life of the praying mantis, the misfires of mimicry among animals, the power of stones to pull the thinking subject into disruptive encounters with inhuman art – a collaboration of the animate and the inorganic propelled by beauty. His work clearly resonates with recent scholarly obsessions: the monstrous, the inexcluded, the exorbitant. He also formulates modes of analysis that move us beyond arguments based upon evolutionary, cultural, or symbolic use value. Caillois proposes what might be called aninormality: an anti-utilitarian conception of the nonhuman that moves us beyond its normalizing function into a realm where human and nonhuman counterinfect, where all kinds of bodies lose the rigor of their boundaries and become anomalous.

The State of the Field in Anglo-Saxon Studies

by J J Cohen

Read all about it in a special forum at The Heroic Age. You will see some familiar names.

EDIT by Eileen [7/1 @ 6:30 pm] Oh, SNAP! Jeffrey beat me to mentioning the special forum, but allow me to also direct your attention, in that same issue, to the first entry in what will be a regular Heroic Age feature, "babelisms," and the first essay to be featured in that column [edited by me], Daniel Murtaugh's "Absent Beowulf." Over and out.

EDIT by JJC [7/2 @ 6:30 am in a more soothing color than Eileen's glaring red of last night] Also don't miss Eileen's excellent essay "Queer Times, Queer Bodies and the Erotics of a Nomadic Anglo-Saxon Studies" here. Note too that the Kzoo 2009 CFP is out, and Eileen is all over it. Who is this Eileen person and why is she everywhere? Does she possess clones? Ought we to do something about her sudden omnipresence? She's the Paul Newman of medieval studies -- just as you can't walk through a supermarket without his leering head confronting you from the labels of bottles of salad dressing, microwave popcorn boxes, jars of pasta sauce, and cans of soup, so Eileen Joy is ubiquitous on every brand of medieval-related scholarship. Is this saturation somehow related to the apocalypse?