Jonathan Boyarin, The Unconverted Self

by J J Cohen

Speaking of Jews (as we do so often here at ITM) ... Jonathan Boyarin's long awaited book on how Europe's experience of Jewish otherness set the terms for its encounter with the indigenous peoples of the Americas will be out by year's end. I just blurbed it, and thought I'd share my advance praise here, since Boyarin's work brings many of the issues we've been discussing to another geography:

The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe

Meet the New World, same as the Old World. Jonathan Boyarin's The Unconverted Self persuasively undermines historical divisions of such endurance that they have come to seem truths of history. Through his focus on spatiality and temporality, through his mapping of the intricate hybridities that undrgird and ultimately betray seeming purities, through his close attention to textual and contextual detail, Boyarin has composed a book that will change the way we think about the supposedly demarcative power of 1492. The Unconverted Self is a powerful work that anyone interested in the medieval and early modern periods, Jewish and Christian history, the New World encounter, or postcolonial studies will want to read.

"And the fervor of his devotion increased so much within him that he utterly transformed himself into Jesus through love and compassion."

by KARL STEEL

A young man, disrespectful of institutional religion, is hailed by two women as Jesus. He allows himself to be crucified, wounded in five places. Elsewhere, another pious soul, caught up in the new fervor of imitatio Christi, crucifies himself on a hilltop on a Good Friday, is taken down half dead by passing shepherds, and recovers fully in a few days.

The first is a familiar story, somewhat muddled, but it takes place in the 1222, in Oxford, rather than the first century. Instead of Mary Magdelene and another Mary (Matthew 28:1; but cf. Mark 16:1, Luke 24, and John 20:1), it's simply "duabus mulieribus," one an old practitioner of the dark arts, and the other the young man's sister. The second story, from Jacques de Vitry's Sermones Feriales et communes, likewise recalls Gospel narratives both deliberately--the hilltop and Good Friday--and accidentally--the shepherds, the return to (full) life after a few days.

The latter exemplum may in turn recall another thirteenth-century pious self-mortification, that recorded by Margaret of Oingt in her life of Beatrice of Ornacieux (d. 1303) in acts meant for our admiration rather than disgust:

She evoked the Passion of Our Lord so strongly that she pierced her hands with blunt nails until it came out at the back of her hand. And every time she did this, clear water without any blood gushed out. Soon after, the wound closed and healed so well that nobody could see it any more. (49)

I bring these stories together as a companion to Jeffrey's post below, on the mocking Jew of Lincoln, whose heckling, as Jeffrey suggests, "seems to be speaking a thought likely on more minds than his own." The Jew is made by Gerald to bear the burden, and to materialize the problems, of dissension and uncertainty within the Christian community. Might we do something similar with the crucifying Jews of the thirteenth century, those accused of reenacting the Passion upon stolen Hosts and kidnapped Christian children? Considered within the field of the pious (and excessively pious--and what perfect piety is not excessive?) stories above, within the field of the various imitatio christi of the thirteenth century, what role are Jews and their purported crimes made to play?

I ask in part because of the first story, from Ralph of Coggeshall's Chronicon Anglicanum, appears sandwitched within two other stories, one about a Christian who mutilates himself to become a Jew, and another about a Jew who mutilates the dead, with the help of an employee (a Christian (?) boy), to learn the future, the very temporal realm from which Jews--witnesses of the past--should be barred.

Presented without any further comment, because I have no further thoughts yet, here's a fuller picture:

Anno Dominicae incarnationis MCCXXII, dominus Stephanus, Cantuariensis archiepiscopus, tenuit consilium suum apud Oxoniam post Pascha; ubi inter caetera exordinavit quemdam diaconum apostatam, qui pro amore cujusdam mulieris Judaicae se circumciderat: qui exordinatus, a ministris domini Falconis combustus est. Adductus est ibidem quidam juvenis incredulus cum duabus mulieribus in concilio, quos archidiaconus ejusdem provinciae accusavit crimine pessimo incredulitatis; juvenem scilicit, quod nollet ecclesiam intrare, nec divinis interesse sacramentis, nec patris catholici adquiescere monitis, et quod se crucifigere permiserit, quinque vulnera in corpore adhuc apparentia gestans, Jesumque se vocari a mulieribus illis gaudebat. Accusabatur una mulierum veterana, quod maleficis incantationibus ex longo tempore esset dedita, et quod juvenem praedictum suis magicis artibus ad tantam dementiam ac talem convertisset. Unde ambo, de tali crimine convicti, jussi sunt inter duos muros incarcerari quousque deficerent. Alia vero mulier, soror praedicti juvenis, libera dimissa est, quia impietatem illorum revelavit.

Eodem anno, quidam Judaeus nigromanticus puerum quemdam pretio conduxit, quem in cute recenti cuiusdam mortui collocavit, ut sic, per quasdam incantationes nigromantiae, futura posset prospicere; puero ad interrogata respondente de quibusdam futuris quae ei quasi praesentialiter apparebat. (190-91)

In the Year of the Incarnation of Our Lord 1222, Lord Stephen, Archbishop of Canterbury, held his council at Oxford after Easter; when among others he judged a certain apostate deacon, who circumcised himself for love of a certain Jewish woman: after being defrocked, he was burnt by the servants of the Lord of Falco (?). There was led forward into the hearing a certain unbelieving youth with two women, whom the archdeacon of that province had accused of the crime of the worst unbelief; namely, that the youth refused to enter a church or to take part in the divine sacraments or be content with the warning of the Catholic fathers and had allowed himself to be crucified, bearing the appearance still of five wounds on his body, and that he was called Jesus by these women who praised him. One of the women was accused, because she had been dedicated to wicked incantations for a long time and because she had converted the aforesaid youth by means of her magic arts to such insanity. As for these two, having been convicted of such a crime, they were commanded to be imprisoned between two walls until they died. But the other woman, the sister of the aforesaid youth, was set free, since she had revealed the impiety of the others.

In that same year, a certain Jew, a necromancer, paid a certain boy to collect the skin of those who had recently died, so that he might, by certain necromantic incantations, see into the future; the boy, when interrogated, spoke about future things that appeared to him as if happening presently. [my lousy translation]

(thanks to Gavin Langmuir, "Thomas of Monmouth: Detector of Ritual Murder," Speculum 59 (1984): 820-846, at 836 n55 for directing me to Ralph and Jacques).

Medieval Jew Punks Medieval Christians

by J J Cohen

From some work in progress:

The twelfth-century cleric Gerald of Wales tells a story about a Jew who doubted Saint Frideswide of Oxford.

The narrative appears in his Gemma ecclesiastica ["Jewel of the Church"]. This text on canon and moral law seems to have been composed during Gerald’s studies at Lincoln towards the close of the twelfth century – a time when Jews and Christians were living in the city together, sometimes quite peacefully, sometimes not. In a long arc of examples illustrating God’s propensity to strike those who question Christian dogma deaf, dumb, paralyzed, or defunct, Gerald supplies an episode “which took place in modern times,” when the body of the city’s patron saint was translated from the monastery in which she died to a shrine church.

The event took place in 1180, and may have been witnessed by Gerald himself. This moment of civic celebration was marked by frequent miracles worked by the Anglo-Saxon virgin, drawing a stream of worshipers to her new tomb. A certain young Jew infiltrated the crowd, with hands and legs tied by cords as if he were paralyzed. After “mockingly” begging the saint for help, he would unbind his ropes and declare himself healed, shouting “Behold, what great miracles the holy Frideswide can work! She has cured others in the same way as she has just now cured me.”

This nameless Jew, in other words, undermined through histrionic excess the marvels supporting the saint’s revitalized cult. Riffing on what Judith Butler called “gender insubordination,” we might call this irreverent Jewish imitation “dogma insubordination”: a parodic overperformance of an orthodox norm that empties that norm of self-evidence, that erodes its foundation by exposing its status as effect “disingenuously renamed” as cause, a fabrication susceptible to disruption. The Jew’s confrontational parody of saintly healing was meant to cast doubt on the veracity of the Oxfordian efflorescence of cures. Can an obscure virgin from five hundred years ago really be so powerful “in modern times”?

The Jew, in other words, seems to be speaking a thought likely on more minds than his own. He pays a price for his lampooning of orthodoxy, hanging himself in his father’s cellar by the same cords with which he faked a divinely given mobility. He dies uttering an unspecified blasphemy, a last and a lost protest against the narrative vengeance machine that swallows him, that engulfs every Jew in Gerald’s text who dares poke a lance against a crucifix or hurl a rock at an image of Christ or desecrate a host. Although his parents attempt to conceal their son’s suicide, the event is quickly made public by “the Jewish family’s servants and nurses, who were Christians” – to the “great joy and rejoicing” of the Christians, and the “great shame and confusion” of the Jews (Jewel of the Church 1.51, p. 118).

[An early instance here of Jewish humor. Nowadays Christians just laugh at Jewish jokes, or groan, or throw a tomato. Back then God forced you to kill yourself. No one likes a yid punk].

Premodern Aerial Views

by J J Cohen

David Wallace has asked me to post this, and I have to say I myself am very interested in the answer: can you, ITM readers, think of any premodern instances of the aerial view, either textual or visual? Here is the note sent to David by his BBC producer:

One of my Clouds essayists is working on a cultural history/tie in Courtald exhibition on the aerial view: you know the kind of thing: de Certeau on the transition from the itinerary to the overhead map; the development of war from the air etc etc. I`ve told him I`d flag any nice passages from modern/postmodern literature that occur to me. But, though he`s pretty well prepared from the early modern period on, I was wondering if any particular premodern passages come to mind: obviously one thinks of angel-eye views, Dante, etc etc. SO, if you have any thoughts on texts/passages he might examine for his study, do please let me know..

Well, what do you think? One instance that comes to mind for me -- only because it is part of my recent research -- is the imagined aerial view of Stonehenge in the 15th C Scala Mundi. I love this because it imagines the tenon joints as visible, when even from the top they are not. Anway, there is something about this bird's eye view that has always struck me as unique.

Can anyone think of other examples? How about texts that describe the world as if from vanatge of heaven?

The Shooting at the Holocaust Museum

by J J Cohen

Most ITM readers will have heard that yesterday afternoon a man double parked his car in from of the the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, quickly entered the building, and shot a guard in the chest. Stephen T. Johns died later in the day at the GW hospital. The attacker would have killed more people had he not been fired upon by other guards. The museum was filled (as it is every summer day) with tourists and school groups. The marble floors were, in the wake of the shootings, streaked with blood.

James W. von Brunn, the murderer, is described in most media reports as a hard core white supremacist who even at eighty-eight years of age was posting rage-filled screeds against Jews and African Americans on the internet.

I don't have much to say about this event other than it breaks my heart. I keep thinking of Stephen Johns, who died because he was near the door of a space that should not need such protection. I spent yesterday writing about Matthew Paris's narration of the Hugh of Lincoln story, a narrative in which nineteen Jews are gruesomely murdered for a crime they clearly did not commit. I wondered what could cause a person to be possessed by such hatred of those whom they live among that they could convince themselves that their murder should be accomplished by their own hands. I wondered how you can look upon someone you do not know with such animosity that even their pain, their dying blood, will not move you to compassion.

Reading Leo Bersani: A Retrospective

Figure 1. Jim Caveziel as Pvt. Witt in Terence Malick's The Thin Red Line

by EILEEN JOY

I am currently in Dublin [Dun Laoghaire, to be more precise, in The Anchorage, overlooking the National Yacht Club, where I am staying with my cousin--or cuz, as we say--Liz], where I have been since Sunday morning, mainly spending my time revisiting childhood haunts [like Sandy Cove, where my brother, sister, and I, plus cousin "little Tom" and Jack Russell terrier and faithful companion Spot used to swim], but also getting ready for a 3-day intensive seminar at University College Dublin, organized by The(e)ories: Critical Theory & Sexuality Studies [founded and led by Noreen Giffney and Michael O'Rourke], devoted to the life-work and thought of Leo Bersani. Here is how the seminar is described by Noreen, Michael, and also Anne Mulhall, who is one of the co-organizers:

This three-day intensive seminar will be devoted to discussing the influential thinker Leo Bersani whose work spans half a century and which helped to define the fields of lesbian and gay studies and what later came to be called queer theory. His vast, in many ways unclassifiable, oeuvre has traversed and blurred the boundaries of the disciplines of modern French literature, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, art history, film theory, aesthetics, masculinity studies and sexuality studies. This seminar will seek to open up and illuminate the connections and relations Bersani's writings have forged among and between these disciplines (and others).

Day one (Friday 12 June) will be devoted to ‘Reading Bersani Retrospectively’ and will focus on four main themes: identity, desire, relationality and aesthetics. Two trigger papers will be read in advance of each session which will be discussion-based and chaired by an expert facilitator. The readings chosen cover a small but representative sample of Bersani’s writings and it is hoped that the thematic focus will allow for an engaged discussion of some distinct (yet overlapping) unifying features which have animated, and continue to animate, Bersani's work.

Day two (Saturday 13 June) will be devoted to ‘Getting Impersonally Intimate with Leo’ and will see Professor Bersani present from his new and ongoing work followed by a discussion with seminar delegates. After the lecture there will be a screening of Intimate Strangers, directed by Patrice Leconte (2004), which Bersani discusses in chapter one of his recent book Intimacies (co-authored with Adam Phillips).

Day three (Sunday 14 June) will centre on ‘Reading Intimacies’ and will be grouped into three sections each taking one chapter from Intimacies as its focus: self (chapter 1), sex (chapter 2) and ethics (chapter 3). Each session will be chaired by an expert facilitator and will feature short responses to the book from a wide variety of disciplinary locations. Professor Bersani will participate in this discussion of his book.

For those of you who may not be as familiar with Bersani's work [suffice to say I am a bit of a mad devotee], here is a list of his most important publications:

Leo Bersani is Professor Emeritus of French at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. His many books include: Intimacies (with A. Phillips, Univ. Chicago Press, 2008); Caravaggio's Secrets (with U. Dutoit, MIT Press, 1998); Caravaggio (with U. Dutoit, British Film Institute, 1999); Forming Couples: Godard's Contempt (with U. Dutoit, Legenda/European Humanities Research Centre, 2003); Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (with U. Dutoit, British Film Institute, 2004); Homos (Harvard University Press, 1995); Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko and Resnais (with U. Dutoit, Harvard University Press, 1993); The Culture of Redemption (Harvard University Press, 1990); The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (Columbia University Press, 1986); The Forms of Violence (with U. Dutoit, Schocken Books, 1985); The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé (Cambridge University Press, 1981); Baudelaire and Freud (UC Press, 1979); A Future for Astyanax (Little, Brown, 1976); Balzac to Beckett (Oxford University Press, 1970); and Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (Oxford University Press, 1965).

Here, also, is the full schedule:

DAY 1, FRIDAY 12 JUNE: READING BERSANI RETROSPECTIVELY

9-9.30: Opening remarks and introductions: Dr Noreen Giffney (The(e)ories Organiser & Women’s Studies, Department of Sociology, University of Limerick, Ireland); Dr Anne Mulhall (GREP & School of English, Drama and Film/Irish Studies, University College Dublin, Ireland) & Michael O’Rourke (The(e)ories Organiser, Dublin, Ireland).

9.30-10.45: Session 1 - Identity

Facilitator: Dr Fintan Walsh (The University of Dublin, Trinity College, Ireland)

Trigger Papers:

'Erotic Assumptions: Narcissism and Sublimation in Freud' in The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1990) 29-46.

'Persons in Pieces' in A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (London: Marion Boyars, 1976) 286-315.

11.15-12.30: Session 2 – Desire

Facilitator: Eve Watson (Psychoanalyst[APPI] & Independent Colleges, Dublin, Ireland)

Trigger papers:

'Desire and Death' in Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977) 67-89.

'One Big Soul (The Thin Red Line)' (co-authored with Ulysse Dutoit) in Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (London: BFI, 2004): 124-78.

1.30-2.45: Session 3 - Relationality

Facilitator: Professor Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, USA)

Trigger papers:

'Sociability and Cruising', Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious (2002): 9-23.

'Against Monogamy', The Oxford Literary Review 20:1/2 (1998): 3-21.

3.15-4.30: Session 4 - Aesthetics

Facilitator: Professor Derek Duncan (Bristol University, UK)

Trigger papers:

'Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject', Critical Inquiry 32:2 (Winter 2006): 161-174.

'Sexuality and Aesthetics' in The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) 29-50.

DAY 2, SATURDAY 13 JUNE: GETTING IMPERSONALLY INTIMATE WITH LEO

10.30-11: Opening remarks and introductions: Dr Noreen Giffney (The(e)ories Organiser & Women’s Studies, Department of Sociology, University of Limerick, Ireland); Dr Anne Mulhall (GREP & School of English, Drama and Film/Irish Studies, University College Dublin, Ireland) & Michael O’Rourke (The(e)ories Organiser, Dublin, Ireland).

11-1: Session 5 - Lecture by Professor Bersani, followed by discussion (Introduced by Michael O’Rourke; Chaired by Dr Anne Mulhall)

2-4: Session 6 - Screening of Intimate Strangers, directed by Patrice Leconte (2004)

DAY 3, SUNDAY 14 JUNE: READING INTIMACIES

10-12: Session 7 - Self

Respondents: Dr Olga Cox Cameron (Psychoanalyst [APPI, CPI, IFPP] & University College Dublin/ The University of Dublin, Trinity College/ Independent Colleges, Dublin, Ireland); Medb Ruane (Psychoanalytic Practitioner [APPI] & University College Dublin/ Dublin Business School/ Independent Colleges, Dublin, Ireland); Deirdre Daly (GREP & University College Dublin, Ireland) & Dr Noreen Giffney (The(e)ories Organiser & University of Limerick, Ireland). Discussion chaired by Michael O’Rourke.

Reading: ‘The It in the I’ (Intimacies, chapter 1)

1-3: Session 8 - Sex

Respondents: Dr Steven Angelides (Monash University, Australia); Dr Anne Mulhall (University College Dublin, Ireland), Dr Jon Mitchell (Independent Scholar, Ireland) & Professor Elizabeth Wilson (Emory University, USA). Discussion chaired by Dr Noreen Giffney.

Reading: ‘Shame on You’ (Intimacies, chapter 2)

3.30-5.30: Session 9 – Ethics

Respondents: Professor Michael Snediker (Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada); Dr Eamonn Dunne (Independent Scholar, Ireland); Dr Graham Price (University College Dublin, Ireland) & Michael O’Rourke (The(e)ories Organiser, Ireland). Discussion chaired by Dr Anne Mulhall.

Reading: ‘The Power of Evil and the Power of Love’ (Intimacies, chapter 3)

As I will be speaking and helping to facilitate a discussion on cruising and "against monogamy," pray for me. All kidding aside, I'll be posting more on the seminar as it progresses! Vive le Bersani!

Summer

by J J Cohen

Ahhhh, sweet aestivation. So close I can sniff your -- um, OK, I'm giving up on that metaphor before it goes anywhere because once you are sniffing something's something, no good writing can emerge.

Summer is close at hand. I know this fact because within a week I will be done the last of my Official Administrative Duties for 2008-09: submission of the English Department's Annual Report. Sure, I still have a pile of Master Course Data forms to complete, a renovation of a seminar room to instigate, an In Box filled with odds, ends, and the neglected detritus of the spring semester ... but the end is nigh.

So what am up to this summer? Since you asked:

• that Leeds keynote I keep mentioning
• a piece on John Mandeville and Manuel De Landa for the inaugural edition of postmedieval
• an essay on Eduardo Kacs and queer green bunnies for a collection on Kacs' transgenic art coming out at U Minnesota Press
• co-editing an issue of postmedieval with Cary Howie on "New Critical Modes" (stay tuned)
• working on a piece for a conference in York for March 2010
• laboring at my next monograph, provisionally entitled Art from a Stone: Dreaming the Prehistoric in the Middle Ages (I have some research money from my university for this book this summer)
• organizing the 2009-10 GW MEMSI schedule

That list looks longer than any summer can stretch, and yet I know I am forgetting something.

Well, here is one thing more: I'll be abroad for almost all of July. After the conclusion of the Leeds conference, I fly to Rome to meet my family. My in-laws now live in a small village outside the city, so we will be visiting for nearly a week before heading to Paris. There we've rented an apartment for ten days in the 5th arrondissement, near the rue Mouffetard. Early in August we are back in DC ... and later in the month head to our annual vacation in Ogunquit, Maine.

Not a bad summer to look forward to. I just need to get some work done on that Leeds plenary ...

"Google Books Mutilates the Printed Past"

by J J Cohen

From the Chronicle Review, an essay by Ronald G. Musto that argues Google's massive project to digitize the archives of several prestigious libraries achieves more harm than good. Musto provides compelling evidence that the scanning has proceeded (in many case) quite poorly, with pages incompletely reproduced or blurry or otherwise demonstrating some sign that a fatiguable human being brings book to glass. He concludes:

If we acknowledge that Google Books is serving up to us only a mutilated, good-enough version of our already vicarious understanding of the past, what value does that hold for us? What dangers lie in wait for generations of students and scholars for whom the digital — and Google's version of it — will become the only reality? Must a whole new generation begin to reassemble the mutilations produced by Google Books to create authoritative and reliable digital texts? Must 2009 repeat the efforts of 1509 in reassembling, collating, editing, and republishing the scattered fragments of the manuscript past, which the age of print finally made uniform and authoritative? That would be absurd, precisely because it is so unnecessary. But should Google Books prevail, and the resources of the scholarly community be made irrelevant by Google's sheer scale and force, the future of our past will be in great doubt.

Though the execution could certainly be better, I have a difficult time seeing why scanning these books and making them avaialble is not good. The library copy doesn't vanish after digitization ... and to have the book's text now included in Google searches seems to me a great benefit.

Am I missing the evil Google commits through this project?

That Leeds Keynote

by J J Cohen

I don't intend to blog much of the content of my Leeds presentation, since I would like some of what I argue there not to be known in advance, but I will offer some fragments as I proceed.

Today, though, for your amusement -- and for those who don't follow me on Facebook -- a recent interchange about that Leeds presentation.
--------------------------

Jeffrey J Cohen 491 words, the first of which is "If." That's something. 11:08am · via Twitter · Comment · Like

Eileen A. Joy at 11:21am June 8

Is the first sentence something like, "If both Jews and Christians had been able to purchase fondue pots at a medieval Crate-and-Barrel-type store, history would have turned out very differently"?

Jeffrey J Cohen at 11:22am June 8

It is now.

Eileen A. Joy at 11:24am June 8

Perfect. Because seriously, things would have been so different between Christians and Jews after all those get-togethers over cheese and chocolate fondue.

Jeffrey J Cohen at 11:29am June 8

Be serious: they would have poked out each other's hearts with those long thin forks and dipped them in the gruyere-emmenthaler mixture for tasty eating.

Sarah Werner at 11:36am June 8

although not the Jews, since surely mixing heart and cheese would be unkosher, yes? maybe if there was a non-dairy chocolate fondue that would be an option.

Jeffrey J Cohen at 11:50am June 8

My research reveals that Jews SOMETIMES violated halakha in order to feast upon Christian hearts as fondue. These cheesy organs were not kosher, but they did melt in the mouth.

Eileen A. Joy at 12:01pm June 8

But the best part, for the Jews, was not so much the taste of the melting, gruyere-covered Christian hearts in their mouths, but the sight of the heart-less Christians writhing around under the tables with all of those fondue pots with thoughts of "oh cruel world!" in their about-to-be-extinguished minds.

Jeffrey J Cohen at 12:27pm June 8

You've got it: cruel because they would die before the chocolate fondue with strawberries, bananas, and pound cake was even served.

Eileen A. Joy at 12:31pm June 8

That's fairly accurate, I think, as Christians pretty much lived for the final fondue course--that, and the bodily Resurrection.

[OK, don't take that too seriously. Believe it or not, folks, fondue will not actually make it into the Leeds version]

2 Posts by Graham Harman I Wish I Had Read 2 Decades Ago

by J J Cohen

1. another advice post on writing productivity
2. quick follow-up

I know many of our ITM readers are graduate students: perhaps you will find some inspiration here.

EDIT 3 PM: A third post, definitely worth contemplating.

Manuel de Landa, Deleuze, Latour...

by J J Cohen

Readers of ITM who also enjoy the philosophical ruminations of Gilles Deleuze will want to watch this video, kindly sent my way by Mike Smith as a way of thinking about objectal agency in Gil Harris's Untimely Matter. I've been a fan of De Landa since I taught his A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History in a graduate seminar on "Hybridity and Complex Systems" in 2002. I've recently returned to his work as a way of thinking about Mandeville as well: more on that later in the summer. Warning: watching this video will make you desire to grow a pony tail.

Speaking of returns, reading Michel Serres and Gil Harris recently have brought me back to a fellow traveler of De Landa's, Bruno Latour. He and I go way back to 1999 (warning: following this link will remind you of how garish web pages were a decade ago; wear sunglasses before clicking) when I taught my first serious course on temporality. I know We Have Never Been Modern is the text most frequently cited by us medievalists, but let me put in a plug here for the amazing second half of The Pasteurization of France as well as the experimental, over the top, odd and wonderful Aramis, or the Love of Technology. These latter two books showed me that scholarship should be practiced not only as a rigorous discipline but also as a form of art. Aramis especially is a book I find myself returning to frequently.

The Timely Arrival of Some Untimely Material: J. Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare

by J J Cohen

Jonathan Gil Harris (or "Gilly" as I frequently call him behind his back) is my colleague here in the GW English Department. He is also my friend. Posting about his new book is therefore both pleasurable and a little daunting. Readers of ITM may want to take what I say below cum grano salis: it hardly counts as unbiased peer review. Indeed, this post is going to sound (I fear) like a fan letter.

And how could it not? I am an unabashed devotee of Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare. I've read it cover to cover twice, and believe it to be one of the liveliest and most perceptive works of scholarship I've encountered.

Time is a subject that has long preoccupied my own research: the "Midcolonial" section of The Postcolonial Middle Ages, "Time's Machines" in Medieval Identity Machines. I've deployed a proliferation of terms (midcolonial, extimité, inhuman circuit, difficult middles) to describe what Harris succinctly labels the polychronic , the simultaneous cohabitation of heterogeneous temporalities within a material object -- where materiality and temporality are active components of a hybridizing, mobile network rather than solitary and self-segregated pieces of a still world. The arguments of Untimely Matter are as relevant to medieval studies as they are to early modernists, insisting that temporality can be thought as something other than straightforward, historicist chronology. Untimley Matter is pitched strongly against what Harris calls the "national sovereignty model of temporality," in which each temporal moment is essentially its own country, with its own rules and borders and determinations of meaning (p. 2). Against synchronic (past as bounded and determinate field of meaning) and diachronic (past as array of discrete eras) readings, Harris argues for the "multiple traces of time embedded in things" (9), what Kathy Biddick has called "the temporality that is not one." His point of departure is Nietzsche's idea of unzeitgemässe, which might be translated as the temporally improper, "resisting absorption into a homogeneous present" (11) -- spurring us to think "how we might use the past to imagine alternatives to the present and to chronology itself" (13).

Harris's central figure in the book is the palimpsest: the work written over by other works, creating an evident simultaneity of times. Palimpsests can be textual (the Archimedes Palimpsest), architectural (Pisa cathedral has a stone embedded within its façade imprinted with IMPCAESAR, rendering evident its origin in a pagan monument; all cities are palimpsests), or conceptual: they are always, however, material and capable of agency, especially future-directed agency. The palimpsested past, in Harris's account, is thick with possibility:

1. supersession (just as one text might be written over another, one time seemingly yields utterly to another ... and yet that other endures within it, as the earlier text remains legible, as Jews lived among Christians long after the triumph of Christianity)
2. explosion (a heterogeneous past temporality is embedded in the new, like Jewish letters on a Christian London wall, triggering an "untimely irruption" that "shatters the integrity" of the present)
   
3. conjunction (uneasy cohabitation: "polychronic matter can activate a heterodox temporality of conjunction, one that disregards the entrenched partitions and distances informing the geometric lines of chronological time" (171).

Though positioned last and certainly valorized, conjunction is not a synthesis in the Hegelian sense of Aufhebung, which would smooth away time's wrinkles and act in a way that is supercessionary. Any synthesis here is in the sense propounded by Michel Serres, who along with Bruno Latour is a patron god of Untimely Matter: "synthesis as a proximation rather than a transcendence of supposedly disparate elements," "an embrace of alterity" rather than an obliteration of difference, "synthesis that refuses singularity, that opens up to heterogeneity" (146). Conjunction is also the only temporality that opens the possibility of dialogue (16).

Given my own looming date with scholarship destiny, I read Untimely Matter with an eye towards how it might spur a rethinking of Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle Ages. The figure of the Jews wanders through Harris's work like, well, a Wandering Jew: surpassed but not quite in Herbert's The Temple, bequeathing explosive inscriptions to Stow's London, written as new Cabbala by Cavendish. Related figures are also central: the Oriental Other, the queer. Heterogeneity in temporality is inseparable throughout from cultural and geographical difference. Untimely Matter provides a rich vocabulary for describing the multiple temporalities that necessarily come into play when Jews lived among Christians in places like London, Lincoln, York and Norwich. Harris's idea of conjunction also ensures that I will be examining Jewish-Christian coinhabitation as dialogue-producing space (or network) where both identities are susceptible to change, to narratives and futures not given in advance.

I did wonder throughout the book about the place of its own author. Maybe that is simply because I know him ... and yet I found the traces of Harris that he leaves throughout the volume to cry out for more story. Photos of statues from Ludgate, now in St. Dunstan-in-the-West Church, are attributed to the author: with whom did he tour the church, and what did he seek, and what unfolded at the moment of beholding these statues mediated by Stow? The translation of the Hebrew characters Stow inscribes is attributed to Stella Harris: I could not stop myself from yearning for a story about this, because it seemed to me that something had to be at stake that was unspoken, something central to the book itself. In a brilliant chapter on Margaret Cavendish and Hélène Cixous, Harris suggests that three authors are touching ... but the one in "Washington, D.C., 2008" gets only that line. But I don't want this to be the kind of review that takes the author to task for not having written the kind of volume the reviewer would write: indeed, I get the feeling that the small traces without narratives were in fact a deliberate strategy on Harris's part.

Long story short: this is a brilliant book. I haven't enjoyed reading a work of scholarship so much in quite a while. I'd highly recommend that In the Middle readers add Untimely Matter to their summer reading lists.

Medievalist(s) Rock

by Mary Kate Hurley

In case you needed more proof that medievalists are not only talented, creative artistic souls, but also just really, really cool: Dry Island Buffalo Jump, an effort to raise money for students at Saint Andrews suffering from the financial crisis.

Medievalists? Check.
Flute in a rock band? Check.*
Catchy tune? Check.
Good cause? Check.

More proof that Medievalists are awesome. Thanks to Stephanie Trigg for the initial link, and I join her in applauding the efforts of Chris Jones and the band.

____

* Okay, so if I were being entirely honest I'd tell you that that's more something I look for in a band. But flutes do in fact make rock bands cooler. I should know. I play one, and therefore am entirely unbiased.

And Then There Was One: A Semi-Erotic Anti-Hagiography

Figure 1. Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur

by EILEEN JOY

[yet another story written expressly for In The Middle]

for Anna Klosowska, and also for my brother whose heart, if I were able, I would help him to unbind

Is it possible that we know nothing about young girls, who are nevertheless living? Is it possible that we say ‘women,’ ‘children,’ ‘boys,’ not suspecting . . . that these words have long since had no plural, but only countless singulars?
—Ranier Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

They were two. Everywhere they went, they subtracted things from people who couldn’t put two and two together. For example, at dinner parties, when no one is looking, they will take all of the raspberries out of the fruit salad and eat them one by one while standing side by side in the dining room when everyone else is still outside drinking beers and telling the children to stop hitting each other. Since most people can’t put two and two together, nor can they ever relax and enjoy themselves with all the children running around, they can never understand where the raspberries went or maybe don’t even remember them being in the bowl to begin with. Other times, these two will take someone’s boyfriend, or girlfriend, and no one ever knows what happened.

They were twin sisters and had perfected the art of multiple sleights of hands and lips—while one would entertain the unsuspecting victim with stories of raspberry embezzlement, the other would slip out a back window with the boyfriend, or girlfriend, and not being able to put two and two, or one twin and the other, together, the woman, or man, or sometimes a duchess, would look all over the house, or castle, and never figure it out. Wasn’t she interesting? the duchess would say to herself, shutting the castle door behind her, the one who steals raspberries? And then: has anyone seen my boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, mistress, fiancée, daughter, maid, horse, dog, the brass andirons inherited from Uncle Harold? And what about the silver?

* * * * *

Then there is the heroine of our story, distant cousin to the twins, who were two, and we really regret to tell you that she really could not put two and two together at all. As our story opens, she is sitting by the side of the road waiting for someone to come by and help her put two and two together, but being the type that can’t put two and two together, she has completely neglected to notice that she is sitting by the side of the road—Highway 64, to be exact—that has been shut down for almost six months for bridge construction. So here is our heroine, who in a former life had been the Roman emperor Titus’s daughter Lavinia who, believe us, could really put two and two together (Tamora + Chiron and Demetrius = trouble in the woods), but she had neither the tongue nor the hands to make it clear or palpable, whereas our heroine, she had tongue and hands but could not make sums or compilations or glosses with them, of herself or of any combination thereof.

Although it goes without saying how beautiful she was, there were days when she couldn’t tell her ass from a teakettle, even when she was falling over one (a teakettle). Likewise, trips to the grocery store were fraught with peril because, not being able to put two and two together, she did not understand the differences in weights and measures and could not see why, for example, a .85 oz. tube of toothpaste wasn’t the same as or at least comparable to a 6 oz. tube, and always opting for what was cheapest (because, at the very least, she did understand that there was never enough money), she never could figure out why there was never enough toothpaste in the tube when she needed it each night after dinner. Extrapolate this anecdote to containers of milk and ice cream, and even to gallons of gasoline, and you can understand why she was stranded on the side of the road. But because we do not feel we should burden our readers with the dilemma of moving our heroine along, we will leave her here for a little while and return to this spot when the sumac along the highway has turned a blazing red and, miracle of miracles, our heroine is on her way, rolling with the tumbleweeds into the city where all of this takes place because, in addition to not being able to put two and two together, she also does not have the wherewithal to withstand the force of rolling tumbleweeds.

* * * * *

Our heroine has a sad brother who can only ever see, and feel, half of everything. He had a weakness for logic and thought everything should move along the lines of so-called common sense and that was a set-up for personal disaster if ever there was one. Time and again he would insist on rationality, and lo and behold, other people would never oblige him, being married, as they tragically were, to their fickle emotions. As a result, nothing made sense to him, not even the weather, and in order to cope he started to squint so that he could only ever see half of everything—that way, he could pretend that, if the other half were visible, everything would make sense and he was just choosing to forgo a foregone conclusion in order to save his sight from its dazzling radiance. He also looked down at the ground a lot while he was walking, as that saved him the occasional trouble of squinting too much.

As a child, the brother had made the mistake of believing in someone who, strictly speaking, wasn’t real: Henry, the trusty servant to the Frog Prince in the story by the Brothers Grimm. You see, everyone remembers the Frog Prince and the little girl (the insipid little girl, as the brother always remembered her) who angrily throws the frog against a wall (or reluctantly kisses him in the less violent, and therefore not as exciting version), thereby turning the frog into the handsome prince who marries her and makes her a princess. But what most people forget, but the brother never forgot, is Henry, the faithful servant who comes in a carriage to retrieve the prince and his child bride at the end of the story, and who, while the prince was in his state of amphibious bewitchment, had bound three iron bands around his heart so that it would not burst from grief and sorrow. While driving the prince and his betrothed home to the castle, each of the three bands cracked and broke, one by one, as Henry’s heart swelled with joy. The brother had spent his whole life looking for Henry, and although it may be obvious to say so, the brother was eternally bereft of him and there is no remedy for that in this world. Everywhere he went, there was a constant strain of Bach’s Suite for Solo Cello No. 3 in C Major echoing in the chambers of his shackled heart.

* * * * *

And then there was the anchorite, who was one. The lost sister to our heroine and her sad brother, she lived in a walled-in enclosure on the east side of a mansion owned by a couple who felt they simply had to have everything. At that time, it was simply de rigueur to have an anchorite and all of the fashionable houses had one. It was not uncommon, when waiting in the foyer of one of those estates in the best neighborhoods, to see a sign that said, “please don’t spoil the anchorite.” But of course you had to spoil the anchorite, anyway. You would bring her almonds, maybe some cognac, and an issue or two of Vogue, if you could get away with it. Anchorites were a bit more exciting at the time of our story than they were in the Middle Ages. Instead of just sitting and praying and contemplating the beyond and imagining what it would be like to be married to Christ and to kiss his wounds—technically speaking, an hallucination, which had never been much to look at through the narrow window (hence, medieval anchorites were never the spectator sport they could have been), these more modern anchorites would set interesting little tasks of endurance for themselves. With just a small bit of petrol and a Bic lighter for instance, an anchorite might draw a circle of fire around herself and will herself to sit very still as the flames danced around her, or she might kneel, with bare legs, for hours and hours, on a scattering of Aegean sea salt. Or, she might engage in staring contests with visitors. You could never win a staring contest with an anchorite, even with Aegean sea salt under her bare knees, although many tried.

Now the anchorite of our story, Lisa of Cincinnati, lost sister to our heroine and her sad brother, and therefore also a distant cousin to the twins who were expert at subtraction, was especially fond of playing dead. No one could play dead better than Lisa of Cincinnati, and no matter how many visitors peered through the narrow window of her reclusorium and rattled things around, like their bags of Skittles or coffee tins filled with pennies, nothing could disrupt the look on her face and body of beatific deadness. As you may already know, being the educated type of person who can put two and two together, an anchorite’s cell was designed for lifetime enclosure, and the anchorite was literally walled in to the foundation of a church, rectory, or house, with only a small opening cut into one wall through which food, water, and small books could be passed in, and leavings and waste products could be passed out. Ideally, there was no window to the outside as that would ruin the feeling of having been sealed inside one’s own mausoleum. The anchorite was dead to the world, as it were, but to herself—oh, to herself, and to God, she was more alive than you could possibly imagine.

As we were saying, Lisa of Cincinnati excelled at playing dead and spent endless hours in this game of self-mortification. Lying prostrate upon the stone floor, which was also her bed, Lisa of Cincinnati had trained herself to be so still that you could not even tell if she was breathing, and those visitors who brought small battery-powered fans and pointed them toward her through the opening cut out in the wall, hoping to make her shiver, never succeeded in accomplishing anything except rustling the pages of the Vogue magazines that lay here and there on the floor in between the tins of almonds and empty bottles of cognac. And as Lisa’s body lay on the floor, dead to the world and to curious tourists, her soul, which was also her body, made such passionate and violent love to God (who, in her mind, bore an uncanny resemblance to Uma Thurman) that the walls of her enclosure were shattered into a thousand flying shards of concrete that flew across Cincinnati and pierced unsuspecting citizens in their hearts, out of the wounds of which their lost child selves tumbled out and ran down the streets, shrieking with wild elation at their sudden freedom from the cages of the adults they had sadly become. And this is why, even today, and even though this was only the anchorite’s hallucination, the parks of Cincinnati are filled with wild children speckled with bits and pieces of concrete who live in the treetops and whose laughter can be heard rippling through the grass and the small green petals of the violets on late summer nights.

* * * * *

The authors are beginning to wonder where this story is going. We honestly don’t know, but what we can tell you is that this story concerns a certain moment late one humid August night when all of the characters in our story came together in the same place. By “came together,” we mean they all ended up in the same city on the same night—even more so, they practically brushed up against each other at the intersection of a particular longitude and latitude—but by “came together,” we also mean that, in different ways and in different beds, and not really in beds, but on the stone floor of a reclusorium, down a windswept street, and under a proscenium arch separating a living room from a foyer, they arrived together in the ex-stasis of arriving, by which we mean, a general coming together.

The brother was a glass-hanger, or as it was said, he worked in curtain wall construction. Curtain walls were the façades—glass, aluminum, steel, and stone—that were hung on the outside of buildings, usually skyscrapers, and the brother had worked as a hanger on many projects, including the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, which were built on 120-meter foundations. As soon as a building’s structure was erected, the brother would show up to hang the façade, thereby turning the hulking mass of steel and concrete into something that glittered like a palace, or a spaceship, or the future. At the time of our story, he had recently arrived in Cincinnati to hang a façade of pink quartz crystal on Lisa of Cincinnati’s enclosure, for the couple who owned her, although they understood that Lisa needed to live in a state of complete and bare and stony deprivation, they did not understand why her enclosure should not be pretty to look at from the outside. Unbeknownst to the brother, his distant cousins the twins had also recently been summoned by the same couple to install new security technology for their moat, as wayward and drunken teenagers had been sneaking in at night to taunt the anchorite. The twins were experts at home security systems and had their own company and they felt you could never be too safe from those who were always trying to subtract things from you. There are no better security experts than those who are themselves talented thieves. Their plan was to install crocodiles in the moat, and they had brought several of them from the Everglades in their black Cadillac Escalade specially fitted with tinted windows, wet bar, and amphibious wading pool.

You will wonder how it could be that, at a certain point on a humid August night, the twins, who were two, the heroine, who could not put two and two together, the brother, who could only see half of everything, and the anchorite, who was one, could all be together in the same vicinity—even pass each other in the hallway, as happened with the brother and the twins, or one look upon the other, as the brother did with the anchorite, or roll by the open windows in full sight of the twins, as our heroine did—and not recognize each other. It is a depressing but true commentary on our times that siblings and cousins grow up and lead separate lives and, little by little, no longer resemble themselves. Promises are made to keep a better correspondence and then the years go by with no messages, or only a pre-printed card bought in a store with harsh fluorescent lighting that says, “Happy Birthday,” signed Your Brother, but it could be anyone’s birthday and anyone’s brother. Eventually, there is not even that and the years roll by like so many unclaimed shirts and dresses at the drycleaners that were once beloved.

Once, they had all been children together and instead of his bald spot, the brother had possessed long curls of golden hair that their mother refused to cut because they were so beautiful, even though their father always said, with some irritation, he looks like a girl. Every summer, the brother and his two sisters, and their twin cousins who had grown up with them after their parents drowned in a boating accident, would be sent to Dublin to live with their two spinster aunts while their parents would travel to Turkey and Greece to pretend they were lovers again, unburdened by children. Times were different then and no one begrudged the parents their happiness in the sun-blanched whiteness of the grottoes, caves, and hills of an ancient Mediterranean world. Because the aunts were so permissive and kind and thought children should lead unencumbered lives, they would send the brother and his two sisters and the twin cousins out into the city each day to have “adventures,” with the instructions to only come home at 6:00 for supper, and again, after supper, when the sun was setting, which in that part of the world was never until 10:00 or so.

The world of children is a secret one and we are reluctant to peer too closely into those past summers and to violate them. Suffice to say that the brother, two sisters, and twin cousins explored every nook and cranny and shop and alley and park of the city and they ventured out into the country as well, looking for shallow sun-drenched pools of water in the rocks above the sea, where they would swim for hours, and for orchards whose apples they could steal and eat until they were doubled over with pain. Suffice to say that they often traveled for miles and miles, concocted secret rituals and games together, and loved, especially, to sneak into empty houses when no one was at home, rummaging through cupboards and under beds, and trying on other people’s clothes. Suffice to say that they loved to climb hills and to make forts in the underbrush of forests and outposts in the tops of black pines, but that they were always too timid to go into the cold, black waters of the north Atlantic Sea. Suffice to say, they befriended many stray dogs and were expert shoplifters of candy, especially Smarties and Crunchie bars, and they often had a difficult time explaining to their aunts why they weren’t hungry at suppertime. Suffice to say, their service to and friendship with each other was a type of holiness and all their worship. Suffice to say, this chapter is now closed.

* * * * *

But what of that humid night in August and everyone coming together, arriving, as it were, at the same place, while also arriving, together? It all happened, or began to happen, when the brother, who typically only saw half of everything, was applying the last pink quartz tile to the frame of the narrow opening into the anchorite’s cell and, so concentrated upon his work that he forgot to squint, he looked through the opening of the enclosure and saw, with all of his eyes, Lisa playing dead, and he was suddenly seized with the desire to lie down beside her and also play dead. Having spent so many years winnowing and saddening and squinting himself, it was no problem to get through the opening, which he did handily. And lying on the stone floor next to the anchorite, who was one, but now was two (or was it three?), he stretched out his body so that he was on his side, facing but not touching her, and closing his eyes he saw Henry driving the carriage toward him, and one by one, the bands around his heart began to break at just the same moment that Lisa was ravished by God’s fire, the concrete splinters of her enclosure hurtling through the dark night of Cincinnati.

Although the time cannot be set precisely, and it may have been a matter of physics more so than of chronology, at about the same time, or place, the twins, having just installed the crocodiles in the moat, had been arguing in the foyer, while the couple waited for them in the living room, over whether or not, after serving the bill and distracting one or the other with their calculations, they should subtract the husband from the wife or the wife from the husband. Although they could never explain it later, to either their friends or themselves, they were both suddenly seized with a compulsion to add instead of to subtract and there, under the proscenium arch dividing the foyer from the living room, without even worrying about the bill, they added the husband and wife to themselves, and in the midst of this delicious operation, or sum, the twins, who were now four, saw through the open window of the living room the heroine of our story, rolling in cartwheels down the street with the tumbleweeds of summer. But what they could not see, or know, was that at the moment they saw our heroine, who was also their cousin, roll by, was that their cousin was just then seized by what can only be called a tumbleweed jouissance—this is the feeling you get, or rather, a kind of explosion that occurs, after you have been blown, with and like the tumbleweeds, through the prairies and towns and cities of the Midwest, until suddenly God appears beside you and, reaching into your body, pulls you out of yourself, and yet, there you still go, rolling along your way.

This is the moment at which the heroine ascended above herself and above the tumbleweeds and above the street and above all of the houses and the entire city of Cincinnati and, like an angel, looked down through the clouds and a small window into the one apartment, on the tenth floor of a nondescript and sad brown building at the end of a dead-end street, where her brother, not a glass- or pink quartz-hanger at all, but a tax accountant, lay sleeping, dreaming all of this into existence, because none of it really happened at all, except for the childhood. That chapter is closed, as we said, but it was real and alive in the foreign country of the past, and his sister was in the heavens above him, blessing him with her tumbleweed jouissance. And that is why she is the heroine of this story, because even though she can’t put two and two together, she is always watching over the brother like that.

* * * * *

And to Henry, wherever you are, faithful servant and carriage-driver to the Frog Prince, consider our tale, if you will, as an emergency flare that has been fired into the stars from the sad brother’s heart. Do you see it burning there among the constellations, where it will burst and then scatter, like red stardust, raining back down upon those of us who are only trying to live our lives, walking with our heads bowed down along the grey avenues of all the busy cities? This is our signal to you, Henry, a momentary cry for help, and for assistance. We have only the one flare, and we have decided to stop being prudent with it. Henry, we appeal to your loyalty and to your steadfastness and even to your once-begotten sorrow. If by chance you receive this our flare, this our letter to you, come unto the brother of our story with your carriage and your horses, by which we mean, Henry, come unto us, and take us away from here, for the brother—by which we mean, we—we have great need of an hallucination such as you. In other words, Henry, we have need of love. We have need, also, of your limbs and your arms and your lips. So make yourself palpable among us, like God, who, when the anchorite, who was one, came alone, but was not really alone, God licked the edges of her heart with his tongues of fire.

Behold, the Beowulf Bullet (and Automatic Rifle)

by EILEEN JOY

Yes, my friends, what you see in this photograph is the Beowulf bullet, specially designed for an AR-15 automatic rifle [also called the Beowulf rifle]. Here is how one gun enthusiast describes the bullet and rifle:

The Alexander Arms .50 Beowulf cartridge packs awesome power in the AR-15 system. Think of it as a lightweight, handy, semi-auto .45/70 but with a larger diameter bullet and greater velocity. The .50 Beowulf uses a bullet of a true .500 caliber, with loaded ammunition offered from the factory in either a 400-grain soft point or a 325-grain hollow point, with velocities listed at 1800 and 1950 feet-per-second, respectively. This kind of power radically changes the performance aspect of the AR-15 type rifle while retaining the excellent handling and shooting qualities of the weapon. The .50 Beowulf cartridge utilizes possibly the maximum diameter bullet in the biggest case that can be made to reliably function in an AR-15, while operating at a relatively low pressure to assure smooth operation and longevity of the rifle.

Oh brave new world, with such weapons and bullets in it! If this sort of thing really intrigues you, you can read more about it here and here. Note also that the same company, Alexander Arms, has also recently developed a Grendel rifle which can shoot targets at even longer range than the Beowulf rifle. Of the Grendel rifle, the company claims, "Currently in testing with the US Military for widespread adoption, the 6.5 Grendel® seems assured a place in history." Oh yeah, baby.