All Things

by J J Cohen

Below, a portion of my introduction to Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects. Follow the link to read its extraordinary table of contents. The volume is the first of several to be published through a partnership between GW MEMSI and punctum books. Pleas also consider liking Oliphaunt on Facebook.

It was fun to return to Old Norse -- so much fun that I will be doing it a second time for my postmedieval "Ecomateriality" essay on fire that I am co-writing Stephanie Trigg. Stay tuned.

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All Things

Though superseded by a newer translation, Denton Fox and Hermann Pálsson’s version of Grettir’s Saga is a text to which I feel a considerable attachment.[1] Its rendering of the Old Norse narrative is crisp and lucid, capturing the austere yet wry style of the original prose. Even more than its artistry, though, what compels me about the Fox and Pálsson translation is the series of photographs with which the book begins. Between the introduction and the story’s instigation have been inserted twelve poorly reproduced black and white pictures depicting locales mentioned in the saga. Unattributed and unpaginated, this interlude of images captures the multiplicity of histories, real and imagined, that animate the Icelandic narrative and its English reworking: a seeming timelessness in which the landscape is ever as it has been; the ninth through eleventh centuries, when Grettir and his ancestors were supposed to have journeyed these frigid expanses; the early fourteenth century, when the saga’s unknown author dreamt a past that never was and placed its unfolding action at familiar fjords, glaciers, and vales; and the 1970s, when Fox and Pálsson published their English translation of Grettir’s Saga, the first in sixty years. The initial photograph, for example, is labeled “Bjarg in Midfjord, site of Grettir’s birth.” The image depicts an undulation of grass, a lone rock, and a distant mountain -- presumably Kaldbak, the chilly ridge that Grettir’s great-grandfather Onund darkly spoke of having traded his Norwegian grain fields to possess. Yet the picture also contains a farmhouse that if not exactly modern is in no way medieval, with its bright paint, three expansive levels, and chimney. The telephone poles and curve of road quietly argue against placing a young Grettir within that home. Yet the story radiates such a keen sense of domestic vitality that it is difficult to resist thinking of this boy destined for a life no farm could contain, creating his particular brand of chaos within that pastoral space. Every time I look at the photo I expect to see geese and a horse, futilely fleeing his juvenile rage; or his beleaguered dad, storming out of the farmhouse after telling a young Grettir one more time that he has made a very bad choice.

Other photographs in the sequence are less anchored in time and narrative. “Arnarwater Moor, where Grettir supported himself by fishing” has no human content, just rocks and grass and mountains. It’s easy to imagine that nothing has changed here in a millennium. The white snow and dark stone of “Eiriks Glacier” could be as full of half-trolls now as it was when Grettir dwelled in an ice cave, learning for the first time compassion for animals (a grieving ewe rebukes him for the devouring of her lamb) as well as the boredom that comes from a life of monstrous solitude. My favorite image, however, is captioned simply “Bjarg, a rock known as Grettir’s Lift.” A boulder dominates the photograph, looming perhaps nine feet high and twice that wide. A young man stands on either side, each with one hand upon the stone: on the left, a bearded fellow in jeans, a t-shirt and a jacket holding what looks like a small shovel; on the right a man with much shorter hair, glasses, and a wool sweater with a distracting pattern. The exposure for the picture was not well executed, so the image is too bright. It’s difficult to make out details. The first man actually could be holding a camera or a bicycle pump, and the second figure could be a woman. But my best guess is that we have here depicted the two translators of Grettir’s Saga. Having traveled to Iceland together, Denton and Hermann had themselves photographed touching a narrative landmark, a stone so heavy that Grettir alone could raise it.

The boulder christened “Grettir’s Lift” appears twice in the saga. Shortly after his fist Althing ends with condemnation to three years of outlawry abroad, Grettir is journeying with some distinguished men and impresses them with his ability to heft the rock: “everyone thought it remarkable indeed that so young a man could lift the stone” (31). The landmark reappears briefly as Grettir fights haughty Gisli, stripping him slowly of his clothing so that he is reduced to streaking across the landscape in his breeches (125). The stone becomes an immediate and lasting sign of Grettir’s remarkable powers, a piece of the landscape that “still lies there in the grass and is now called Grettir’s Lift” (31). The picture reassures us that to this day we can see and lay hand upon the historical marker. Its endurance reassures us that the saga’s power abides. Denton and Hermann, I imagine, had themselves photographed touching Grettir’s Lift in acknowledgement of Grettir’s saga own impress upon them. The rock takes the place of the narrative, and reassures that some things will never vanish into history, that stories possess an enduring materiality, weighing heavily even when they may have very little that is historical behind them.

The picture of the translators with hands upon the boulder well emblematizes a recurring theme of the saga. Unembellished as its prose may be, the narrative could not progress without a world enmeshed in densely expressive material objects. No matter how firmly anchored they may seem, these objects may, like Grettir’s Lift, suddenly begin to move. Though their power sometimes becomes most evident just at the moment of a human touch, they possess an uncanny agency all their own. Fire, ice and water are actors in the text: they consume, convey, renew, destroy. So is wood. Grettir’s great-grandfather and the man most similar to him sports a timber leg, attached after his limb is severed in battle. The trunk is quite literally Onund Tree Foot’s support, the bestower of his full name. The disability also makes him stronger, more renowned. Early in life Grettir is cruel to animals; toward the end of his days he befriends a lonely ram. Only some of the characters in the saga are people. The short sword that Grettir snatches from the undead Kar the Old becomes his most treasured possession, his constant companion. Kar resided in a dark burial mound, where he sat upon a throne in silent and perpetual surveillance of his silver and gold. Grettir severs the barrow-dweller’s head to end his haunting. He knows that the life of objects is in their circulation, that their consignment to subterranean stasis deprives them of story. Kar’s liberated sword therefore serves him well until his last moments of life. Even in death it cannot be loosed from his hands.

Yet Grettir is also undone by an agential object. Whereas a tree had been the source of Onund’s continued life, Grettir dies when a log on which a curse has been inscribed arrives at his island hideout. His axe rebounds off its trunk and gashes his leg, infecting him incurably. Grettir’s downfall is engineered by a sorceress, a woman who knows how to place the world’s materiality into movement: the enchanted driftwood floats to Grettir’s hideaway against the current, and each time it is tossed into the ocean the log returns. Things matter in this text. And why should they not? Thing comes from a medieval Germanic word denoting a judicial assembly. Thus Grettir’s life revolves around periodic meetings of the Althing, a national convocation of Iceland’s powerful men at which law cases are decided, officials elected, and momentous decisions ratified. This contentious annual assembly held at a place called the Thingvellir was a two week struggle for power. Its participants vied over how best to be heard, how to have an enduring impress, how to bring about a desired future. Here Grettir’s outlawry – his being outside the protection of the law – is twice pronounced. Grettir dies just before he is admitted back into the society that employed the mechanism of the Althing to exile him.

What if at this contest for agency some of those who spoke were not priest-chieftains or influential landholders? What if short swords, enchanted tree trunks, and hefted boulders were allowed a voice? Shouldn’t an Althing include all things? Isn’t a republic a res publica, a public thing? At a parliament (from French parler), who gets to speak? In his book Statues Michel Serres explores the place of things like stones or statues, objects condemned to silent roles in human dramas.[2] Because Germanic and Latinate terms for “thing” are etymologically related to the words for cause (causa, cosa, chose, Ding), Serres observes that things tend to be admitted to reality only by legal tribunals and assemblies – as if reality were a human fabrication (294, 307). Yet things, especially things that appear to hold themselves in silence, must possess a power indifferent to language: something that comes from themselves, not via human allowance. Silent things must be able to speak, exert agency, propel narrative. The philosopher of science Bruno Latour has famously imagined just such a Parliament of Things, where

Natures are present, but with their representatives, scientists who speak in their name. Societies are present, but with the objects that have long been serving as their ballast from time immemorial … The imbroglios and networks that had no place now have the whole place to themselves. They are the ones that have to be represented; it is around them that the Parliament of Things gathers henceforth. ‘It was the stone rejected by the builders that became the keystone’ (Mark 12:10).[3]

Or the stone hefted by the Icelandic warrior doomed to a life of bad luck and unhappiness, a stormy life that proceeded through his dependence upon objects: rocks to lift, swords to keep him company, last days with a fire and a ram and an island and a shepherd’s hut that became his best home.

            The essays collected here make a cogent, collective argument that things matter in a double sense: the study of animals, plants, stones and objects can lead us to important new insights about the past and present; and their integrity, power, independence and vibrancy needs to be acknowledged, and can found a politically and ecologically engaged ethics in which the human is not the world’s sole meaning-maker, and never has been.

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[1] Grettir’s Saga, trans. Denton Fox and Hermann Pálsson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974). Further references by page number. The newer translation is by Jesse Byock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). For the saga in Old Norse, see Grettis saga, ed. Örnólfur Thorsson (Reykjavík: Mál og menning, 1994).

[2] Michel Serres, Statues (Paris: François Bourin, 1987).

[3] Brono Latour, We have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) 144.

Waking Moment

by J J Cohen 

For Eileen 

I 

I read Eileen's moving post on insomnia and could not sleep that night. In the next day's weariness the world seemed no more vibrant. No smile, gesture or waterbowl transported me. I tried to work on a writing project, tried not to snap at family because I was foggy and overtired. Early bed and the deepest sleep. 

II 

A vivid dream. 

We are in the midst of a family vacation, only this year we are walking from DC to Maine along the Appalachian Trail. We've made it as far as New Jersey, where we climb the sandy peaks of the Pine Barrens. I can't believe that Katherine has been able to tread 625 miles without complaint. I know these mountainous dunes are dangerous, and I am afraid she will topple to the city of Patterson far below. I tell her to crawl. I think that I can make out the house of William Carlos Williams, in the basin below the ridge. 

Katherine might die on this walking trip I've planned. Remember when we were almost stranded on that Australian mountain? But now we are in New Jersey. I realize we've been joined by Gay, who lives across the street. We're helping her up the hill. Just before her husband died of cancer, Roger came outside to whisper good-bye to Katherine. Then he died, and that was that. Katherine cries sometimes for Roger -- Katherine who still sleeps with the empty collar of our own dog. Everything ends, we all vanish, no matter how much we like being here. 

In college my "American Modernism" professor told us that William Carlos Williams delivered 100,000 babies. I think that math was not his strong point, yet here above Patterson all those infants seem a good omen. Williams was all plums and wagons, but the best story he wrote was "The Use of Force," of the triumphs that are mistakes. 

We descend into Patterson and catch our breath at the Community Center. We are sitting with the Senguptas, who moved to New Jersey twelve years ago. They are watching their daughter figure skate or their son play hockey. They are curious about us -- they have never met Jews before -- but they don't say a word. The dream ends when the alarm sounds. I don't think anything remarkable was going to occur. 

III 

Like Eileen I love the vividness that intense being-together and tiredness impart. Chinese food at three in the morning, karaoke at four, games of truth at two: they stay with me. But I know that intensity arrives limned with boredom, frustration, stupid dramas, things gone wrong, gestures not susceptible to transformation, that which asks forgetting. I don't lose those memories: the ruined plans, the callous remark, the betrayal, the complainer, those who leave and never come back. I believe in vibrancy, but I suspect that it arrives only at a cost. I'll pay. I'll think about Patterson viewed from a sand mountain, Patterson with and devoid of metaphor, and continue that impossible walk towards the coast.

I'll Stop the World and Melt With You: A Plea for Inextricability, for Staying Awake, and for an Insomniac Humanities

by EILEEN JOY

for Brantley Bryant

Every known object
rotates

as if:

b. keeping busy
c. stunned
(Rae Armantrout, "Arrivals")

We address the question of our aliveness to the object of fascination because contemplating such an object allows us to suspend our aliveness without suffering from it; in reverie, in gazing, we are undead.
(Aranye Fradenburg, "My Worldes Blisse: Chaucer's Tragedy of Fortune")

leave your possessions, positions, ambitions at home,
temporarily quit the human race;
how long can we stay?
the fairies with the stars won't say;
it all depends on your money . . . or your case.
(poem written by an anonymous American while incarcerated in a Chinese prison, from This American Life, Episode 448, Adventure!, Act I: "Chinese Checkmate")

What we need is an account . . . of how the complications of praise may be thought, said, and sung together with the complications of truth and, yes, pleasure.
(Cary Howie, "Inextricable," Glossator 4: Occitan Poetry)

Before beginning, a disclaimer and a frank personal aside: I am well aware that some people are afflicted by chronic and long-term bouts of insomnia, and that this can be a horrible thing to live with, and I am not meaning in any way with my post here to minimize or overlook that fact. For a brief period, when I was working on my MFA in the early 1990s and living in Richmond, Virginia, over a period of about a year, I had a terrible and long battle with insomnia that was also combined with an illogical anxiety that if I went to sleep, I would die. I never actually sought help for this (because I was young and stupid), but spent many late nights and early mornings riding my bicycle through the lamp-lit streets of the historic Fan district in Richmond in order to wear myself out, and also because I believed that, by cycling, I was keeping myself alive. I had a lot of interesting "visions," epiphanies, "visitations," and hallucinations on these bike rides, some of which made it into my fiction writing, and one of which convinced me I had cracked the "code" of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland." but mainly, it was just a horrible period in my life. It didn't help that, at the time, I was also -- how shall I put this? -- a total pothead. But I must admit, I have some nostalgia for those visions and visitations, which were, for lack of a better way to describe them, windows that momentarily cracked open to reveal to me the frail yet tender interconnectedness of everything, human and inhuman, past and present (Richmond is a truly Southern gothic city in which the past is always visible), as well as the shining beauty of the world. In short, even when sick and afraid, I'm an optimist [or is it" hopeless aesthete?].

When I was in New York City just this past September for a series of "speculative" and "object oriented ontology" events, I did not sleep very much. As is typical for me, when I am caught up in certain events, such as a conference or symposium or even just visiting friends, I like to stay up late and soak it all in: for me, these are joyous occasions in which to take everything in and not let anything go unnoticed or unattended, if at all possible. If there are several events and things to do that last for longer than four or five days, I sometimes go for 2 or 3 days in row without really sleeping at all, and of course, New York City is a great place to do just that. On one day in particular, the Sunday after the party to celebrate the publication of Karl's book (How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages), for which I was up until about 4:30 am, rising again at 7:30 am, and which followed the Friday night after the Speculative Medievalisms event when Jeffrey and I and and three brave graduate students stayed up the entire night and did not sleep at all, well, suffice it to say: by Sunday, I was like the walking dead. And still, I did not go to sleep after arriving at Nicola Masciandaro's apartment in Brooklyn, where I was staying -- I kept going until later that night. There was so much to do that day (which involved a gorgeous bike ride with Nicola from Sunset Park to Park Slope to open up a bank account for punctum books). So much to do, so much to see.

On such days, when one is so tremendously sleep-deprived, a peculiar thing happens: sleep begins to feel almost beside the point, or so fugitive you give up trying to catch it. You imagine, likely insanely, that you can just keep staying up, avoiding the sleep that obviously every cell in your body is clamoring for, and there is a certain exhilaration, a certain heightening of all of your senses, while at the same time, all of your balance and equilibrium and your reaction time is seriously compromised: you can't quite line up thought and speech and if you drove a car, you'd probably kill someone. My favorite "text" on this subject is Christopher Nolan's film Insomnia, in which Al Pacino plays a seriously sleep-deprived police detective [Detective Dormer, pun intended], who has been sent to Nightmute, Alaska [at a time of year when the sun never sets] to help investigate an unusual homicide, and who in the midst of a confusing chase of a suspect in a fog-filled river ravine accidentally shoots and kills his partner. And that's just the beginning of the movie -- everything that happens afterward is part classic mystery thriller, part gorgeous dissection of the surrealities of an insomnia-addled mind, in which the most mundane and typically unnoticed (because so common) gestures and objects become suddenly charged with a kind of slow time-lapse hyper-sensuality.

Taking the subway back to Sunset Park in Brooklyn that Sunday morning, walking up Fifth Avenue toward 46th Street afterward, and sitting at a dinner table later that evening which had been specially prepared for the arrival of strangers and for a practice of faith within a co-operative anti-Church "church" ["no costumes, no hierarchies, no dogma"] that stands "opposed to systems of this world that prioritize individualism and personal success," I experienced several instances [four instances, to be exact] of such highly charged moments in which I felt as if the entire world -- and more so, particular items within that world -- had become irradiated, and also, suddenly detached from their surrounding contexts, both human and inhuman, demonstrating what Jane Bennett might call a certain vibrant thing-power and "agentic capacity" that "refuses to dissolve completely into the milieu of human knowledge" and becomes somehow (impossibly) independent from human subjectivity (Vibrant Matter, p. 3), and through which thing-power Graham Harman might say we experience "a strange new realism in which entities flicker vaguely from the ocean floor: unable to make contact, yet somehow managing to do so anyway" ["On Vicarious Causation," p. 193]. In such moments, the world both stops, all of its "items" coming forward for particular "freeze-frame" notice, and also melts into me, so that I can't tell where I end and the world begins, and vice versa.

As I was having this experience, but also afterwards when I had the benefit of some actual sleep, I reflected on the ways in which these four charged "moments," which were also things glimpsed anew through my insomnia, provided some interesting structures of thought for re-thinking our professional and institutional affects, especially within a humanities that might benefit now from more "enchanted" [while still critically rigorous] modes of inquiry, theory, and practice [on this point, see also Jane Bennett's The Enchantment of Modern Life and Tara Williams's essay, "Enchanted Historicism," in postmedieval's recently launched online Forum]. I'll pose these structures of thought as questions [for now], arising out of four insomnia-riddled moments, which are also figures as well as objects:

1. The Smile: as I was walking through the underground tunnels that connect the Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Street stations, and in the midst of the hurly burly of this crowded interchange in which most, people, including me, were looking down or straight ahead to non-peopled vanishing points [we're afraid to really look at each other in crowded places, although I often make a concerted habit of doing just that], I glanced to my left and saw a couple, a man and woman in their thirties [I guessed], walking toward me and holding hands, not talking or looking at each other, but obviously happy, and apropos of nothing in particular, the woman smiled, broadly -- it was the kind of smile that took over the entire space of her face and instantly altered the architectonics of the subway tunnel, shooting like a radiant arc to all of the other passersby, to me, to the tiles and posters that lined the walls, to every piece of trash, and to the turnstiles and defunct machinery. The smile levitated and caused everything in its multiple arcs to levitate with it. It was both human, because emanating from this woman, but also inhuman and prosthetic and thingly, because, once given [or suddenly manifested], it detached itself and began to travel as a force with its own contours and properties, and a large part of its power was its spontaneity: it seemed to arrive from absolutely nowhere -- there was no predisposition to its arrival, for it surfaced suddenly from the depths of this woman and just as quickly, overflowed her in its glimmering. It was infectious and made me smile; the tunnel of the subway, typically dingy and worn down with human traffic, all grays and greens and blacks, was now shining with the surplus of this spontaneous gesture, both utterly human but also inhumanly for-itself. In his book Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions, Michael Snediker undertakes a reading of the "smiles" of Hart Crane's poetry as "certain things" that have their own autonomy and which recuperate "the unequivocal objectness of the positive" [pp. 47-48]. As Snediker also writes,

What does it mean for a smile to mean something? How to distinguish a smile's own local conditions and effects from the conditions and effects that a smile (metaphorically or otherwise) might designate beyond itself? [p. 59]

It might be said, as Snediker suggests, with reference to the smiles of Crane's poetry, that the smile is "both doomed and indefatigable," always fading at the moment of being offered but also, simultaneously, "ever present" [p. 68], and therefore, also transcendent, even beyond death. For me, the question all of this begs, within the context of institutional or disciplinary affects, and following something Hart Crane himself practiced [perhaps ludicrously -- after all, he committed suicide], is whether or not, "through very much dullness and suffering," it might still interest us to "affirm certain things," and even to engage, or participate, together in "pure emotional crystallizations" [pp. 218, 65] of joy, of happiness, as forms of self-sustenance, but also as a form of lending to others the positive objects of our affirmation, so that, even when, as Auden once wrote, we are "beleagured by the same negation and despair," we might "show an affirming flame"?

2. Tenderness: while sitting on the D train, headed to 36th Street, I sat across from an elderly couple, a man and a woman, who had between them a young girl, maybe 9 or 10 years of age, who I assumed was their granddaughter. As the young girl threaded her arms into those of her grandmother, who kissed her on the top of her head, the grandfather took off his glasses and handed them to the grandmother who, without even acknowledging the gesture, and with no direct looks between them, simply took the glasses and placed them in her purse, as I assumed she has done thousands of times before. They rode together like this in what appeared a contented silence, each of them locked in their own thoughts but also intimately intertwined through touch, holding, and unconscious yet ritualized gesture. Here, there was a light touch and unspoken concord that suggested a certain familiar comfort, but also solicitous [if unspoken] tenderness. Similar to the smile, the action of taking and putting away the glasses detached itself, or jumped, from the three fellow-travelers with whom it initially co-habited and thus warmly embraced, with tenderness, the entire train-car and all of its human inhabitants, as well as the nonhuman objects of the car, such as the seats, the doors, the various bags and backpacks and purses and iPods and newspapers and so on [this was just my hallucination, of course, but perhaps a productive one?]. Tenderness comes from the Latin verb tendere -- to stretch, hold out, offer -- and then, with the idea of "yielding" built in, as an adjective it comes to mean something that is soft or delicate, fragile, easily broken, frail, fine, easily giving way, and so on. Tenderness, then, connotes an action which is itself delicate and frail, if assured [a light touch], but which also seeks to shelter [without imposing or containing] that which is delicate and frail -- a yielding to that which is also yielding. Similar to Whitman's poet, and with the "years straying toward infidelity," tenderness "is no arguer," and also "judges not as the judge judges but as the sun failing round / a helpless thing" ["By Ontario's Blue Shore": for a beautiful meditation by Jane Bennett on this poem of Whitman's in relation to the "voices" of things, go HERE]. How can we better practice, within the humanities, the lighter, more tender touch, in which we might seek to create new spaces for the more loving holding and carrying of others' projects? How might the humanities, further, be envisioned as a collective endeavor in which, while we may constantly and very productively disagree about all sorts of things [here, I remain committed to Bill Readings' vision of the university as a dissensual community, a multiplicity "not of subjects but of singularities"], we also commit ourselves to the care of others' work? To be blunt: are we willing to dedicate a portion of our careers to the tender holding and carrying of not only others' work, but also of the persons themselves, who may need our affections, may need our affirmative [yet non-oppressive] touch? Can we take responsibility, not just for own careers, but for the careers of others [and I don't mean just our students -- that is a given] who would no longer be our agonistic competitors but our queer traveling companions?

3. The Water Bowl: after I left the 36th Street station in Brooklyn and made my way up Fifth Avenue toward 46th Street, I stopped, quite purposefully, at the large garage and parking lot where all of the New York City MTA buses are parked overnight, and where my friend Heather Masciandaro leaves food and water for the neighborhood's homeless cats twice a day, every day of the week [this is just one of three places that she does this], and I noticed that the stainless steel water bowl had been filled recently and was gleaming in the bright sunlight. I was hoping to get a glimpse of the cats, who were hiding, and the bowl of water began to vibrate and send rings of watery light through the bars of the large metal gates and down Fifth Avenue, encircling all of the cars, the persons walking up and down the street, and me. It struck me that this bowl of water, filled and re-filled every day by Heather, was like a bottomless well and also a river than ran through the Sunset Park neighborhood, offering the comfort of a sustenance that could be depended upon to those persons [the cats] who are marginal, unseen, uncounted, abandoned, and untouched [and even reviled by some as not worthy of human attention, of requiring extermination]. This bowl was just a bowl of water, but it was also a shining token [literally, from the Old English "tacen," a "sign," a "mark"] of a certain dedication, a certain unwavering fidelity, one that performs small miraculous acts of staying on and watching over, that says, "I won't leave you," even though, of course, we all leave at one point or another and nothing is forever. Heather will likely be embarrassed that I have "outed" her charitable acts in this way: she seeks no attention for them and does what she does out of necessity. It isn't because she wants to be "good," or feels she has to be "ethical," that she feeds these cats every day, but because she can't see how she could not do this. In this scenario, necessity names the affective (and loving) propulsion through which anything good could happen at all, what Levinas termed the gestures of "la petite bonté": those smaller singular moments when “the human interrupts the pure obstinacy of beings and its wars.” This goodness, which is “little,” is ultimately “fragile before the power of evil,” and yet is the only means available for ethical attention since goodness can never be “a regime, an organized system, a social institution” [Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, pp. 207, 208, 217]. How might the humanities be the preserve for the production and safekeeping of the gestures of "la petite bonté," however frail and ultimately doomed? How, in other words, can we make the humanities more liveable for each other, as well as the place in which the number of "persons" and "things" that count as lovable and grievable are expanded beyond our current imagining, and where we would remain "true" to each other?

4. The Table: Sunday evening, after doing some work, I headed to The Commons, a co-op space on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, to join my friend Meagan Manas who recently started a new church co-op and ministry there, "Our Table," that mainly consists of a dinner on the occasional [not every] Sunday night, where friends [and hopefully, the occasional stranger] gather to eat together and "tell and share sacred stories," and also to share the ups and downs of their lives and work projects. Yes, it's a Christian co-op, but one that is decidedly anti-Church [with a capital "C"] and that is invested in social justice and in desiring and building "alternative realities." I am not at all a religious person, and on most days I really hate religion for the divisiveness and hatred and violence that it sows [while I also recognize the more positive role it has occasionally played in historical events such as the movement to abolish slavery], and as a medievalist, I know too much about how the late antique and medieval European Church "assembled" and propounded its theology [and the Protestant Reformation didn't improve anything, in my mind]: ultimately, I think we need an ethics "before ethics" and a divinity [what I might call the dignity of persons and things] "before divinity." Nevertheless, sitting around the table that Meagan had brought into being, and which I had "arrived" at through Meagan's invitation -- and now pretty much completely whacked out of my mind from lack of sleep -- and talking with people I had never met before about the tribulations and struggles of their week, and also hearing people ask for others to pray for them and for those over whom they have much anxiety [such as a gravely ill mother], I reflected on the table itself and how tables, over time, have served as important sites for gathering and orienting us to each other. Sara Ahmed has written eloquently, in Queer Phenomenology, of tables and what they allow, or don't allow, to arrive, and how even the tables themselves don't always "appear" or "arrive" to us in the way they should [such as the writing table of a philosopher of phenomenology like Edmund Husserl, whose domestic writing table "disappears" in the philosophy that it made possible], and yet, as Ahmed writes,

objects not only are shaped by work, but . . . they also take the shape of the work they do. To think about how objects are "occupied" we can begin by considering how we are busy "with" them. Whether we "take" up different objects depends on how we are already occupied and on the kind of work that we do. We say that we occupy space; that we have an occupation. We are occupied with objects, which present themselves as tools to extend "the reach" of our actions. We are occupied when we are busy. We are booked up; we are using up time when we are occupied with something. . . . How are we occupied with objects? How does an occupation orient us towards some objects and, in that towardness, to some way of living with others? How does this orientation take up time as well as space? [p. 44]

We need tables around which to gather, and do so all of the time within the humanities, although we often pretend otherwise, since we are so invested in the "singular" success story, the "one" theory or "explanation" that triumphs over others, as if we were always sitting alone at solitary tables. Aren't we always sitting at tables, as I am doing now, writing this, facing and talking to interlocutors [imaginary and otherwise], with whom we are hoping for some affinity, some agreement, some affirmation -- at the very least, some company [which literally means to break bread with others]? How might we make our tables more visible -- the homely, domestic spaces within which we work -- while also better articulating the fellowships we are working at secretly all of the time? How can we work harder in the humanities at sitting together, facing each other, and just talking, not always knowing where that talking might lead -- as Leo Bersani recently put it, this would be "a life devoted to love as a lifelong devotion to philosophical discussions -- or, to put it not quite so dryly, to spiritually liquefying speech" [Intimacies, p. 87].

Further, how can we be more "awake" to each other, and to the world? How can we practice better the "disorder" of insomnia, which in the Middle Ages was termed amor hereos, or "love-melancholy" [thanks, Aranye Fradenburg, for teaching me that!], where we might take better notice, with pangs of longing, of the shining strangeness of others and of Otherness, and take better stock of the gorgeous [if even, at times, terrifying] singularity of all of the items of the world, human and nonhuman, accounted for and unaccounted, the diamonds as well as the trash, your lover lying in bed beside you, but also the homeless cat howling outside of your window, the lost grocery list blowing down the street, and what George Mackay Brown described as the most frail things, "spindrift or clover-scent or glitter of star on a wet stone." Or, put another way, and because I think everyone knows by now how much I love others' words and can't live without them, as Cary Howie writes in an essay cited in one of my epigraphs above, if we can hear the

“mine” in the most radical sense—as necessarily co-implicated with the “you” . . . —something explodes inside ownership. You are mine. You are a minefield. And that small explosion—I can’t help wondering—must have something to do with how I am bound up not just with you, whoever you are, but also with these bodies, human and inhuman, animate and otherwise, that are both near and distant from me. We are inextricable. ["Inextricable," p. 32]

ANNOUNCEMENT: Online Forum [postmedieval]

by EILEEN JOY

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
–William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

Myra Seaman, Holly Crocker, and I are excited to announce the launch of a new, semi-annual feature of postmedieval: an online, open-access Forum, to be directed and edited by Holly Crocker, and to feature short responses, as well as debate and dialogue, relative to essays, reviews, and topics featured in regular issues of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies. Our first forum, Forum I: Historicity Without Historicism?, comprises 5 essays written by Bettina Bildhauer, Brantley Bryant, Ruth Evans, Larry Scanlon, and Tara Williams, all responding to Paul Strohm's book review essay that was published in Volume 1, Issue 3: 2010 (available now to be read online, free of charge), and which has stimulated wide-ranging and lively discussions over the roles and shapes and ethics of historicism in medieval studies.

As Holly writes in her Introduction to Forum I,

In constituting this forum . . . I offer my own response to Strohm’s review essay: I asked scholars whose work comments on what I see as historicism’s unfinished business — from politics, to psychoanalysis, to presentism, to feminism — whose work challenges, and potentially even explodes, the disciplinary boundaries of older ‘new’ historicisms. These are scholars who refuse to ‘Ced[e] an interest in the past,’ yet who simultaneously remake what this commitment might look like through their active, creative reimaginings (Strohm, 2010, 380). As readers will see, contributors to this forum made the invitation to respond to Strohm’s review essay their own: while Brantley Bryant emphasizes historicity’s potential ‘to promote the value of our discipline in a time of catastrophic program cuts,’ Bettina Bildhauer reinvigorates terms we might have set aside, encouraging us to ‘Acknowledge Zeitgeister’ in her provocative reading of the past’s co-presence. Larry Scanlon throws down sage tenets that recall us to the political potential of historicism as an interpretive hermeneutic, and Ruth Evans offers an elegantly concise reading of the failed sexual relation at the heart of Troilus and Criseyde as a means to demonstrate the historical capacity of psychoanalysis. Each essay enacts some version of Tara Williams’s ‘enchanted historicism,’ which she develops as ‘a deep curiosity that is broader and more active than wonder . . . a state of being rather than a reaction.’

These scholars evince deep theoretical attentiveness to the political implications of historicism, but there are no advanced declarations of what that might mean within any particular interpretive encounter. There appears to be a shared awareness that, to borrow a quip from Jacques Rancière, ‘If everything is political, then nothing is’ (Rancière, 1999, 32). Consensus is not automatic, but must be assembled from the specific, the concrete, the tangible. As Evans illustrates with respect to sexuality, complementarity is not just a myth, it is a disabling fiction that perdures through presumption. When Bildhauer observes, ‘Any person in 1243 was surrounded by concepts and objects that had persisted over generations as well as by budding new ones’ she calls us to notice the specificity of history’s multiplicity. If this unqualified resistance to abstraction resembles Wendell Berry’s situationist ethics, it is equally (un)naive about the unwavering intellectual and emotional demands that tangible involvement in the past requires. Whether it is the pedagogical expansiveness Bryant extols, or the analytic clarity Scanlon realizes, this combination of uncertainty and confidence takes its own time to develop.

It is hoped that postmedieval's online Forum will serve as a vibrant space for public, open, and spirited conversations relative to the content published in postmedieval and to pressing issues and questions circulating in medieval and early modern studies more broadly. Please watch, also, for Forum II: Open Peer Review, slated for publication in Jan. 2012, and featuring meditations on the state(s) of peer review and e-publishing in the humanities from Jen Boyle, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Martin Foys, Eileen Joy, Sharon O'Dair, Katherine Rowe, Sarah Werner, and Bonnie Wheeler.

Twisted Aristotle and the Great Indoors: Re-Booting Ontology with Graham Harman, Patricia Clough, and Nicola Masciandaro

by EILEEN JOY

If the Middle Ages is a machine of the Great Indoors, of the Ptolemaic world, of the cosmic egg, then we have to think the Great Indoors is living in the Great Outdoors, not just pointing to it from within.
--Nicola Masciandaro, from his closing remarks to Speculative Medievalisms 2: A Laboratory-Atelier

Continuing in the vein of sharing audiofiles of the talks and responses from Speculative Medievalisms 2: A Laboratory-Atelier, held at The Graduate Center, CUNY on September 16th [go HERE and HERE for digests and audiofiles of the talks and responses by Kellie Robertson, Drew Daniel, Julian Yates, and Liza Blake], I now share here the audiofile of Graham Harman's talk, "Aristotle With A Twist," with a response from Patricia Clough and closing remarks from Nicola Masciandaro.

Graham first began by graciously leading us through what have become some of the foundational tenets of his philosophy of objects (and which are most recently articulated in The Quadruple Object, just out from Zero Books), including the idea that, historically, most philosophies have either "undermined objects" (reducing them downward to their supposed "parts" or smaller "components") or have "overmined" them (reducing them upward to their supposed relations with other objects). For Harman, Heidegger is a fellow-traveler with him in his project to restore to objects their irreducibility and primary reality, partly because Heidegger gave us the idea of being as something that is never entirely reducible to its presencing, which it always somehow exceeds (and therefore, in Heidegger's philosophy, singular being, more so than how objects and things change over time, may also be a form of time itself--this is complicated and I refer everyone to Chapter 3 of Graham's book for more elucidation on this point). Thanks to Heidegger, we have a philosophy that draws our attention to the deeper, withdrawn realities of objects which humans, for all of their attenuated consciousness, can never "drain to the dregs." But because Heidegger was also caught to a certain extent in the post-Kantian moment, where he could only think about objects in relation to the human's ability, or inability, to grasp the deeper reality of objects, what he could not see, that Graham himself argues for in his own philosophy, is that objects not only never come into full contact with us, but they also never come into full contact with other objects: nothing in the world, in Graham's philosophy, is ever exhausted by its relations with other objects--something always remains withdrawn, or hidden, in the subterranean depths of objects, and it is to this "reality," as well as its indirect relations with the sensual and experiential world in which we live, that Graham productively tilts his thinking.

For Graham, Aristotle, somewhat perversely perhaps, remains the one philosopher who took the question of a thing's "substance" (apart from its properties and accidents and immersion in and relation to and co-option by other things, substrates, and forces) seriously in a way that might still be fruitful for an object oriented philosophy interested in the "real" autonomous singularity of objects. In the end, in Graham's philosophy, all of us (humans and other things, for we humans are also "things" or "objects") remain, to a certain extent, sealed in "private vacuums," and although, of course, we are every day partially transformed (or taken up) into continuums (like: a symposium on speculative medievalisms!) of which we are and play a part, our status as singular entities is never fully deployed or exhausted in those continuums. In Graham's talk, he explained how the question of why this might be the case was one that Aristotle never solved, but which Aristotle raised more urgently for us than we might have expected.

Patricia Clough opened her response to Graham by describing her attraction to Object Oriented Ontology and Speculative Realism because of its "re-booting" of the ontological that "restores wonder for objects, that concedes a causality of allure, offers a take on aesthetics," and also "inserts a refreshing aporia between ontology and epistemology." She then went on to outline three questions for Graham (but was it really four questions?), to which he responded, and then Nicola Masciandaro offered a wonderful wrap-up of the entire event, all of which you can listen to here:


Graham Harman, "Aristotle With A Twist" [with a response from Patricia Clough and closing remarks from Nicola Masciandaro]

If you prefer to download audiofiles and listen to them on a portable, mobile device, go HERE.

#occupythemiddleages

by J J Cohen

#occupythemiddleages

Read Karl's post. Read Vellum's post. Compose your own post; we will link to it here.

#occupyhistory

It's symbolic solidarity. But it isn't to be disparaged for that: symbolism is powerful.

#occupy

Symbolic actions are real. Medievalists know that. Early Modernists know that. Literary and historical scholars from all periods know that fact well.

#occupytogether

#occupythemiddleages "God Spede the Plough"

by KARL STEEL

I couldn't have done better on purpose. Yesterday afternoon, my wife and I set out to join a couple ten thousand of our Union allies to march on Wall Street. Earlier that day, in my medieval senior seminar on eating, I taught Chaucer's Plowman portrait, Piers Plowman B.6 (the "Hunger" passus), and "God Spede the Plough". I told the students I'd be starting my office hours early so I could get out for the protest, gave a bit of CUNY-specific context about my going (I pointed to the blackboard and said, this one here, it's ok, but you know it's about the only decent blackboard on this floor), and then stymied an incipient discussion about contemporary politics.

Not that that did much good. What ensued was necessarily political. Everything(?) is, anyhow (always historicize! says the one; always de-correlationize says the other; sometimes they speak together), and it can't help but be when we're reading medieval texts about peasants. For Chaucer's Plowman portrait, for example, I asked the students why Chaucer had the Plowman work for free; why he omitted the coercions of the landowners; and why the second line of the portrait links him with "donge": here, I said, is an image that's at once one of production and disgust, delight in food (which the peasant brings) and disgust at our reliance on the body and the labor of peasants (remember, I said, who would have been reading this text: not the 99%).

Then "God Spede the Plough." Here's the first stanza translated:

As I walked myself over wide fields
When men began to plow ("ere") and sow,
I saw how quickly farmers hastened
with their beasts and plow all in a row.
I stood and saw the beasts well yoked/used
To plow the land that was so tough;
Then to a farmer I said this saying,
"I pray to God, may the plow prosper."

First I suggested that the last line, repeated at the end of each of the poem's 12 stanzas, might be operating like Shakespeare's "Brutus is an honorable man." Watch, I said, how the context changes the meaning of this only apparently innocuous line.

Then: who is this I and why do we need him? Why does the voice of the farmer require an intermediary? Spivak proved to be useful here: I proposed that the text thematizes the impossibility of hearing peasant voices directly. As in "French" feminism, the peasant cannot speak in this system and be heard as a peasant. Notably, the last stanza (ll. 89-96) shows this witnessing "I" completely missing the point of what he had heard. From the third to the eleventh stanzas, the farmer complains that peasants work, and work, and work, and one after another the rich show up to demand their cut. The land may be tough, but what's worse are the rich. Yet the final stanza, missing the entire point of the complaint, offers nothing better than be of good cheer. The event has not happened.

I focused on this stanza:

"To paye the fiftene ayenst our ease,
Beside the lordys rente of our londe --
Thus be we shepe shorne, we may not chese,
And yet it is full lytell understonde.
Than bayllys and bedellis woll put to their hande
In enquestis to doo us sorwe inough,
But yf we quite right wele the londe;
'I praye to God, spede wele the plough.'"

And yet it is full lytell understonde: the line teaches itself, yes?

I led them through two translations of the last 4 lines. The obvious reading: "Then bailiffs and beadles will take hold of us in inquests to do us sorrow unless we do right by the land: 'I pray to God, may the plow prosper.'" In a classic damned if you do/don't sentiment, the farmer says they'll be fleeced either way: if they prosper, the priest and friars and nobles will reduce them to penury; if they don't prosper, they'll be arrested for not paying their rents.

Another translation, with slightly different punctuation: "Then bailiffs and beadles will take hold of us in inquests to do us sorrow; but if we totally abandon the land, I pray to God, may the plow prosper." The complaint's now a threat: do wrong by us, haul us off to jail, and you will all starve. You need us. We are many; you are few.

Then I returned to Monday's class, when I taught Wynnere and Wastoure (translation here). Here's a closed argument between a miserly and spendthrift noble about who better serves the kingdom and their own souls. What their debate leaves out are are the workers whose efforts--not Winner's--stuff the granges to the bursting point. For this debate, workers are only subjects of charity, there to get by as best they can on the leftovers of Waster's excess.

If we read Wynnere and Wastoure from the anamorphic perspective of "God Spede the Plough," we see the truth of the matter: both these nobles are wasters. Both sponge off the labor of others. In sum: class means class war. À bas the 1%!

And then, not having taught a political class at all, I went to the protest.
(here I am with my colleague Samir Chopra: some of you may want to read his most recent book, A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents)
(and a big tip of the hat to "Vellum" for the twitter tag #occupythemiddleages)

Some Thoughts about Books and Access

by J J Cohen

I've published three books with Palgrave Macmillan (1 2 3). I've published three with the University of Minnesota Press (1 2 3). Palgrave books are limited run affairs: $90 hardcovers sold mostly to research libraries. Electronic versions exist, but only if your institution subscribes to Palgrave Connect (mine does not: too expensive). Needless to say, with this model of publishing Palgrave sells few copies of each book. They don't have to: at almost a hundred dollars a pop they know that their company will earn enough to make producing the volumes a good investment. For them. Authors collect little return; most individuals cannot afford the books; dissemination is low.

The University of Minnesota Press, on the other hand, publishes most of its books in simultaneous paperback (Palgrave went to paperback only for The Postcolonial Middle Ages, and that took two years; unlike the hardcovers that have struggled to reach 200 sales, PoCo Middle Ages has sold 1200 copies). UMP also partners with Google (at least in the US) and Amazon to make their books available in reasonably priced electronic versions. Medieval Identity Machines is $26 in paperback, and $14.04 for the Kindle or Google Books versions. My other two Minnesota titles are priced similarly. This pricing structure obviously works. I just received my UMP royalty statement with information on lifetime sales to 6/30/11. Medieval Identity Machines: 548 softcovers; Monster Theory: 2032; Of Giants, 1489. I don't understand why any publishing house would shy away from reasonably priced, simultaneous softcover books.

Or electronic versions. For the first time ever, I earned more royalties on digital sales than on physical copies, almost one third as much. I'm also grateful that "Monster Culture: Seven Theses" finds its way into so many coursepacks, especially (oddly enough) as part of first year writing programs. And someone put that essay in this book; although they didn't ask me, they did pay the press for it, and UMP sent along an author's cut. The permissions income from "Monster Culture" will buy a very nice dinner. With wine. And maybe even dessert.

But you know, I'm not publishing my work in order to purchase the occasional good dinner with wine and dessert. No sane person composes a scholarly monograph for the financial rewards. I publish because I want to be part of as capacious a scholarly conversation as possible. In the end it doesn't matter so much if people like my work (though it is pleasing to be liked): I just want my work read, and reacted to. If scholarship possesses a life, then its vitality inheres in this embodied process of writing, reception, rethinking, rewriting. Perfect books -- the ones that are magisterial, unimpeachable -- sit on high shelves and demand to be admired. I think it's OK for them to cost $100. They aren't usually interested in mixing and mingling. I want my books to wander the world, to bring the exchanges that animate their pages (every good book is a collective effort, even when published under a single name) to unexpected places ... and, in time, be superseded. The best end of a book's life occurs when someone cares enough to compose a better one.

So I'm a big fan of open access publishing, of presses like re.press and punctum that publish in print (for a reasonable fee) and allow quick, free downloading. I wish more presses followed this model, or at least enabled easy access to e-versions of books (Ohio State University Press, home of the promising Interventions series, requires that you order a CD for $9.95 and have it mailed to you to obtain an electronic book). I have no idea what the contours of the publishing landscape will resemble in the years ahead, but I am reasonably certain that the future is with Minnesota, re.press and punctum rather than the $90 books of Palgrave, Brill, D. S. Brewer, Ashgate, and so on.

Meet me in Ypsilanti...

by J J Cohen

... where I will be co-presenting with Tim Morton at "Nonhumans: Ecology, Ethics, Objects" on March 15. The event will be held at Eastern Michigan University and is sponsored by the Journal of Narrative Theory.

Details as they develop.

Pause

KEC at the Haunted House

by J J Cohen

Perceptive readers will have figured out that the only person I'm really attempting to fool with that palm tree in my office is myself. Admittedly, I am quite gullible. Yet there I was yesterday, up before 6 AM on the weekend, editing the final essay for AVMEO and finishing some letters of recommendation and a fellowship endorsement and completing an essay of my own for publication. This isn't the life of unhurried contemplation that fellowship leave is supposed to yield. Yet if I don't clear out some of my commitments soon I will never free up the time I need to write my book.

Within this whirl of activity I have been thinking about moments of pause. My family built such a lull into today, since our weekends have lately been full of either travel or soccer games and fencing matches and other ways of ensuring constant dispersive motion. This morning the four of us did tashlich together, a minor Jewish ritual that consists of nothing more than casting bread on moving water, a sign that you are starting the new year fresh. We carried some stale slices of cinnamon raisin (not so stale that Katherine and Alex didn't nibble along the way) to a stream that burbles not far from our house. We thought about what in the past year could have been better, about how we ourselves could be better, then tossed the bread into the water and watched the pieces float away. We are not a religious family, not a family of believers. We don't fool ourselves into thinking that bread conveyed by water carries with it the failings of the year. We don't want ducks to eat our sins. Yet these small customs mean something nearing profundity all the same. We then took a long, brisk walk together to eat felafel at a farmers' market. Later in the day we visited a haunted house at the garden center down the street and brought back gourds and pumpkins. Perfect.

What unfolds during pauses remains in my memory more vividly than occurrences within whirls. "Speculative Medievalisms" in New York was a maelstrom of heady events and late nights. After the Friday talks Eileen and I and a few brave souls stayed up all night. At six, as the sun was just starting to break the cloud cover, plans for pancakes were suddenly derailed by someone's urgent need for sleep, so I said good-bye to all and walked back alone to my hotel. The exquisite quiet of the city was almost worth the loss of breakfast. As I neared Murray Hill my family called my cell phone: their day was just beginning as mine was coming to its end. After a few hours of sleep I lingered at the hotel, composed a blog post, practiced some guitar (oddly, the hotel had one available to borrow). Late in the day I met a friend at the Strand. He'd been browsing for a while and found an inexpensive book in their basement that I'll share with you in a moment. We looked at books together for a bit, then went to a nearby hummus bar for a bite. We sat by the window, watched the city pass, talked. Suddenly Myra Seaman was banging on that window as she hurried to meet Allan Mitchell. They, like us, were headed to Brooklyn for Karl's book launch party. The four of us together on the subway watched the city in its nighttime splendor as we crossed the bridge. I very much enjoyed Speculative Medievalisms, but Saturday's pauses stay with me more.

Back to that book from The Strand. I was skeptical of the volume that Lowell had found because the last stone book he brought to my attention strangely conflated rocks in Arizona with those in Gaza, American Indians with Palestinians, and the white settlers of the West with contemporary Jews. I'm not saying there is nothing to be made of such an analogy, but the emotional way it asserted itself throughout the book was startling. I've come to realize that there is a whole subgenre of biography that is written through meditation upon stone and -- despite the invitation to Zen that you'd think rock offers -- these autobiolithicographies churn with despair, regret, loss. They are also at times harrowing. Barbara Hurd's Entering Stone: On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark is such a book. It opens with the author's first attempt to explore a cave. About to wriggle on her stomach through a small underground passageway, she is overcome by the sensation that she is with her cousin at the moment of his death, crushed by a truck that roared into his car. The book becomes a meditation on mortality, depletion, darkness, the subterranean, the stony. It could have been melodramatic and overdone; instead Entering Stone is poetic and subtle. Exploring various caves is interspersed with meditations on death. Hurd's friend dies slowly of cancer, giving up on the world before departing. Her father dies without imparting a wartime secret that she knows haunts him. Underground spaces offer a weird intimacy with and distance from the emotions that these mounting losses bring. Yet Hurd doesn't seek from stone a permanence she cannot otherwise find. She loves it blankness, its constant coldness, as much as she love the fact that it sheds light on nothing. In its cold enclosure she paradoxically receives the affective and intellectual gifts it isn't supposed to yield.

My favorite passage occurs towards the end of the book. Hurd has been thinking about how romantics are ill suited to ecological adventures: they always end up dead. Caves are for the pragmatic. She thinks about Orpheus, and wonders if his fatal mistake was to believe that caves are metaphors, songs. I've been working with a rewrite of the Orpheus myth, so I enjoyed this subterranean meditation (it takes place inside a cave):

I've always loved Orpheus, the way his life is such a testament to the power of music. But I wouldn't want him in a cave with me, wouldn't want a romantic who can't be practical, who can't separate the literal from the metaphorical. A romantic might charm the bats into a deeper torpor, turn flashlights into candles he sets on a boulder with crackers and cheese, spread his overalls across underground streams so that you can keep your feet dry. For the romantic, the cave becomes scenery, the set designed for the play of imagination. He won't realize he's wasting light or risking hypothermia. Or maybe he'll think it was worth it. I've done a little of both myself, sat enchanted against a cave wall, letting my light play over the boulders until conduction chilled my backside and the beam began to flicker. The trouble with a romantic is that he can get you killed -- gloriously, perhaps, but killed nevertheless. Or if you manage to escape then after that initial enchantment he'll be disappointed in everything else. Maybe Orpheus' mistake, in fact, was not just the result of confusing the literal and the metaphorical. Maybe Orpheus deliberately turned around. Maybe he knew no long-term marriage could live up to its early romance. Maybe he decided against a life with Eurydice, the tedium of the morning tea and milking goats, and chose, instead, a life of lament and then high-drama death at the hands of the limb-rending Maenads.

Romantics, I think, do not know the beauty that inheres in pause.

The Disaster Is Up to Us: Julian Yates and Liza Blake on Metaphysics, Composing, and Kitchening

Figure 1. Douglas Hodge as Titus and Sarah Rees as Lavinia in 2006 production of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus at the Globe Theatre

by EILEEN JOY

Composition may be the recipe for deriving a practice from Object Oriented Ontology, or Speculative Realism, but the disaster is up to us.

--Liza Blake, Response to Julian Yates @Speculative Medievalisms 2

Having already shared the audiofile of Kellie Robertson's talk, and Drew Daniel's response, from Speculative Medievalisms 2: A Laboratory-Atelier, held at The Graduate Center, CUNY on September 16th, I now share with everyone the audiofile of Julian Yates's talk, "Kitchen Shakespeare," and Liza Blake's response.

In Julian's talk, which represented an experiment in "composing" (vis-a-vis Bruno Latour's "Compositionist Manifesto") as a Julian-Titus Andronicus-Latour-Irene (a Parisian housewife included in Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life) assemblage, Julian attempted to trace, through a certain "practical" metaphysics, the "desires of texts to become other than they are," to detach, or disconnect, however "freeze-framed," from the chains of meaning-making to which they traditionally belong. Looking at both cookbook recipes and play-scripts (in particular, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus), as "actants" in "cascades" that lead to certain things -- a cake, or the performance of a play -- Julian meditated upon how recipes and play-scripts are always preceding and post-dating their projections. What kind of archive, Julian asked, might recipes and play-scripts compose, and with what sorts of "time effects," since both recipes and play-scripts, while they may emit time effects, do not properly belong to any one specific time, but rather, may act as translational "relays" between the living and the dead? Ultimately, what Julian (I think) was hoping we might carry away from these questions, is a way toward an "ecology of practice" that might understand better that the "moral philosophemes" housed in the humanities always already "inhabit" the technics of the sciences.

In her response, Liza began by first musing that everyone in the room formed a Graham Harman monad ("we are all Graham Harman") and wondered aloud what a book composed by all of us would look like, modeled on Harman's Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. It would look like Harman's book, with the first part being about Latour's practice as a sociologist, as an actor-network theorist, as a philosopher of science, etc. The second part, still looking like Harman's book, would offer an object oriented metaphysics (with Latourian foundations, but importantly re-tweaked by Harman), and the third part, still remaining to be written, might formulate a critical practice (such as literary criticism: just one example) based on Harman's metaphysics. Indeed, that is partly the impetus behind the Speculative Medievalisms project, as Liza rightly intuits. Liza went on to propose some very provocative questions: in what way(s) can one work outward from a metaphysics to a practice, critical or otherwise? Is any one metaphysics (such as Harman's Object Oriented Ontology) capable of driving only one practice, or could it possibly produce multiple practices? And more pointedly, in relation to Julian's talk, Liza asked why we would want to continue to hold the distinction in place between poiesis and critique, or between composing/making/cooking and critique? Isn't criticism also a form of making, a form, in other words, of poetics?

And so, upward and onward with the audiofile:


Julian Yates, "Kitchen Shakespeare" [with Response from Liza Blake]

If you're interested in downloading an mp3 or other version of the audiofile for listening on iTunes or other audio platforms and your own devices, go HERE.

Figure 2. Julian Yates at Speculative Medievalisms 2, Sep. 2011 (The Graduate Center, CUNY)