Prismatic Ecologies: Ecotheory Beyond Green

by J J Cohen

I'd like to share some good news with readers of In the Middle.

Although I haven't blogged about it for fear of jinxing the endeavor, I've been at work since last May on a new edited collection for the University of Minnesota Press. My Stories of Stone project has an ecological underpinning to it, and while reading through contemporary environmental criticism and ecotheory I realized that I wanted to bring some writers together for a larger conversation about the topic -- sort of what I did with Monster Theory: Reading Culture. From an inchoate idea the book quickly became an object with its own life, including a burgeoning table of contents. The contract arrived today from Minnesota. This will be my fourth book with UMP, but my first since 2003 (yes, Medieval Identity Machines is that old). It's good to be back -- especially because Richard Morrison, whom I've worked with before, has been so supportive of this collection.

Below is the proposal. I'm eager for any feedback you'd like to give: the project will change, no doubt, as it matures.

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Prismatic Ecologies:

Ecotheory Beyond Green

Edited by Jeffrey J. Cohen
George Washington University

Green has long been the favored color of environmental criticism and theory. A green reading is an easy synonym for an ecology-minded analysis of literature and culture. Despite a pastoral bent, an emphasis on innate plenitude, and a quiet faith in a nature that if left to its sublime solitude would persevere in harmony, green modes of interpretation remain powerfully attractive. The color typically signifies a return, however belatedly, to the verdancy that an unspoiled world is supposed to possess. Myths of a Golden Age have been replaced by dreams of a primordial verdure, a Green Eden. As Timothy Morton has pointed out, this shade of “bright green” tends to be “affirmative, extraverted and masculine” as well as “sunny, straightforward, ableist, holistic, hearty, and ‘healthy’’’ (The Ecological Thought 16). Stephen J. Pyne has detailed how landscapes that Europeans perceive as untouched have often been profoundly reconfigured by fire regimes, such as those pre-contact Aboriginal peoples developed to manage their diverse environments (Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia). Lawrence Buell has written compellingly of how ecofeminism and environmental justice -- among many other movements within ecocriticism -- can move us beyond some of the limits of green ethics and aesthetics (The Future of Environmental Criticism 97-127). Ursula K. Heise has emphasized that the local obsessions of much green criticism do not necessarily yield the capacious frames of analysis necessary to understand how global ecologies work, especially in a world at risk.

It’s not easy being viridescent. A green criticism emphasizes sustainability, balance, the innate, the modern, and the natural. What of the catastrophic, the disruptive, the eruptive, inhumanly longues durées, the mixed spaces where the separation of nature and culture are difficult to maintain? Underneath every field is a cosmos of primordial stone, worms, recent debris, reservoirs of natural and manufactured chemicals, poisonous and fertile muck. In a green Arcadia what do we make of the airplane, graves, gamma rays, bacteria, invasive bamboo accidentally planted as an ornament, the crater become a lake, hyperobjects, the invisibly advancing or receding glacier, relentless lunar pull, electronic realms, prehistoric flora lingering as plastic refuse, parasites, inorganic compounds, a species about to undergo a sudden change? This collection of essays traces the impress and interspaces created by ecologies that cannot be reduced to the bucolic expanses of green readings, with their utopian emphasis upon balance, order, and the implicit benevolence of an unexamined force labeled Nature. What of the ocean's turbulence, the fecundity of excrement, the solitude of the wandering iceberg, the mineral excrescence of a city, the life of objects that may or may not demonstrate an interest in connecting to human spaces? Nature is not a creature of solitude and solace, but a concept for repeated interrogation, a term without transparent explanatory force. Through the suggestive entryway of colors, the contributors examine the coming into existence of nonanthropocentric ecologies, where the oikos in ecology is not so much a bounded home as an ever unfinished world. Prismatic Ecologies: Ecotheory Beyond Green gathers scholars from multiple time periods and several disciplines who have a nontraditional bent to their work to think collaboratively of what a more-than-green ecology might offer. The volume emphasizes critical approaches that have not yet been much used to envitalize ecotheory (especially queer theory and speculative realism/object oriented ontology), but approaches are diverse, having in common an emphasis upon materiality, the inhuman, and the innovative possibilities that an emphasis upon this invented spectrum enables.


INTENDED AUDIENCE
Because of its topic, this book will appeal immediately to those working in environmental studies and ecotheory. Many of its contributors are already well known in the field (Stacy Alaimo won this year’s ASLE Book Award in ecocriticism; Jen Hill is an expert on Arctic narratives; Tim Morton’s work on “ecology without nature” is widely influential; and Lawrence Buell, a founding scholar, has agreed to compose the volume’s afterword). The volume is intended to create a cross-disciplinary as well as cross-temporal dialogue. Its essays should attract theorists interested in French postmodernism (Bernd Herzogenrath is a well known Deleuze scholar, and Allan Stoekl is an expert on Bataille), queer theory (Robert McRuer, Will Stockton, Vin Nardizzi), speculative realism and object and oriented ontology (Graham Harman, Tim Morton, Levi Bryant, Eileen Joy and Ben Woodard are highly regarded practitioners), early modern studies (Steve Mentz, Vin Nardizzi, Will Stockton, Lowell Duckert, Julian Yates), medieval studies (Jeffrey Cohen, Eileen Joy), anthropology (Kathleen Stewart) and architecture (Ed Keller). With its capacious table of contents and unified focus, the volume should be widely read. Our hope is to bring ecotheory into some important critical conversations that have not so far made much use of it, and to bring to ecocritics some theoretical tools useful for forming new alliances.


TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Jeffrey J. Cohen, Ecology’s Rainbow

Ursula K. Heise has demonstrated that, contrary to a belief long cherished in environmental studies, an attachment to the local does not necessarily foster the globalized ethic of care demanded in a transnational age (Sense of Place and Sense of Planet). Her notion of eco-cosmopolitanism is useful for broadening critical perspectives, substituting a view from a planet at risk for the boundedness of small citizenships. But a sense of planet will not in the end be capacious enough. Moving beyond the near-to-hand and pastoral (that is, green) spaces that are focus of much environmental criticism requires emphasizing the cosmos in eco-cosmopolitanism – yet not in the classic sense of a tidy and beautiful whole (Greek kosmos means “order, ornament”). Bruno Latour has coined the term kakosmos to describe the messy and irregular pluriverse humans inhabit along with lively and agency-filled objects, materials, and forces (Politics of Nature, “Compositionist Manifesto”). Using colors in their materiality as an entry into this muddled and intricate complexity, this introduction to the volume traces the inhuman actants with which the eco-cosmopolitan is always in alliance: rogue planets, x-rays, hyperobjects, electronic realms, distant arms of the galaxy and event horizons, shit and muck, urban sprawls, lost continents, plate tectonics, as well as forests, oceans, glaciers. Touchstones include Steve Mentz on blue cultural studies; Tim Morton on ecological thought; Jane Bennett on vibrant materialism; and Graham Harman on object oriented ontology, among others.

2. Tobias Menely and Margaret Ronda, Red

Whether biosemiotically or symbolically, red marks states of emergency and sites of emergence. It is the most dialectical color, the hue of birth and death, eros and thanatos, strength and abjection. It says come hither (kiss me, eat me) and noli me tangere (STOP). The blush; swollen lips; plumage; leaves in autumn (“hectic red, /Pestilence-stricken multitudes”); red tide; the blood-red moon of Apocalypse; petals unfurled; the ripe or poisonous berry; the brushfire; volcanic lava: red signifies in extremis, in excess, demarcating boundary and its breaching. An ecology of red, then, is a site for dialectical thinking, pointing to the generative and destructive impulses of “nature red in tooth and claw” without attempting to resolve them into reassuring synthesis. In place of verdant green, red returns us to the deep links—figural and etymological—between blood, earth, human, and animal. Modernity may be defined by the imperative to mystify its constitutive violence, to hide its bloodiness, but red, repressed, returns as toxic sludge, pink slime, and animal blood from slaughterhouses entering waterways. Drawing on theories of abjection and biopolitical corporeality (Kristeva, Derrida, Agamben), this essay ponders the limits of liberal eco-optimism. We emphasize rupture, tragic necessity, violence, and the prophetic red of apocalyptic skies. Attuned to the revolutionary symbolism of red, we ask whether forms of radical ecological activism that exceed institutional solutions might prove necessary to grapple with the crises of the Anthropocene.

Tobias Menely is an assistant professor of English at Miami University. He is currently finishing a book, "The Community of Creatures: Sensibility and the Voice of the Animal," and he has begun working on a new project on the climatological unconscious. Margaret Ronda is an ACLS postdoctoral fellow at Indiana University, and she will join the English Department at Rutgers in September 2012. She is the author of a book of poetry, Personification, and she is working on a study of poetry and obsolescence in the twentieth century, Remainders: Poetry at Nature's End.

3. Robert McRuer, Pink

This essay examines the queer ways that pink circulates through neoliberal tourist economies, materializing both objects (the pink euro, dollar, and pound) and locations (San Francisco, the Canary Islands, Tel Aviv).  Pink “sticks” to gay male travelers, the objects they touch, and the locations they inhabit, but it is a stickiness that—contrary to Sara Ahmed’s understanding of “sticky” stereotypes that restrict the mobility of certain populations—puts bodies into motion. Pink economies generate pink waves upon which certain cosmopolitan queer subjects sail. Yet queer analyses of both neoliberal capitalism and what Judith Halberstam terms “metronormativity” might be deployed to think pink otherwise, in ways that might counterpose such pink economies to a critically pink ecology. This essay examines two efforts to refract a metropolitan pink and to move towards a minor, more sustainable pink: queer Palestinian deployments of the concept of “pinkwashing” to critique the ways that Israel’s gay rights record is discursively used to obscure its operations in the occupied territories and queer disabled reflections on rural environments, exemplified by Eli Clare’s meditation on salmon, old growth forests, and rural Oregon in Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation.
Robert McRuer is Professor of English at The George Washington University.  He is the author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (NYU, 2006), The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities (NYU, 1997), and co-editor of Sex and Disability (Duke, 2012).

4. Lowell Duckert, Maroon

Caught between hues of red and brown, maroon is a restless color: it marks an act of isolation or separation (marooning), a chestnut (marron), an explosion (firework), and even a runaway slave (cimarrón). This essay explores maroon’s multiple meanings through an appropriately undulating medium: the arctic phenomenon known as the aurora borealis. When the aurora’s excited oxygen particles stabilize in the atmosphere, they emit a maroon light that is barely perceptible to the human eye. As an energetic entanglement of wind, gas, and sky, maroon signals things in action and in collaboration, materializing the alliances traced by actor-network theorists such as Bruno Latour and Michel Serres. At the same time, maroon’s double etymology emphasizes the complexities of race within the colonial encounter, especially in peopled arctic landscapes that are far from the “barren expanses” of Eurocentric perspectives. Yet these two aspects of maroon (celestial mixtures, eco-cultural rights) need not be an either/or proposition. An aurora’s maroon glow illuminates an ethics of material entanglement and a space for environmental justice. I focus upon Samuel Hearne’s three voyages with the Chipewyan and Dene tribes around Hudson Bay from 1769-72, specifically his descriptions of the Northern Lights but also his troubled participation in the Bloody Falls Massacre of twenty Inuit men, women, and children. Hearne’s Journey (1795) is ecology in maroon: it offers an affirmative way of becoming entangled with the world, but it also realizes the violence that isolating indigenous bodies from ecological perspectives involves, violence that is often met with a desire for self-isolation and self-preservation. Maroon might be a difficult color to discern in the ecocritical aurora, but paying closer attention to the flickering of the color may, in Jane Bennett’s words, “inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations.” Maroon inspires us to think of human and environmental rights not in isolation but rather as a shared initiative never at rest.

Lowell Duckert is a PhD candidate at George Washington University, finishing his dissertation on early modern aquascapes, actor-network theory, and ecocriticism. Along with Jeffrey J. Cohen, he is editing a forthcoming special issue of the journal postmedieval on “Ecomaterialism.”

5. Julian Yates, O / r / a / n / g / e

“Richard of York,” we know from the early twentieth-century mnemonic device, “gave battle in vain.” Yet at the time of the Battle of Wakefield (1460), the word “orange” had only just come to designate the color phenomenon that occurs, in the visible spectrum, at a wavelength of about 585-620 nanometers. The mnemonic “ROYGBIV” enacts the promise and the problems of the impressions left by complex ecological systems on human-centered writing machines. The perception named “color” occurs at the interface that is the human sensorium—an unreliable material-semiotic contact zone in which the ties between variously forms of matter, sign systems, and syntaxes, ‘make up’ the set of effects humans name “world.” We have trouble keeping our colors straight, a difficulty that the proliferation of codes aims to reform. But as the multi-temporal mnemonic “ROYGBIV” demonstrates, it is not possible to linearize or describe color through a straightforward chronology or geography. Colors, like any other complicated phenomenon, reveal themselves to be a multiplicity, a “sheaf of temporalities” (Michel Serres) or “knot in motion” (Alfred North Whitehead) that connects different times and places in a structure of apparent simultaneity. “Orange” offers us a prismatic archive, a word that comes into being as a multi-lingual approximation or translation of multiple differences. Accordingly, an “orange ecology” leads me to posit what amounts to a prismatic grammatology, an account of the shifting color effects hosted by different substrates in the built world. Taking the form of a florilegium or book of flowers, this essay inventories key gatherings in the story of orange. It imagines a world before “orange,” tracing the extension of the word for the fruit to include the color and traces the after lives of the word and its poetic castings in nursery rhymes and in two novels (1984 and The Tropic of Orange) which imagine worlds without the fruit. In doing so, the essay seeks to think through the process by which the paradigms of description offered by ecology “learn” by their translation to different fields of study and other orders of phenomena such as those deriving from human language arts as they are backed by a variety of media platforms.

Julian Yates is Associate Professor of English and Material Culture Studies at University of Delaware. His first book, Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) examined the social and textual lives of relics, portrait miniatures, the printed page, secret hiding places in Renaissance England and was a finalist for the MLA Best First Book Prize in 2003. His recent work focuses on questions of ecology, genre, and reading in Renaissance English Literature and beyond. 

6. Graham Harman, Gold

Gold is the name of a color, but this color refers to the hue of a well-known metal. As the pillar of the “gold standard,” this substance underlies human economic life as it has done for millennia. The deepest that humans have dug towards the center of the earth, more than two miles, has been in pursuit of gold. The westward drive of Americans towards the Pacific Ocean was spurred by this very metal, just as the earlier legends of El Dorado (the city of gold) drove the imperial ambitions of the Spanish in the Western hemisphere. But along with the role of gold in human economic and fantasy life, there are the scientific aspects of the problem. Gold is formed not on earth, but only in the heart of supernovae. Furthermore, gold has its famous color rather than the more likely silvery-white hue solely because of effects that can be explained only by the principle of relativity. In this way, gold weaves together a sprawling ecology ranging from human economics and politics to physics and cosmology.

Graham Harman is Associate Provost for Research Administration and Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo. He is the author of the following books: Tool-Being (2002), Guerrilla Metaphysics (2005), Heidegger Explained (2007), Prince of Networks (2009), Towards Speculative Realism (2010), Circus Philosophicus (2010), L’Objet quadruple (2010), Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (2011), and [with Bruno Latour & Peter Erdélyi] The Prince and the Wolf (2011).

7. Vin Nardizzi, Greener

Human beings evolved to want the landscape where they put down roots to be green. According to Edward O. Wilson’s Biophilia (1984), humans most desire living environments that resemble the African savannah. Since we cannot always have the green that we want, we content ourselves with mowed lawns and excursions to civic and national parks. Such “lawn mentality” lends itself to – and deserves – trenchant critique for its presumed timelessness and for its quintessential white-bre(a)d, heteronormative, and middle class underpinnings. This essay likewise takes a dim view of the mid-century lawn – that pocket of well-picketed grass – but its eco-critique follows a different path: it is a survey of green’s darker and more perverse figurations in Anglo-American science fiction. Likely suspects in this critical review of “greener” texts whose plots could be summed up as “Attack of the Post-War Plants!” include Ward Moore’s Greener Than You Think (1947), an apocalyptic tale in which the chemically treated lawn of an LA housewife grows unstoppably until it extinguishes all other forms of life on Earth; John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (1951); Roger Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors (1960); and the “Man-Eater of Surrey Green” (1965), an episode of the British television series The Avengers that borrows heavily from Triffids. In a different key, this sampling of texts anticipates the more eco-canonical visions of chemical bombing and avian holocaust in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Like that benchmark in ecofeminism, these texts suggest that fertilizers that were used to make plant life (from the lawn to the conservatory to the florist’s shop) grow green more quickly and, in Wilson’s idiom, more reminiscent of humanity’s primordial environment were also imagined to be human-killers during the nuclear age. Greener grass may look better, but it’s not always safer. And yet we keep spraying growth stimulants. Perhaps we desire the deadly aesthetic of “greener.”

Vin Nardizzi is Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches Renaissance drama, ecocriticism, and queer and disability studies. With Stephen Guy-Bray and Will Stockton, he has edited Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze (2009); and with Jean E. Feerick, he has co-edited The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (forthcoming in 2012). He has finished a book manuscript, Evergreen Fantasies: Shakespeare’s Theatre in the Age of Wood.

8. Allan Stoekl, Chartreuse

Chartreuse is a meeting point of a sustainability of the esthetic and a sustainability of the sublime. Sustainable esthetics entails a steady state of nature, a promise of human happiness mediated through the recognition of human freedom. Nature is an object of contemplation, of esthetic satisfaction, and an infinite source of materials. This is the sustainability of the closed economy; it can be arrived at through a formalist project, a technocratic effort in which inputs and outputs are precisely balanced, or through a free-form project in which materials are reappropriated, recycled, repurposed, and in which the ultimate tactics are improvisatory. An ethically based society will be doubled by a nature returned to some state of completion, an economic and energetic closed loop. Deep ecology is one possibility, with nature on one side and a chastened humanity on the other. Another is urban-local culture modified through "retrofit," scavenging, and open-ended improvisation, with, nevertheless, a careful calibration of money and energy inputs leading to an ethically advantageous society. Sublime sustainability is grounded in the impossibility of calculating external costs. Before the task of calculating the "real" cost of say, nuclear power, the mind reels. For Kant, the sublime entailed the awe we feel before mountains, waterfalls and volcanoes. Today our mathematical sublime is the sensation of delirium before the numbers that can't enable us to calculate energetic inputs and economic outputs. This sublime cannot be exemplified by human reason (as it was for Kant)--it is precisely human reason's failure that leads to the recognition of the sublime of externalities in the first place. External costs are formless, in excess; they are finally not reckoned but "experienced" in the Bataillean sense as a kind of non-savoir, a sacred nodal point where any hope of stability of calculability (God) has died. Sustainability as calculation here enters a delirium from which it emerges as a practice, a corporeality, rather than a calculation. Sustainability now is post-sustainability, the intimacy of a sacred that affirms the energetic excess of eroticism or laughter--the only possible reactions to the sublime of externalities--rather than that of non-sustainable expenditures (fossil fuel culture). Sustainability in spite of itself. Here the happiness of mutually recognized freedom is supplemented by the ritual agony of joy before death.

Impossibly mediating between these two sustainabilities is Chartreuse, a golden-green drink made in the very beautiful Chartreuse region. It is the drink of monks, carefully crafted for over 900 years in the mountains south of Chambery, the "desert of the mountains." Just like the Syrian desert. The Carthusian order is a contradiction: a monastic order of hermits. Chartreuse is powerful stuff, 69% at its most wicked, and if you can get it down it packs a real punch. It is the liquor of sublime sustainability, an object, in its recalcitrance, that puts in question human will and human ends. One cannot imagine the monks drinking it together--but they must, or at least they must have. It is, however, the product of an order that we might call the most sustainable of all (in the esthetic sense), living alone in the pristine mountains, protected by nature, and protecting it, in its "desert" status, from human encroachment. Deep ecology avant la lettre, we might say, meeting the profoundly sense-less.

Allan Stoekl is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Penn State University, University Park, PA. He has translated a number of works (by authors such as Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Paul Fournel), and has been especially concerned with questions of economics and political-literary commitment in twentieth century French intellectual history. Recently his work has taken an ecological turn: his most recent book is Bataille's Peak: Energy, Religion, and Post-Sustainability (University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

9. Will Stockton, Beige

A beige ecology is an apocalyptic ecology that shades into yellow, brown, and pink ecologies. Its subject is queerness and waste, or the apocalyptic – world-changing, world-destroying, and, subsequently world-building – eroticizing of the world’s detritus. This essay develops the concept of a beige ecology through a reading of Samuel R. Delany’s The Mad Man (1994/2002), a novel about a gay, African-American, philosophy graduate student named John Marr, who lives in New York City throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. While investigating the 1970s murder of another philosopher in a hustler bar, Marr pornographically recounts numerous sexual encounters with the city’s homeless, and details the effect of the AIDS outbreak on places for public sex. The apocalyptically “mad” men of the novel’s title are those whose eroticization of waste (piss, shit, the black body and the homeless body) transgresses the boundaries of a heteronormative ecology that seeks to foreclose sexual contact between men, irrespective of collective ignorance about which acts actually spread the virus. A series of revelations among these men produce, in the novel, particular critical effects, including a quasi-utopian critique of economies of sexual scarcity, the development of an approach to sexual risk that does not partake of the illogic of phobias, and a re-conceptualization of the institution of the home and its ecology (from the Greek oikos: home, house, dwelling place, habitation) against heteronormative models of domesticity. Collectively, these revelations pull apocalypticism from the ethical waste bin, using it to trope the world-altering consequences of what Michel Foucault calls the bios philosophicus: “the animality of being human, renewed as a challenge, practiced as an exercise--and thrown in the face of others as a scandal.”

Will Stockton is Associate Professor of English at Clemson University. He is the author of Playing Dirty: Sexuality and Waste in Early Modern Comedy (Minnesota, 2011) and the co-editor of Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze (Ashgate, 2009) and Sex Before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England (Minnesota, 2013).

10. Steve Mentz, Brown

Smelly, rancid, and impure, it is no one’s favorite color. We need brown but don’t like looking at it. It’s a color you can’t cover up, that won’t go away.  At the end of a long afternoon finger-painting with the kids, it’s what’s left, sprawled across the page. This color helps clarify ugly strains of ecological thinking.  Brown crosses between organic and inorganic matter in both directions; it’s the color of the fertile soil plants consume and the fecal waste animals reject. Thinking brown helps identify hybrid spaces that straddle living and nonliving matter, aesthetic values and biological drives. Plunging into this color challenges many old ecological and theoretical models: ancient anthropocentric humanist fantasies, newer green pastoral recuperations, and even today’s expanded universes of mutually entangled and withdrawing objects in object oriented philosophic and literary ontologies. Brown marks intimate and uncomfortable contact between human bodies and nonhuman matter. Drawing brown out entails trying to make sense of stinking goo. This essay follows three different brown threads: first, sand, which marks and unmarks boundaries; second, all-dissolving swamp; and last, the shit that living bodies excrete into the world around them. These three substances reveal themselves through three canonical literary texts: Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti 75 (“One day I wrote her name upon the strand”), the Slough of Despond in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and a excretory vision in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. These three browns and three texts together facilitate rethinking the blurred boundaries between human bodies and the nonhuman world. For literary ecostudies to reconceptualize the relationship between human experience and nonhuman matter, plunging into a brown study seems essential, though perhaps not inescapable.



Steve Mentz is Associate Professor of English at St John's University in New York City. His ecological criticism to date has mostly focused on the blue oceans, including the book At the Bottom of Shakespeare's Ocean (2009), the gallery exhibition "Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550 - 1750" (Folger Library, summer 2010), and several articles.  He has also written on Shakespeare, narrative romance, print culture, and the early modern city, including the book Romance for Sale in Early Modern England (2006) and the co-edited collection, Rogues and Early Modern English Culture (2004).

11. Eileen Joy, Blue

Is madness the marker -- or even, ingenitor -- of various social collaborations between people as well as between humans and their environments? Is madness something to be located on the so-called ‘interior’ of sentience and biological physiology, or is it in the world somehow, with the ‘becoming-haptic’ of the human mind only one of its many effects? Is madness, in other words, ecological? Following Timothy Morton’s argument that too much of current ‘ecological’ thinking hinges upon the spectrum of ‘bright,’ optimistic, ‘sunny’ greens that are ‘holistic, hearty, and healthy,’ often leaving aside ‘negativity, introversion, femininity, writing, mediation, ambiguity, darkness, irony, fragmentation, and sickness’ (The Ecological Thought), this essay will focus on sadness and melancholy as forms and signs of deep ecological connections, as well as ethically valuable modes of  ‘plugging in’ to worlds as always already post-catastrophe. Through readings of the Old English poems Seafarer and Wanderer, this essay traces the co-implicated and affective relations between the human figures and the non-human ‘strange strangers’ of post-apocalyptic (post-war, but also post-human) medieval landscapes in order to formulate a ‘blue’ ecological aesthetic that might take better account of our world as both empty and intimate.


Eileen A. Joy teaches Old and Middle English literature at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and has published a variety of articles, special journal issues, and books on the intersections between medieval texts and contemporary culture. She is the Co-Founder and Lead Ingenitor of the BABEL Working Group, the Co-Editor (with Myra Seaman) of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, and the Co-Director (with Nicola Masciandaro) of punctum books: spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion.

12. Stacy Alaimo, Violet-Black

A violet-black ecology hovers in the bathypelagic, abyssopelagic, and hadal zones, the three regions of the deep seas, 1000 meters down and much deeper, where sunlight cannot descend. The violet-black depths--cold, dark regions under the crushing weight of the water column--were long thought to be “azoic,” or devoid of life.  Even as deep sea creatures have been brought to the surface, it remains convenient to assume that the bathyl, abyssl, and hadal zones are empty, void, null--an abyss of concern.   When historic expeditions have dredged up creatures from the depths, the profusion of animals has been met with astonishment. Rather than scrutinize deep sea creatures as they writhe and squirm in suffocating air and glaring light, a violet-black ecology, would descend, in highly mediated ways, to zones of darkness to witness diverse animals in their own watery worlds, but it would also grapple with the watery “environment” itself.  As the contemplation of the deep seas is always already a politically charged, scientifically-mediated process—partly because of the staggering costs of even the most basic investigations conducted at these depths---it exemplifies Bruno Latour’s call to “compose the common world from disjointed pieces.”(Bruno Latour, “An Attempt at a Compositionist Manifesto,” New Literary History 41 (2010): 485). As a new materialist endeavor, a violet-black ecology would attempt to understand the water of the abyssal zone as being rather than nothing, as substance rather than background, as a significant part of the composition.

             At the turn of the 21^st century scientists and environmentalists warn of the devastating ecological effects of ocean acidification, massive overfishing, bottom trawling, deep sea mining, shark finning, and decades of dumping toxic and radioactive waste into the oceans. Marine science, which is still in its infancy, struggles to keep up with the devastating effects of capitalist waste and plunder as countless species may be rendered extinct before they are even discovered. William Beebe’s worry, however, that biology would become “colorless” and “aridly scientific,” would be assuaged by the early 21^st century representations of sea creatures in which science, aesthetics, and politics swirl together. The massive, international, decade-long Census of Marine Life, for example, produced not only a treasure trove of scientific disclosures but a vibrant profusion of still and moving images for wide audiences. While the Census of Marine Life’s gallery of photos on their web site and Claire Nouvian’s stunning photographic collection The Deep: Extraordinary Creatures from the Abyss attempt to gain support for deep sea conservation by featuring newly discovered life forms, it may be worthwhile to scrutinize what is intentionally out of focus in their photographic compositions—the violet-black background of the photos.  What possibilities does this eerie and entrancing hue pose for new materialist and posthumanist ecologies of the depths? And how do the prismatic bioluminescent displays of creatures in the abyss provoke recognitions of the multitude of aquatic modes of being, communicating, and knowing?  Violet-black ecologies of the abyssal zones entice us to descend, rather than transcend, to unmoor ourselves from terrestrial and humanist presumptions, as  sunlight, air, and horizons disappear, replaced by dark liquid expanses and the flashing spectrum of light produced by abyssal creatures. The violet-black seas themselves, which entranced William Beebe, and the addictive bioluminescent creatures, underscore the significant differences between the life worlds of human beings and abyssal beings, as well as the potential for prismatic ecologies to lure us into less anthropocentric, less terrestrial modes of knowledge, politics, and ethics.

Stacy Alaimo is Professor of English and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. She has published widely in environmental humanities, science studies, and feminist theory, on such subjects as environmental literature and film, environmental art and architecture, performance art, environmental pedagogy, gender and climate change, and the science and culture of "queer" animals. She currently serves on the MLA Division of Literature and Science and is the new editor of the “Critical Ecologies” stream of the Electronic Book Review.  Her publications include Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (Cornell 2000);  Material Feminisms (edited with Susan J. Hekman); and Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Indiana 2010).  She is  working on a book tentatively titled Sea Creatures and the Limits of Animal Studies: Science, Aesthetics, Ethics.

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13. Levi Bryant, Black

Traditional ecology tends to argue for three interrelated theses. First, that relations are internal to their objects, such that they are both constituted by their relations and have no existence independent of their relations. Thus Arne Naess argues that a mouse would no longer be a mouse in a vacuum because it has detached itself from the relations that constitute it. Second, ecology tends to treat the ecological as a distinct realm, Nature, independent of culture and society.  Finally, ecology tends to privilege homeostatic, self-regulating systems, equating them with the “natural”, treating systems that are characterized by positive feedback as unnatural. Traditional ecology thus presents a spiritualized picture of nature that is harmoniously self-regulating so long as humans do not interfere in it. Black ecology is the study of relations between entities per se. Here ecology does not refer to the study and investigation of a special domain of being, the “natural”, but rather, wherever there are relations there is an ecology.  Thus, plastics, nanotechnologies, cells phones, media, images, the printing press, and families are no less objects for ecological analysis than the presence or absence of vultures in India or the role that bees play in pollinating plants. Where traditional ecology treats relations as being internal to and constitutive of objects, black ecology argues that relations are external to objects. Objects indeed pass in and out of relations with other objects. Ecology investigates what takes place when entities disappear from networks of relations or when new entities are introduced into networks of relations.

It is here that we encounter the “blackness” of black ecology. The idea of a color that arises from an object not reflecting light in the visible spectrum suggests entities that are withdrawn, that are never entirely present or actual.  As objects pass in and out of relations with other objects, new properties and qualities appear such as vultures in India dying from the painkiller diclofenac given to cows or the impact of fracking for natural gas on streams and fish. Black ecology investigates the transformations withdrawn objects undergo as they enter into new relations. It argues for a new form of Enlightenment where we become aware of our network relations with other entities, that we are not outside of these networks, and that there is no intrinsic teleology governing these networks that insures stability. Where traditional ecologies tend to present “nature” as teleologically providential, black ecology argues that there is no inherent teleology to nature, that nature that succumbs to positive feedback loops is no less natural than homeostatic nature, that the atmosphere of Venus is always a possibility, and that therefore we must embrace our status as ethical subjects and develop values and practices that would aim for the sort of contingent world we would like to exist.



Levi R. Bryant is a Professor of Philosophy at Collin College and a former Lacanian psychoanalyst.  He is the author of Difference and Givenness:  Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence (Northwestern University Press, 2008), The Democracy of Objects (Open Humanities Press, 2011), and co-editor, with Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, of The Speculative Turn:  Continental Materialism/Realism. He is the author of numerous articles on Deleuze, Badiou, Lacan, and Žižek, and a leading theorist in the object-oriented ontology movement.

14. Jeffrey Cohen, Grey

The hue of color at twilight, grey could signify a loss of vitality, the shade of death and loss. Yet this essay seeks the vitality in grey: grey as life in other forms, grey as an ecology of monsters. By tracing how a cultural fascination with zombies intersects with a contemporary love of apocalypse (the staging of the  ending of the world that is always underwritten by an environmental narrative), I argue that the "undeadness" of grey reveals the intimacy of an object oriented ecology to the human. Zombies are figures for our racial others, for the disabled, the elderly, for all those bodies we otherwise refuse to behold. Yet beyond this allegorical or symptomatic function, the zombie offers a life in death that demonstrates how even our bodies are not our own, how even the life they possess does not amount to a subjectivity that perishes when the flesh is moribund. The zombie is an ecology of life in another form.



Jeffrey Cohen is Professor of English and Director of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute at the George Washington University.




  15. Bernd Herzogenrath, White

Ice is a crystalline inorganic solid, less dense than water, prone to powerful expansion. Ice is a shape shifter; it can take the form of snowflakes, icicles, hail, pack ice, and glaciers. More than 10 percent of the world’s land mass is permanently covered with ice, glaciated. Seven hundred million years ago, the whole surface of the world was covered with ice, which turned the globe into a giant snowball, as geologist Paul Hoffmann has it. I concentrate on the icy landscape and glaciers of Alaska, and unfold a complex ecosystem here, combining ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ ecologies. Nature percolates into culture, and vice versa, resonating in each other. Ice as a habitat, ice as a ‘vital force,’ but ice also triggering linguistic theories of climate-dependent languages, and, finally, the Alaskan landscape – natural and cultural – stimulating the site-specific ‘sonic geography’ of Alaskan composer John Luther Adams. Snow muffles every sound, the sound of glaciers, of ice cracking, of the land’s inhabitants form a complex sonic landscape into which the work of Adams taps, but which he also then re-inserts into and as a ‘real part’ of the Alaskan landscape.

Bernd Herzogenrath is Professor of American Literature and Culture at Goethe University of Frankfurt/Main, Germany. His fields of interest are 19th and 20th Century American Literature and Culture, Critical Theory, and Film|Media Studies. At the moment, Bernd is planning a project cinapses: thinking|film, that brings together scholars from film studies, philosophy, and the neurosciences (members include Antonio Damasio).




16. Ben Woodard, Ultraviolet

Ultraviolet light marks the unseen and the harmful, a radiation which degrades organic life yet is likely responsible for an evolutionary variation which allowed for genetic repair. Ecological criticism has consistently and uncritically relied on the visible to order to invoke pathos and critique thereby utilizing a concept of nature both naïvely positive and representationally shallow. To combat these conjoined tendencies, this essay will engage the non-aesthetic of ultraviolet as representative of nature as partially visible while equally corrosive and constructive. To this end I explore the relation between Johann Ritter (the discoverer of ultraviolet) and FWJ von Schelling by way of their shared commitment to Naturephilosophie and of a nature based on potencies and powers as well as the relevant anti-aesthetic present in numerous tales of the weird fiction author HP Lovecraft. This conception of nature is far more useful for theorizing nature and for ecological practice.

Ben Woodard is a PhD candidate at the Theory Centre at the University of Western Ontario. His forthcoming texts are: Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation, and the Creep of Life (Zer0 Books) and On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy (Punctum Books). He blogs at Speculative Heresy and Naught Thought.




17. Tim Morton, X-ray

… like God taking a photograph … (Empire of the Sun)

X-rays mark the instigation of the Anthropocene, the geological period in which humans play the decisive role, notably in the Sixth Mass Extinction Event and global warming. The Anthropocene began in 1945 when the Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs deposited a layer of radioactive materials throughout Earth's crust. X-rays are part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but humans can't see them. Indeed, as far as X-Rays go, the boot is very much on the other foot. They see you. They see you so intensely that in sufficient quantities they kill you. X-Rays (also known as Gamma Rays) give the lie to the artificial division between perceiving and causing that has plagued philosophy and ideology since at least the Kantian turn. In an age of ecological awareness, the idea that the perceptual dimension is a neutral field is ended, in part by lethal entities that make up that very dimension itself. The time of nuclear materials and global warming is a time of lethal light.



Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair of English at Rice University. He is the author of Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota UP, forthcoming), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (forthcoming from Open Humanities Press), The Ecological Thought (Harvard UP, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard UP, 2007), seven other books and eighty essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, food and music. He blogs regularly at http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com.




Afterword, Lawrence Buell  

A founding figure in ecocriticism and an important voice in its practice since the mid-1980s, Lawrence Buell has agreed to compose an afterword which will meditate upon the book’s project, react to the collected essays, and suggest future avenues of research. Buell recently retired after many years as a professor of English at Harvard University. He is the author of The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (1995); Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the United States and Beyond (2001) and The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (2005).

Upcoming Talk: me at Urbana Champaign this week

by KARL STEEL

If you're in Illinois this week and not otherwise occupied submitting dead letters, why not come to Urbana Champaign on Thursday and see me talk about animals, or swing by Friday for a werewolf seminar?

The lecture's title, submitted back in August, has not much to do with the actual talk I'm delivering. Such is the way of the world. So falls ambition. In the midst of life we are in death, etc.

While the seminar's still on werewolves (and Derrida's Beast and the Sovereign), my talk (shhh, don't tell Rob Barrett) is actually called "Yvain's Herdsman, A Lion, and Several Dead Dogs: Rules for Being Human, and Some Ways Out." No one knows this yet but me. And you, now.

I'm really enjoying the chance to return to some material from my book and to do it better. We have 17th-century French Jansenists, codicology and l'animot, and some challenges to the logic of the pet. I'm VERY much looking forward to it, and thanks much to Rob and the tireless Charlie Wright for making this happen.

new imprint from punctum and BABEL: dead letter office books

by EILEEN JOY

The United States Postal Service started a dead letter office in 1825 to deal with undeliverable mail. In 2006 approximately 90 million undeliverable-as-addressed (UAA) items ended up in this office; where the rightful owners cannot be identified, the correspondence is destroyed to protect customer privacy, and enclosed items of value are removed.Items of value that cannot be returned are sold at auction, except for pornography and firearms. The auctions also occasionally include items seized by postal inspectors and property being retired from postal service.

~“Dead letter office,” Wikipedia entry

I am tired, Beloved,
of chafing my heart against
the want of you;
of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.

~Amy Lowell, “The Letter”

Don’t fear anything for your letters, they are burnt one by one and I hope you do the same with mine.

~Camille Claudel

. . . it is a fine consolation among the absent that if one who is loved is not present, a letter may be embraced instead.

~Isidore of Seville

punctum books is pleased to announce a new imprint, in partnership with the BABEL Working Group:

dead letter office

dead letter office will publish small chapbook-style works, of approximately 20 to 40 pages, representing work that either has “gone nowhere” or will likely go nowhere, yet retains nevertheless little inkdrops of possibility and beauty and the darkling shape of a more full-bodied form and structure — to whit: the conference or seminar paper that will never become an article, the stray pages for a half-baked article that will never become the full-baked article, the half-finished chapter that will never make it into the book or the dissertation, the outlines and notes and semi-polished pages for manuscripts that are simply unfinish-able, the essay that can find no welcoming harbor (and that you half-suspect is ill-conceived but likely isn’t), the prospectus for the project you can never seem to find your way to start, the prolegomenon and preamble without follow-up, the stray children of your pen, the letter you wrote then tucked away in a drawer, fearing to mail it, or the one you sent and received again, with the stamp, “return to sender,” or which was never received or returned, that you perhaps lost (then re-found). We seek, also, experiments in whimsy, in over-reaching, in idle speculation, in prospecting for fool’s gold, in marking and then forgetting a path in a wild wood of visible darkness. In short, the dead letter office invites you to take those letters out of the drawer or shoebox, to re-visit and re-polish them, without worrying about conclusions or ultimate destinations, and send them to us.

We welcome, as always, innovations in form and style, especially with forms that are outmoded (whether the breviary or the telegram, the leechbook or liner notes). Send queries, with a brief outline of your “dead letter,” to Eileen Joy and Nicola Masciandaro at: punctumbooks@gmail.com.

Samesex, Not Queer: How the Brahmans Do It

by KARL STEEL

First, read Eileen!

Our women are not adorned to please us. Indeed, they reckon adornment a burden since they wish to be beautiful not for their ornaments but for their innate nature alone. For who can improve on nature's work? If anyone does wish to improve it, that is a crime which cannot be permitted. (History of Alexander's Battles 92)

Neither they nor their womenfolk strive to make themselves more beautiful than the way they were born; they realise that no-one can improve on the work of nature. Hence they think that the use of ornaments is more of a burden than a decoration. There is no fornication, incest or adultery, nor do they sleep together except for the sake of having children. (Robert Grosseteste, On the Six Days of Creation 23)

Oure paramours vs to plese, ne pride þaim beweues,
Nouthire furrers, filetts, ne frengs, ne frettis of perle.
Is þam na surcote of silke ne serkis of Raynes,
Ne kirtils of camlyn, bot as þam kynd lenes.
Ne ne3e we neuire þaim on ni3t to naite for na luste,
Bot for to sustayne oure sede & syn ay to voide. (Wars of Alexander 4465-71)

I've talked here already (this and this) about the medieval tradition of Alexander and the Brahmans, focusing on the text's peculiar ecological thinking. Something odd struck me the other day, though, about the women Brahmans. I'm glad it did, finally. With these texts, as with my work on humans and animals more generally, I haven't done much on gender, much to my annoyance (though I think I might be fair in saying that most critical animal theory doesn't do much with gender, for what it's worth: but see here).

Here goes something.

The Brahman women are basically men. Though the women make barely any appearance in the most popular of the medieval Brahman traditions, I can safely say from what little we see of them that there's no real sexual difference. They're no disunity among the Brahmans. They're all philosophers, all contemptuous of cultural excess and perhaps of culture as a whole, all contemptuous in particular of cosmetics and fancy clothes, the features in any number of textual traditions (an early one: 1 Corinthians 11:6-15) of women and dandies.

Brahman sexuality, in other words, is, structurally speaking, samesex sexuality, but antiqueer samesex sexuality. It attempts to imagine a sexuality without the disintegrations of desire (see for example this guy). It's not quite Augustine's Eden, but it's close enough.

Women tend to be put on the side of Nature, there to be conquered and dominated. Though this may be true, say, for the Albina legend, it may not be the case for classical and medieval texts more generally, where women, along with cosmetics and nonreproductive sex, belong to culture and its human errors (linked to aspirationally as a book I'm looking forward to reading). It's not the case, either, for moden masculinist nature writing (as condemned, e.g., by Morton), where men go out into the wilderness to commune with a masculine sublime nature, free of all inauthenticity (read: cosmetics, decorations, etc.).

In the medieval Brahman tradition, though, these philosophical women and men are on the side of nature and reason, categories indistinguishable from one another. On the one side Nature/Reason and on the other (where we find Alexander, and his silk shirts and nice food) culture. As usual, the queer's on the side of culture, against nature. Except this time, it's what the kids used to call "opposite sexuality" that's queer. Odd? Worth playing around with some more?

Something else to play around with for the persistently interested: Dindimus speaks on behalf of the Brahmans, but especially on behalf of the men. "Oure paramours vs to plese" divides us, the male philosophers, from our women, even as the presentation of the women immediately subsumes them into masculinity. Here, then, is the first obstacle to my reading. Find more obstacles with my blessing!

No, Jeffrey Williams, the "Life" of the Theory Journal Has Not Been Brief, It Is Only Beginning

by EILEEN JOY

In the 16 October 2011 edition of The Chronicle Review, an essay appeared by Jeffrey J. Williams, "The Brief, Wondrous Life of the Theory Journal," which argues that a certain "wave" of new theory journals in the 1970s (with the founding of journals such as New Literary History, boundary 2, Semiotext(e), Signs, Critical Inquiry, and Social Text, among others) brought about whole new cultural sensibilities (and careers) within the humanities, and also bravely took on the boundaries of literary criticism and "the role of criticism itself." Sadly (or disturbingly), according to Williams, the "rise" of the theory journal in the 1970s has no comparable counterpart in the present where “our current moment is remarkable for its relative paucity of new journals,” especially in theory and cultural studies, and as regards what new journals might be on the horizon now, “we cannot yet glean the form that online journals will finally take.” Here is how Williams concludes his essay [which you can read in full by following the link above]:

The theory journal thrived on university funds. For instance, New Literary History received $14,000 a year ($86,000 in current dollars) its first five years from the University of Virginia. That was on top of other kinds of support, notably for libraries that would subscribe to most new journals, a practice that came to an end by the 1990s. The enhanced research university fostered the tendency toward technical specialization, although it also allowed for a good deal of intellectual freedom, experiment, and exploration.

This genealogy prompts the question: What new kind of journal is looming now? One might identify a turn toward cultural studies in academe, but there is no comparable wave of cultural-studies journals. Rather, cultural studies has been absorbed into the format of the theory journal. An obvious answer is online journals, but most existing online journals, like Postmodern Culture (1990), are in the lineage of the theory journal, although perhaps we cannot yet glean the form that online journals will finally take. A bleak hypothesis is that a new kind of journal has not appeared because of the shrinkage of support for the humanities.

The question of the future is the question of material backing. Today it's clear that we have entered a different moment in the history of higher education; we've passed from the welfare-state university to the post-welfare-state university, determined by the protocols of privatization. Under its terms, the theory journal is becoming a residual form, like the philological journals.

Without the capacious financing for higher education, I predict that journals will return to being philanthropic projects, like the early little magazines, subject to private support, and thus the tastes and vicissitudes of that support. And they will become more rarefied as their readership shrinks—as the number of full-time faculty, who might publish in them and read them, becomes a yet smaller fraction of those who profess.

While it was interesting to read Williams's take on the "rise" of the social-scientistic theory journals in the 1970s, and also his brief history of the more literary-humanistic "little magazine" in the decades before that [such as The Kenyon Review and Partisan Review], and also his musing that what the future may have in store for us is a return to the earlier little magazine, "subject to private support, and thus the tastes and vicissitudes of that support," I basically could not disagree more with Williams's conclusions here, mainly because I'm pretty sure he does not have a grasp on what has actually been happening in the past ten or so years in the area of new academic publishing initiatives, which have virtually exploded in recent years, especially in the realm of open-access online publishing. Further, there can be no "return" to the "little magazine," because it never really left us and has mainly migrated, also, to more open-access online environments, while it has also benefited from on-demand print and e-reader modes (a great example of this is what I like to think of as the McSweeny's empire, with "empire" here actually being a force for the greater good of literary and intellectual publishing).

As I think many of our readers here at ITM are aware, I am a great optimist when it comes to the future of more open, creative, and collaborative forms of cultural-intellectual work within and beyond the university, and punctum books, which will be publishing books and new journals "across a whimsical para-humanities assemblage," recently co-founded with Nicola Masciandaro, is one of my own personal "bets" on this future. I honestly believe that, even with the various wrecks of the economy all around us and many institutions of higher learning facing dire budget cuts and budget freezes, and with many people [perhaps rightfully] panicking about the future of the humanities within an increasingly technologized and corporately bureaucratic university, that the times could not be more fruitful and promising relative to the formation of new and more intellectually generous spaces for the creation and sustenance of new work within the humanities. And I challenge and invite everyone to join me in this optimism, and to also donate your time and your work to some of these new ventures springing up all around us.

Also, I found myself compelled to write a letter to the editors of The Chronicle Review, relative to Williams's essay, and I share that with you here:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

4 November 2011

The Chronicle of Higher Education
1255 Twenty-Third Street, N.W.
Seventh Floor
Washington, D.C. 20037

Dear Editors:

this letter is in response to Jeffrey J. Williams’s piece in The Chronicle Review (16 Oct. 2011), “The Brief, Wondrous Life of the Theory Journal.” While I very much appreciate this brief history of the “rise” of literary theory journals in the 1970s (as well as of the rise of the “little magazine” in the decades before this), I have to take issue with his argument that “our current moment is remarkable for its relative paucity of new journals,” especially in theory and cultural studies, and that as regards what new journals might be on the horizon now, “we cannot yet glean the form that online journals will finally take.” Nor do I agree that “a new kind of journal has not appeared” yet because of the lack of funding within the humanities.

For the past ten or so years, we have seen a veritable explosion of new journals in theory, cultural, and literary studies -- journals, moreover, that also felicitously ignore and bypass traditional disciplinary divisions while also founding new areas of intellectual inquiry, and which are engaging in creative experiments in terms of their platforms of delivery and presentation, from: (1) purely open-access html-based issues, to (2) open-access downloadable .pdf issues combined with on-demand print editions, to (3) html-based issues that also include video, audio, and other flash media, to (4) letterpress print, subscription-based issues with some open-access online content, to (5) traditional subscription-based print issues with a weblog component, and so on and forth. Examples of such journals, many of which have prestigious editorial boards, have garnered large groups of readers, and also have institutional and other types of support, include:

• Arthuriana (http://www.arthuriana.org/)
• rhizome (http://www.rhizomes.net)
• continent (http://www.continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/index)
• Collapse (http://www.urbanomic.com/publications.php)
• Cosmos & History (http://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal)
• Post Identity (http://liberalarts.udmercy.edu/pi/)
• Speculations (http://www.publicpraxis.com/speculations/)
• Gaga Stigmata (http://gagajournal.blogspot.com/)
• Glossator (http://solutioperfecta.wordpress.com/)
• The Heroic Age (http://www.heroicage.org/)
• O-Zone (http://ozone-journal.com/)
• Journalism, Media, and Cultural Studies/JOMEC (http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/research/journalsandpublications/jomecjournal/index.html)
• Fragments (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/f/frag/)
  
• Film Philosophy (http://www.film-philosophy.com/index.php/f-p)
  
• Space and Culture (http://www.spaceandculture.org/)
• Culture Machine (http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/index)
• Parrhesia (http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/about.html)
• Fibreculture (http://fibreculturejournal.org/)
• Whiskey & Fox (http://www.whiskeyandfox.org/)
  

I could go on but won’t do so because of space limitations (and I have not even begun to approach the subject of non-English open-access online journals, of which there are many: indeed, we need to start thinking more globally when we contemplate the state of academic publishing today). It should be noted as well that commercial academic presses, such as Palgrave Macmillan, are continuing to innovate within their journals divisions and in areas which you might not expect, which is how some of us in medieval studies were able to found with them a new journal in medieval cultural studies (postmedieval) in 2010, published quarterly.

Thanks to various modes of publishing available through the Internet as well as to open-source publishing software and more and more start-up companies (such as CreateSpace, Lulu, Blurb, and so on) that are enabling affordable and even profitable on-demand printing and e-reader text production services, the time is ripe for what I would call new forms of academic publishing entrepreneurship, involving creative partnerships between professors, students, commercial companies, university presses, and even partners from outside the university proper (such as cultural arts organizations and the like), and the fruits of such entrepreneurship are all around us already. If anything, what we have now is an excess of riches as regards smart and gorgeously designed new journals, and the only question I have in my mind now is how many of these will continue into a long, sustainable future. The unflagging energies and forward-looking intellectualism of graduate students, I might add, have been critical in the start-up of new journals and they have emerged as equal partners with professors in new journal start-ups (continent, Speculations, and O-Zone are good examples of this).

The question of institutional support will always be an important one, as professors and their students who wish to start and edit new journals will still need release time, space, and technical support for these ventures, but what they will not need, that traditional journals have needed in the past (and which was horrendously expensive) is money for advance print runs, traditional modes of design, mailing, and print-based marketing campaigns. Contrary to what many people believe, information is not really “free,” even in open online environments (immense amounts of human labor have to be donated every minute of the day to keep online journals going, for example), but what is exciting about the times in which we live now, is that we in the humanities have an unprecedented opportunity, through various hybrid electronic-print publishing platforms, to take over the reins of the modes of the production of our work in such a way as to open up more and more spaces for more voices to be heard, for more editorial transparency, for more fields to be founded, for more creative innovation across fields and disciplines, and I would add, to also save the book and print journal as still-viable commodities and objects of desire. In my eyes, the future for academic publishing looks bright, indeed, with more, and not less, of the professoriate and their students, as well as intellectuals and artists outside of the academy proper, joining together to create a more robust and diverse library among the “clouds” of the virtual and more material bookstores and libraries emerging alongside us today.

Sincerely,

Eileen A. Joy

Magical Mystery Treasure: National Geographic's Piece on the Staffordshire Hoard

by EILEEN JOY

Figure 1. A strip of gold once studded with a gem bears the same biblical quotation in Latin on each side: Moses' declaration, "Rise up, Lord, may your enemies be dispersed and those who hate you flee from our face," as the Israelites journeyed out of Sinai. The object may have decorated the arm of a cross prized by recent converts to Christianity. All artifacts owned by: Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery; Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent (from the Nov. 2011 issue of National Geographic; ©Robert Clark/National Geographic)

We did, of course, back in 2009, report on the discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard [go HERE, HERE, and HERE], and now National Geographic has come out, in its November 2011 issue, with a richly illustrated article on the discovery, "Magical Mystery Treasure," which I think our readers may be interested to read HERE. Here is an excerpt:

The Staffordshire Hoard, as it was quickly dubbed, electrified the general public and Anglo-Saxon scholars alike. Spectacular discoveries, such as the royal finds at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, had been made in Anglo-Saxon burial sites. But the treasure pulled from Fred Johnson’s field was novel—a cache of gold, silver, and garnet objects from early Anglo-Saxon times and from one of the most important kingdoms of the era. Moreover, the quality and style of the intricate filigree and cloisonné decorating the objects were extraordinary, inviting heady comparisons to such legendary treasures as the Lindisfarne Gospels of the Book of Kells.

Once cataloged, the hoard was found to contain some 3,500 pieces representing hundreds of complete objects. And the items that could be securely identified presented a striking pattern. There were more than 300 sword-hilt fittings, 92 sword-pommel caps, and 10 scabbard pendants. Also noteworthy: There were no coins or women’s jewelry, and out of the entire collection, the three religious objects appeared to be the only nonmartial pieces. Intriguingly, many of the items seemed to have been bent or broken. This treasure, then, was a pile of broken, elite, military hardware hidden 13 centuries ago in a politically and militarily turbulent region. The Staffordshire Hoard was thrilling and historic—but above all it was enigmatic.

Some stunning photographs of the hoard's contents, by Robert Clark, also appear in the November 2011 issue of National Geographic in which this article appears, and can be accessed HERE.

Happy halloween

by J J Cohen

So it's that special day on which I pontificate in my tiresome fashion about what monsters mean. Blah blah blah, Professor Cohen, have you nothing new to say? Can you really be living in the aftermath of a book published in 1996? Let it go already, would you? Move on.

Actually, follow the link above and you will discover that once in a B&B in Providence I was haunted by a ghost -- and this despite the fact that I don't believe in them. She didn't seem to care.

I had fun doing the interview with Danny Freedman of "Untrodden Ground," GW's Research blog. Let me know what you think.

Happy Halloween!

Oh: and the illustration is the pumpkin I carved this year, sitting upon the doorstep during its test run last night. It's a werewolf, of course.

The Werewolf's Indifference

by J J Cohen

Just in time for Halloween ...

I posted a version of this short essay yesterday on Google+ and immediately garnered very useful feedback from Karl, Allen Michie, Ana Grinberg, Derrick Pitard and Jessica Lockhart: thank you. It's the draft of a piece I'm contributing to a cluster on animals, to be published in Studies in the Age of Chaucer. The essay has already exceeded its 2K word limit, and much as I'd like to expand it ... well, some day.

Your suggestions and comments are most appreciated.

---------------

            A werewolf is the problem of animal difference expressed in monster’s flesh. This compound creature asks how intermixed with the bestial (-wolf) the human (were-) might already be. All that is civilized, ennobling, and sacred is lost in fleshly war with lupine appetites, impulses, and violence. The werewolf would seem the ideal monster to query the suppression of “the animal part within us all.”[1] Yet a warning that this monstrous admixture is not so easy to make a universalizing metaphor inheres in the fact that Latin possesses no common noun for werewolf. Laycaon might be transformed by an angry god into a wolf, and might (in Ovid’s narration) inhabit briefly an interstitial space where he possesses human and bestial qualities, but at transformation’s end one noun replaces another, vir to lupus. When Gervase of Tilbury in the Otia Imperialia is describing men who metamorphosize under lunar influence he observes:

In England we have often seen men change into wolves [homines in lupos mutari] according to the phases of the moon. The Gauls call men of this kind gerulfi, while the English name for them is werewolves, were being the English equivalent of uir (87-89; I.15)

Gervase employs French and English words to gloss his Latinate circumlocution.[2] As its etymologically admixed nature suggests, the werewolf is a hybrid monster. Caroline Walker Bynum has argued that hybridity is a dialogism in which “contraries are simultaneous and in conversation with each other.”[3] The werewolf is therefore not an identity-robbing degradation of the human, nor the yielding to a submerged and interior animality, but the staging of a dialogue in which the human always triumphs. Hybridity is therefore a simultaneity of unequal differences. As Karl Steel has demonstrated, this overpowering of animal possibility by human exceptionality is a ceaseless, fraught, and violence-driven process. Humans are made at animal expense. Steel points out that a werewolf’s raising the problem of “the animal part that within us all” is possible only “if humans are understood to have discrete ‘animal’ and ‘human’ parts.”[4] As idealized differences these categories need to be produced and stabilized repeatedly: the only way to maintain such separations is through more violence.

As admonitory figures, werewolves would seem to warn us why species difference must remain firm. So keen is the desired division between animal and human that many medieval werewolves are not true composites but humans encased in lupine skin, awaiting liberation. Gerald of Wales describes natives of Ossory cursed by Saint Natalis to don wolf fur and live as beasts. Under these animal garments their bodies remain unaltered.[5] Two of these transformed Irish villagers announce their appearance to a group of startled travelers with the resonant words “Do not be afraid.” Wolf skin is peeled back to reveal an ordinary woman inside. The werewolves deliver a human message, an anthropocentric horror story about being entrapped in an alien encasement. What human would not seek an immediate release from enclosure within such degrading and disjunctive corporeality? If this hybrid form stages a dialogue, the conversation is one sided. Who speaks the animal’s narrative? Who could wish for such a monster’s impossibly amalgamated body? Who could desire such a life?

Cursed and pedagogical creatures, werewolves cannot be a happy lot. The citizens of Ossory bewail their compulsion. Yet medieval literature also describes werewolves cheerful in their composite bodies: the clever Alphonse who teaches the young lovers to disguise themselves in animal skins in Guillaume de Palerne; the forest-loving protagonist of Mélion, who discovers in wolf fur a success never realized while an ordinary husband and vassal; Bisclavret, who when trapped in animal form attains a satisfaction denied as a quotidian knight. Animality is supposed to be a despised state, the abject condition against which humanity asserts itself. The werewolf knows better. This monster inhabits a space of undifferentiated concurrency, in the doubled sense of a running together and a mutual assent. The werewolf offers neither a conversation (which too easily becomes a conversion) nor a dialogue (weighted in advance towards human domination), but a pause, a hesitation, a concurrence during which what is supposed to be contrastive remains coexistent, in difference, indifferent. Werewolves do not reject the stony enclosure of castles for arboreal wilds. They are not proto-romanticists or early avatars of Bear Grylls. What is most intriguing about the state of unsettled animality that they incarnate is its irreducible hybridity, its ethical complexity, and its dispersive instability, pro-animal yet posthuman.

Perhaps that sounds too affirmative for so fierce a creature. In “Bisclavret” Marie de France glosses “werewolf” in harsh but familiar terms:

Garualf, c[eo] est beste salvage:

Tant cum il est en cele rage,

Hummes devure, grant mal fait,

Es granz forez converse et vait. (9-12)

[A werewolf is a savage beast:

while his fury is on him

he eats men, does much harm,

goes deep in the forest to live.][6]

Marie vividly describes the bestiality incarnated by this monster, its sylvan existence of uncontrolled violence, even anthropophagy. Who would embrace such animal life? Bisclavret. A well-respected knight four days of the week and a forest-dwelling wolf the other three, Bisclavret is not unhappy. His mistake is to confide the secret of his dual nature to his wife. Unlike the werewolves described by Gerald of Wales who don lupine skins, Marie’s knight simply removes his clothing and stashes the garments in the hollow of a woodland rock. Once “stark naked” (tut nu), he tells his fearful spouse, the following adventure (aventure) inevitably arrives:

Dame, jeo devienc bisclavret:

En cele grant forest me met,

Al plus espés de la gaudine,

S’i vif de preie e de ravine. (63-66)

[My dear, I become a werewolf:

I go into the great forest,

in the thickest part of the woods,

and I live on prey I hunt down.]

This account of roaming the forest is significantly less violent than the vision of lycanthropy with which the lai opens. The wolf’s sustenance in the forest depths is described as preie, which could be deer, rabbits, and foxes. Or not. What matters is that unlike the opening gloss no invitation is extended to consider brutality against specific bodies. Bynum therefore sees a vast difference between the garvalf, the Norman word for the savage werewolf of tradition, and Marie’s own bisclavret, the term of unknown origin that is supposed to be its Breton equivalent (Metamorphosis and Identity 170-71). I wonder, though, if these two nouns can be so easily separated, and suspect that Marie is up to something more complicated and inventive.

Bisclavret hesitates to reveal his covert life. He fears he will lose his “very self” (“me meïsmes en perdrai”) if this secret becomes known. Yet although he admits his second nature to his wife with apprehension, he speaks it without shame. He arrives home from his three wolfen days joius e liez, happy and delighted (30). Time in the forest vivifies. His wife is terrified by this knowledge, and certain she will never desire to share a bed with him again (102). Feigning passion for a neighbor, she arranges to have Bisclavret’s clothing stolen, trapping him in animal form. Bisclavret’s anger at his wife is immense, his revenge brutal: when she comes to the court where he has become the king’s favorite pet, he bites the nose from her face. Torture compels the disfigured woman to reveal her crime, and she admits the stealing of his transfigurative clothes.

Strangely, however, when the vestments are returned to a lupine Bisclavret he looks upon them with indifference: “he didn’t even seem to notice them”(280). A councilor suggests that the former knight is too modest to dress in public. Critics generally find this intratextual interpretation persuasive. Bisclavret’s shame signals his readiness to abandon his animality and return to civility. Yet the councilor’s words are nonsensical. Why would Bisclavret feel shame? Certainly not at his nakedness: he is covered in fur, and he is refusing to dress, not to strip. The clothing is a potent materialization of his humanity. Why would shame inhere in a return to that superior state? Marie de France’s lais are usually crafted around densely symbolic objects that might be described as parabolic, an adjective for parables (stories) as well as parabolae (curved orbits). To enter into relation with a parabolic object is to be swept into an unexpected narrative that alters the trajectory of one’s life, spinning it around a novel center of accelerating gravity. Everything changes at such encounter. These objects are aventure in material form: the ship in Guigemar, the hawk and sword in Yonec, the swan in Milun. Why would Bisclavret demonstrate such apathy towards the thing that can restore human being?

Werewolves’ bodies are convenient animal vehicles for meditating upon human identity in the Middle Ages. They are theologically rich, and pose difficult questions about identity and continuity, as Bynum has shown. They often prove to be less hybrid than they at first appear: unzip the wolf skin and out pops the human who had always been dwelling inside. Werewolves easily become allegories, reaffirming the superiority of the human, their natural dominance and difference. So why would a werewolf through dogged disinterest suggest his being at home in a shaggy form? Could it be that Bisclavret is simply indifferent to a return to quotidian humanity, and thus offers no reaction at all to these powerfully symbolic accouterments?

As a knight Bisclavret is noble and loved. His three days spent prowling the forests in a wolf’s body detracted nothing, and he returns home refreshed. The forest is a place of privacy. He resists telling his wife about his lupine sojourns because he fears the loss of that space, her love, his selfhood. He places his clothing in the hollow of a rock by an ancient chapel to gain something that he knows imperils his life as husband and neighbor: a space inhuman (lived among vegetation and beasts, filled with violence but also shared with trees, other animals, stones) and innovative (he creates and sustains a precarious existence). This hybrid space is also too easily annexed back into the orbit of ordinary human lives. Bisclavret in his wolf body earns the king’s affection through an act of submission, kissing the monarch’s stirrup and making his readiness to serve visually evident. Well fed and watered, full of proper submission but also ready to unleash proper violence, he is at once like a favorite hunting dog and like a good household knight. He learns the equivalence between two forms that seemed mutually exclusive, learns their indifference.

Immediately upon his restoration Bisclavret is beheld asleep upon the royal bed. His wife – the one who did not want him in her bed any more – is banished. Her female children inherit her noselessness, an infinitely repeating historical sign of the misogyny that has limned this tale, with its closing vision of a thoroughly homosocial world. And perhaps with that trading of one dreary bed for another we realize the reason for Bisclavret’s unresponsiveness to the offered clothing. He returns from his wolf’s form to a startlingly familiar scene, one that he thought he had trotted away from long ago. How sad his departure from lycanthropy must be, as an ephemeral but invigoratingly uncertain world yields to soft beds and predictable human vistas “a tutdis,” forever.

---

[1] Joyce E. Salisbury, “Human Beasts and Bestial Humans in the Middle Ages,” Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History, ed. Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior (New York: Routledge, 1997) 9-22. Salisbury is arguing for more sympathy towards the animal within. See also her book The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 1994).

[2] Although Gervase is dubious about many animal transformations, the werewolves seem to be a true change of body. See the thorough discussion in Leslie A. Sconduto, Metamorphoses of the Werewolf : A Literary Study from Antiquity through the Renaissance (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2008) 35-38.

[3] Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001) 160.

[4] How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University press, 2011) 12.

[5] Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. John O’Meara (London: Penguin Books, 1982). For an influential treatment of the episode stressing its stabilities of forms, see Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity 15-18, 106-111 for a complete account.

[6] Marie de France, Lais, ed. Alfred Ewert, introduction by Glyn S. Burgess (London: Briston Classics Press, 1995); translation from Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante, The Lais of Marie de France (Durham: Labyrinth Press, 1978). Further references by line numbers.

"Relatability": BARF

by KARL STEEL

Read Eileen first! on the wonderful Bonnie Wheeler.

Ok. Thanks. Here's a comment I just wrote on a student paper. It's a long one (especially for a 600-word assignment!), but it finally articulates something that's been bothering me for a long time, namely, the word relatable. Yuck. Here's the comment:

the word “relatable” kind of drives me nuts. For a historical treatment of it, see here. The problem is that it suggests that certain characters are somehow naturally more relatable than others. But what kinds of literary characters readers relate to—and I think the better term is identify with (as is, they are willing to see the character as a second or even better self)—differs from time to time and culture to culture. Medieval people clearly identified with knights and kings, and often did so: the hundreds of surviving manuscripts of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain is sufficient evidence of that. But, as you say, for a few decades in the later 14th century, English readers started relating to or rather identifying with peasants instead of kings. And indeed we should say “as well as” rather than “instead of,” since chivalric literature continued to be produced and consumed in this period. If we say the new identifications happened because peasants are more “relatable” than kings, then we're just saying that of course people should “relate” to peasants instead of kings. We're just saying that this is the natural way of things, and that's the end of thinking. Except people did identify with kings etc. The question therefore should be: when do they identify with certain classes and why, and what kinds of effects do these shifts in identification cause or indicate? "Relatability" prevents analysis, whereas "identification" opens it up.

Obviously we could take this in any number of more sophisticated directions, but for a comment on an undergraduate paper, I think it's sufficient. Cut and paste for your own grading as necessary!

Why Bonnie Wheeler Is My Hero

Figure 1. Bonnie Wheeler with Marty Shichtman at the 2008 Kalamazoo Congress

by EILEEN JOY

Driving home this evening after teaching my undergraduate Chaucer class, I started thinking about Bonnie Wheeler and how singularly important she has been over the past decade or so in the transformation of the field of medieval studies, especially with regard to her labors in assisting younger scholars to establish themselves in the field (and thereby also secure tenure -- I am one of those scholars) and in securing significant space for creative, theoretically inventive, and even risky scholarship and writing that otherwise might have never found a home. I don't know why Bonnie crept into my thoughts after collecting my students' papers and then letting them leave early so they could watch the fifth game of the World Series [the Saint Louis Cardinals are playing the Texas Rangers, and for my students, let's just say that their devotion to the Cardinals borders on religious fervor], but somehow, as I was passing the Cahokia burial mounds in the gorgeous velvety dark of an almost summer-like evening and listening to the old Fleetwood Mac song "Landslide" [which has the line, "Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?"], it just made me think of Bonnie -- why, I honestly don't know, but perhaps because the line got me thinking about the difficulties we all navigate in our careers and personal lives, and how our culture is heavily invested in the idea of the heroic individual who succeeds, or fails, completely on her own merits and labors (or supposed lack thereof). As Zygmunt Bauman once wrote, being an individual in modernity is no longer a choice, but a fate. We need help to sail through those changing ocean straits, and Bonnie has helped an immense number of people in our field, not only as the founding editor of the journal of Arthuriana, but also as the instigator and director of Palgrave Macmillan's New Middle Ages series, and even in her other non-medieval studies leadership roles, such as her stint as President of the Council of the Editors of Learned Journals [CELJ]. As Jeffrey once wrote, and it is worth repeating,

Few have had such a positive impact upon Medieval Studies as Bonnie Wheeler. Her special mission throughout her career has been the cultivation of young scholars, fostering their intellectual growth through mentoring and their professional possibilities through guiding their research. She is and always has been an inspiration, a catalyst for change, and a fairy godmother for those working on nontraditional projects.

Also -- and this has been weighing on me for quite a while now -- I missed two opportunities in recent years to publicly toast and thank Bonnie at the Kalamazoo Congress when events were organized to honor her contributions to medieval studies. In one case, in 2009, a party organized to honor and celebrate Bonnie's career coincided with a moment of complete exhaustion on my part [unusual for me, I know], and while others were feting her and engaging in other social events, I was alone in my hotel room engaging in some much-need sensory deprivation. The second time [last year, when the first award of the Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship was announced], I had another obligation which I could not duck. I have felt terrible about this for a long time, because I don't think we can pay enough public tribute to what Bonnie has done for so many of us, and for what she has made possible in our field, and so I want to do so now, here, in this public space.

I want to say, first, that I am in awe of Bonnie's indefatigable energies when it comes to seeking out younger scholars for the New Middle Ages series. If she thinks you have an interesting idea, even if it is half-baked and in dire need of further development, she will encourage you to do just that [with much-needed criticism] and assures you simultaneously that she will back your project when it is completed [and if it is good -- and thanks to knowing Bonnie is in your corner, by god, you make it good]. I have personally benefited from Bonnie's stewardship and encouragement so many times, I barely know where to begin. For example, when the BABEL Working Group did not yet exist except in a very early proto-manifesto version that only a few of us [Myra Seaman, Betsy McCormick, Kimberly Bell, Mary Ramsey, Tim Spence, Cindy Ho, Anne Clark Bartlett, and a couple of other people] had seen, Bonnie came to a session we organized [under the name, Group for Postfeminist Scholarship] at the 2004 meeting of the Southeastern Medieval Association on "Remaking the Middle Ages on Reality Television," and afterwards she followed us to a cafe for coffee and said she would love to see the session developed into a book. She insisted that only untenured assistant professors be the editors, thereby helping some of us to secure tenure. She then told us she would only help us if we got rid of the name "Group for Postfeminist Scholarship," which she frankly told us was insulting to all feminists and maybe stupid, too. We sheepishly mentioned we were batting around the name, "BABEL Working Group," at which point she asked to see our little "manifesto" [never brought to light anywhere, I might add] and told us to add her name and email address to our list of "members," which, at that point, was the six or seven people who were sitting around that table in the cafe, and we hadn't exactly made it "official." Some of us had jobs, some of us did not, and except for Anne and Cindy, we were all worried about long-term job security. In short, Bonnie breathed wind into our sails and gave us hope that -- maybe, just maybe -- we could publish a book together and also launch, if even tenuously, this new group we were "dreaming" at the time. She was literally the first person to say, make me a member of BABEL. In all reality, we had no official "membership" at the time. Guess what? That was Bonnie's idea -- to even have a "membership," and also a list-serv. So, it was like Bonnie ran into a group of vagabonds loitering together on a corner, who had some good ideas but no definite direction, and with a few sharp prods and gestures of welcoming, she ignited us. And she published our book, which was only became a book because she suggested it could be one [Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages].

I could tell more stories, but another one I want to share has to do with postmedieval. When I and other members of BABEL were batting around the idea for a new journal, we initially wrote up a brief prospectus and sent it to Blackwell Publishers. They declined to even submit it to a full review because medieval studies is not a "growth area," and the readership for such a journal would be too small to make the venture worthwhile for them, especially at a time of financial austerity and a general shrinking of library budgets and the like. There are all sorts of plot details regarding how we eventually came to convince Palgrave Macmillan to publish this journal [and which involved writing up a very detailed vision statement and prospectus for external review, assembling an Editorial Board and the like], but only one detail really matters: because of the success of the New Middle Ages book series, which Bonnie has directed so successfully, the powers-that-be at Palgrave's Journals division in the UK had decided at one of their board meetings that medieval studies would be a good area within which to develop a new journal. So basically, Bonnie opened that door, and we walked through it. Whatever happens with the journal will be our fault [or success], but we wouldn't have it at all without Bonnie's vision and hard work to clear the ground for the possibility of its arrival.

I don't know if it's possible to ever express my gratitude for the gift of Bonnie Wheeler to our profession with words that would be adequate to how much she has blessed my and others' careers. What I can say is that, for those of us situated in university careers where we are often made to feel as if we must swim or sink on our own, and where a terrible level of anxiety and fear and self-loathing is the result of that professional zeitgeist, Bonnie Wheeler has inspired and orchestrated endless spontaneous acts of the fostering of individual [hopes and] careers, but more importantly, of a collective good will that has been infectious and spread to many dark corners. Tonight, after midnight, with a martini poured by my friend Sheryl Meyering sitting on the table next to my laptop, I raise all of my virtual and real glasses to Bonnie, who shines the most stylish and searching lights upon the often tumultuous and dark seas of our studies. Bonnie: we thank you ever so much; you have our undying devotion.

[ANNOUNCEMENT] O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies

by EILEEN JOY

I'm thrilled to announce the launch of a new open-access, online, and print-on-demand journal, to be published annually by punctum books: O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies. I'm especially excited that we've assembled an editorial team and board of advisory editors whose areas of expertise have such a broad and felicitously cross-disciplinary and cross-temporal reach, from political science to medieval studies to media studies to ecology to American literature to philosophy to sociology to religious studies to culture studies to critical animal studies to the fine arts and beyond. See below for our vision statement and the Call for Contributions for our first issue [you can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter].

Ozone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies
http://ozone-journal.com

Editors
Levi Bryant
Kris Coffield
Eileen Joy

Vision Statement

. . . all these changes concern objects; at least, that’s what I’d like to be sure of.
—from the notebooks of Antoine Roquentin

O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies is a peer-reviewed, open-access, and post-disciplinary journal devoted to object-oriented studies, both situated within and traversing the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and the arts. The journal aims to cultivate current streams of thought already established within object-oriented studies, while also providing space for new pathways along which disparate voices and bodies of object-oriented knowledges might encounter, influence, perturb, and motivate one another.

Situated within a post-Kantian philosophical outlook, where everything in the world, from the smallest quarks to lynxes to humans to wheat fields to machines and beyond exist on an equal ontological footing, O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies invites new work that explores the weird realism, thingliness, and life-worlds of objects. Possible methodological approaches and critical modes might include: actor-networks, unit operations, alien phenomenology, agentic drift, onticology, guerrilla metaphysics, carnal phenomenology, ontography, agential realism, cosmopolitics, panpsychism, insect media, posthumanism, flat ontology, dark vitalism, prosthetics, territorial assemblage, vibrant materialism, dorsality, distributed intelligence, dark ecology, hyperobjects, realist magic, post-continuity, and other paradigms for object-oriented thought still coming into being and yet to be articulated.

The journal will appear annually and be available online, free of charge, and also in affordable print-on-demand and e-reader editions, published in partnership with punctum books.

Advisory Editors
Marisol Bate
Katherine Behar
Jane Bennett
Ian Bogost
Bill Brown
John Caputo
Patricia Clough
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Joan Copjec
Elizabeth Grosz
Graham Harman
Katherine Hayles
Timothy Morton
Michael O’Rourke
Jussi Parikka
Daniel Remein
Steven Shaviro
Cary Wolfe

Call for Contributions: Object/Ecology (to be published in Fall 2012)

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in ecology in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, with exciting new conceptual innovations and critically reflective returns to the work of earlier ecological studies. If ecological thought, in its most broad definition, investigates the interrelations and interactions of entities with one another, then the concept and domain of ecology can be expanded significantly, referring not simply to the natural world apart from social structures and configurations, but rather to relations between entities of any kind, regardless of whether they are natural, technological, social, or discursive. In short, culture and society are no longer thought of as something distinct from nature, but as one formation of nature among others. Increasingly, a sensibility has emerged that views as impossible the treatment of society and nature as distinct and separate domains, and instead sees the two as deeply enmeshed with one another. Similarly, ecological and posthumanist developments have increasingly come to intersect with one another, jointly conceptualizing humans not as sovereign makers of all other tools, beings and meanings, but as beings (or objects) among other beings (and objects)—animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman—entwined together in a variety of complex contingencies.

The inaugural issue of O-Zone seeks to expand current ecological dialogues and open new trajectories for ecological engagement vis-à-vis the world of objects, or even world(s)-as-object(s). Authors are invited to contribute short meditations, of approximately 2,000 to 3,000 words, on any object-oriented ecological turn or (re)turn percolating through their current work. Authors might consider the following questions when composing their contributions:

• How do the post-correlationist, post-Kantian, realist, and materialist turns transform our understanding of the systems, operations, objects, and/or ontology of ecology?
• What is an ecological politics, and what might certain political considerations bring to object-oriented and new materialist trends of ecological thinking? Conversely, how might an intensive focus on the singularity and autonomy of objects revise our conceptions of political domains?
• Object-oriented theorists have proposed a number of new critical modes to expand ecological inquiry, like dark and black ecology. In what ways do these new approaches challenge the traditionally “green” orientations of ecological investigation? Further, what other new modes of ecological thought might we propose now, beyond green?
• Ecology has traditionally been defined as the study of systems of inter-dependent relations, often with respect to natural environments. How might certain strains of object-oriented thought that take as a given the withdrawn nature and independent reality of objects give rise to new ecological thinking? Further, what would it mean to think the non- or para-“natural world” ecologically: such as new media, machinic and other technologies, artificial life, bioinformatics, cloning, and the like?
• What is the relationship between posthumanism and ecology? Can there be a post-ecology, and how might that relate to the “life” of objects?
• What would it mean to retrieve earlier ecological and materialist voices, especially from feminist, gender, and queer studies, and what might these voices contribute to object-oriented and new materialist modes of thought?

These questions are only suggestions for possible meditations. Authors are also invited to develop their own topics.

For its inaugural issue, O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies will also consider submissions on topics unrelated to ecology, but still within the orbit of object-oriented studies. These contributions might take the form of short essays, longer articles (of no more than 10,000 words), or digital media. In addition, we are accepting reviews of recently published works on object-oriented and new materialism subjects. Queries about the relevance of a given topic or potential review are welcome.
Deadline for submissions is May 30, 2012. Please send all submissions and queries to editors@ozone-journal.com.

The Canarian's Ships of Fools

by KARL STEEL

Here's a blog post I drafted in the Summer, which I held off on because it doesn't quite feel right here. There are no object-oriented meditations; no grand imaginations of the shimmering mysterious world and the coalescence of another humanities; no encounters with loss and longing and beauty. So, read Jeffrey, read Eileen, and then, if you like, read me.

"Vn temps jadis souloit-on mettre en escrit les bonnes Cheualeries, et les estranges choses que les vaillans conquereurs souloient faire au temps passé, ainsi qu'on trouue és anciennes histoires

"It was the custom in old times to record in writing the deeds of chivalry and marvellous feats of the valiant conquerors of former days, as is seen in our ancient histories"

"Et puis quand ils estoient retraits, et le bastel s'accoustoit à terre, ils couroient sus l'vn à l'autre, et duroit l'escarmouche vne grand' piece" (71)

"When they had gone away and their boat was near the shore, they began quarrelling, and the commotion lasted for a long while"

The above comes from an early fifteenth-century history pretentiously (or optimistically) called The Canarian, which concerns two French noble adventurers, Jean de Bethencourt and Gadifer de la Salle, who in 1402 set out to take the Canary Islands for the glory of Christianity and themselves, and who failed, because of the astonishingly effective resistance of the Canary Islanders--perhaps no people were ever better at throwing rocks--and especially because of their own squabbling, recorded by the monk Pierre Bontier and the priest Jean le Verrier in all its sordid, gossipy, and embarassing detail.

After opening with intonations of high adventure, Bethancourt and Gadifer (barely) convince their sailors not to abandon them, then scavenge an anchor and boat from a captured ship, which they barely make off with, and which nearly get them arrested on accusation of piracy at their next port. Then a chunk of their sailors run away. "Les estranges choses," to be sure, but not ones we'd likely to see Roland, Erec, or Lancelot suffer.

They land at Lancerote where "Monsieur de Bethencourt went inland and made great efforts to capture some of the people of Canary, but without sucess, for as yet he did not know the country: so he returned to Port Joyeuse [their pretentiously named landfall] without doing anything more." The history is crammed with such incidents, which demand a script by Joseph Heller (RIP) and a production by the Werner Herzog (also RIP, sort of) of Fiztcarraldo and Corba Verde.

I'll leave it to you to read it, to learn about the treachery of the wicked sailor Berthin, a slaver indifferent to the treaties his masters draw between themselves and the Canary Islanders, and who leaves Gadifer to starve on the island of Lobos; the Canarian king--a much better subject for a chivalric chronicle!--who breaks free from the slavers six times; and especially the two chaplains' attempt at writing a handbook on belief for the use of future Canarian missionaries.

In a rummage sale catechism, a true Summa, disordered and containing all they could imagine, the fundamental knowledge of the faith includes the characteristics of bitumen, used to seal Noah's ark (only menstrual blood can dissolve it); the paleness of Jews, "descoulourez" by fear; and whether the Host should be made of leavened or unleavened flour (useful knowledge for a people who made no bread!). At the end (p. 90), they say they've done this "as simply as we could according to the knowledge which God has given us" (good job, God!) and they hope that someone later can "explain the Articles of the faith better than we have been able to do." I doubt it.

Only sardonic or disgusted laughter is really appropriate here, as the Canarians were among the first victims of the great age of Exploration. The two chaplains did want the islands conquered (in part because "here one may easily learn news of Prester John"). Within 90 years, all would be, not just the three least-populated ones Gadifer and Bethancourt managed to grab; and shortly after, the remaining populations would be dispersed, mostly to slave labor in Madeira. There's much else to deplore: the frequent battles, increasingly won by the Europeans; the conversions, essentially coerced; the Canarian mother hiding from slavers who strangles her infant, perhaps to keep it from giving away her refuge.

I can't hold it in, though, at the the grotesque difference between the high style of crusade and the domestic squabbling that follows Bethencourt's wife unfavorably comparing his age to that of his brother. We can take this historically, if we like, as a symptom of the twlight of the Middle Ages (but we'd be better off not doing this) and the end of private armies, or psychoanalytically, if we think of crusade histories and chivalric romance as the mirror in which our two heroes (mis)recognize themselves, or some other way, to be determined by you.

Put it on your syllabus and see what happens.

(thanks French wikipedia for the image, which comes from one of the two extant mss. You'll note that the edition/translation I'm using is different from what this ms offers. It begins "Et pour ce que jadis souloit-on mettre en escript les bonnes chevaluers que les princes et les conquereurs souloient faire" etc. Each manuscript, by the way, is a partisan for either Gadifer or Bethencourt, each telling a slightly different story. You'll observe that this manuscript lists Gadifer first, and then Bethancourt, which reverses the order of introduction in the other: the squabbling never ended. )

Folly Beach

by J J Cohen I'm composing this not far from the ocean on a crisp day with blue sky. I've had a great morning, because I enjoyed something I receive little of: time by myself, without the tyranny of some writing project to ruin it. I'm visiting the College of Charleston, staying not far from the city in a beautiful area called Folly Beach. I taught Myra Seaman's undergraduate class on medieval objects last night, then went out with her and a colleague for pizza and wine, then out again later for wine and gossip. Myra has been a great host. I was back at Folly around midnight and fell asleep almost right away ... and woke to a day on which my first obligation is is at 5 PM (a dinner, followed by a public lecture). I intentionally didn't bring my laptop with me so that I would not be tempted to work on my book or an essay I have due next week (I'm typing this out on my iPad, which I have convinced myself is unsuitable for scholarship, even though it is not). So I spent the morning walking a windy, empty beach. I was alone except for a few dogs and their owners. A part of me wished I'd brought my running gear, since the morning was perfect for velocity, but I was also happy to surrender to a slow tracing of where the waves lap the sand. The beach was littered with shells and stones, so I stopped every now and then to pocket some tidal object. Later in the day I returned to my room and hand wrote the outline of an essay I may never compose on Bisclavret. I don't have an off button. Yet I was relaxed, I could smell the ocean, the wind through the open window was invigorating. I was still writing when I found out that my son had been hazed at school. This is spirit week at his new high school (he is in 9th grade), and on this day each class wears a different colored shirt. Freshmen wear white. At some point a tradition arose of upperclassmen marking those white shirts with pens, silly string and spray paint -- and the day became Freshmen Beat Down Day. Alex heard the stories and didn't want to go. We forced him to, and at 11:30 he was on his way home after having been attacked by some juniors and doused in ketchup. He was one of many boys this happened to -- and we are not talking about a light spraying. Those who did the bullying drenched their victims in the stuff, as well as with mustard and relish. The idea was to make them stink so badly they would be humiliated. I was wrong to send Alex today against his will and I feel terrible about how his school failed him. How I failed him. He and the rest of my family are on their way to South Carolina tonight and I am glad he is getting away from DC for the weekend. I've written here before about how the edge of the ocean always provokes in me thoughts of mortality. I was thinking about currents, changes and catastrophes as I walked this morning. The news from Alex made me feel like I am a thousand miles away. And then as I was processing all of this (and I know, yes, he will get over it, and I will get over it, and it could be worse and all that, but still: no one has the right to commit an act of violence against another person like that) -- I was thinking about all this when I learned via twitter that a former student of mine, one I didn't know all that well but who was my FB friend, died yesterday when a tree branch fell on him. Folly Beach.