ITMBC4DSoMA 2: vote now

by J J Cohen

Links to your choices are here, poll is up at the right. Note that The Tiny Shriner's Tiny Book of Scatological Verse is NOT an option.

Cinesexuality

by J J Cohen

This looks intriguing.


Cinesexuality
Patricia MacCormack, Anglia Ruskin University, UK

Cinesexuality explores the queerness of cinema spectatorship, arguing that cinema spectatorship represents a unique encounter of desire, pleasure and perversion beyond dialectics of subject/object and image/meaning; an extraordinary 'cinesexual' relationship, that encompasses each event of cinema spectatorship in excess of gender, hetero- or homosexuality, encouraging all spectators to challenge traditional notions of what elicits pleasure and constitutes desiring subjectivity.

Through a variety of cinematic examples, including abstract film, extreme films and films which present perverse sexuality and corporeal reconfiguration, Cinesexuality encourages a radical shift to spectatorship as itself inherently queer beyond what is watched and who watches. Film as its own form of philosophy invokes spectatorship thought as an ethics of desire. Original, exciting and theoretically sophisticated – focusing on continental philosophy, particularly Guattari, Deleuze, Blanchot, Foucault, Lyotard, Irigaray and Serres – the book will be of interest to scholars and students of queer, gender and feminist studies, film and aesthetics theory, cultural studies, media and communication, post-structural theory and contemporary philosophical thought.

Contents: Series editors' preface: for the love of cinema; Spectatorship: an inter-kingdom desire; A cinema of desire: cinesexuality and asemiosis; Cinemasochism; Baroque cinesexuality; Baroque becomings; Zombies without organs; Necrosexuality; The ecosophy of spectatorship; Bibliography; Index.

About the Author: Patricia MacCormack is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Film at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. Her principal research interests are in continental philosophy, particularly the works of Deleuze, Guattari, Irigaray, Foucault, Bataille, Lyotard and Blanchot and she has published extensively in these areas. She has also written on a diverse range of issues such as body modification, post-human ethics, performance art, monster theory and particularly Italian horror film.

'In film and cultural theory, we have lived too long in the age of signification and identification. In her brilliant and challenging book, Cinesexuality, Patricia MacCormack brings us into the era of intensity and becoming. Offering an Anti-Oedipus for image theory, MacCormack has produced a completely original approach to spectatorship as a corporeal and material distribution of desire beyond dialectics. For many readers, this will be an intensely liberating book.'
D.N. Rodowick, Harvard University, USA

'MacCormack is the ultimate third millennium sexual radical: she subverts discussions about the gender of the gaze with bold insights into the ethics and the erotics of contemporary spectatorship. She swaps linguistic regimes of signification for corporeal perspectives, semiotics for affect, identifications for hybrid contagions and exemplary cases for productive anomalies. This is a wickedly clever trans-disciplinary analysis of who we are in the process of becoming.'
Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Extracts from this title including a full contents list, Chapter 1 - Spectatorship: an inter-kingdom desire, and the index are available to view here.

And the Votes are In!

(a small victory montage for Tiny)

by Mary Kate Hurley

One week ago, we asked our ITM readers this question: With which ITM blogger do you most self-identify?

And, in an overwhelming victory, despite some questionable campaign tactics, the Tiny Shriner, though last among us in height, towers over the other ITM co-bloggers in stature among the reading public, proving what I've always believed: Everyone can identify with the Tiny Shriner.

The final results:

The Tiny Shriner: 38% (37 votes)
J J Cohen: 17% (17 votes)
Eileen Joy: 17% (17 votes)
Karl Steel: 12% (12 votes)
Mary Kate Hurley: 12% (12 votes)

total votes cast: 95

Long live the Tiny Shriner! Let us not be short in praising his virtues.

(the ITM co-bloggers pose with the Tiny Shriner)

"a desperate wishing that I might somehow live inside the poem"

by J J Cohen

Check out this beautiful post at The Rebel Letter. The Lettriste quotes Seamus Heaney's "A Norman Simile" from "Ten Glosses": "To be marvellously yourself like the river water / Gerald of Wales says runs in Arklow harbor / Even at high tide when you'd expect salt water." She then writes:

once I learned how to read, all the other chaos and grief--my grandmother's sudden death, my infant brother's surgery and subsequent illnesses and accidents, a robbery, my parents' terrible consequent battles and ultimate separation--erupting in my family was somehow made more bearable ... I know that my wish to live inside literature is also a desire to prolong sensual, aesthetic pleasure. For me the wish is often associated sound, rhyme, repetition, rhythm. As in Heaney's "water-harbor-water" half-rhyme repetition. But it's also a wish that goes beyond mere pleasure. I think it's also about wanting to be alone with language, to be consoled by language, to simply sit there and listen. It's a privileging of solitude, of private conversation.

Read the post in its entirety.

False Victims, Inwardly Ravening Rulers

by Karl Steel

Wherein your author falls off the edge of the world in the end of his post.

In the most recent Nation Cory Robbin (BC-CUNY History Prof) reviews Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative, the collection Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, and Jacob Heilbrunn's They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons. On his way to arguing for the fundamentally reactionary nature of conservatism (and thus against the notion that Goldwater and his descendants have much to teach liberals about organizing), on his way to pointing out how much terminological ground the Conservatives have lost to liberals (for decades, at least, they have had to argue for "freedom" and "liberty" and "egalitarianism"), and on his way to kicking Heilbrunn down the stairs for what he diplomatically termed "sloppy...borrowed...derivative" writing (and what I might, less diplomatically, refer to our academic integrity office), Robin writes:

While John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville and David Hume are sometimes cited by the more genteel defenders of conservatism as the movement's leading lights, their writings cannot account for what is truly bizarre about conservatism: a ruling class resting its claim to power upon its sense of victimhood, arguably for the first time in history. Plato's guardians were wise; Aquinas's king was good; Hobbes's sovereign was, well, sovereign. But the best defense of monarchy that Maistre could muster in Considerations on France (1797) was that his aspiring king had attended the "terrible school of misfortune" and suffered in the "hard school of adversity."

Conservatives have asked us not to obey them but to feel sorry for them--or to obey them because we feel sorry for them.

And soon after he writes:

[Conservatives] are aggrieved and entitled--aggrieved because entitled--and already convinced of the righteousness of their cause and the inevitability of its triumph. They can play victim and victor with a conviction and dexterity the subaltern can only imagine, making them formidable claimants on our allegiance and affection. Whether we are rich or poor or somewhere in between, the conservative is, as Hugo Young said of Maggie Thatcher, one of us.

This point, in part because Robin expresses it so well, hardly requires the emphasis of proof, but I could offer our friend Charlotte Allen as a perfect example. And by that I of course mean she's merely an example.

However, my point is not to promote Robin's brilliant review, nor to herald the nobility of CUNY (and we are all fans here of Steve Kruger, Glenn Burger, and Valerie Allen, inter alia). Rather, my point, if I want to reduce it to this, is to trapdoor another Nation review, because of course we medievalists always salivate when anyone writes "arguably for the first time in history."

(I thus defer responsibility for what I do here to my drives.) The dynamic of "a ruling class resting its claim to power upon its sense of victimhood" predictably conjures up the clichéd Hegelian insight that any desire for a self-sustaining, idealized identity (for example, "the human") is necessarily going to discover itself under threat, as this continuing failure is, after all, inherent to identity-as-fetish and is, in fact, what enables it: hence my use of the phrase "discover itself" to characterize this violent phenomenology.

Robin's "ruling class...sense of victimhood" also conjures up the structure of Christianity itself, whose Savior is a victim whose Kingdom opens most easily to the poor, the sick, prisoners, and the scorned, or to those who ascetically take on the habitus, if not the class position, of such groups. A couple of centuries later, Christianity becomes the State religion. The cognitive dissonance necessary to adapt an outsider faith to a position of dominance infinitely fascinates me, perhaps nowhere near so much as in Eusebius's record of the effects of Constantine's conversion. In one sermon for this period, we hear how:

Benefactors of themselves and all men, and Christ they [emperors and the secular ruling class] acknowledge as Son of God and sovereign Lord of the universe, naming Him 'Saviour' on monuments, and inscribing in royal characters in the middle of the city that is queen of the cities on earth an indelible record of His triumphs and His victories over the wicked.
(G. A. Williamson trans., revised by Andrew Louth, in the 1989 Penguin edition of The History of the Church, 4.17, p. 309)

With this delight in Jesus honored by emperors as a emperor-god--that is, in the style to which Roman gods and emperors had grown accustomed--any earlier scorn of Rome, any wishes for its destruction and for a new eternal city, retroactively looks less like otherworldliness and more like ressentiment (and you will observe now, if you have not already, the hoariness of my "insights").

Looking far ahead, I slide into the exegesis of Psalms 79: 14, “exterminavit eam aper de silva, et singularis ferus depastus est eam” (The boar from the woods has banished her; and a singular wild beast hath devoured her), which interpretations passed down from Augustine and Cassiodorus understood as referencing the destruction and dispersal of the Palestinian Jews under Titus and Vespasian. In this exegesis, admiration for the power of Rome, and for the ability of Rome to do God's will, was always polluted by a (feigned?) scorn for Rome itself; thus in his commentary on the Psalms Bruno the Carthusian impugns Titus and Vespasian with “ ‘aper de silva’ procedens, Vespasianus scilicet, qui ferus erat et immundus sordibus vitiorum, sicut aper ferum animal est et sordidum” (PL 152: 1066D; "a boar from the woods” appearing, namely Vespasian, who was savage and unclean with filthy vices, just as the boar is a savage beast and filthy). In a commentary on Habakkuk, Rupert of Deutz explains Habakkuk 2: 17 (“vastitas animalium deterrebit eos de sanguinibus hominum” (and the ravaging of beasts will terrify them because of the blood of men) through what must be a memory of Psalms 79:14: “Ut dictum, ita et factum est. Venerunt enim animalia de silva” (as it was said, so it happened. For animals came from the woods). These animals are, as usual, Titus and Vespasian, who justly destroy the Jews, “qua primi ex omnibus gentibus ausi fuerunt ad se missos prophetas et sapientes et Scribas occidere et crucifigere, flagellare in synagogis suis, et de civitate in civitatem persequi” (who had first among all peoples dared to kill the prophets, wise men, and scribes sent to them, and to crucify and beat them in their synagogues, and to pursue them from city to city). For all his desire to have such a people scorged, Rupert designates Rome as the “silva," and characterizes the silva as a place “ubi erat multiplicitas errorum, et feri homines habitabant, sicut ferae in silva” (PL 168: 623B-C; where there were many errors, and bestial men lived, just as beasts do in the woods): this city, this center of civilization, this "queen of the cities," is no city at all.

Monks of the eleventh and twelfth centuries upheld their social power in part by scorning the world, but they did this even as the world's endowments swelled their estates, even as they became the financiers of Crusade (see Robert C. Stacey, “Crusades, Martyrdoms, and the Jews of Norman England, 1096-1190,” in Juden und Christen zur Zeit der Kreuzzüge, ed. A. Haverkamp. Sigmaringen, 1998, 240). Knowing this, is it enough to demystify monastic scorn of "Rome" and its emperor by pointing out the obvious, namely, that in their enjoyment of Titus and Vespasian and through their enabling of yet another destruction of Palestine, the monks are themselves the boars come from the woods? Is it enough to return to Eusebius to strip the feigned authenticity of victimhood from (certain) Christianities? Have I done enough in invoking ressentiment and Hegel? Is there enough in these gestures--to which I might add my 2005 Leeds paper on "The Christ Child and Pigs in the Oven"--to justify what I do here, to make all this something more than a precious insistence that Robin weigh down what's already an enormous review with the detritus of my medievalist memory?

Lacking a proper conclusion, lacking even directed motion, all I can do is stop here for now.

(Creative Commons image from here.)

Eileen scolded us for not reading enough poetry

by J J Cohen

So go read some.

(Who else but Dan Remein can combine Banana Republic pants with Chaucer, Boethius, Robert Frost and baleen?)

Stonehenge: Decoded! ; or, What's so Secret about the Past?

by Mary Kate Hurley

[fig. 1: Aliens over Stonehenge, pilfered from the National Geographic site here]

If one searches ITM for "Stonehenge", a number of results come up, many associated with JJC's Weight of the Past project. I have not seen the special on the National Geographic Channel to which the title of this post refers to, though I'm hoping to catch it on a rebroadcast at some point. However, when I ran across Robin McKie's article on the Guardian entitled "Leave these stones their eternal secrets".

The article didn't really provoke much comment (or at least anything that was really productive), but I thought it might be of interest to ITM, particularly because of this part of McKie's process, which is in the ending of her article:

And that, of course, is the wonderful thing about Stonehenge: there are more theories about its meaning and purpose than there are stones inside it, a trend that goes right back to the idea, popular in the Middle Ages, that its monoliths had been assembled on Salisbury Plain by Merlin, though exactly why he bothered to do so remains a mystery.

In fact, Stonehenge took at least 1,000 years to build, starting from rings of wooden poles to its current complex status and its use clearly changed over the millenniums. Recent studies suggest it may have been 'Christianised' in the first millennium AD and at one point was used as a place of execution by the Anglo-Saxons to judge from the 7th-century gallows found there. This multiplicity of use increases opportunities for archaeologists to pin their pet theories to the great stone monument.

The crucial point is that every age gets the Stonehenge it deserves, as archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes once remarked. Hence in medieval times, it was built by giants, while in the 1960s, at the dawn of the computing era, researchers said you could have used it as a giant calculating machine, while in more mystical New Age times, it was clearly a spaceport for aliens. 'In fact, you can come up with just about any idea to explain a structure like Stonehenge if you stare at it for long enough,' says archaeologist David Miles.

Just what that the latest patch of Stonehenge theories says about the 21st century is less clear. I would argue that the World Heritage site is probably best viewed today as a monument to government prevarication and deceit. Having promised a decade ago that it would bury and realign the roads that surround and disfigure Britain's most important ancient monument, ministers now seem to have abandoned any attempt to protect the monument and restore the site to its ancient glory, for the simple reason they are too mean-spirited and short-sighted to see its value.

What interests me here is the assertion, made clearer by the end of that final paragraph, that "every age gets the Stonehenge it deserves," commonly attributed to Jacquetta Hawkes. McKie makes an interesting point, though she doesn't really flesh it out. She seems to be arguing, if I read between her lines correctly, that every age dreams the Stonehenge it deserves -- or more likely, the Stonehenge that can speak to it, in that time, in that place.

Of course, "Stonehenge" is not really the monument it was at its building (whether by Merlin or under the influence of Aliens or as a burial ground), much less in its "original" usage -- rather, "Stonehenge" is a kind of shorthand, by which we mean all the things which intervened, the multiplicities of usages and all the "theories" about its origins that exist in the intervening time. The question McKie doesn't really ask, and the one which I think may be necessary to ask, is whether Stonehenge, World Heritage site, is important in and of itself, or only important in so far as "modernity" recognizes something in it.

It raises a question that I'm addressing in my current dissertation chapter, on time in the Old English Orosius. I'm planning another post on this, when I've figured out what it is I'm trying to do with Bakhtin, but there's this part of The Dialogic Imagination, in "Discourse in the Novel" that keeps obsessing me:

every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word it anticipates…The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction. Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such is the situation in any living dialogue. (280)

However, in his "Epic and Novel" (which I should really reread at some point, Bakhtin makes the point that "The dead are loved in a different way. They are removed from the sphere of contact, one can and indeed must speak of them in a different style. Language about the dead is stylistically quite distinct from language about the living."

It all returns to a question that for me is not really answerable: can there really be a conversation between the living and the dead -- the past and the present? Or is the past destined to be a kind of straw man, whose script is always written by the living?

Or is there a way in which past words -- or past monuments -- are, in an odd Bakhtinian* way still actively responding to a kind of "answering word its future" -- our present -- will provide? Can we expand a notion of a "living dialogue" so far?

Work Cited
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination : Four Essays, University of Texas Press Slavic Series ; (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004).

Cross posted at OENY.

Of Hospitals, Waiting Rooms, and Singular Unable Bodies

by EILEEN JOY

[please note query for the next ITM book club event below]

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.--Franz Kafka

For reasons both anticipated [my mother’s hip replacement surgery] and unanticipated [a friend’s appendicitis, another friend’s traumatic fall, an elderly aunt’s pneumonia], I have spent a good deal of the past month in the corridors and rooms of hospitals and rehab centers, and it has got me thinking a lot about conversations we have had here on supposedly non-integral and unbounded and transversal bodies. As much as I have become enamored [and perhaps even “gone over” to the side] of the idea that there can never really be such a thing as a singular, bounded, inviolate body or self [while I have also not wanted to let go of the idea of a singular person as an ethico-legal foundation for human rights and maybe also for personal freedom], I have always found this [attractive] idea of the unbounded body or always becoming-something-else self severely wanting in the presence of those who are injured, seriously ill, or aging poorly. My mother is, at seventy-five, in very good health and will be out in a week or so of what I can only call the most posh rehab center/luxury resort I have ever seen, and with new hips, she will get a renewed lease on life, but the same cannot be said of almost every single other inhabitant on her wing, many of whom can never get out of bed, while others cannot go anywhere without wheelchairs and oxygen tanks and heart monitors and the kindness of assistants and therapists and, if they’re really lucky, relatives who might show up once in a while to take them for a spin. Ironically, humorously, or cruelly, the corridor where the Alzheimer’s patients live is called the Reminiscence Wing [I kid you not] and we have been warned not to open the door that leads there in case we might unwittingly aid a resident eager to escape [apparently this happens often]. So, while in my mother’s wing [the physical therapy ward], no one is able-bodied enough to actually get anywhere on their own, in the Reminiscence Wing, almost everyone is agile and swift of foot, yet have no idea who they are or where they would go if they got out. And such are the betrayals of the body and mind that await all of us at some point, unless we depart this life by some other fashion and suddenly, and before we grow old enough to start to lose ourselves, little by little, or all at once.

For those of us who like to pretend that we live intellectual lives in which we can “go anywhere” and “do anything” with our minds, and who sometimes like to play the game of deconstructing the singular human being as an entity to devoutly be wished over, the emergency rooms, trauma wards, and corridors of hospitals and nursing homes can be humbling and sobering places, perhaps even a reality check, maybe even a little frightening. I want to be me, and I don’t want to die, yet. Most distressing for me this week was to see how many residents in my mother’s rehab wing [including her roommate] were visited by no one, talked to by no one, touched by no one, fed and bathed and medicated by those paid to feed and bathe and medicate them [sometimes tenderly, sometimes not], and left to sit or lie alone for hours on end, immobile in front of droning television sets or looking out windows onto blank skies and the outlines of skyscrapers. And last week, in an emergency room in South Carolina, I sat next to a man who writhed in his chair and moaned in pain for what seemed like forever before the doctors would see him. At one point, he grabbed his girlfriend’s arm and begged her to convince the nursing staff that he was in so much pain he thought he was going to die. He was thin and frail and his arms were covered by sores and bruises. What was wrong with him, I do not know, but what I do know is that, because of his pain, he was afraid and couldn’t think beyond the urgency of that fear, and also that pain. It’s a helpless feeling, and those who witness it are also helpless [unless you’re the doctor who eventually shows up and knows what’s wrong].

For all of our philosophizing to the contrary, we do live to a large extent in singular, bounded, gendered, human [and otherwise uniquely contoured] bodies, outside of which it is not really possible to be fully ourselves, let alone comprehend or experience what else might be possible. And when we don’t get the fully abled bodies we think we wanted or deserved, or we lose our ableness in some fashion, we’ll work around that in sometimes beautiful and creative fashion, or we’ll give in to despair, or land somewhere in between [and on this point, I might ask Greg Carrier’s assistance]. And I think many of the women [and a few men] in my mother’s ward are something of all of those things, and I can’t stop thinking about this ever since my mother’s roommate, Dorothy, who is on oxygen and has only been there for about three weeks, and whose only daughter lives in Boston and can’t [or won’t] visit, said to me two days ago, “I think this place is starting to get to me.”

But I guess I’ve been thinking about bodies that get ill and bodies that age and bodies that forget who they were, or can’t forget but can no longer move, and also about these frail, aging bodies left alone with themselves in the dimly lit and antiseptic rooms of the impersonal hospital or nursing home and who, without their once more full mobility, or their minds, are not fully themselves, whoever they believe or imagine themselves to be. And, although I’m not entirely sure why, I’m thinking a lot about Kafka’s story “Metamorphosis,” and the scene that gives the story its conclusion. You will recall that after Gregor dies, the apple still stuck in his back, and the cleaning lady, disgusted, finally resigns, the father gathers his wife and daughter to him, saying, “Let’s finally get rid of old things. And have a little consideration for me,” at which point, the wife and daughter “rushed to him, caressed him, and quickly ended their letters.” But it’s the very image that closes the story that I am thinking of now, when the father, wife, and daughter leave their apartment, with no proper leave-taking of the dead insect who they no longer believe is their son, and while riding the electric tram “into the open air outside the city,” the realize how happy they are, just the three of them, and how much happier they will be once they find a new place to live, and the father and wife suddenly notice

how their daughter, who was getting more animated all the time, had blossomed recently, in spite of all the troubles which had made her cheeks pale, into a beautiful and voluptuous young woman. Growing more silent and almost unconsciously understanding each other in their glances, they thought that the time was now at hand to seek out a good honest man for her. And it was something of a confirmation of their new dreams and good intentions when at the end of their journey the daughter first lifted herself up and stretched her young body.

And because this is Kafka, we know that this young and beautiful body, stretching into the supposedly hopeful (normative and abled) future, is really a figure of horror, and this brings to mind something Kafka once wrote in a letter, “The life of society moves in a circle. Only those burdened with a common affliction understand each other.”

ITMBC4DSoMA 2: You decide

by J J Cohen

Remember last year's In the Middle Book Club for Discerning Scholars of Medieval Arcana (ITMBC4DSoMA , or the Impenetrable Acronym Club for short)? We'll do another version this year, and next week will conduct a poll and allow our readers to decide what book to discuss together. So far we have on the table:

1. Valerie Allen, On Farting
2. Anna Klosowska, Queer Love in the Middle Ages
3. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval (a reappraisal)
4. Emma Campbell and Robert Mills, eds: Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image
5. Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird, Queering the Non/Human

Any other suggestions before we rig set up the voting?

DC snapshot

by J J Cohen

We had a little bit of bad weather here in DC today.

My son Alexander is in his final week of serving on his elementary school's Safety Patrol, a job that comes with a shiny badge, the power to move orange cones from storage to the street, and the power to tell kids younger than him WALK DO NOT RUN. I knew he'd be standing outside of his school just as a strong line of storms with a possible tornado was about to sweep through DC. I ran from my house, flew like a banshee (or some other vaguely medieval but very swift creature) to the school (a ten minute walk that I accomplished in 2.5 minutes), grabbed him and all the other Safety Patrol kids and made them RUN DO NOT WALK back into school. In the mass panic that ensued,

1. the sky turned green
2. the loudest thunder I have ever heard crashed around us
3. limbs tumbled from trees
4. a tempest whirled
5. rain such as Noah once saw drenched us
   

We made it inside the school soaking wet, along with many children and parents who had likewise been caught. The power went out and we were plunged into darkness. I used the radiance of my iPhone to calm the kiddies til the emergency generator turned on. We were then moved to a windowless computer lab because a funnel cloud had been spotted. Children were crying, it was dark, it was suffocatingly warm. And here is where I learned something amazing about Alex (besides the fact that has good taste in literature); he soothed the smallest kids by telling them it was going to be OK. He stroked their backs and mussed their hair. He smiled at them, even though none of us felt like smiling.

The storms passed quickly, and thirty minutes later we were home. Alex walked through the door, collapsed on the floor, and broke down in tears. He could only be brave for so long.

Pleasure reading

by J J Cohen
[illustration: would you trust this guy's taste in literature?]

A recent post at the blog Caught in the Snide caught my attention: in Outside of a Dog (alluding to a famous Groucho Marx aphorism, which I have emblazoned on a favorite orange T shirt from a favorite DC bookstore), Prof. de Breeze laments the decline in his leisure reading.

Those who know me well know that I also lament with similar lamentations. My decline in pleasure reading coincides with two major life events: having young spawn, and being chair of my department. My mad time management skillz have demanded of me that most of the reading I do be oriented towards publication or administrative commitments. Neither of these obligations kill the pleasure of reading, of course, since in general I publish on topics I enjoy, and great pleasure comes to me in reading the work of colleagues. Still, the empty spaces that I could fill with random works of literature don't bubble up as much as they once did.

Still, it is not as if I never open a book except out of a sense of scholarly obligation. Lately I've been reading through the adolescent-themed fantasy in which my son Alex is so expert: the Abhorsen Trilogy by Garth Nix, for example, is so dark and so well imagined that the volumes have proved impossible to put down. A few weeks ago I finished Philip Reeve's marvelously conceptualized Mortal Engines, a novel set in a post-apocalyptic future (all futures are post-apocalyptic in speculative fiction) in which cities move around the devastated earth on great traction devices, ingesting those settlements smaller or slower than themselves, a practice called Municipal Darwinism. Though the city that this book centers upon is London, longtime readers of this blog will remember that I purchased the volume two years ago in Kilkenny as a souvenir. Not only was I taken by the cover illustration, the literary title, and the blurb, I also realized that the book was written by an illustrator beloved by my son (Reeve did the snarky pictures in many of the Horrible Histories volumes).

Much of my reading, then, comes from an eleven year old who sometimes wears jester caps (I snapped that picture today). That's OK, because he has good taste. So, I must admit, does my daughter Katherine: the Disney Fairy series is actually not as bad as you might think, and right now she and I are reading a simplified (but still murder-filled) version of Treasure Island to satisfy her hunger for pirate stories. Also, a tip for Prof. de Breeze: your kids may not be old enough yet, but one thing the Cohens like to do is a communal read-in-bed before the oldest three of us turn in for the night. This nightly ritual ensures that everyone gets some pleasure reading accomplished while enjoying the pleasure of each other's company (the only downside being that sometimes you'll be engrossed in your book when Alex's Cold Toe of Death comes over and plants itself on the part of your body that will make you both jump and drop your volume).

Not all of my reading is adolescent. Right now I am halfway through Edward P. Jones's The Known World. Being a medievalist obsessed by time, I'm entranced by the temporal whorls that cluster around each character (particles of their past and future spin away from their narrative present; this effect is so artfully done that I am truly in awe of Jones's craft). I've always wanted to read this book, but I do have an objective in reading it now: I and four of my colleagues are meeting with him for lunch today to explore the possibility of his spending a semester at GW. Wish us luck.

So what about you? What pleasure reading have you done lately? What's on your list for this summer?

Start Voting for Me or the Tiny Shriner Dies

by J J Cohen

Some of you readers think it is amusing to self-identify with a plastic figurine with a legendary penchant for booze, rude comments and sensual indulgence over a tenured professor of English who has superpowers and can fly (<-- formulation taken from the fantasy world of Katherine Cohen, age 4). Well, stop it. Because as you can see from the photo I just took, the Tiny Shriner is in peril: should you continue to vote for him over me, he will be plunged seven stories to his painful demise.

Think I'm kidding? Try me.



[Figure 1: Tiny Shriner suspended. Note expression of shock and dismay on face. Fortunately for him, his fez is glued in place.]

Look to your right ...

by J J Cohen

... and behold our frivolous poll. Well, don't just behold it, PARTICIPATE IN IT. We're conducting an experiment to see if we can get the polling gadget to work, because we actually do have an important question to ask and may use a poll to come to an answer.

In the meantime, though, take the poll at right. And vote for me, me, me!!!
[and remember I said look to your RIGHT. That pie chart thing to the LEFT is a joke, not the poll I was talking about. Clicking on it will only enlarge the image and make you feel like a doofus because you'll have dead-ended yourself at a noninteractive JPEG]

On raising disoriented children

by J J Cohen

Eileen posted on Sara Ahmed's new work, describing how Ahmed examines (among other things) the potentially coercive orientation of family towards a circumscribed, impoverished notion of happiness.

While I don't think many readers of ITM will find themselves disagreeing with Ahmed's thesis, at least as Eileen has articulated it (who wants their happiness to function as a normalization mechanism? who wants to submit to the demand to live for the happiness of another, especially when that demand is really just another way of holding you in a place in which you do not actually wish to reside?), Eileen and Ahmed collaboratively offer much to chew over in thinking about living one's life, and especially in orienting the lives of others.

Allow me a personal admission: that post got to me. It made me think, in a rather troubled way, about the potential coerciveness of the family structure in which my son Alexander and daughter Katherine dwell.

It's not the first glimmer of self-awareness in childrearing to come my way, of course. Remember that Eve Sedgwick classic, How to Bring Up Your Kids Gay? I read that in graduate school, a few years after I got married as I recall, and it made me think If Wendy and I ever have kids we will raise them in a utopia-like übertolerant familial structure! Well, it seemed a practicable idea at the time, since I was pretty much a kid myself, and had no idea of the sheer labor of maintaining a household. Somehow I assumed it would merely extend my life as currently configured. My best friend and teaching partner was [is] gay. It was the heyday of queer theory, we were living in the People's Republic of Cambridge, many of our friends were [are] queer, anything seemed possible.

Then life intervened, in the form of a move to a new city and the superprofessionalization that comes with having jobs and proliferating responsibilities. From the start, and again before we had kids, Wendy and I found ourselves happy (if oddball) members of queer communities: we lived in Dupont Circle, we became [and remain] good friends with our landlord, above whom we lived. Uncle Jim (as our kids call him) lives now in Maine, and we see him and his partner Uncle Joe a few times a year. We've also maintained many of our Massachusetts friendships: Alex is especially attached to Uncle Richard, whom he got to know from frequent visits to DC (Alex wasn't born until we'd been living in DC for quite some time). Like all of us, Alex was dumbstruck with grief with Richard's partner died of pneumonia in 2004. We've also remained close to four Boston friends who live as a polyamorous quad (and to them I say hello! I rely on two of them to read the blog for its funnier bits and to steer odd bits of information my way). Robert McRuer, one of my favorite GW colleagues and a queer theorist extraordinaire, gave Alexander his favorite childhood counting tome, a Keith Haring board book written in English, French and German.

But the fact is we do not live in Dupont Circle anymore. We moved to Montgomery County, Maryland, in 1996, at a time when democracy had been suspended in the District and a control board placed in charge of city government. Combined with the lack of congressional representation, and triggered as well by some less grand and a bit more personal events, we decided that when it was time to invest every penny we had in a house it would not be in DC. We love where we live: a small enclave of small houses just a teeny bit over the DC border, with an amazingly good public school a five minute walk away (living in DC also typically means relying on a private education system), the subway is nearby, we can walk to almost anything we need. MoCo is also politically quite liberal: nothing like Cambridge, but far to the left of most areas in the USA. A plurality county, no single population group holds a majority. But it is also quite affluent and privileged, and we do feel the lingering guilt of having abandoned the city (even if we did so by moving less than five miles: DC is tiny).

So our children enjoy fencing lessons and ballet. They have good lives, but I worry sometimes that we've oriented them towards that suburban notion of happiness that Ahmed labeled coercive. Sure, we can encourage them to be as odd as they want to be, and to have the confidence to be secure in that choice. I think this blog has offered ample evidence of their more eccentric proclivities (Katherine's latest ambition: to be a ballerina-policeman who can fly). We've also tried to leave enough space in their lives that they can fill it with interests that (we hope) do not come from parental coerciveness: Alexander's desire to play piano is a case in point, since neither Wendy nor I has musical bone in our bodies. Fortunately, we have the resources to refurbish an old piano a neighbor gave us and to hire a piano teacher so that he can pound the keys to his heart's content.

But it also strikes me that what have striven to do is to orient our children nonetheless towards a certain kind of happiness. I recognize the coerciveness that comes with that orientation, the domestication that we've worked on them, the ways in which their lives have been circumscribed and shaped. How do I know, I wonder, that we've oriented them rightly? Ethically? Happily?

Dispatches from the Queer Future, Part I: Happiness, Killjoys, Sticky Objects, and a Plea for Arrested Development

by EILEEN JOY

[this post has been composed-in-time to synchronize with our ongoing discussions about medieval disability studies and what I would call bodies-in-time, here, here, and here; and don't miss JJC's notice of Nadia Altschul's recent essay on postcolonialism and the Middle Ages here]

What Rough Lolcat, Its Hour Come Round at Last, Slouches Toward Sara Ahmed to be Born?

I have the stardom glow.—Jennifer Lopez, or, J-Lo

Although some of us [well, okay, just me and Michael O’Rourke] involved in the recent intensive seminar devoted to Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology at University College Dublin [21-22 May; organized by Michael and Noreen Giffney as part of their brilliant The(e)ories: Advanced Seminars for Queer Research] were hoping for major theorist diva-tude from Sara Ahmed, we were sorely disappointed. What we wanted was for Sara to arrive with at least fifteen pieces of pink faux-crocodile Vuitton luggage and endless demands for Fiji water, Krug champagne, boiled salamander eggs, Polynesian serving girls, and a hotel room temperature that never went above or below 71.5 degrees fahrenheit. What we got was a lovely, warm, funny, and down-to-earth person who also happens to be so smart it’s almost frightening, and yet would rather talk about Dolly Parton and American Idol and The L Word than critical race theory and Husserl [although, in point of fact, she talked about all of these things].

But we still held out some hope. When we noticed that on the first day of the seminar Sara was wearing what could only be described as an uber-cool jacket [don’t ask me to describe it; suffice to say it was shiny and multi-colored and matched her mini-backpack purse, although she swore the “matching” was unintentional], Michael suggested that she might want to demand an extra hotel room just for the jacket, and I agreed: the jacket needed its own room, its own plasma screen television, its own remote, its own bottled water, its own serving girls. Sara didn’t seem to understand our meaning, and the crushing blow came when she told us the jacket had been purchased in a store in Lawrence, Kansas. Good god no, we shuddered. Anything but that.

But the real low point for me, personally, was when we were riding the bus Thursday evening to dinner at Eden restaurant, and after I indicated my horror at people who like to display pictures of their cats online, and to look at these pictures, Sara immediately chimed in with, “but I like to look at pictures of cats. I really do.” Before I even knew what was happening, everyone was whipping out their cell phones [Michael, Noreen, Sara, and I] to show each other photos of our cats/dogs/girlfriends. Any shred of coolness that I may have had up to that point was instantly stripped away from me, and sadly, it may never return. To add insult to injury, Steven Ambrose [delightful graduate student in women’s/gender studies at Trinity College] told Sara about lolcats and “I Can Has Cheeseburger,” and since I’ve returned home I find myself waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat imagining Sara Ahmed, somewhere in the world, staying up late at night browsing the cat pictures on “I Can Has Cheeseburger” instead of finishing her brilliant new book. Speaking of which,

On(Against) Happiness and (For)Killjoys

Touch . . . involves an economy: a differentiation between those who can and cannot be reached. Touch then opens bodies to some bodies and not others. Queer orientations are those that put within reach bodies that have been unreachable by the lines of conventional genealogy.—Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology

Although the primary purpose of the intensive seminar at UC Dublin was to have an extended, interdisciplinary conversation with Ahmed about her recent book Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, on the first day, Ahmed shared with us a portion of her current project, On Being Directed: Promises, Happiness, Deviations, which is, in some ways, a natural extension [or outgrowth] of the “lines” of her thought in Queer Phenomenology, where she writes,

“For a life to count as a good life, then it must return the debt of its life by taking on the direction promised as a social good, which means imagining one’s futurity in terms of reaching certain points along a life course. A queer life might be one that fails to make such gestures of return.” [Queer Phenomenology, p. 21]

Further, and also in Queer Phenomenology, Ahmed takes on what might be called the spatio-temporality [and spatio-temporal “orientations”] of straight and queer and racialized lives [in ways, I might add, with powerful implications for those of us working in what I now want to call QueerMedievalFutures—you know the roster: Dinshaw, Lochrie, Schultz, Kruger, Cohen, Biddick, Burger, Howie, Klosowska, etc.], and calls attention, thereby, to “the intimacy of bodies and their dwelling places” [p. 8]. Most importantly [and here, I am hoping for some convergence with our current ongoing discussions on medieval disability studies]:

“The ‘here’ of bodily dwelling is . . . what takes the body outside of itself, as it is affected and shaped by its surroundings: the skin that seems to contain the body is also where the atmosphere creates an impression . . . . Bodies may become orientated in this responsiveness to the world around them, given this capacity to be affected. In turn, given the history of such responses, which accumulate as impressions on the skin, bodies do not dwell in spaces that are exterior but rather are shaped by their dwellings and take shape by dwelling.” [p. 9]

“The work of inhabitance involves orientation devices; ways of extending bodies into spaces that create new folds, or new contours of what we could call livable or inhabitable space. If orientation is about making the strange familiar through the extension of bodies into space, then disorientation occurs when that extension fails. Or we could say that some spaces extend certain bodies and simply do not leave room for others. . . . In such moments, when bodies do not extend into space, they might feel ‘out of place’ where they have been given ‘a place.’ Such feelings in turn point to other places, even ones that have yet to be inhabited.” [p. 12]

Certain “lines” [such as “straight” or “white” or “married,” etc.] that we follow in our lives are such “orientation” devices, and while they help us “find our way,” they also “make certain things, and not others, available” [p. 14]. Moreover, we don’t have to “consciously exclude those things that are not ‘on line’,” because the “direction we take excludes things for us, before we even get there” [p. 15]. We are “orientated,” then, “when we are in line. We are ‘in line’ when we face the direction that is already faced by others. . . . We might speak then of collective direction: of ways in which nations and other imagined communities might be ‘going in a certain direction,’ or facing the same way, such that only some things ‘get our attention.’ . . . We follow the line that is followed by others: the repetition of the act of following makes the line disappear from view as the point from which ‘we’ emerge” [p. 15].

In relation to sexuality, heterosexuality, in Ahmed’s view, is a “compulsory orientation” and the heterosexual couple “is ‘instituted’ as the form of sociality through force” [p. 84]. In this scenario, heterosexuality functions “as the most intimate and deadly of parental gifts” [p. 85—think also Judith Halberstam’s “time of inheritance”]. We don’t have to think of the “normative” or “straight” couple in just heterosexual terms, however [in my mind], for, still following Ahmed’s thought, the “affinity of the couple form is socially binding: premised as it is on resemblance and on the ‘naturalness’ of the direction of desire, which produces the couple as an entity, as a ‘social one’ (from two)” [p. 84]. Ultimately, when we “see” couples in a particular field of vision that is heterosexually structured, the form is so familiar that the labor of becoming that couple disappears from our sight, and to “see the couple form in its ‘sensuous certainty’ (Marx and Engels) as an ‘object’ that can be perceived, would be not to see how this form arrives as an effect of intergenerational work” [p. 84—I must add that, for me, all couples, queer and straight—perform this object-function and are essentially oppressive in certain ways, but that's a discussion for another day, and full disclaimer: I've been part of a couple for 16 years now]. Lesbian sexuality also involves “work,” or labor, because one has to “shift” one’s orientation in a certain direction, which also involves following certain lines, and it is not that certain “objects” [other women?] cause desire, “but that in desiring certain objects other things follow, given how the familial and social are already arranged,” and “the object in sexual object choice is sticky: other things ‘stick’ when we orientate ourselves toward objects, especially if such orientations do not follow the family or social line” [p. 101].

Ultimately, for Ahmed, “lesbian desire puts women into closer ‘contact’ with women” and “lesbian contact slides back and forth between forms of social and sexual proximity” [p. 103]. But we should not [and here is where Ahmed’s thought really takes off for me, personally] “think of this ‘contact zone’ of lesbian desire . . . as a fantasy of likeness (of finding others who are ‘like me’), but as opening up lines of connection between bodies that are drawn to each other in the repetition of [the] tendency to deviate from the straight line. . . . Lesbian desires move us sideways: one object might put another in reach, as we come into contact with different bodies and worlds” [p. 105]. And this brings to mind, too, as Ahmed points out, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s idea that the “queer world is a space of entrances and exits, unsystematized lines of acquaintance, projecting horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies” [“Sex in Public”]. Therefore, in Ahmed’s view, it “is important that we do not idealize queer worlds or simply locate them in an alternative space,” for it is “given that the straight world is already in place and that queer moments, where things come out of line, are fleeting. Our response need not be to search for permanence . . . but to listen to the sound of ‘the what’ that flees” [p. 106].

Now, I see this listening for “the sound of ‘the what’ that flees” to also be intimately bound up with Ahmed’s new project on promises, happiness, and deviations [On Being Directed], in which she helps us to see the ways in which the world and particular objects in the world arrive to us with certain affectivities already built in, as it were, before we encounter them. Objects are “happy” for us when we are “directed” [by our families, for example], to believe they will bring, or “promise,” us happiness. The “promise” of happiness, in something like marriage (or virginity! or the suburbs! or children!), for instance, “grounds” our expectations and provides a supposed assurance that we will be happy, if only we follow (or allow ourselves to be directed) along certain (familial and social) lines. As opposed to John Locke’s idea that “happiness is a direction we take in relation to objects that come close to us” [which gives to happiness a certain intentionality], Ahmed posits the brilliant “twist” [a term I invoke intentionally since it is one of the meanings of “queer”] that we are oriented [directed to be oriented] toward happy objects even before they arrive. And you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out the crushing disappointment that often ensues when the supposedly happy object does finally arrive. Just read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, or Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, or D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, and I could go on and on.

In relation to love, we can see the ways in which certain notions of happiness, as Ahmed brilliantly illustrated to us, can be ultimately deforming and destructively oppressive, including the speech acts: “I am happy if you are,” “I will only be happy if you are happy,” “If you are unhappy I will be unhappy,” “You must be happy for me,” and so on, and to love another is to ultimately want their happiness [ouch]. When others have a certain dependence on your happiness being directed in a certain way [toward, perhaps, a certain common good], then many lives [perhaps all, I would argue] are ultimately lived in the gap between directed promises and the possibilities of different lives that have to be lost and mourned in advance. For Ahmed, a queer politics would allow us the freedom to be unhappy [especially when others, including our families, want us to be the “happy queer”—think of the mother who tells you, “it’s okay that you’re gay, as long as you’re happy”], to cause unhappiness by acts of deviation away from communal [straight or gay] happy objects, and to literally “kill joy” by being the killjoy. By holding onto their unhappiness, their discomfort, their anomie and angst and distress, the melancholic migrant, the angry black woman, the unhappy queer, the feminist killjoy--and might I add, in light of our recent discussion here, the pissed-off crip [all “alien affects” within certain communities] function as important “blockage points” to others’ “promissory happiness” and thereby make the future [different futures] possible.

Wow. What can I say? I will just quote Austin Powers: “yeah, baby, yeah.”

Of course, it has to be admitted that I, myself, am a pretty happy person and I told Ahmed that her writing and thought “made me happy” [just teasing, somewhat]. But I would also like to rethink what I think happiness is through Ahmed’s thought while still reserving a place for the idea that one can be happy and even be surrounded by sticky happy objects [all entendres intended] and still depart/deviate from whatever lines, while always leaving the future open. For me [and I am still trying to flesh this out more fully], happiness has something to do with always leaving everything open as a possibility, with not expecting or demanding certain promises to be fulfilled [while at the same time believing in the promise of what has not been promised but wished for], with existing within [or “making happen”] various “fields” within which everything is always about “to-come.” Nothing is “gotten” but everything is always coming, and coming undone, at various “points” of arrival. Also, happiness is allowing and undertaking the labor of clearing room for all bodies to arrive in this field, all of whom surprise me by their arrival, and are [hopefully] surprised in turn. I am happy just laboring in this field, or clearing ground within it.

Stuck in the Middle with You, Stuck in the Middle with You: Embrace Your Arrested Development

We have hope because what is behind us is also what allows other ways of gathering in time and space, of making lines that do not reproduce what we follow but instead create wrinkles in the earth.—Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology

He wants to be hungry all the time: he chooses to be starved, to be longing, rather than belonging.—Lauren Berlant, “Starved,” in After Sex: On Writing Since Queer Theory (special issue of SAQ)

By way of conclusion, I want to share what I am thinking of as a strange moment in my reading of Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology. It occurred in Chapter 2, “Sexual Orientation,” where Ahmed undertakes a queer excavation of Freud’s “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” in order to delineate the ways in which family love is “elevated as an ideal that can only be ‘returned’ by heterosexual love” [p. 73], and also how Freud’s attempt—albeit a “fumbling” attempt—to construct the “straight” lines of normative sexuality “is what shapes the very tendency to go astray” [p. 79]. While reading Ahmed’s description of Freud’s definition of “deviation” or “perversion” as what happens when “there is an extension in an anatomical sense beyond the regions of the body that are displayed for sexual union” or “there is a lingering over intermediate relations to the sexual object,” which “should normally travel rapidly on the path toward the final sexual aim” [qtd. on p. 78], I found myself wanting to stay with this moment of “perversion” as a “lingering over intermediate relations.” Since so much of Ahmed’s thought in this book is structured along the idea of lines and points along lines and deviations from lines and also about “facing” [and this is the ethico-political imperative, in a sense] those who “flee” or retreat from us along different lines, making themselves “strange” or “oblique” as they depart from us, then what might it mean to also grasp as a site of utopian political [and also ethico-sexual] possibility the lingering over a particular intermediate point [which might also be a certain body] along a line that is not only not followed but also never abandoned, never departed from, never completed, in that lingering? What infinitude of horizons might open up in this lingering, this staying, this pausing over a particular point, a particular body, that never exhausts itself in its intermediacy, its inter-between-ity?* What is the tempo-spatiality of such a point, its constellation of affects and movements, its cartography, and how many lifetimes might I need to chart its territories? Is it possible that choosing to be perverted by not traveling along nor deviating from any line toward anything in order to dwell in a state of suspension at a certain point, with a certain body, or bodies, who are willing to risk with me, in the words of Lauren Berlant, “the collaborative risk of a shared disorganization,” might be the most utopian stance we can take?

And this, too, is a love letter: for Michael and Noreen.

*"Inter-between-ity" cadged from Michael O'Rourke.