Robot Weekend: Reflections

by KARL STEEL

Read Jeffrey on April Madness first.

UPDATE: And let me introduce you to a blog all about medieval robots.

Last weekend, I had my own April madness (in my case, more like April silliness) of flying from Paris to State College, PA, to give a version of my worms paper at the Penn State Institute of the Arts and Humanities "Robot Weekend: Being Human Gizmos." How could I say no to Michael Bérubé? Could you? (and, incidentally, if you haven't read his recent MLA column, do so as soon as you can, and PARTICIPATE in the crowd-sourced project on non-tenure-track faculty).

The Institute's to be praised for putting--as you'd get from its title--the humanities in touch with the arts, something we tend not to do, preferring not to (or not take the trouble to) contaminate our commentary with the messiness of creation. Not our readers, of course! We're a messy bunch, I hope.

The arts, in this case, were represented by our papers, no doubt, and especially by Anthony Clarvoe's new play "Gizmo," a hilariously rhizomatic take on Čapek's R.U.R., and by Laurencio Carlos Ruiz's puppets (including one of Bob Flanagan!). Penn State treated me right, I met some great people, and I learned about some horrifying things and some less horrifying things. And, seriously, BABELers: if we're not reading Susan Squier, we need to get on it, and soon.

I'm sharing with you an expanded version of some of my notes. These aren't comprehensive, not even close, and they don't presume to represent the papers and presentations I heard. Instead, what you're getting are my ideas. I'm representing my reactions (like this automaton). If you're an old hand at robot studies, much of what follows will probably strike you as old hat. If you're new to it--like I am--then maybe you'll find something worth playing with.

• I proposed that we should not look for the real breakthrough with artificial intelligence in machines that think as well or better than we do, nor in machines that love or suffer tragedy like we presume ourselves to do (and here, I direct you to the conclusion of R.U.R.) I don't think we need to keep swinging between, or trying to undo, the old divisions of thought and feeling (notoriously, the conclusion of Metropolis). Instead, I think the breakthrough will come when we build machines that play, and not in the sense of playing chess or in following any set of rules. I mean play in the sense of taking pleasure in things and each other, and in suspending the rules temporarily in order to bring a new world into being for its own sake. R.U.R.'s brilliant, but imagine if Čapek had ended it not with love and sacrifice, but with the robots jumping rope? Or singing karaoke?
• All of this, of course, eludes the fundamental question of the distinction between artificial and "natural" or "innate" intelligence.
• Note that the same problem of distinction applies to autonomy (eg, humans), semi-autonomy (eg, robots), or, well, whatever falls outside or below this threshold, like automata. Derrida's analyses of sovereignty and of reaction vs. response require more attention to these distinctions. More straightforwardly, studies of the cognition of elite athletes demonstrate that the athletes work best when they work automatically: pitchers who think about their motion, who becomes less 'robotic,' lose their effectiveness. Consider, finally, the entry on automata from Diderot's encyclopedia: "engin qui se meut de lui-même, ou machine qui porte en elle le principe de son mouvement." [Instrument which moves by itself, or machine which contains within itself the source of its motion]. If we follow deconstruction mechanically, we know what to do with this. On the one hand: the automaton moves itself; on the other, it is the object of an internal intention, so to speak, the object to a subject within itself, a motion-imparting subject that we will never be able to get at.
• Notably, actors in Gizmo had wanted to know their "motivation." What's a motive but that which moves us but which isn't accounted for in the action itself? A motive's a kind of extra power. The actors want to know, in other words, what makes them more than robot. Alternately, a "motive" is precisely the search for the mechanism: actors who want to know their motives are robots who want to know what makes them tick. They're not looking for free action so much as looking for a different way to wind themselves up.
• We had several papers on robot caregivers for disabled people. I won't presume to summarize (or mangle) their arguments. Instead, I'll just (again) offer my ideas, in this case, on the chronological difference of robots. Robots operate at a different speed than (most of) us do. Either they operate far more quickly (in terms of information retrieval and processing) or they operate far more slowly, in the sense that they might long outlast us, or they operate in a kind of stasis or quick temporal looping, in the sense that an action or set of actions will be repeated identically, whether done 10, 100, or 1000 times. See Disney's Sorcerer's Apprentice.
• Proposed: what distinguishes robots from artificial intelligence is that robots are bodied. Counterproposal: HAL or Alpha 60 [in Alphaville] can be hurt, and seem to finally be localizable, and Skynet (in the Terminator films) does its ill through materializations (the terminators, nuclear warheads, etc.). Development: it's impossible to imagine a disembodied mind: it's all (necessarily) material, in the sense that everything has a place.

April Madness

by J J Cohen

I snapped the picture I've used to illustrate this post yesterday at about seven in morning, as I walked the mile or so to the subway on my way to work. I typically cut through what a sign used to call the Willard Avenue Park, before the sign fell and was removed. Now there's an expanse of grass where a playground and building once stood, a brook that becomes Little Falls stream, a forest of bamboo and other invasive species, some enormous trees, and an asphalt path that cuts along a streetcar route dating to the early 1900s (it's a pedestrian path now). At some point twenty years ago or so this area was renovated into an oddly shaped urban park that cuts behind some busy roads. Now almost everything the park contained has fallen into ruin or been removed. Yet I love walking through the area to see how the bamboo is growing, to look up at the trees, to check if the ducks will be in the stream. This morning I saw the white bark of a tulip tree reflected in the water, which for once was mirror still. It seemed the best moment of the day. It was certainly the most tranquil.

Things have been busy, and I knew once I got to campus they'd be busier still. As March is to university basketball teams, so April is to faculty and students. Though on the calendar the spring semester appears to be exactly the same duration as autumn, those of us who have lived through its agonies multiple times can attest that spring passes about 50% more quickly. (Fun fact: if you spend the entire spring semester running rapidly, Einstein passed a law that makes it so that spring semester will pass 50.000000000087% more quickly. My advice is to walk. Very. Slowly. From. January. To. May.)

This temporal acceleration has its most pronounced effect on April, which stays true to its mendacious beginning on the 1st of the month by skipping the first few weeks and proceeding immediately to the middle of third. And here we are now. April Fool. On top of a semester ending, though, there is also the problem of an academic year coming to its termination. Those of us who are students have multiple papers to write, exams to complete, and assignments to finish (which may include Big Things like a dissertation or masters or honors thesis). Those of us who are faculty must grade these endeavors as well as file annual reports, possibly compose reports for various committees we serve upon, conclude the business year ... and meet the writing deadlines that tend to cluster around the end of April and beginning of May. True, I am on leave, so I don't have the papers to grade, but I am drowning in project deadlines: the final copyediting of AVMEO (almost there!), editing the Ecomaterialism essays (almost there!) and composing the introduction (some ideas sketched out, and possibly a form), editing the Prismatic Ecologies essay and writing my own piece (nary a thing done). Plus, you know, other things. The end of the semester takes its toll. The stress was palpable on campus yesterday. I mainly avoided it by hiding in my office ... but I did meet with one student, whom I got to know in my Chaucer class last year. She is quirky, creative, brilliant -- but always one step away from breakdown. I meet with her from time to time to check in and give a (heartfelt) pep talk. She deserves a better life than the one her parents gave her.

Yesterday was somber partly for that rendezvous, one in which I tried to get my student to focus beyond the impossibles of the next two weeks (novels to read! papers to write! tasks to finish! not enough time!) and to think about the month with a little more perspective. What will April look like from May, when everything's done? How about when college is done? Who do you want to be?

I've also been dealing with a domestic problem. Ninth grade is the most difficult our son has experienced. Without going into the details, I'll just say that he has faced some fairly profound challenges, some the fault of his school, others that he has brought upon himself. Perturbations reached a crisis point yesterday after some choices he made that were not, well, good choices. The whole day I was on edge, knowing that we were going to have an evening talk about what had transpired. What surprised us, though, was that even though the problem arose from actions displaying a lack of maturity (and had to do with that most fundamental of high school questions, how to fit in with a group and not feel like an awkward freak), Alex punished himself harder than any parent would. Once we understood what was going on it became easier for us to brainstorm a solution together. And we did. It's going to be a long road, but as we emphasized to Alex it is during these uncomfortable, even painful periods in life -- the ones that we want to rush through just so that they will be over -- that we shape our future selves. Despite the hurt, at such times the best gift we can give ourselves is to slow down and make well considered choices. These are the times during which we decide who we will be. These are the times out of which our best selves arise. I've learned that fact from my own hard experience. And I relearn it every time I speak with someone who has been going through a rough period (lately, that is quite a few people I know).

Now I can see that this post is all about time: how when we don't want time to throw us forward, it does, and how when we wish it would propel us quickly out of that which hurts, fortunately for us it seldom responds to our request. To make an art of the gradual: what better can we do in troubling times?

Here's hoping that if April is not treating you well, thoughts of a better May will pull you through. Bon courage!

On the Edge: Medieval Margins and the Margins of Academic Life

by J J Cohen

This looks interesting. Posted on behalf of Kelli Wood.

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On the Edge: Medieval Margins and the Margins of Academic Life

Symposium, Wednesday May 9^th, 2012

University of Chicago, Special Collections Research Center, The University of Chicago Library

1100 East 57th Street Chicago, Illinois 60637

Keynote: Lucy Freeman Sandler, Professor of Art History Emerita, New York University, “Outer Limits: Marginal Illustrations in Gothic Manuscripts”

Honoring the twentieth anniversary of Michael Camille’s Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art, the On the Edge symposium will accompany a special preview of the exhibit of the same name that pairs marginalia in illuminated manuscripts with photographs of life at the University of Chicago.  Camille’s groundbreaking work brought light to the confluence of the serious and the playful, the sacred and the profane in medieval manuscripts and architecture. The serious and the playful also converge at the university.  University life is defined not only by cutting edge research, but also by superstitions, protests, scavenger hunts, streakers in sneakers, social groups, and dance marathons. The papers at the On the Edge symposium explore the margins of medieval art and life. Lucy Freeman Sandler, Professor of Art History Emerita, New York University will give the keynote speech of symposium, “Outer Limits: Marginal Illustrations in Gothic Manuscripts.” Please contact kLwood@uchicago.edu for questions or comments. Open to the public.

Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship Announced for 2012: Lois L. Huneycutt

by J J Cohen

We at In the Middle heartily congratulate Lois L. Huneycutt for winning the second Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship. We encourage you to apply for next year ... and, even more importantly, to consider making a donation so that this important fellowship may continue to grow.

Bonnie has long been an important influence for good in medieval studies. See, for example, this post. Or this one. Or browse some books.

The complete press release is below.


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Lois L. Huneycutt, Associate Professor of History (University of Missouri, Columbia), is the winner of the 2012 Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship.

Professor Huneycutt is the second recipient of a Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship.  The inaugural 2011 fellowship went to Lorraine Kochanske Stock, Associate Professor of English (University of Houston, Texas), in support of the completion of her book-length monograph on medieval primitivism and the Wild Man figure.

The Bonnie Wheeler Fellowships are designed to help women medievalists who are close to completing a significant work of research that will fulfill a professional promotion requirement. The 2009 MLA Report, “Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey,” indicates that women are much more likely than men to “stand still” in the course of their academic career and to be “caught in the middle” of the promotion ladder. The Bonnie Wheeler Fellowships aim at placing many more women scholars at the top scholarly tier.

Professor Huneycutt earned her Ph.D. in 1992 at the University of California-Santa Barbara.  The author of Matilda of Scotland: A Study in Medieval Queenship (2003), she was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 2002.

Professor Huneycutt’s current book project, “Becoming Christian: Women, Conversion and Resistance in the Early Medieval West,” examines the period between the fifth through thirteenth centuries in northern Europe. Building upon Richard Fletcher’s The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity (1997), it treats the process of conversion as a negotiation between old and new, focusing especially on “women’s roles in that negotiation, from the highborn women who became Christian queens to the humble wives who decided which rituals would be practiced within a household.” 

Huneycutt’s study promises to yield significant new findings.  She argues that “domestic proselytization” (J. T. Schulenberg’s term) played a much more important role in the spread of the faith than current scholarship allows.  Indeed, the widespread changes in familial structures and roles “cannot be explained,” she asserts, “without an acceptance that religious beliefs and spiritual practice actually did matter” to many premodern people, especially the women who shaped home-life.  Following the model of Robin Fleming’s recent Britain After Rome, Huneycutt pays new attention to material culture and its transformations in the use of both sacred and household space. “Finally,” she writes, “I am as interested in why people did not choose to adopt Christianity as I am in why they did.”

Five chapters are projected for Professor Huneycutt’s book.  The first discusses the major missionary movements into northern Europe. The second takes up theoretical questions concerning the definitions of, and models for, religious conversion. The third studies the impact of Christian conversion upon Carolingian households and society. The fourth is devoted to cases that show a historical reluctance to embrace Christianity, including syncretistic phenomena.  The fifth draws upon the evidence of material culture to describe the reconfiguration of many “areas of life . . . under the new religious dispensation.”        

A special feature of the Bonnie Wheeler Fellowships is the designation of a mentor, who is responsible for reading the work-in-progress of the fellow and for offering feedback, constructive criticism, and encouragement.  Professor Robin Fleming (Boston College), author of Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400-1070 (2010), will serve as mentor to Professor Huneycutt. 

2M2D

by J J Cohen

That acronym stands for "Too Much To Do," for those of you not fluent in Text. Five hundred years in the future, only medievalists will study this arcane language, but for now -- since Text is a living tongue -- fluency is not required and you do not have to take a proficiency exam to obtain your PhD. I hope that comes as good news, especially if you are drowning in work like I am. And unlike many people reading this post, I'm not grading papers.

Yes, I know, it's my footloose 'n' fancy free period of fellowship leave, but it's also been a span of months in which I committed to projects and travel long before I knew I'd be funded to compose a book. So that stone stuff? Haven't thought anything lithic since early February. Or maybe it was January. It's been all about the other elements: for a "Fire" essay I co-wrote with Stephanie Trigg, and used a portion of at the Exemplaria symposium; for a presentation I gave at EMU with Tim Morton; for my watery response at SAA; for the "Ecomaterialism" essays I'm co-editing with Lowell Duckert, as well as for the yet to be composed introduction to that issue. It's also been all about the zombies: first version presented at ICFA (and revised already into a journal article), second conceptualization to come at "Sensualising Deformity" in Edinburgh, mid June. Right now it's also about the colors as the Prismatic Ecologies due date looms. I have to edit those essays and compose an introduction. And, as icing for this scholarly cake, the proofs for Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects have arrived. This first book in the Oliphaunt series (via punctum) will be out in time for Kalamazoo. And it will be beautiful.

Speaking of Kalamazoo, I have organized one session and will be speaking in two others. And don't get me started about NCS this July ... On top of that there are the field and qualifying exam lists, the dissertation moving towards defense, the GW MEMSI annual report, and blah blah blah (which in Text would be written Bx3).

Intensity of work has a black hole effect, spurring other intensities to be drawn towards its maw. When life is at its busiest, that's when other things begin to exert their ability to trouble. Chez Cohen we've been dealing with the repercussions of a son who became addicted to video games, to the point at which his grades plunged and he deceived us about what he was working on (he no longer has a computer in his room, and his X-Box has been sold: these were his own solutions, even as at almost 15 he knows the struggle will be constant). Our daughter meanwhile now has the torture device known as a palate expander in her mouth. It hurts, makes her drool, and impacts her ability to speak clearly. And do I need to remind you of how cruel eight year olds are to children with too much spit in their mouths who cannot articulate their words well?

As it turns out, teaching or not, the middle of April inevitably brings on the stress.

Oceanic Shakespeare Feelings

view from my hotel room at dusk

by J J Cohen

[read Karl on Derrida as a table first]

Last week I attended my first SAA (Shakespeare Association of America) meeting. Despite my well documented propensity to poke fun at my early modernist colleagues (because, who can resist?), I will not compose an anthropological account of a medievalist's visit to that other world, Planet Shakespeare, where the quills of outrageous fortune aim their squibs at a sea of trouble, and where in homage to the Bard all metaphors are mixed and playfully devoid of sense. OK, it is true that most papers at SAA follow a set formula for their title ("'Famous Line from Shax Play': A Study of Something Somewhat Related to One Word Within That Line"), that Hamlet surprisingly endures as urtext and wellspring, and that canonicity is alive and well ... but that's all I've got. The SAA struck me as a lively and in most ways ordinary academic conference. I expected to feel a little out of place, but instead recognized someone I knew from somewhere each time I turned a corner or stepped out of the elevator. In other words, I felt welcome and at home.

I attended SAA Boston because Steve Mentz kindly invited me to serve as a respondent at his "Oceanic Shakespeares" seminar. Instead of traditional panels of papers, the SAA confab revolves mainly around these gatherings of 15 or so people who pre-circulate work and arrive in a room ready to speak about the papers they have read and the umbrella topic. The benefit of this format is that the seminar is intense, and (for its participants) so much more engaging than listening to three papers and hoping the presenters don't go over their allotted time so that a few questions may be posed. Probing and provocative discussion unfolds. The downside is that these seminars are not much fun to watch if you didn't read the papers, so once your seminar has concluded there isn't much left to do at the conference besides a plenaries and a few general panels. Of the latter I attended a terrific session put together by my colleague Holly Dugan, considering Shakespeare's primatology. I also went to see a double plenary at which Marjorie Garber, who taught me how to teach, lectured on "Shakespeare and/in the Humanities." Though a silent assumption of her piece -- and that of her co-lecturer -- was that Shakespeare and the humanities are the same thing (to which: ???!!!), I quickly came to realize that these plenary talks were a celebration of the SAA at age 40 and as celebrations they can be anglophile and bardolatrous and all those other things that many of us don't see so much of any more. It was like time travel. As was the meeting as a whole, in a personal way: I lunched and coffeed and simply ran into so many people I know from graduate school that I was reminded constantly how happy I am to have had the chance to get to know them later in life, when the insanity of that time has become a memory we can laugh about together.

Back to the seminars. Much obviously depends upon the leadership of the particular seminar, and Steve did an extraordinary job in that role. The papers arrived on time, discussion began electronically before we stepped foot in the room in the Copley Plaza Westin, and the two hour proceeding was well structured through a series of culminating moves. As an icebreaker we narrated one story of our relation to the sea (I spoke about arriving in my hotel room the previous night, looking out across the harbor and spotting George's Island; on the ruins of the civil war fortress there, staring at an ocean that stretched to vanishing, I proposed to my future spouse in a moment that surprised us both). Steve also gave us a secret nautical term that has entered common language. We were supposed to work it quietly into our remarks at some point, pushing the paper with the term to the middle of the table when we did so. Mine was "grog" so I held it until the end, when I suggested we continue the discussion at a tavern over some.

I enjoyed each of the seminar papers. I circulated a response to three in the "Fresh Water Ecologies" section ahead of time, and posted these blanket questions about the whole group of papers:

So far my big emergent questions have to do with how Oceanic Shakespeares of necessity must also be Rocky Shakespeares, Fiery Shakespeares, and Stormy Shakespeares: that is, it’s pretty clear to me that you can’t trace the agency of one element without tracing that of the others. And that of course brings up the Big Question of agency. Is uber-canonical literature like Shakespeare to be saddled with functioning as store of poetic tropes for, say, the ocean in ways that ultimately have to do with human psychologies and subjectivities, or can the elements speak and act and exert agency in ways that the plays make evident? To what extent must an oceanic Shakespeare an inhuman Shakespeare? Is to ask that question to transport Shakespeare out of history and again make him for All Time? What does the sea do to temporality?

I was trying to push the seminar to make bigger claims. The papers tended to be vast in potential, but typically rather circumscribed in their claims: Shakespeare not for all time, but for an event involving pirates on a small coast on a well documented day in 1596. I also wanted to get at the tension between the local histories that seemed to cluster easily around fresh water (ponds, rivers, bodies of water small enough to be emplaced rather precisely within geography and history) and the invitation to temporal, geographical and cultural hybridity and dispersedness that oceans inevitably extend. Isn't the oceanic the closest thing we have to a metalanguage, or at least to a lingua franca? (And now I can see I was using "ocean" as an elemental substitute for "Shakespeare," so I wonder also what is at stake with that: can a materiality replace a textuality as "our" commonality?) Some of the other questions I tried to raise: We'd spoke a bit about metis, or hand-knowledge, the embodied craft you need to sail. But Metis, daughter of Oceanus, is also the titaness swallowed by Zeus to give birth to Athena. So how does metis curve into intellect? Might we look to Thetis, goddess of the sea, mother of Achilles (bound to history he cannot escape) and daughter of Proteus (who changes and changes)? What do these enmeshments reveal about gender and fluidity? What is the relation between the shore (as a human place, where sea becomes inscribed as historic events that unfold and are marked; where we seek out our store of tropes for emblems, psychology, poetry, accounts of conferences) and the ocean (the blue ecology, the vast and salty and extralinguistic place that is not our home, in Steve's lucid account)? What about estuaries -- admittedly, my favorite kind of place, where land and fresh water meet sea, marsh, and salt? Estuary comes from the Latin word aestus, meaning boiling or tide. Related to it are aestas (summer: that is, a small duration) and, obliquely, aedes (temple, house, edifice: something in which to dwell, something that might last). In the brackish water of the estuary -- always mixed, always moving even when it seems still -- a complicated mesh unfolds in which life adapts and elements combine. Estuaries are also factories for the production of stone: the silt washed into oceans resurfaces millions of years later as the rocks with which we are most familiar. Estuaries as combinatory and impure places invite us to an elemental frame and inhuman notions of time.

I'm not going to report on individual papers since so many came to me stamped with warnings not to quote or cite them. But I will say that discussion we had was so lively that four days later I am still ruminating over what we covered. It was a great pleasure at the conference to get to know Steve Mentz better, to drink numerous Dark 'n' Stormies with him, and to close out two bars in one night doing so (we were joined by some other die hards: Will Stockton, who I met for the first time and almost convinced to buy a horse pillow that looked like a cow as we walked through a mall; Ayanna Thompson;  Lowell Duckert; Liza Blake, among many others. I name them all honorary medievalists for their perseverance). Boston will always seem like home to me, and it was fun to be back in a hotel only a few blocks away from where a cafe once stood in which I wrote much of my dissertation, walking streets that have changed somewhat but not all that much in the years I've known them. I even got to have lunch with my parents. But all in all I will remember SAA as the place that reaffirmed for me how many good, smart people work in the early modern period and how important it is for medievalists and early modernists to work more closely together. We have too much in common, and too much to learn from each other, to allow historical divisions to create segregations.

What if Derrida's cat had been a worm? Or coffee cup? And Derrida a table?

by KARL STEEL

(also: watch this space for Jeffrey's SAA post. I know it'll be here soon)

This Thursday I'm flying from Paris to State College, PA, for Robot Weekend: Being Human Gizmos," where I'll do my wormy song-and-dance. The conference starts with Anthony Clarvoe's new play, Gizmo, which is fantastically good. I'm just thrilled to have been invited. I'd be thrilled, even more, if any inhabitants of Happy Valley (and I don't mean Bhutan and its disreputable happy valley) saw fit to show me some of your fabled American hospitality. I hear you people drink glasses of cow milk. That'd be kind of fun to see.

I'll be giving a version of my ecomaterial worms paper, starting with a question about Derrida, a cat, and worms. It goes like this:

At least for me, critical animal theory's ur-moment is Derrida's naked encounter with his cat [in case you doubt it: see Gerald Bruns in On Ceasing to be Human; a lecture by Carla Freccero; Erica Fudge; Laurence Simmons in the Knowing Animals anthology; and several blog entries -- this last one rather more close to home than the others]. The cat comes across Derrida just as he's emerged from the shower, and, so far as Derrida thinks, looks at his penis. From here, we get Derrida feeling ashamed, and a bit ashamed of his shame; we get a sketch of philosophical distinctions between self-aware nudity and unwitting nakedness, and from there, of course, another of Derrida's dismantling of the pretensions of the humanist tradition. To suspend or refuse human domination, to break with what he calls carnophallogocentrism, Derrida lets himself be “seen seen” by his cat. He allows himself the uneasiness of being caught in his own cat's eyes; he lets himself stay uncertain; and he opposes those who take “no account of the fact that what they call 'animal' can look at them, and address them from down there.”

What addresses him is his cat, not, he tells us, “the figure of a cat. It doesn't silently enter the room as an allegory for all the cats on the earth.” It isn't here “to represent, like an ambassador, the immense symbolic responsibility with which our culture has always charged the feline race.” Maybe. No doubt Derrida was fully cognizant of this maybe. As several other people have observed about this scene, cats are particularly useful for troubling humanism. A cat isn't just any old kind of animal. They're independent, nocturnal, clever carnivores we want to let stay with us, who kill without our supervision and often without our approval. A dog just wouldn't have been as uncanny.

A cat is apt, yet there's only so far it can go in troubling humanism. We've long set aside a place for them. Like a dog, a cat's familiarity makes it easier than it would be with other critters to recognize the vulnerability that humans and nonhumans share. Recall what Derrida did with Jeremy Bentham's question about nonhumans, not whether they can speak, or reason, but whether they can suffer. Derrida finds in these questions the “nonpower at the heart of power” of being unable not to exposed to suffering or at least to vulnerability. It's relatively easy to think of sharing this condition—crucially, not a capacity—with a cat. It's not hard to hear an ethical call from a cat, because who wants to hurt a cat? Who wants to let a cat be hurt? When Derrida talks about the injustice of human dominance, many of us will look at our cats and say, "I would never lord over you, bub, never," or even, "if it came to it, I'd let you have the last spot in the lifeboat."

But what if the cat were a maneater? I asked this question on Facebook, and someone quipped “it would have eaten his penis!” No surprise, Derrida doesn't forget this. He talks about the cat's looking at him “without touching yet, and without biting, although that threat remains on its lips or on the tip of its tongue.” That's it, though, and I don't think any of us seriously thought Derrida's cat would castrate him.

Unless you're a mouse or a songbird, or, like me, very allergic, a cat's not much of a threat. Being a medievalist, though, I can't help but wonder about anthropophagous animals, because my literature's full of them. There's the baby-eating pigs of the animal trials; there's the whale that swallowed a fisherman named Within, who, before he's freed, has to endure an eleventh-century analog of Who's On First. There's Partonopeu, who goes out into the woods hoping to be eaten by bears and tigers, and Ortnit, sucked out through his armor by baby dragons. How would our thoughts about vulnerability and ethics change if Derrida's cat had been the lion that ate Ignatius of Antioch or the butchering boar of the Avowyng of Arthur?

Even so, maybe not much would change. Critical animal studies and animal rights philosophy both demand we reconsider the relative value of human and nonhuman lives. It's not easy, but it's less hard to do with charismatic megafauna, a category in which I think we can safely place whales, bears, tigers, lions, and maybe even baby dragons. But what if our anthropophagous animal didn't have any eyes? What if it had been a worm, or a mess of worms? A cat is uncanny, but there are animals far, far more unhomely, namely, worms, the paradigmatic anthropophage in medieval literature, where we humans are all “food for worms” (see, e.g., the Cerquiglini-Toulet here).

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That's where my introduction stops. Having just read Ian Bogost's Alien Phenomenology (discussed by Levi Bryant here and here), I can now imagine taking things in a radically new direction. What if Derrida's cat had been, not a worm, but, say, Levi's blue coffee mug? And what if Derrida had been a table? What if we had (because we've now become Graham Harman), on the one side, cotton and, on the other, fire? The first objection--cotton can't see!--is the easiest to brush aside, since 'seeing' might be read as just a particular kind of apprehension or engagement whereby a subject (whether human, ceramic, or cotton) becomes an object to another (whether cat, Formica, or fire). Seeing of course has its own history and physiology, but there's no good reason to elevate it above other modes of apprehension or engagement.

More tomorrow, maybe? When I might dig into Bogost's diggings into the problems of object-oriented ethics in his section on "Metaphor and Obligation."

Medieval Stuff, Over at "Le Prof & La Potiche"

by KARL STEEL

My wife, Alison (aka La Potiche), has been keeping a blog on our stay in France. Occasionally, I contribute, although I've been too busy fighting (and conquering! rarh!) deadlines for the last few months to do much else but fight and conquer, etc.. Alison's recently written about our visit to Bayeux and and Caen and touches on the Middle Ages and memory in ways I think will resonate for some of our readers. I'd be happy if you read it.

(for an explanation of the blog's title, see here)

A more expansive narcissism

by KARL STEEL

All best to all my friends in Boston for the SAA Conference in Boston. Cause some trouble; let yourself be troubled.

Above is a picture of the oldest work in the Louvre, a 9000-year-old statue of a human, made from gypsum plaster smeared over a skeleton of cords and woven fibers, with pupils and eyelids of bitumen. It was most recently rediscovered in 1985 at Aïn Ghazal, restored at the Smithsonian from 1985-96, and is currently in Paris, on loan from from Jordan (for more commentary, see here).

My second thought on encountering it was: hello, Adam:

And I said unto the Cherubim, 'My Lord, of what kind was this righteousness wherein Adam was arrayed, and which he received from His hand?' And the Cherubim said unto me, 'On the day wherein God created Adam, Adam was twelve cubits in height, and six cubits in width, and his neck was three cubits long. And he was like unto an alabaster stone wherein there is no blemish whatsoever.'

I'm quoting from the Coptic The Mysteries of Saint John the Apostle and Holy Virgin, an early twelfth-century celestial journey in which we find, let me stress, a wholly coincidental description of what might as well be the Aïn Ghazal statue.

Here's my first thought:

[I] called a 9000-year-old object [the] oldest in Louvre. How very anthropocentric of me. We're full of star dust.

I assume you know I'm referencing Lawrence M. Krauss:

The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust.

Possibly to its credit, the Louvre calls the Aïn Ghazal statue its oldest work, not its oldest "object" (possibly: I don't perfectly remember what the placard said). Nonetheless, even "work" still presents human agency as the only agency that matters. Anyone reading this blog knows anything can "work." Even exploding stars.

As for age, even if we bracket off stardust, the statue's primary material itself still strikes me as almost impossibly old: gypsum has been here for perhaps 2.5 billion years. What can we do with such a big number, so much more vertiginous than the vague, transcendent non-number of the infinite (on this point, see The Ecological Thought 40: incidentally, can I declare a moratorium on "infinite"? In a universe that matters, nothing's infinite).

And then there's my delight in the statue. Like my delight in manuported pebbles, carried by humans or proto-humans millions of years ago, I delight in feeling myself sharing the touch that shaped this statue 9,000 years ago. Look at it! You can see where hands worked it. Can't you imagine touching it too?

Yet isn't this an anthropocentric delight? Especially with this statue, which, after all, looks back at me with a human face? Proper disanthropocentrists should take at least as much delight in the age of the gypsum, in the statue's unseen armature, and in the stardust that we once were and will be again.

My call for an expanded delight isn't a call to overcome narcissism. That's too easy, and ultimately too humanist. I'm not advocating that we all abandon our training as humanists by learning to take delight in something other than the human or its products. I'm advocating something more complicated, directed against the loneliness of traditional humanism.

I'm advocating that we recognize ourselves not only in this statue's face; that we cease to think of our singular humanity as the most interesting thing about us; that we develop, in short, a more expansive narcissism. (here's what that might look like)

We are all stardust, in part (93%, in fact). We share something with gypsum, and with ancient woven cords; we're perhaps future bitumen. At the least, we all exist, in some way. We all share this condition of being temporary configurations of matter. We can recognize ourselves in that existence. We can take an interest in the existence of others because of that self-recognition, and, through that narcissistic interest, feel our sense of self give way, or open up.

In sum, the statue's elements, too, are places where we might encounter an ancient face looking back at at an "us" that finally knows itself not to be only human.

BEWARE: fireflies and corpse-candles

by KARL STEEL

As Jeffrey knows, medieval treatises on magic, science, and various nonhuman lively objects offer a world of resources to the new materialists. With that in mind, and also because I just like weird stuff, here are a few passages from pseudo-Albert the Great's De secretis mulierum, a work already very popular by 1500. It's worth knowing, then, for a grab-bag of reasons.

BEWARE: I suspect I'm not using the best edition, and I'm ignoring a modern translation because I don't have access to it here, in my apartment. BEWARE my Latin, as it's possibly less able than my French.

BEWARE, especially, the following: in De secretis mulierum, opposite the page with instructions on how to make a man seem to have an ass's head, or three heads, or on how to concoct something to let one understand the speech of birds, we have "ut homo semper eunuchus fit, accipe ex vermiculo qui in aestate lucet, & da ei bibere" [in order to make a man always impotent {or even a eunuch!}, take a firefly {right?} and give it to him to drink].

BEWARE the following, too:

Dicunt Philosophi, quod sinciput est prima pars capitis: ex sincipite hominis parum post mortem generantur vermes, cumque praetereunt ei dies septem, vermes illi fiunt muscae, & post quatuordecim dies, fiunt dracones magni, quorum unus si momorderit hominem, morietur statim, quod si tu acceperis ex eo & coxeris [oops! I had 'coexeris' yesterday] illud cum oleo, & feceris ex eo candalam in lucernam aeris cum lichinio panno exequiarum, videbis ex eo rem magnam, & formam, quae narrari potest cum timore forti.

corrected translation (following suggestions from the great and wise Chris Piuma) from The philosophers say that the brain [or forehead] is the chief part of the head: worms are born from a man's brain [forehead?] shortly after death, and when the seventh day goes by, these worms become flies, and after fourteen days, they become great serpents, and if one of these bites a man, it [or he!] will die immediately; but if you take it from him [presumably meaning if you take worm out of the guy, and not the other way around] and cook it with oil and make from this a candle in a brass lamp with a wick made from funeral cloths [a shroud?], you will see from this a great thing, and a shape, which can be related only with great fear.

Feel encouraged to dig around a bit in pseudo-Albert's secrets. No doubt there's more (DANGEROUS) fun to be had.

For useful commentary on De secretis mulierum, see, of course, Lynn Thorndike: here and also "Further Consideration of the Experimenta, Speculum Astronomiae, and De Secretis Mulierum," Speculum 30.3 (1955):413-443, and, more recently, David J. Collins, "Albertus, Magnus or Magus? Magic, Natural Philosophy, and Religious Reform in the Late Middle Ages," Renaissance Quarterly 63.1 (2010): 1-44.

Image from here. And thanks to Florilector on Twitter for a fun conversation last night about dragons and Albert. (and for continued interventions today: see here for a link to various editions of the Albert)


UPDATE, a couple hours later.

I was so deep in the skinweeds that I didn't have a chance to read Jeffrey's post on elemental relations until just now. Wow.

If you want more disanthropocentric narrative, if you want more "composition rather than imposition," then by all means try to make a corpse candle. I'm about as far from having made an exhaustive study of De Secretis Mulierum as one can be, but my initial forays suggest that its techniques are largely about achieving a certain result by following the instructions. It's a recipe book, in essence, although rather than tarts we get men turned off wine for a month by being slipped a beverage made from the slime around a tired donkey's balls ["Similiter spuma quae invenitur circa testiculos cervi vel equi, vel asini fatigati, admisceatur cum vino: & illud vinum detur alicui potatione, abhorrebit vinum per mensem"]. What's the opposite of an étoile Michelin? That's what this is.

The corpse candle, on the other hand, doesn't lead to anything useful. The philosopher will be overwhelmed by his materials. We have here a combination of agents--worm, brain [from the sleep of reason, indeed!], wick, brass lamp, death, a human either killed or killing--resulting in a great thing, a great shape, terrifying and (nearly) impossible to relate, something sounding not a little like the cosmic horror so many of us have grooved on these days. The trick for the fun-loving scholar would be to dig through this pseudo-Albert to find what other recipes get away from us (and doesn't this notion of "getting away" strike you as a potentially highly productive concept?). Isn't this desire to be surprised and horrified by the mystery of materials disanthropocentric?

de monstro possunt fieri monstruosae quaestiones, or, an apology for an omission

by KARL STEEL
(image: your humble, monstrous blogger, in a mystery spot)

"Le monstre sert d'outil conceptuel, au même titre que d'autres cas limites comme l'embryon ou le cadavre, pour penser la personne humaine et les rapports complexes entre âme et corps, forme et matière."
[The monster serves a conceptual purpose, in the same capacity as other limit cases, like the embryo or the cadaver, for thinking about the human person and the complex links between soul and body, form and matter.]

I've spent the last month, not blogging, obviously, but rather hitting a tight deadline to produce 6k words about skin. Depending on reviewers, publishing schedules, and our developing environmental eschaton, you'll see what I did sometime in...2014. Maybe sooner. Unless I paraphrase some of my ideas here first. For now, let's just say that I had a lot of fun conceptualizing skin through object-oriented philosophy rather than psychoanalysis (those prices!). In essence, I was looking in instead of (inside my skin) looking out.

But today I'm here to confess something. I'm proud to have an essay in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous on "Centaurs, Satyrs, and Cynocephali: Medieval Scholarly Teratology and the Question of the Human." I'm also ashamed, though, because I somehow missed an important essay, Maaike van der Lugt's "L'humanité des monstres et leur accès aux sacrements dans la pensée médiévale" [The humanity of monsters and their access to the sacraments in medieval thought], available for download here. I'm ashamed, because it's a great article, but also because I'm a big fan of her work on barnacles and because her book on WORMS (hello!) somehow didn't get cited in my worms paper. That will be corrected.

So, apologies, Professor van der Lugt, if you happen to be reading this. I hereby swear to follow your career with interest.

In the meantime, if your French is pas si bon (and--the Parisians know--mine is barely enough to get by), I'll summarize some of my favorite bits from it, starting with the last line, a kind of punchline from Hugh of Pisa: "de monstro possunt fieri monstruosae quaestiones" (23 n91; concerning monsters, monstrous questions can arise).

The article concerns itself primarily with the baptism of conjoined twins and the ordination of intersexed people, mapping the differences and overlaps between canon and civil law (the former concerned with the sacraments, the latter with inheritance and paternity). It occasionally touches on disability, pygmies (included mummified pseudo-pygmies, traded by merchants), and the heterogeneous offspring of bestiality. Needless to say, discussions of monsters inevitably mean discussions of the so-called norm: questions of gender determination, for example, are universally applicable in a society--like theirs, like ours--that divides so much labor according to gender roles.

So. The article opens with two accounts of conjoined twins, one near Florence in 1317, the other in 15th-century Paris, the first denied baptism as a bad omen, the other baptized (as Agnes and Jeanne) shortly before they died; their body would be displayed for three days to the people of Paris (see here, item 508). Fascinating! Here follow some of my favorite bits:

• the observation, via Aristotle, that all children not resembling their parents are already some kind of monster, insofar as the sperm didn't manage to reproduce the image of the father;
• Peter Abelard's proposal that satyrs come from the union of servents and nonhuman animals, which means that they're human, since one human parent suffices for a creature to be human, regardless of its appearance;
• An anonymous mid-13th-century commentary on the human body, added to the Summa of Alexander of Hales, arguing that blemmyae, lacking heads, could be considered human only if some other part of their body has an organ that serves as a brain; preferring not to grant humanity to cynocephali; and identifying the internal organs rather than external appearance as the key element for determining humanity. The important organs are the brain, heart, liver, and testes. If these are human, so's the creature. On the other hand, says our writer, since monstrosity is punishment for sin, then monsters are ipso facto human, since animals of course can't be sinners;
• Later in the 13th century, a Franciscan Quodlibet argues that, yes, pygmies are human, since they have human proportions; by similar reasoning, a child born with legs coming out of its sides isn't one. The Franciscan also observes, on the topic of the spawn of bestiality, that human sperm is not powerful enough to convert other sperm into being human: see also mules [semen hominis non est tante virtutis quod possit convertere aliud semen ad suam speciem sicut asinus non convertit semen eque, sed facit tertiam partem (10 n40)];
• Albert the Great, a dubious source tells us, stopped the execution of herdsman thought to have fathered a peculiar calf; au contraire, said (pseudo) Albert: the stars had aligned oddly! But in Holland in 1464, Willem Boudewinszn, a lover of cows and the father of one--or so he admitted under torture--was executed and burned, along with the cow he (confessed he) loved (11 n46);
• Nicholas Oresme in 1370, countering the argument that humanity can be determined on the basis of form, argues that children born blind, deaf, and "nulla ratione utentes minus quam canis" (having less reason than a dog) should be baptized, though they seem far more monstrous to him than, say, a blemmye (12-13, n50). (van der Lugt also directs us at Aquinas);
• On the question of baptizing conjoined twins: obviously, they should be baptized, but how many times? Quodlibets at the end of 13th and beginning of 14th century often considered the problem. Two heads might be sufficient cause for two baptisms, but several medieval theologians, following Aristotle, gave priority to the heart, not the head. Of course, there's no easy way to determine whether an infant has two hearts, so we encounter recommendations that the second baptism be conditional (and, on this point, I said: HELLO Erkenwald! My favorite Middle English conditional baptism). Pierre de la Palus suggests that if a spot on the monstrous body can be found in which a wound or a stab transmits pain only to one head, but not both, then two baptisms will be required;
• The quotlibets continued to worry at the problem of married conjoined twins: what if the twins have only one vagina between them? Then consummation for one would be fornication for the other, while the husband of one would be committing adultery and incest at the same time as he carried out his proper marital duties on the other. But nature makes nothing in vain, and, possibly, says Eustache de Grandcour's quodlibet, they may have one vagina, but two uteruses [et possibile erat quod habuerint diversas matrices];
• And then, finally, we have the problem of intersexed people. The church authorized their marriage, but only if they adopted either a feminine or masculine role, and stuck with it. Those without a preference were to remain chaste. Choosing which gender dominated was a knotty problem: some thinkers emphasized genitals, others secondary sexual characteristics (a beard, for example), and others comportment and behavior. Baptism wasn't a problem here, although in cases of doubt, the priest should give the child a masculine name, which could easily be made feminine if necessary (Robert would become Roberta, Gerald would become Daphne, etc.). Those intersexed people thought to have a dominant masculinity could even be ordained as priests.

There's much, much more, particularly in the footnotes. If your French is up to it, and you're into monsters, gender, and the human as a question (and if you're reading this blog, I suspect you are), then this is an article you'll love. Highly recommended.

EXTENSION: Deadline for BABEL's 2nd Biennial Meeting [Boston, 2012]

Figure 1. from Beth Dow, Ruins

by EILEEN JOY

First, run outside and hug some medievalists, or, hug yourself.  Second, take note that we have extended the deadline for submission of presentation proposals for the 2nd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, "cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university," to be held in Boston on 20-22 September 2012. You do not want to miss a conference where sessions have been organized around the topics [and activities] of the alehouse, impurity, punking, going "rogue," the Se7en Undeadly ScIeNceS, and wayzgooses. Plus, we will be introducing the Staffordshire Hoard cocktail [mixology by Karen Overbey]. You can see the listing of organized sessions, with contact information for session organizers, here:

Call for Presentations: 2012 Meeting of the BABEL Working Group

If you'd like to submit an individual presentation proposal, you may do so directly to Kathleen Kelly and me at: babel.conference@gmail.com. Now please, go back to your hugging, and to your being hugged.

Happy International Hug a Medievalist Day

by J J Cohen

Each year this celebration grows exponentially. We at In the Middle hope that yours is suitably festive and filled with warm embraces. And remember: the line between a cheerful hug and an awkward capture is only about five seconds. Pace yourself accordingly.

And thank you,  Sarah Laseke, for your instigation of this most sacred of festivals. It has now come to rival Leeds and Kalamazoo on the medievalist calendar.

The Paleo Diet and the Zombie Diet: Coincidence?

by J J Cohen

[Thought you might enjoy this short paragraph from the talk I gave at ICFA. I'm reworking the piece into an essay to be published in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.]

Zombies are proliferating at the same time as our reigning fad diet is the Paleolithic, extolling the consumption of raw foods. Meat loving and contemptuous of grains, the Paleo Diet renounces agricultural humanity for a fantasy of primal hunter-gatherers who devoured what they killed or snatched with their own hands. Everyone was supposedly healthier when they resembled Bear Grylls, despite the fact that most hunter-gatherers probably lived very short lives that terminated in the stomachs of predators. Like the “Born to Run” movement, this diet is propelled by a fantasy that the past was a better space, and that the current imperfections of our bodies were in the distant past its flawless adaptations. The Paleo Diet, like the Zombie Diet, imagines that it is best to consume without adding culture to your food (do not process what you devour), and that what we eat should arrive through no intermediary (nature offers bounty enough). We might even be tempted to label both the Paleo and Zombie diets green: what could be more natural, more eco-friendly, than a culinary regime that leaves so small an environmental footprint? In the end, however, zombie diets are actually the more sustainable, since humans are in fact the most neglected meat in a flesh-loving culture. Zombies know that deer, horses, and humans all make good eating, and they were early practitioners of snout to tail dining.