The Werewolf Painting of Poligny (Jura)

by KARL STEEL

Werewolf and monster scholarship loves to cite a painting of three werewolves holding knives, supposedly in (or once in) Poligny, in the Jura, in the Church of the Jacobins (i.e., a Dominican church). For example, see Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire infernal, ou Recherches et anecdotes sur les démons (501, s.v. Michel Verdun); Charles Thuriet, Traditions populaires du Jura (66, and sorry for no Gallica or archive.org link); and more recently, well, this google search should work.

The ultimate source seems to be Henry Boguet's Discours exécrable des sorciers, 123, from 1603.


Here's an English translation, from Charlotte Otten's Lycanthropy Reader, 89:

And if anyone ask with what instrument witches, when appearing to be wolves, effect the death of those whom they kill, I shall answer that they have only too many contrivances for this purpose. For sometimes they use knives and swords, as did Perrenette Gandillon, who killed Benoist Bidel with his own knife, and therefore he who painted the three were-wolves of Poligny represented them as each carrying a knife in its right paw. 

Que si quelqu'un desire de sçavoir avec quel instrument les sorciers estans en apparence de loup dónent la mort aux personnes qu'ils tuent, je luy diray qu'ils n'ont que trop d'inventions pour cela: car quelquefois ils se servent de cousteaux, et de glaives, comme nous avons dict de Perrentte Gadillo, qui tua Benoist Bidel se son propre cousteau: et je tiens, que c'est la raison pour laquelle celuy qui a depeint trois loups garoux de Pouligny leur faict porter à chacun un cousteau en la patte dextre. (French very roughly edited by me, some early modern spellings preserved)

I've been trying to track down the painting. No luck. Poligy's tourist board says nothing about it, and no one on flickr gives me a picture. Nothing on Wikipédia either.

So! Conversation on the MEARCSTAPA listserv has been very helpful in leading me to believe that while the painting might once have existed, it may also just be lost. I'm inclined to think it's as legendary as the "lost" pig execution painting of Falaise, Normandy, well-known to animal trial scholars as the greatest artistic loss in human  (and porcine) history.

Have any of you ever seen it? Or seen it reproduced? Citoyens de Poligny, aidez-moi !

(h/t, merci bcp to Zachary Fisher for sending me towards the image above, which is from here, page 17, and case not of lyncanthropy but rather hypertrichosis)

Having to Stretch, Having Room: A Voyage of Brendan Lesson

Valhalla Rising, to set the mood

by KARL STEEL

 "Merely quantitative differences, beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative changes."
 (Marx, Capital I.11, cadged from Malcolm Harris)

This semester, I'm teaching my first 3-hour, once-weekly class, an undergrad medieval comparative lit course. It runs from 6:30-9:10 every Monday, which I bisect with an optional but absolutely needed 15-minute break from roughly 7:45-8pm.

Three classes in and I'm loving it. It's not just that I have to wind myself up to teach this stuff only once instead of twice a week (and we know, at least I do, the emotional effort required to step into a classroom); it's what a long class does to my teaching.

For me and other talkers, a 75-minute class (or these thrice-weekly 50-minute classes I've heard rumor of) loves for me just to offload great blocks of ad-libbed information. And judging by my evals, this works. The letter arrives at some destination, if I'm just trying to convince my students that they're getting what they think is an education and, even more so, if I want them to think I'm smart. But it's obviously not our jobs to convince students that we deserve to be running the class.

Three hours of talking though? Doable, definitely, but far more obviously useless than in a regular-length class, or my name isn't Karl "Increase Mather" Steel. Quantitative differences have forced me to flip my classroom. I'm following the scientists who are following humanities teaching.

Below, I'll give you a map of the whole class. First, though, last night's favorite bit.

I showed them the Wikipedia page on The Voyage of Saint Brendan and gave them five or ten minutes to read it (either from the screen up front or from their phones) and to write down one key thing the wikipedia page missed, and--if they had time--why this thing matters for understanding the text. If you don't want to read the Wikipedia, because why?, it offers a very brief intro and then a 29-item list of the steps of the voyage. And that's it.

Here's a partial list of what the class turned up:

• Birds are fallen angels, not just birds. 
• Interactions between the people – the kisses for example, or the bowing, or the conversation. 
• What Brendan thinks about Abbot Ailbe's silence, which he thinks too severe for human nature to bear. 
• How Brendan lets God guide them to islands rather than travelling deliberately. 
• All the stuff about don’t worry, god will keep us safe: gryphon eg. 
• Jasconius: wikip doesn’t seem to understand that he is also the whale island. 
• Omits the size of the sheep – giant holy land sheep who never get milked. 
• Above all: the Psalms and the liturgy. Calendar and the solstice, Easter, Christmas. 

What champs! We could have kept going for another 20 minutes on this. Now, I told them the obvious: they were being tested on whether they'd done the reading, and also being given a practical lesson in Wikipedian inadequacies. They got all this. But then I unpacked a fun fact: we have 120+ extant manuscripts of the Voyage of Brendan, and translations into most European vernaculars. And a lot of the translations, or really, adaptations, do exactly what the Wikipedia article does, namely, they hush up the religious element and turn up the adventure. See some of this for example. What does this say about continuities between medieval and modern readers?

Keep reading for the complete lesson plan. And if you'd rather just skip to comments, do that, and let me know your classroom flipping tricks, because frankly this old talker is new to all this...fun. Note that my class has only 24 students, which strikes me as perfect for a 300-level undergrad course.

The whole plan:

1. As students come in, to set a mood, I played a long scene from Valhalla Rising of warriors drifting at sea, mostly mute, filthy, and lost in the fog; 
2. the medieval news: last week it was Richard III. This week it was the Pope's resignation (helped along by showing them Bruce Holsinger's blog) and then some Wonders of the East from the newly digitized Cotton MS Vitellius A XV (which means talking about the Ashburnham House fire);
3. then, once I know I have a full complement, the Wikipedia thing;
4. three five-minute student presentations. All smart and interesting. The first on animal guides; the second on ecology, conservationism, and sainthood; and the third on Christian allegory. Everyone had to write down a comment or question for every presenter, which meant a lively discussion until the break at 7:45;
5. during the break, students who stuck around learned how to build a coracle;
6. since mine might be the only medieval class the students take, I do a lot of "medieval ambassadorship"--or just show and tell--whenever I do take time to talk. Last night I showed them an Adam Roberts pun ("The Em-Bayeux Strikes Back") and then...explained the joke;
7. boring discussion of the papers I had just graded. Had to be done, but this I hadn't quite planned on, so I reverted back to the old lecturing Karl. Will need to fix this next time;
8. quick gesture at favorite bits from the immrama and echtrai, mostly from old issues of the Revue celtique available on Archive.org: Voyage of Snegdus and Mac Riagla; Voyage of Mael Duin; Voyage of the Húi Corra; and the Voyage of Bran. This led into a brief discussion of medieval remix culture, and using TvTropes to undo the modern pretension of "originality";
9. and finally, in-class writing, small group discussion, followed by reports back to the class.

Here were the questions:

• Having read Bede's Life of Cuthbert and the Voyage of St. Brendan, what do you now know about Christian monastic asceticism, and what does this say about their conception about the good and the evil? What do they think someone needs to do to be holy, and why? [this required explaining the difference between asceticism and aestheticism]; 
• Why is the Voyage precise on so many things (the size of the "iceberg" for example), but never about where things actually are (the relative position of the islands)? 
• Why should being naked except for full-body hair be a sign of holiness? 

They got 10 minutes. They could write first about whichever one interested them, and all three if they could. One detailed response would be more than sufficient, though. Then groups of four had to try to synthesize an answer (which is always, usefully, impossible). Discussion had to be cut off, both in the small groups, and then when I finally let them go precisely at 9:10.

One more point! Because of all the in-class writing (which is ungraded but read and counts for 15% of their grade), and the presentation (which has a graded written component), I'm eliminating TWO short papers from my standard syllabus. Advantages abound: less to grade; they write more; they think about the reading more often, and possibly more deeply; and they have more time at home to work on their other classes. Which means I'm not the bad guy, and I'm stuck in grading jail a lot less. Everyone wins.

Next week we start four weeks on Gerald of Wales. I hope we all can keep it up!

Multilingual Shakespeare: A Guest Post by Alexa Huang

 by ALEX HUANG

(The following is a guest post by my GW colleague Alexa Huang. Enjoy it ... but please read Jonathan Hsy's Distemporality first! -- JJC)

“What Country, Friends, Is This?”: Multilingual Shakespeare on Festive Occasions

Touring theatre is a place where theatre studies and globalization come into contact. The year of 2012 was a year of global festivities in which Shakespeare’s works played a major part. Through their exemplary power, the intersections of world cultures and Shakespeare provide a set of important issues for repositioning theatre studies in the wider field of globalization studies.

How does Shakespeare make world theatre legible in the British context? What roles have “foreign” performance styles played in the rise of Shakespearean theatre as a “global” genre and to post-imperial British identity in the world? More specifically, what does it entail for international touring theatre artists to perform Shakespeare in Britain and for the British press to judge these touring productions?

Some answers to these questions can be found in the patterns of production and reception of Shakespeare in postnational spaces—festival venues where national identities are blurred by the presence of such entities as transnational corporate sponsors. Some of the touring theatre works in 2012 were produced under circumstances that may prove challenging or alienating to even the most cosmopolitan audiences. Shakespeare in the diaspora puts pressure on some of the theoretical models theatre historians have privileged in their documentation of the Western sources of non-Western performances.

In particular, the reception of touring performances is informed by issues of politics, language, and performantive cultural affiliations.

First, the cultural and political conditions of a venue or a production intervene in reception and undercut the work of artistic intent. This genre of stage works is shaped by forms of agency that are not rooted in intentionality.

Second, in Shakespearean performance, language is often granted more agency than the materiality of performance, leading to the tendency to privilege certain modernized and editorialized versions of Shakespearean scripts and their accurate reproduction in foreign-language performances. The humanities over the past century have witnessed the so-called linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, and the cultural turn, all of which operate on assumptions about the substantial and substantializing power of language as opposed to the materiality of cultural representation. As opposed to other forms of embodiment, language as a marker is deeply ingrained in identity politics. Language is a tool of empowerment to create solidarity, but it can also be divisive at international festivals where audience members who do not have access to the immediacy of the spoken language on stage might feel alienated or excluded.

Third, Shakespeare productions that tour to the United Kingdom reflect shifting locational terrains of performative meanings that—unlike nationalist imaginations of Shakespeare—do not always correspond to the performers’ and audiences’ cultural affiliations. The systemic mutations in the politics of cultural production and compression of time and space engender variegated, layered subject positions. Directors from Africa, Asia, and Latin America who tour their works to the U.K. often make revisions to accommodate the performance space and audiences of international festivals, dictated by the cultural prestige of the exporting nation. In contrast, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC)—occupying a more privileged position in the Shakespearean circle—does not usually localize its productions for the purpose of international tours (e.g., Loveday Ingram’s The Merchant of Venice, starring Ian Bartholomew, in Beijing and Shanghai, 2002).

“As Huge as High Olympus”
Organizers of the 2012 London Olympics and the Cultural Olympiad proclaimed Shakespeare, once again, the bearer of universal currency. Much more ambitious than the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2006 Complete Works festival, the 2012 Globe-to-Globe (part of World Shakespeare Festival) was an integral part of the Cultural Olympiad to celebrate the Olympics. The festival was presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the EIF, and the Globe to Globe program. Opened on 21 April, it brought theatre companies from many parts of the world to perform Shakespeare in their own languages (“37 plays in 37 languages”; Fig. 3) “in [the London] Globe, within the architecture Shakespeare wrote for.” In fact, thirty-eight Shakespearean plays were performed in languages ranging from Lithuanian to sign language. This is arguably one of the most important festivals since David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769 that jump-started the Shakespeare industry and tourism in Stratford-upon-Avon.

The World Shakespeare Festival, unlike the previous RSC Complete Works Festival, included almost exclusively non-English-language performances. The WSF also made an effort to cover Africa, the Americas, Russia, Asia, Europe, and New Zealand. In terms of geographical distribution during the WSF, European companies alone offered fifteen touring productions to the festival including British Sign Language performances. Asian companies offered eight productions (not counting the Maori Troilus and Cressida), African companies six, and Middle Eastern companies six. Groups from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and the US also brought productions to the WSF.

Both the Olympics and the Globe’s festival focused on participants from many nations and on brands in promotional efforts. The parallels between sports and performance have been explored in various studies. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht attributes the fascination with watching sports to a very literal sense of aesthetic experience, namely the nature of athletic beauty. J. P. Singh argues in Globalized Arts that “creative products” can be incorporated into local and global markets to address cultural discomfort and anxieties about globalization. Some visiting companies and audience members who spoke the languages the companies used in their productions saw the festival at the Globe as an opportunity to assert identity.

Both the Olympic Games and the Cultural Olympiad share a common goal of promoting mutual understanding among countries, but they also fuel nationalism in various guises. Despite the London Globe’s effort to market the international Shakespeare productions by focusing on the languages of the plays and the cities of origin of the companies rather than their countries (e.g., a Hebrew Merchant of Venice from Tel Aviv; The Comedy of Errors from Kabul), national flags appeared online and were brought onstage while enthusiastic crowds of expatriates cheered on. Similar to international sporting events, the multicultural celebration of languages inevitably fueled nationalist sentiments in various guises that ranged from political protests to celebration of independence.

For instance, a 12 × 4.5-inch image of a crowd waving flags of the Republic of South Sudan (est. 2011) adorns the Globe’s Web page advertising the South Sudan Theatre Company’s Cymbeline in Juba Arabic. At the curtain call of Dhaka Theatre’s Tempest at the Globe on 8 May 2012, one of the actors reappeared onstage wrapped in the Bangladeshi flag. The gesture connected an artistic achievement with national pride. More controversial were the street demonstration outside the Globe Theatre and calls to boycott the Israeli company Habima’s performance of The Merchant of Venice.

Boomerang Shakespeare Comes Home

Prominent in the marketing language of the World Shakespeare Festival (of which Globe to Globe was a part) was Viola’s aforementioned question in Twelfth Night, now made rhetorical: “What country, friends, is this?” appears with an image of a marooned ship on the WSF’s website to advertise the RSC’s “shipwreck trilogy” (The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest) and to serve as a tongue-in-cheek reaction to the deliciously confusing festival. The idea seems to be that if each country’s artists fully embody the essence of their culture, the audience would be able to tell which country it is at first blush.

The Q Brother’s ninety-minute hip hop Othello: The Remix was invited to represent the U.S. at the Globe. Set in modern-day U.S., the story about the reigning king of hip hop was acted and narrated by a cast of four men in jumpsuits, with a DJ up in the balcony. The production was among the first show to be sold out, and attracted a large number of young audiences.

There were moments in several productions when questions about cultural and geopolitical identities ceased to be rhetorical and became pressing in a productive way. The Belarus Free Theatre’s production of King Lear was refreshing and challenging, partly because few audience members were familiar with Belarus and its culture. The facetious performance treated the play as a comic folktale that spirals into tragedy. Lear wobbled onstage with a thatch of white hair atop his slender frame, only to throw off the wig and reveal his jovial self. The play did not seem to need a Fool. The division-of-the-kingdom scene was presented as something akin to a reality TV show involving a rival striptease among the daughters. It is a different story with other troupes.

One of the contributions of touring productions and theatrical contingency is that Viola’s question will be asked with increasing urgency and will prompt more reflections on cultural identities that have been taken for granted. “Shakespeare” is a canon that is supposedly familiar to educated English speakers, but it is increasingly alien to the younger generation. If the Belarusian Lear estranged Shakespeare in linguistic and artistic terms, the hip hop Othello made Shakespeare more familiar and relevant. Thus, the Globe to Globe seasons and other similarly structured festivals including Edinburgh International Festival and the Barbican International Theatre Events pitched Shakespeare as global celebrity against Shakespeare as national poet and created a new brand with contemporary currency and vitality.

What is left unarticulated, however, is how foreign Shakespeares have been deployed to validate and elevate the status of English Shakespeare performances, especially at a venue such as the London Globe.

Working with and against the Surtitles
Festival organizers have a curatorial function in bringing together and presenting works by diverse groups. During the World Shakespeare Festival in 2012, the Globe devised a strategy to divert attention away from the surtitles to the action onstage and applied it uniformly to all of the productions in different languages. The purpose was to remove language as a distraction, if not an obstacle, in order to allow for certain degree of improvisation. One obvious limitation is that the architectural space of the Globe is not ideal for line-by-line surtitles because of the pillars and the thrust stage. Only short summaries of the scene—written by the Globe staff in consultation with the visiting companies—were projected on the two screens next to the stage. According to Tom Bird, the synopsis surtitles were meant to avoid the elitism associated with line-by-line translations of Shakespearean texts. The plot summaries are based on Shakespeare’s script most of the time rather than performative choices or improvisational elements. Obviously no synopsis can be neutral whether it is based on narrative or dramaturgical structure, because it involves interpretive acts.

As the actors worked with and against the surtitles, the synopsis surtitles redirected the audience’s attention to the tension between the plot and dramaturgical structures. In the Mandarin Richard III, short English phrases were inserted by actors playing the two murderers for more immediate comic effect. In another production, the actors mocked the surtitles. The audiences were told not to trust what was being projected “up there.” Such moments of textual resistance became more noticeable through the synopsis surtitles.

Some touring or intercultural productions were seen as showcases for the exotic beauty of unfamiliar performance traditions for cultural elites. Targeting audiences who are bored by an overworked Shakespeare through the education system, these productions are not for purists. A few strands dominate in the narratives surrounding this type of productions, ranging from celebration of other cultures’ reverence of Shakespeare (e.g., the “Shakespeare Is German” season at the London Globe in 2010) to suspicion about delightful but bewildering (for the press at least) productions that are fully indigenized.

Sites of Origin and Cultural Prestige
In this second decade of the twenty-first century, touring foreign productions of Shakespeare have emerged as a new brand in Britain, competing side by side with British productions. Non-English interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays are not lesser versions of their English counterparts.

At the core of the touring phenomenon is the idea of returning to Britain as a geocultural site of origin (performing “within the architecture Shakespeare wrote for”), as an imaginary site of authenticity (e.g., the Shanghai Kunqu Opera’s adaptation of Macbeth, entitled The Story of the Bloody Hand, performed in Scotland in 1987), and as a privileged site for performative acts (both original practice and international Shakespeares are now the Globe’s main products).

It is interesting to note that the logo of the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival is the Earth seen from over the North Atlantic, showing Britain nearest the center of the world. This “return” is part of the organizing principle of some festivals, and the narrative surrounding it is informed by internationalism and (paradoxically) a form of nationalism. As part of the cultural festival to celebrate the 2012 London Olympics, the multilingual World Shakespeare Festival evoked such a “return.” According to festival director Tom Bird and the Globe’s artistic director, Dominic Dromgoole, the festival brought Shakespeare’s plays—“plays which have travelled far and wide”—“back home” to London’s South Bank, “dressed in the clothes of many peoples.”

Part of the touring boom is created by festivals, internationally renowned films, and visiting companies, and part of it is shaped by British directors who incorporate non-Western performance styles into their productions, such as Peter Brook and Tim Supple, or who work with artists from other parts of the world, such as David Tse, and thereby raise awareness of a broader range of performative possibilities among British audiences.

Many theatre artists rely on international spectators to disseminate their decidedly local works, and some festivals thrive on the ideological purchase of being “global.” Msomi’s 1970 adaptation of Macbeth may not have achieved international recognition without the 1972 production at Aldwych (as part of the RSC’s World Theatre Season) and the 1997 revival at the London Globe. U.K. tours are equally important for local companies. Thelma Holt Ltd.’s partnership with Ninagawa since 1990 has benefited both sides and made the Japanese director a mainstay on the English stage, and in 2004 Thelma Holt CBE received the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays and Rosette at the Embassy of Japan in the UK in recognition of her contribution to mutual understanding through theatre exchange.

Global Shakespeares have a deterritorializing effect, in the anthropological sense, that unmarks the cultural origins of intercultural productions because they work against assumptions about politically defined geographies in theatre historiography—artificial constraints that no longer speak to the realities of theatre making. Touring productions can also reterritorialize the plays upon arriving in a new location. In a world constantly in motion, representations of certain aspects of culture transcend territorial boundaries. These touring works can be best understood through theatrically defined cultural locations (e.g., a French–Japanese Richard II in Paris and on tour, a “culturally neutral” Richard III made in Beijing but presented in Berlin) rather than through political boundaries (e.g., when “Shakespeare in India” is used as unproductive shorthand for literary universalism). Simplified notions of the universal can be self-deceptive and even self-effacing.

Theatre can produce and redefine visible and invisible cultural localities. Performance history is currently driven by polity, by periodization, and by continental divisions, and as a result it inadvertently creates myths of multiple unknowable objects. Touring global Shakespeares can uncouple speech and writing and problematize various conventions of authenticity and the kind of dramaturgical stability that dulls the edge of theatre. They can unsettle assumptions about the referential stability of Shakespeare as a textual and verbal presence and about non-English performances as a privileged, unified, visual signifier of otherness.


Redacted without footnotes from Alexa Huang’s “'What Country, Friends, Is This?': Touring Shakespeares, Agency, and Efficacy in Theatre Historiography." Theatre Survey 54.1 (2013): 51-85.  Full text available at: http://web.mit.edu/acyhuang/www/Publications/HuangTS2013.pdf 

Distemporality: Richard III and That Whole Leicester Car Park Thing

by JONATHAN HSY

Caption: "Markers are laid out for excavation in Leicester, as two reenactment knights look on." [Press Association image; found HERE collated by HuffPo]

Disinternment and Discovery

Hello ITM readers. It has been a while since I've posted here! So, yeah, this is basically a chance for me as a medievalist to chime in and say something about this whole Richard III thing before the "moment" passes. Unless you've been hiding in a cave / under a rock / whatever these days, you've probably heard of the unearthing of what appears to be the DNA-confirmed body of the medieval English monarch Richard III (see HERE); this king is most commonly imagined (via Shakespeare and other sources) as an immoral, scheming villain with a hunchback. The curved spine of the body -- discovered buried underneath a car park (parking lot) -- seems to confirm the identification.

Recently I've been thinking a lot about how notions of temporality (especially as developed in premodern literary studies) can further engage with conversations in disability studies, and I'd actually like to take "this Richard III moment" to think not so much about the king himself but a little something I'd like to call "distemporality." In this image above (with many similar ones online and in other media), we see a partially staged photo op: historical reenactors in "medieval" armor look on as the car park excavation begins. As far as I know this term hasn't really entered the critical lexicon in any coherent way (this term pops up in scholarship only idiosyncratically, in a rather ad hoc fashion), but I would say that a certain "distemporality" characterizes these types of cultural moments quite well. In a different context, Rebecca Schneider (discussing historian reenactments of Vietnam War art) identifies certain forms of reenactment as "[m]oments of dis-temporality, of uncanniness, of error, or of a return to sense occur in pauses ... or tiny details of interruptive anachronisms as the 'now' folds and multiplies -- even for [Howard] Zinn's 'brief flash'" (186). [1] This quotidian "snapshot" above -- a flashpoint humorously depicting a "culture clash" between everyday modern life and re-created nostalgia-inflused past -- visually conveys the distemporality effected by the entire "event" of Richard III's disinterment.

Distemporality, as I am thinking through the idea, is not just about temporal disruption per se: I'd like to use this concept to rethink everyday assumptions about how we move through time itself. If we more deeply unpack a notion of distemporality, we could say this involves attending more carefully to the co-operation of many different modes of transit and forms of motion through time and/as space. If queer temporality so often suggests a fluid motion across time -- flowing circuits of desire, contact, cross-identification etc. -- what happens if we attend to the profoundly uneven mechanics of motion itself, and reflect more closely upon the participation of co-agents to enable co-mobilities across time and space?

If this is all sounding too obscure, let me try to unpack this a bit more: The Richard III discovery -- often sensationalized as a disruptive, "game changing" encounter with the past (A "mind-blowing" discovery! See the video HERE) -- is, in my own mind, enacting a deep distemporality. The translated (transported) decomposing remains of a medieval body found underneath a modern car park -- a collective space for vehicles in transit -- at one grounds an event in stationary space while also evincing the potential of future motion and a manifold history of prior travels: multiple modes of motion in and through one shared space.

In other words, the "discovering" (dis-covering) of Richard III's body is simultaneously material and metaphorical (rather than a completely conceptual recovery or uncovering). In another admittedly quite disparate context, Jasbir Puar -- engaging with the temporal "flash points" of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida's time out of joint -- also cites Nilüfer Göle in reference to September 11 as "an exemplary incident which, in one moment, allows different temporalities to emerge, and with them, a range of issues hitherto suppressed" (qtd. at xvii and xvi). [2] The disinterred medieval body marks a profound disruption, a "history-making" moment that the popular media reports as having the potential to revise broad master narratives: rethinking the shifting perceptions of the monarch over time, both demonizing and apologetic (flip through the gallery HERE); providing an alternate timeline for the Reformation (end of the article HERE); or what you will. On a more immediate level, the fact is that this body's disinterment radically reconfigures social relations and lived space. The dis-covered (revealed, uncovered) body in the car park has cascading effects, obliging drivers and commuters find alternative sites and modes of transit. Richard III now "spills over" into media, online and social (the Richard III Society is going bonkers about this on Facebook, and check out the endless "Richard III parking violation" memes e.g. here and here). And, on a very material level, the disinterred Richard III physically transforms the local landscape (Leicester is, among other things, building new Richard III attraction across from the car park itself).

Distemporality entails necessary disjunctions and material differences between modes of living, attending not so much to "time out of joint" but a profoundly disjointed materiality to time itself (the many "riffs" that Derrida enacts upon this idea are illuminative. Even with all the varied translations and explications he provides for this one Shakespearean line, the corporeal element of the "joint" remains occluded: he readily marks this "joint" as referring to a door but can also potentially suggest a body). [3]

Perhaps the "discovery" is not so much an uncovering or recovery but rather a strategy of covering-differently. Re-construction of Richard III's face superimposed upon the skull (HERE with gallery HERE) resembles quite a few familiar premodern portraits, yet his features have been strikingly domesticated: he appears attractive, young, and "rehabilitated."

It is my impression that media coverage loves "the car park" angle (it always comes up that he was discovered there!) because of the rhetorical and cognitive effect that very site creates: this sense of a collision, explosion, or "clash" between a mundane modern space and an extraordinary medieval body -- and an unexpected sensational contact between times. But it's not that the modern space just gives us new (or renewed) access to the materiality of the past; this dismodern body actively reconfigures modern materiality as well.

Getting closer? Richard III excavation in major news coverage (articles HERE and HERE)

Accessing Richard III

I've had discussions with medievalists who have said that this whole "Richard III thing" -- especially the whole obsession with the car park discovery, excavation, and transformative sense of history -- resonates with a Middle English text known as St. Erkenwald: in this text, construction work on the "New Werke" in the "metropol" and "mayster-town" of London unearths the tomb of a pagan judge, and much solemnity occurs. Karl (see HERE) has already written in rich and nuanced ways about this poem as a narrative that (among other things) features discovered body from a prior age that radically reconfigures time and community. If I had the time/energy, I would say more about this too -- but in this discussion I'd like to pivot the question of how we move through time to access Richard III himself.

As I see the media coverage of this story, I must admit that something that irks me -- identifying as a medievalist here -- and it's the tendency for Richard III to be referenced as one of "Shakespeare's" kings. (You can take practically any article about the Richard III hullaballoo and find it a challenge not find some reference to Shakespeare in it somewhere!) Due the imaginative power the Bard holds in the popular imagination, there's a palpable sense that this late medieval monarch is always/already filtered through an formative early modern representational lens -- and so much of the discussion about accessing the "real" Richard III effectively "digs itself out" from underneath layers and layers of Shakespearean mediation. In all the talk about "rehabilitating" Richard III (with all its uncomfortable implications for his alleged deformity and the social meanings attached to his forms of somatic difference), we can't access a truly "medieval" Richard III  -- even if we have the body. [4] Our access to Richard III (always-already) acknowledges -- in dutiful, obligatory, perhaps even perfunctory ways -- the disruptive and intervening presence of the influential Shakespearean manifestation.

Some performances of Shakespeare's "Richard III." Only relatively recently has this role been inhabited by disabled actors and/or actors using prosthetic devices. Clockwise from left: Antony Sher (RSC, 1984); Kevin Spacey (Old Vic, London, 2011); Henry Holden (Spoon Theater, New York, 2007).

Transtemporal Embodiment

The discovery of Richard III's body and "what it all means" will continue for some time. Just to end, I'd like to briefly consider the implications this has for reorienting how we think about Shakespeare's "Richard III" and its the very material consequences that the king's body might have for disability and performance. Scholarship about Shakespeare's Richard III that engages with disability studies is becoming increasingly common. Katherine Schaap Williams, for instance, offers a very engaging first gambit (available HERE for everyone at Disability Studies Quarterly, an open access journal). [5] She offers astute readings of crucial passages in the play that refer to the maligned king's deformity and remarkable modes of embodiment, all the while, "with deliberate anachronism," adapting Lennard Davis' notion of the "dismodern subject" (which Davis developed within a 19th-century historical context). But to approaching the Shakespearean work as a performative bridge between performance and disability studies, we could say that this play -- no matter who inhabits the role -- will always feature multiple temporalities at play in single body: the present performance, early modern language, medieval king -- and we can pay more attention to how these temporalities collide or co-inhabit shared space. In performance, temporalities move unevenly and via disparate means. In these images above, we gain some hint of how performances can mobilize quirky, discordant assemblages of temporally-marked signs concurrently -- including a conspicuous clash between the use of "period" costume with disruptively anachronistic prosthetics like modern crutches or futuristic technologies.

Rather than a queer "touch" across time, the dis-covery of Richard III's body helps us attend to how temporalities move (slide, bounce, connect, and shuffle): we can think about how they not only engage in modes of rearrangement but also jostle together and collaborate in an unpredictable dance. To adapt Puar from a different context, we can think in terms of "spatial, temporal, and corporeal convergences, implosions, and rearrangements" (205), inhabiting a world in which temporalities "interpenetrate, swirl together, and transmit affects and effects to each other" (205). [6] Times, in other words, are anything but static: they enact co-movements that register as awkward, intimate, explosive, beautiful, or all of the above.

[1] Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York: Routledge, 2011.
[2] Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
[3] "A disjointed or disadjusted now, 'out of joint,' a disjointed now that always risks maintaining nothing together in the assured conjunction of some context whose border would still be determinable" (1). Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuff. Routledge, 1996 (orig. publ. Spectres de Marx, Editions Gailée, 1993); door hinge reading on p. 20.
[4] (And depending on how much faith you place in DNA analysis, there could still be an "if"...)
[5] Katherine Schaap Williams, "Enabling Richard: The Rhetoric of Disability in Richard III." Disability Studies Quarterly 29, 4 (2009); full text HERE.
[6] I deliberately adapt the original quotation here. Puar refers to "representational economies, within which bodies [my emphasis] interpenetrate, swirl together, and transmit affects and effects to one another" (205).

Storied Matter

sunrise, Apollo Bay 2011

by J J Cohen

Though I haven't had the chance to speak very much about some of these projects on this blog yet, I've found myself in a happy and prolonged collaboration with two ecotheorists who conduct most of their research and writing together, Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann. When Prismatic Ecology comes out this fall from University of Minnesota Press, you will see that it concludes with a stunning "Onward" that they co-composed.

Recently they asked me to write a foreword for their forthcoming collection, Material Ecocriticism. The book is great, with essays by Stacy Alaimo, Timothy Morton, Simon Estok, Jane Bennett, Cheryl Glotfelty, and many others. It's intimidating to introduce such a book. Here's my draft, though. Thanks to discussions with the amazing EBOV participants, who allowed me to examine my own amphibious preoccupations in seminar last week, it ends up being about modern and medieval toads.

Let me know what you think.


Foreword: Storied Matter

Mel Y. Chen begins Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect with a story of toads.[1] Chen’s book is a penetrating examination of how our sortings of the environment into hierarchies of life ignore the hybridity, movement, slipperiness and vitality of what gets subordinated to the (white, male, able bodied) category of human. Through a series of “reworldings” she demonstrates that a “fierce sensitivity” to mundane but strange affinities (the love of a writer for a couch, of a word for semantic glide, of a metal for biological intimacy) can disrupt the scale of being and thereby interrogate the politics that accompany its maintenance. To find some tailless brown amphibians at the commencement of this study bringing together disability studies, queer of color scholarship, linguistics, critical race and affect studies is a little surprising. The majority of the spaces Chen roams in the book are anthropocentric – so that, for example, the queer animals she analyzes are mainly art installations, pets, and racialized or costumed humans. Yet Animacies begins with toads, its only non-mammalian animals and the very first things named in the acknowledgements. 

Chen writes that to the presence of toads belongs the book’s “ideational and affective matter,” since their tangible presence in the landscape of her childhood was formative to her own worldedness. Animacies commences: 

I begin with heartfelt thanks to the toads: literally grubby and ponderous yet lightning fast … Toads infused my lifelong experience with their peculiar, but resolute, grace, with a style of creatureliness that I could and could not occupy. And though they were only sporadically visibly, I could be certain a toad was somewhere nearby. (vii) 

A story that begins in gratitude and admiration turns towards elegy when Chen observes that frogs and toads are vanishing from the world, victims of a lethal fungus fostered and then distributed globally through the laboratory use, commercial trade and domestic keeping of aquatic frogs. The fungus entered various ecosystems with the release of the frogs into new habitats as well as when herpetologists carried the deadly agent into the field as they conducted their studies. Backyards everywhere may in the future harbor few amphibians. Though the presence of toads during her Illinois youth is important, it is the “style of their disappearance” that becomes the actual spur to the subject of Chen’s book, with its emphasis upon toxicity, unexpected animacy, and “retrospective temporalities and affects” (vii). A perilous leakage between human space and animal place demonstrates the limits of an imagined segregation, as well as the “transbiology” of many laboratory-bred amphibians.[2]

Among its many other achievements Animacies contributes to the critical movements sorted into rubrics like the “new materialisms,” “material feminisms,” and “vibrant materialism.”[3] Its thanked but vanishing toads open up the possibility of traversing an intimately related road, that of what Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann label a new “material ecocriticism.”[4] The extinction of these amphibians is not inevitable. The toxic meshwork formed by a fungus, Xenopus frogs, laboratories, various humans, and systems of global exchange has materialized certain catastrophic effects, but mourning those results will not alter the future for backyard toads. Material ecocriticism urges us to contemplate

matter’s “narrative” power of creating configurations of meanings and substances, which enter with human lives into a field of co-emerging interactions … matter itself becomes a text where dynamics of “diffuse” agency and non-linear causality are inscribed and produced. (Iovino and Oppermann, “Material Ecocriticism” 79-80)[5]

Mere matter becomes in Iovino and Oppermann’s beautiful account “a site of narrativity, a storied matter, a corporeal palimpsest in which stories are inscribed” (“Theorizing Material Ecocriticism” 451). Material ecocriticism is, in other words, a story-laden mode of re-enchantment.[6] It demands a material ethics, an ethics of entanglement and wonder. Matter and its dynamic, diffusive meshworks generate some strange stories, demanding participations that move co-composers beyond the certainties of closure.

With what tales might toads burgeon, other than the tragic, familiar and general narrative of species decline at anthropogenic environmental change that they bear along with thousands of other plants, animals and substances? Can we imagine these amphibians as possessing a future, one in which we are perilously co-implicated, companions rather than elegists for the disappeared?[7] Might toads possess a unique materiality, an agency, and even an inscrutability that demands that their story not be a human one, not be a familiar one, not be a text that we write without their futural agency, a text that might confine them in a past where they might remain “hunched and still … in their cold hibernations” (Animacies vii)? We live in catastrophe’s widening wake, but that doesn’t mean that we will not from time to time be surprised when what we thought was dead stone darts to sudden life. As Chen has eloquently argued, a post-toxic landscape, an environment full of bodies invaded by foreign agents, is also replete with “queer productivity.” It’s a dangerous space, but we have already arrived. If we convince ourselves of inhabiting a historical cul-de-sac, the Anthropocene of our sinfulness that arrives as merited reward, then we should also recognize that anthropocentric resignation to foregone calamity is far less demanding than embracing the ethics of relationality that actually bind us to living creatures like toads and fungi as well as to inorganic compounds like toxins. Despair is easy. Composing with hope requires work.

As I read Mel Y. Chen’s acknowledgement of her wondrously catalytic toads I was reminded of an amphibian discovered in the north of England more than eight hundred years ago. Encased in the geological, blurring the lines between living and inanimate, beautiful and lethal, nature and culture, the sudden advent of this medieval toad is queer. Writing just before the year 1200, the historian William of Newburgh provides the contemporary account. An attractive stone that some unknown artist seems to have created by conjoining two lithic pieces is cracked open to reveal a living creature at its center. Workers in a quarry are excavating building materials when they discover the perplexing object:

There was found a beautiful double stone, that is, a stone composed of two stones, joined with some very adhesive matter. Being shown by the wondering workmen to the bishop, who was at hand, it was ordered to be split, that its mystery (if any) might be developed. In the cavity, a little animal called a toad, having a small gold chain around its neck, was discovered. When the bystanders were lost in amazement at such an unusual occurrence, the bishop ordered the stone to be closed again, thrown into the quarry, and covered up with rubbish forever.[8] 

William narrates the story because its inexplicability haunts him. He does not know what to make of an animal emerging from a rock to announce its strange intimacy to human worlds. The stone-toad-chain ensemble seem to exist beyond the dualisms employed to order the world. The gold around the creature’s neck is precious, lovely, a symbol of both artistry and humane care (the word used is cathenula, the Latin term for a pet’s leash). The toad itself is natural, startling, vivacious and toxic (toads were held to be venomous creatures in the Middle Ages). The conjoined rock is a cementing together of the disparate into a beautiful if incongruous whole, a union of geology and art. No totality emerges from the discovery. William cannot render the episode an allegory for something else. The stone-toad-chain mesh is parabolic in a double sense: it demands story, and it curves epistemologies into new orbits, warps knowing into swift but novel coursings. 

The excavated and opened objects have an undeniable materiality, a heft. They also possess agency, causing the quarrymen to become lost in astonishment, lost in the realization that world is more mysterious than they had ever imagined: enlivened by stories that meld the human and the inhuman, stories that are fragments seeking greater connection. Perhaps that is why the bishop reassembles the stone (but how?) and consigns the toad and its golden chain to the earth’s depths, the rubbish heap of history (a fertile place, in the end: the toad surely must be waiting there still, awaiting rediscovery). 

Despite the episcopal command the work of the toad was set inevitably into motion. The laborers at the quarry were already enraptured by amphibious wonder. William of Newburgh is infected by the same wonder, an astonishment irreducible to a moral. Ever since I read the passage, I have wondered at its lithic toad, at its hold on me, how it makes me dream of childhood toads uncovered in their winter stillness while digging in my family’s yard, creatures and their earth suspended between life and death, full of agency all the same. I remember a toad in my hand as I write these words, its heft and its chill, and realize that the toad-rock-chain is a material manifestation of a storied world that is more than I can ever hold or know. Toads are humbling. 

Inspired by this collection of essays that plumb the beauty, the agency, the danger, and the complicated multiplicity within material ecocriticism, I pass along that wonder – and that rock that is a work of art, and that gold chain that is a work of love, and that beautiful toxic amphibian -- along to you.

* * *
Notes

I thank Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann for their invitation, their inspiration, and their companionship.

[1] Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2102).

[2] “Transbiology” is the term minted by Sarah Franklin to describe the “redesign” of the biological within the contemporary biosciences. See “The Cyborg Embryo: Our Path to Transbiology,” Theory, Culture and Society 23 (2006): 167-87 and Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

[3] The literature on these subjects is vast, as the essays that follow in this collection make clear, but for a start see Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Serenella Iovino, “Steps to a Material Ecocriticism: The Recent Literature About the ‘New Materialisms’ and Its Implications for Ecocritical Theory,” Ecozon@ 3 (2102): 134-45.

[4] In addition to this collection, see Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, “Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency, and Models of Narrativity.” Ecozon@ 3 (2012): 75-91, and “Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A Diptych,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 19 (2012): 448-75. In deep sympathy with Iovino and Oppermann’s project is the ecocritical work with which I have recently been engaged, such as the edited collection Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and, with Lowell Duckert, the special issue of the journal postmedieval on Ecomaterialism (volume 4, 2013).

[5] Iovino and Oppermann go on to argue that “Taking matter ‘as a text’” demands a widening of what text means, a “questioning the very idea of text”: “The text, for material ecocriticism, encompasses both human material-discursive constructions and nonhuman things: water, soil, stones, metals, minerals, bacteria, toxins, food, electricity, cells, atoms, all cultural objects and places” (83).

[6] “Its intention to ‘re-enchant’ reality, claiming that all material entities, even atoms and subatomic particles have some degree of sentient experience and that all living things have agency of their own, is essential in the making of the new materialist approaches” (“Material Ecocriticism” 78).

[7] I take the term “co-implicated” as a term for environmental entanglement and composition from Lowell Duckert. “Speaking Stones, John Muir, and a Slower (Non)Humanities,” in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2012) 273-279.

[8] William of Newburgh, The History of English Affairs, Book 1, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh and M. J. Kennedy (Wilthsire: Aris and Phillips, 1988) 1.28. I am grateful to the students in my graduate seminar “Environ Body Object Veer” at the George Washington University (2013) for talking through the apposition of Mel Y. Chen and William of Newburgh’s toads with me.

Blogging and Social Media: My GW DH Talk

by J J Cohen

The two day fiesta of digitizing, annotating, tweeting, performing, theorizing, practicing, envisioning, developing, collaborating, skyping, interrogating and hobnobbing that was the GW Digital Humanities Symposium has come to its end (some background also here). So many good things need to be said about the event -- and fortunately most of them have were said as the conference unfolded via Twitter. But for the record, one more time: I am so in awe of my colleague Alexa Huang, who gathered the funding from many sources to make the symposium happen and did much of its behind the scenes work (intellectual and otherwise); my colleagues Jonathan Hsy and Daniel DeWispelare, who planned and executed the conference with Alexa so flawlessly; and Em Russel, a GW graduate student who ensured the whole thing ran beautifully, with all the labor that entails. All four of them are visionaries and I'm very proud to work with them.

For a small-ish conference, the symposium had a fairly extensive Twitter and Facebook presence, as we had hoped. We ran into some bumps, though, and Ryan Cordell's post on the matter should be required reading for anyone interested in social media and community (if you are reading this blog, that includes you!). His Principles of Conference Tweeting apply just as much, I think, to blogs, Facebook and other forums.

When I delivered my own talk I had the livestream of the Twitter feed projected around me and encouraged the audience (as well as anyone listening in remotely) to tweet reactions to what they were hearing. I knew that I was risking being tweet bombed, but that didn't bother me. Though I knew it would be distracting to have the feed scrolling along as I spoke, my hope was that this larger than life broadcasting would achieve three important things: make those in the audience not on Twitter (the majority of those in attendance) realize that they were missing some discussions that add depth and fun to the symposium; stress that social media forms communities that can be ephemeral but that are also powerful modes of conducting scholarship and partially archiving that work as well; and emphasize for those who were tweeting the proceedings that our community is not gated, but part of a larger public whose participation is often invisible but still counts.

My presentation is below. As usual I ended up ad libbing and this isn't exactly what I said, but it's close. Let me know what you think.

---

Presenting on blogging to a crowd like this one makes me feel like I’ve been released for the afternoon from the assisted living center to speak about how life changed when they switched my stories from radio format to picture versions. Blogs are old news, so 2005: an unremarkable part of the scholarly landscape rather than the innovative digital forum they once were.

Maybe. But perhaps, now that blogs have been assimilated into our habitual critical practice, it’s worth pausing to make a few observations about their achievements, current status and future promise. Warning: much of what I say in the short time allotted to me will be common sensical and based on personal experience. That’s why I’m hoping we can have a vigorous discussion when my fellow presenters and I conclude.

I have been blogging since January 2006, when I founded the site that became the group blog In the Middle. Back in that ancient past, humanities blogs were not a novelty, but they did seem to populate a frontier. It was a time of invention, and agonizing over the professional status of such modes of scholarly endeavor. (A large portion of this “agonizing,” I want to stress, was on the part of non-bloggers, exhibiting thinly disguised assertion of privilege, as well as worry over the fact that blogs give to the academic precariat a strong voice.) My inspiration came from reading many blogs -- but the ones that stand out were those of four female medievalists, all at a risky stage in their career when they started, all with a feminist bent, all demonstrating in their writing a generosity of spirit, an inventiveness and a playfulness.

 Of course, not every blogger espouses such a companionable ethos. Writers in various internet forums, moreover, have sometimes transported into a new arena a business as usual mode of academic praxis, sometimes with an eye towards policing those who challenge the styles of legacy scholarship. This criticism is usually disseminated under the guise of keeping the Academy precise, worthy, superlative – but such adjectives tend to be code for scholarship practiced in a way consonant with orthodox training and a love of one’s own authority. If in 2013 you do not realize why open access publication is essential; why the current for-profit journal and book publication model is broken, and especially poisonous to the young in the field; why digital modes of conducting, creating and disseminating work are the most future-oriented; and why we need always to think scholarship as a communal endeavor that challenges at every point the walls of a university system that -- demonstrating neither heart nor brain -- exploits adjunct labor and excludes some of our very best intellectuals from full access to its resources and from its ability to enable collective thriving – well, if you don’t realize these things, open your eyes, read a little, or maybe retire.

But, blogs. “In the Middle” did not start auspiciously. Despite my interest in the liveliness of blogs, I instigated mine as if it were an updatable but static webpage: a single-author, professionally focused way to provide information published conventionally elsewhere. Sometimes these early posts were pre-prints, and sometimes they were a bare form of open access, enabling material locked on library shelves to roam the internet. The first post I published was a cut and paste piece on “Race” written for the supplement to the Dictionary of the Middle Ages. I’m certain many more people have read the entry on the web than have glanced at its printed version, incarcerated in a volume that weighs ten pounds and costs $200 used. Next came encyclopedia entries for “Postcolonial Theory” and “Erotic Animals” (the latter is among most popular posts ever at In the Middle; I can only imagine the disappointment of those who arrive at the “Erotic Animals” page and find a scholarly analysis instead of whatever they thought those terms would yield through Google). A draft of the introduction to my book Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain joined them. Something extraordinary happened at this point: the blog’s first comments.

Submitted by an anonymous reader, comment number one stated simply “I disagree.” Fifteen more followed. Several were silly, speculating what the musical based upon the book might be entitled, or the possibilities of a pop-up version of Beowulf featuring a Grendel who loses his arm, with real ripping action. Other comments were serious, especially those by my eventual co-blogger Karl Steel, who pushed me to think about some assertions I’d made rather glibly. I threw myself into the discussion, and the blog’s infancy was cut remarkably short. A conversation unfolded, and it became clear to me that community-building and knowledge dissemination had to be unified endeavors. Eileen Joy and Mary Kate Hurley were early members of the commenting community. I invited them to be guest bloggers and then co-bloggers. My GW colleague Jonathan Hsy joined as a blogger last year. Together we cover a diversity of academic life stages, from senior faculty to the precariat.

Seven years later, In the Middle has obtained a substantial, dedicated readership. The blog has also become extensively networked. We’ve integrated with a fan page on Facebook (740 likes) that distributes links to blog posts and some unique content as well. Each of the five bloggers generally share the blog posts with their own Facebook friends, forming a web of cross-commentary. All five of us are to varying degrees active on Twitter, where we will typically link to the blog and catalyze discussion about material related to its ambit. In the Middle is also by association and through use essential to several communal projects and organizations: the BABEL Working Group, the GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Group, the open access press punctum books, the journal postmedieval. To give a recent example, two ongoing discussions at In the Middle became conference sessions sponsored by BABEL and MEMSI. The presentations will soon become essays in an edited collection jointly published by punctum books and Oliphaunt, the open access publishing arm of MEMSI. These partnerships are mutually sustaining, and atypical of the scholarly landscape of even a few years ago.

I’d really like to emphasize this networked modality: no vibrant blog exists by itself but stretches across multiple sites, Twitter, Facebook, live events like conferences and symposia, open access and traditional publishing, and (to various degrees, depending on the topic), email discussion lists, YouTube, Pinterest, Flickr, Academia.edu, MLA Commons, and so on. And you know, you could substitute “vibrant intellectual presence” for “blog” in what I just said and get at the mission of the scholar in the post-digital humanities. I truly believe that part of our calling is to create as many publics as possible. If the humanities are important enough for us to dedicate our lives to their study, then we need to share our work, our play, and our wit in proliferating contexts. The days of locking research in an expensive book in a members-only library should be part of the scholarly past.

Different audiences interact with “In the Middle” within each forum, with Facebook and Twitter often generating more discussion than the blog site. The downside to this relocation of the commentariat, especially into the ineptly gated community of Facebook and away from a more accessible space is that much of the conversation unfolds literally among friends. The vast majority of blog readers do so in silence, a non-interactive consumption that I do not understand but that characterizes how most users approach social media. That’s fine: I realize that seemingly nonparticipating readers do in fact interact with what is published through the blog and with the discussions that unfold across its networks. It’s just that these interactions are largely invisible because their effects include impacts on thinking and relocation of some of the material to more traditional scholarly settings like essays published in journals and books. I know that this mode of participation proceeds because I often receive appreciative emails telling me so, and occasionally read citations of blog discussions in print. Everyone participates differently. Social media is, shall we say, differently social for many of its participants than for the loquacious minority who propel it.

I began my talk with the “blogging is dead” topos: I repeated it because the form does seem to have lost any radical edge it once possessed -- partly through assimilation, partly through mainstream acceptance, and partly through social media diffusiveness. I devote a great deal of time to the study of monsters, though, and I can tell you with confidence that nothing has really begun to live until after it is declared dead. Blogs continue to perform important work, even if much of what they achieve doesn’t get noticed or discoursed about as back in the days of their novelty. Let me put this another way: blogs continue quietly to reconfigure the academic landscape, sometimes in ways so profound that the restructuring isn’t apparent until after its accomplishment. This potential has been demonstrated, for example, over the past few years by the philosophical approach to materialism that goes by the names of speculative realism and object oriented ontology. In an infamous interview the philosopher Ray Brassier declared of the movement:

The ‘speculative realist movement’ exists only in the imaginations of a group of bloggers ... I don’t believe the internet is an appropriate medium for serious philosophical debate; nor do I believe it is acceptable to try to concoct a philosophical movement online by using blogs to exploit the misguided enthusiasm of impressionable graduate students … I see little philosophical merit in a ‘movement’ whose most signal achievement thus far is to have generated an online orgy of stupidity.

Several points deserve remark here. First, everything Brassier says is wrong. Serious philosophical debate flourished across a constellation of blogs during speculative realism’s genesis. By the time Brassier gave this interview in 2011, the crossover from blogs to multiple modes of dissemination had taken place. Now, much publishing on the topic happens through mainly open access presses, but not before the hashing out of ideas on blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Though controversial, object oriented philosophy has already had a profound impact upon disciplines as diverse as art, architecture, medieval studies, computer programming, game theory, literary criticism, and ecotheory. Many of its elaborators lack (or once lacked) the pulpit of a prestige university and venerable university press. Without blogs the movement could not have burgeoned into such life.

I also want to point out the slide that Brassier makes from blogs to easily exploited and “impressionable” members of the profession. It’s almost as if Dr. Fredric Wertham has returned, only he isn’t attacking 1950s comic books; this time the seduction of the innocent involves misguidedly enthusiastic graduate students. Brassier’s pronouncement manifests a disdain for the young in the field that I find repugnant. The problem is not that graduate students are too impressionable or too enthusiastic; it’s that they tend to be more cognitively flexible than their mentors, and when they see an intellectual project worth pursuing, they will pursue it with energy, rigor, and creativity. The access to ideas that blogs grant enable that pursuit to occur and increase – and that is why the audience and authorship of blogs often skews towards the young in the field and those without secure place in the academy. (I don’t want to get too utopian; as blogger Mary Beard has recently made clear, blogs can also organize micro-communities that foster the most rancid hatred and misogyny – though they can also be called out publicly for that fact, as she has done. I’ve had to cope with a blog stalker whose animus was not confined to virtual spaces).

Academia loves its hierarchies. The humanities are an overburdened, underpaid, and sometimes unpleasant field of scholarly endeavor. Anything anyone can do to make the discipline less inhospitable, less rigid, and more congenial ought to be done. I never understand the tendency to haze, bully, and intimidate those young in the field and other members of the precariat, or why those with tenure track jobs can speak of “the adjunct problem” as if adjuncts were the problem, rather than adjunctification itself. Embracing a nonhierarchical and wall breaching nomadism assisted by social media’s tools may help to make scholarship more gregarious, less solitary, less cold – and strengthen the friendships among those within the university, those who have forged careers within alternative academic modes, and those who are building a future of increasing importance, the para-academy. Social media is the means by which we can collaborate on what we will do together next.