tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-56292473416198410372024-03-21T09:01:23.925-07:00Bacchanal in the LibraryAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.comBlogger42125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-48588569075009908262015-06-08T10:19:00.000-07:002015-06-08T10:19:33.042-07:00Caverns of the Inhuman<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhygG3-l3e0mdKBY7d12VU8vzqB8QgAihGCb0D0LXi04Rom3R3ti6OsSWan4IV5FQtA8gexMX2b6QLU2Csv5Xcws3vvCRfo3Y-sKCj6qyVvTvtktrczVl4zq5nXCDo4GYm0ywI9WGGCsawv/s1600/11412263_10153415379561171_6648132940978922591_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhygG3-l3e0mdKBY7d12VU8vzqB8QgAihGCb0D0LXi04Rom3R3ti6OsSWan4IV5FQtA8gexMX2b6QLU2Csv5Xcws3vvCRfo3Y-sKCj6qyVvTvtktrczVl4zq5nXCDo4GYm0ywI9WGGCsawv/s320/11412263_10153415379561171_6648132940978922591_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
I just returned from a week in Geneva, Switzerland, where I presented at the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/approachingposthumanismconference">"Approaching Posthumanism and the Posthuman"</a> conference at the University of Geneva. It was my first time overseas, and the experience was utterly remarkable. Geneva is a smallish city, to be sure, but rich in culture, Reformation-era history, and green-space, both manicured and wild. To be honest, I spent the majority of my time surrounded by the flora and fauna of the region, in part because I was curious about this land's biodiversity, and in part because, having traveled alone and unable to speak French, it was easiest to most enjoy my time around the kinds of life that did not demand my fluency within a particular system of human language. At the <a href="http://www.ville-ge.ch/cjb/"> Jardin Botanique</a> I reveled in the recreation of the stony topography decorated by the mosses, ferns and wildflowers of the Alps, and meditated beneath the largest and oldest oak tree I have ever witnessed (it's possible that two leaves of this tree came home with me, pressed between the pages of Cary Wolfe's "What is Posthumanism?"). I took a cable car to the top of <a href="http://www.myswitzerland.com/en-us/mount-saleve.html">Mont-Salève</a>, also known as the "Balcony of Geneva," where I captured the most stunning views of the city and its Jet d'Eau from outside a Tibetan Monastery at the peak (and met a most curious and colorful slug). I toured the immense <a href="http://www.site-archeologique.ch/contenu.php?id-node=2&lng=en">archaeological dig</a> beneath the <a href="http://www.saintpierre-geneve.ch/">Saint Pierre Cathedral</a>, learning that the first iteration of this temple was a prehistoric pagan burial mound (the headless skeleton of this unknown figure still preserved and on view), and climbed the towers for another remarkable view of the city, although from such heights I suffered a bit of vertigo and feared I would not make it back down the narrow spiral staircases. I also explored a number of parks, rode the water taxi (free for visitors of Geneva, as with all local public transportation), and dined at the city's first strictly vegan restaurant.<br />
<br />
The conference itself was a huge success, and its organizers, Deborah Madsen, Manuela Rossini, Kimberly Frohreich and Bryn Skibo-Birney, should be congratulated. The keynotes I was able to attend were stimulating, and left much to be digested long after their hour-long performances. I did take ill Friday and Saturday, and missed many of the actual panels, as well as the workshops, but I will say that my own panel generated fantastic queries and conversations during the Q&A, and I know that the rest of the conference was as flush with vibrant and challenging conversation. In order that the conversation need not end even if the conference itself has come to a close, I want to post here the content of my talk; this material is a first-step towards my dissertation project as well, so any additional questions or feedback are quite welcome. This will be an exceptionally long blog-post, so I appreciate your patience and willingness to spend some time with this investigation of the Premodern, cave-dwelling, Posthuman below:<br />
<br />
<br />
<b><span style="color: #e69138;">Caverns of the Inhuman: Porous Bodies and Posthuman Subjects in Pre-modern Literary Representations of Caves</span></b><br />
<b><br /></b>The sixth-century <i>Etymologies </i>of Isidore of Seville was the first and most enduring encyclopedia of the Middle Ages; within this great work, Isodore attempted to preserve classical knowledge by presuming that the truth of the natural world could be found by tracing words to their Greek and Latin roots. At first glance, the Etymologies provide a fairly unsurprising definition of a cave; Isidore tells us that the cave, or <i>specus</i>, is a “subterranean rift from which it is possible to ‘look out’” from the Latin term <i>prospicere</i> (1). Here Isidore makes sense of the world according to assumptions that we would today associate with humanist ideologies: he presumes a human subject that makes sense of the objective world somehow outside of itself, a human subject that comes to empirical knowledge through the privileging of visual information; truth is available to the human eye. The cave becomes the very platform for gazing upon the natural world, the place where we stand and <i>prospicemus</i>, the site which marks our privileged position at the pinnacle of the great chain of being. It is from such a definition of a cave that the human subject emerges, this definition produces the idea of the unique subjective experience of the human, and yet the cave itself seems to disappear from this very attempt to make sense of it by means of that technological apparatus we so often presume offers us direct access to our environment: language.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY8xiB9mivjL6Ssfp-KqqNafdro5cMN_alX-X2Y79kgertf7syCOf0nYhcRV2-lrzxFSG6qNEog5GrFig96BMiyfaX5vJck6PZM5O_hZvuVJ7FOK27pMHIeQEMYil8SpHZSr2B7LHo3aeY/s1600/Reflecting_cavern_lake.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY8xiB9mivjL6Ssfp-KqqNafdro5cMN_alX-X2Y79kgertf7syCOf0nYhcRV2-lrzxFSG6qNEog5GrFig96BMiyfaX5vJck6PZM5O_hZvuVJ7FOK27pMHIeQEMYil8SpHZSr2B7LHo3aeY/s320/Reflecting_cavern_lake.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
Fortunately, Isidore continues to define the cave, next exploring the term “cleft” or “hiatus.” Isidore argues the hiatus is a “deep break of the earth, as if the term were ‘a departure’” from the participial form of the Latin verb “ire,” the verb of motion (2). Here, then, and almost ironically, the cave is defined by its mobility, its activity, how it performs its own being-in-the-world. A cavern in the earth is no longer just a platform for human observation but is itself an actor in the world, a subject, in the grammatical sense, which can take an active verb. The definition gets more surprising: “Properly speaking, however,” and here I am quoting Isidore once more, “hiatus is the opening of the mouth of a human being, with the sense transferred from wild beasts, whose eagerness for something is shown through the opening of the mouth.” The cave, then, is a sort of affinity, a similitude that can be traced throughout the natural world, a feature that cuts across the animal/vegetable/mineral divides even as it attends to the differences between earth and human and “wild beasts.” Yet it is also an eagerness, a desire, a hunger, and appetite, or the gesture of the appetite, an outward sign of an internal condition, a craving shared by all matter as well as the mark within a semiotic system that suggests hunger. It is the openness towards the radically ahuman technology of communication, an openness shared here by organic and inorganic alike. This definition of the cave, then, which locates a hunger in various iterations of matter without privileging the sensory experience of the human, disseminates subjectivity widely throughout the non-human world while still attending to what Carey Wolfe would call the “specific materiality and multiplicity of the subject” (3).<br />
<br />
What is it, then, about the cave that both produces and resists certain definitions of the human? Or, instead of believing that we can arrive at such an answer, or that an answer would offer us some sort of truth or certainty about the world, let’s follow Isidore’s lead and move across a number of caves, enter into three premodern representations of caves that challenge the kind of binaristic thinking and belief in human exceptionalism that inform Humanistic attempts to order the natural world. And as we transverse these subterranean spaces, let us think about what kinds of Posthuman subjectivities emerge when we take seriously the activity and agency of environ.<br />
<br />
Let us begin, then, or continue, by thinking with that most famous of historical representations of the cave: Plato’s allegory. A brief refresher of the content of this story: human figures, immobilized by chains and staring only at a wall inside a dark cave, see shadows of themselves created by a fire behind them, as well as shadows cast by puppeteers behind a wall. One prisoner becomes free, and eventually comes to “see” the real world in the light of the sun, recognizing the shadows were only illusions and that there is a greater truth to reality that is separate from its material manifestations, a truth humans can access by means of proper education.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3tEWkTXZy_h8DA5SemW-y2ar7WOHWBuwGzypeJl8fp-QRh0BTvxot9whMn-g2j7_DAPwt3gRf0YBzCceCw0tfsYYv04n8hlkkOy48aJlLGVF6lhD5BpIvErKo5YVQrlmPyygWHDof7zRf/s1600/plato-cave.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="177" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3tEWkTXZy_h8DA5SemW-y2ar7WOHWBuwGzypeJl8fp-QRh0BTvxot9whMn-g2j7_DAPwt3gRf0YBzCceCw0tfsYYv04n8hlkkOy48aJlLGVF6lhD5BpIvErKo5YVQrlmPyygWHDof7zRf/s320/plato-cave.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
Thus, Plato’s cave is one of the originary sites in the Western metaphysical tradition for the emergence of binaristic thinking, for the division of the human subject and the knowable world “out there,” as well as the idea of human exceptionalism, that our unique capacity to reason provides access to some greater “truth.” Of course, Derrida has already taken us a long way towards thinking Plato’s cave differently, not as an allegory of the division between ideal forms and material simulacra, between truth and illusion, of the transcendence of human reason over the natural world, but as a site for thinking within the play of semiotic systems, for acknowledging the way binaries fold back upon themselves and redouble in meaning, where the aporia between signs and referents is the matter at hand. Plato’s cave is Derrida’s “hymen,” the entering into knowledge and the space between observer and observed, the moving towards, but never arriving at, truth. As Derrida remarks in the Double Session from <i>Dissemination</i>, the hymen “produces the effect of a medium…It is an operation that both sows confusion between opposites and stands between opposites ‘at once’” (4). He also calls the hymen a “tissue on which so many bodily metaphors are written,” observing its etymological function within so many terms that describe human and non-human animal, and vegetable, anatomy, as well as noting its textuality, its weaving of spiders’ webs and nets and songs (5). How much, then, like Isidore’s multiple definition of the cave, which is both the platform from which the human subject seeks knowledge, and the dissemination of a bodily metaphor, the hungry mouth, which confuses the observer by underscoring difference – between human and beast, organic and inorganic – even as it traces similitude across these polarizing divisions.<br />
<br />
Of course, like Isidore, Plato and Derrida both forgo the materiality of the cave in their attempts to arrive at the truth, or non-truths, of Western metaphysics. Let us trouble this cave a little further, then, and shift crabwise from poststructuralism to Posthumanism, to a materialist and ecocritical approach that doesn’t privilege the human observer or obsess over questions of truth and knowledge, but instead recognizes the cave qua cave, as something at once unknowable in its entirety and yet fully present in its own subterranean way. I would like to take the textuality of Derrida’s concept of the hymen seriously, then, and think about the ecological impress of caves upon the texts into which they write themselves (6). To start, I read Plato’s cave a bit more literally; the shadows on the wall are not simply evidence of the inferiority of mimeticism compared against the real, nor are they just the endless play of signification in which meaning is only an illusion created by syntax and time, but they are the very performance, the textuality, of the cave. The cave here is the collective of its networked actors, each actor itself a storied being (7) : the cracked and craggy stone walls offer an historiography of the waters that eroded fragile soluble rock; fire speaks the combustion of reactive matter as well as the presence of oxygen; bound human bodies suggest punitive measures, deprivation and physical suffering, the puppeteers reveal the uneven distribution of power within a political state, and shadows mark not just an absence of light, but the presence of darkness, a darkness that communicates the porosity of stone, fire, air and human; shadows that engender an entire tradition of Western metaphysical philosophy as they flicker in and out of existence upon the face of a rock polished smooth enough by water or tectonic forces to stage such a dance of darkness; medium, motion, and material agency. And I offer this peculiar reading of Plato’s text only to show what happens when we resist the allegorical tradition which relies on the certainty that the natural world is reducible to signs, to metaphors which can be mobilized in the pursuit of some “greater truth” in spite of the material objects to which they refer. I read the cave in this way to illustrate that within the darkness of caverns the porosity, the intra-activity of all bodies, and not only human bodies, becomes evident, that what emerges from the darkness, the pressing and present darkness, of cavernous impress, is the relationality of all objects, the relationality that produces manifold subjectivities.<br />
<br />
Next I would like to think with the 13th century Icelandic Saga of Grettir the Strong, or at least of a particular cave within the saga that allows us to think differently about that imaginary line that divides human from non-human animal. <i>Grettir’s Saga</i> recounts the life of its violence-loving but painfully unlucky titular character, moving from his bellicose youth to his eventual outlawry during which he meets with trolls, and possibly a god, and is eventually destroyed by a sorceress’s curse. Early in his text, he suffers a minor outlawry and takes up residence in Norway. He becomes the guest of a man of high standing called Thorkel, but is annoyed by another guest, Bjorn, who was quite possibly more arrogant and bellicose than Grettir. In the winter, a bear emerges from a cave on Thorkel’s lands and terrorizes his farms; Thorkel asks his men to find the bear, and they eventually arrive at the bear’s cave, a cavernous den overlooking a sheer cliff. Bjorn is determined to defeat this bear himself.<br />
<br />
Bjorn, whose name, we must keep in mind, means bear, and therefore bares a trace of the non-human, nevertheless falls into a humanistic trap: in accepting a certain transparency in language, in presuming the sign is a direct link to the referent, and that through language the human came come to certain knowledge, Bjorn presumes himself the equal of the bear. “Now we’ll see, he said, how the game goes between me and my namesake” (8). And yet, trusting in the truth of language, he never forgets his human status, and assumes he will defeat the bear by means of his superior reason, that he can outwit the bear by following its roars in the night and hiding in the grass under his shield. Overconfident in his human senses and the information they return, Bjorn remains ignorant of a difference that makes a difference: the bear’s superior olfactory sense. The bear, sensing the musky Bjorn lurking in the grass, waits for the human to fall asleep and casts his shield over a cliff, severing man from technology. Bjorn flees in terror. Grettir, however, takes a different approach to dealing with the cave dweller, and enters the space in which animality flourishes not as human, but as cyborg. Unlike Bjorn who trusts that man-made technology will perform a certain way, Grettir takes his sax, his sword, and binds it to his arm, giving himself a bear-like claw, a becoming-bear that attends to difference instead of presuming equivalence. Aware of the mutability of bodies, of the body’s ability to “plug in” to various technologies, Grettir takes on a machinic-arm and, as cyborg, enters the darkness of the cavern.<br />
<br />
Once inside the cave, the text narrates a battle between two porous bodies, and Grettir with his bear-like weapon, his cyborg arm, severs the claws of the bear, taking away one of the features that marks the bear’s animality, its non-human status. Within the darkness, these two figures, Grettir the cyborg-becoming-bear and the bear becoming-human with its clawless phalanges, wrestle, and the narrative shifts perspectives in a dizzying attempt to deny the privilege of perspective to either figure. First the bear attacks Grettir, then Grettir defends himself, here slicing off the bear’s paw, next the bear lunges at Grettir from a stump, but the stump is too short and the bear loses balance, falling into the arms of its offender; Grettir holds the bear by his ears to preserve his face from gnashing teeth, and together, entangled in each other’s limbs, they roll off the cliff just outside the cave as one. This constant shifting of perspectives invites us to consider the affinities that stretch across the categories of human and animal, categories that here fail to designate certain ontological distinctions between combatants. Within this rock-bound and adumbral ecology, the only differences that make a difference are not epistemological divides drawn by imaginary taxonomies, but only the material differences, a well-timed slice with a cyborgian arm, a clumsy misstep onto a stump misjudged in height, and, eventually, the bear’s greater weight which causes his bodily contribution to the Grettir-bear assemblage to crash into the rocks, preserving the life of the Grettir-fleshed half of these dueling figures.<br />
<br />
This combat between Grettir and bear is like another combat that occurs in subterranean space, Grettir’s battling the undead for possession of the sax with which, as I just argued, he becomes something other than human. Another battle staged in cavernous space, here the narrative shifts between perspectives again, denying privilege to either point of view, but narrating as if the cave itself is witness to the coming together of two liminal figures: hero and monster. The sax seems to unite these two spaces, and it is no surprise that an inorganic but clearly agentic object moves from cave to cave, just as caves, recalling Isidore, perform their own sort of mobility. The text is calling attention to the agency of matter, to the excesses of materiality, to the irreduction of matter to defineable form, but as something always performing beyond the boundaries of the human imagination. The caves in <i>Grettir’s Saga</i> speak to the shared vitality and activity of matter, and not just a shared vulnerability (9). Thus, in caves, Grettir does not meet his combatants as equally vulnerable bodies, but as comparably immanent expressions of matter’s performativity, as iterations of matter that refuse to confine themselves to easily comprehensible categories of being. The text suggests that subjectivity is something that emerges, moment to moment, in relation to environment and other bodies, always networked, nomadic, moving. The caves engender what we might call Posthuman subjectivities, not the supposedly stable taxonomic categories “human” or “bear,” but the always multiple and mutable cyborgs and becomings.<br />
<br />
One last subterranean narrative. Here I turn to the story of Hippocrates’ daughter and the cave in which she resides, a story made famous in the Premodern period by the late medieval travel narrative <i>The Book of John Mandeville</i>. According to the legend, Hippocrates’ young daughter was transformed into a dragon by the goddess Diana and must remain in her draconic form until a right and proper knight will plant a kiss on her monstrous visage. This kiss will not only release the maiden from her curse, but also grant the knight ownership of her islands and of her very body. If the legend itself is, sadly, unsurprising for its medieval misogynistic fantasies, the stories that accrue around this legend are somewhat unexpected.<br />
<br />
After the Mandeville narrator tells of a knight too frightened by the princess’s beastly shape to release the maiden from her curse, we read of another figure, a regular Joe, so to speak, who encounters Hippocrates’ daughter in a human body. He finds her in a castle, whereas the dragon is said to reside in a cave, and this beautiful woman tells the man to become knighted and return to kiss what would appear then to be a hideous form in order to undo the magical curse and earn his reward. This man too fails the test, but what is curious is this metamorphosis between bodies, this character that is sometimes a dragon and sometimes something appearing to be human. Moreover, not only the maiden but also her cavernous home mutates as well, appearing to some as a cave and to others a castle. And unlike the maiden who seems to only appear as a dragon to the knights who would release her from the curse, the cave becomes castle becomes cave with no real consistency or reason. This cave resists classification; it is the “hiatus” of Isidore that communicates desire and moves across ideas of definite forms but, like the “hymen” of Derrida, also exists as an indeterminate space. As the text oscillates between calling the space a “cave” and a “castle,” what we witness is not an edifice magically transforming between two discrete types of space, but the system of language itself forced to make selections from a limited set of terms, neither of which is sufficient for summoning in the human mind the actual referent. Instead, by multiplying its terms, but substituting one selection for another, then re-substituting the first, the text denies our faith in the ontological divide between human home and creaturely habitus, and thus betrays the possibility of the very category “human.”<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOvo3FNLbHG7m4-Ikps7s4YJJsdjXMZdk6J21SoYVaQT2Nswg3UCpk6R-osY1_2aESJCkdGqDjkZEqudrbVgI4xAbJtXuMOxZexw1LfNuMZCy03cYmFS249jxaFna68_5H8lxevFBeEUdt/s1600/IMAG2474.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOvo3FNLbHG7m4-Ikps7s4YJJsdjXMZdk6J21SoYVaQT2Nswg3UCpk6R-osY1_2aESJCkdGqDjkZEqudrbVgI4xAbJtXuMOxZexw1LfNuMZCy03cYmFS249jxaFna68_5H8lxevFBeEUdt/s320/IMAG2474.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
Thus we find a mutual impress between a shape-shifting maiden becoming-dragon and a cavern becoming-castle, each porous and liquid body informing the instability of the other. And if release from this “curse” offers only submission to male domination and entrapment within a definite body, might we read Hippocrates’ daughters’ mutability as something liberating? Might a Posthuman intervention in our interpretation of this story invite us to think about the excess of materiality in a way that celebrates the indeterminacy of both cave and human female? Elizabeth Grosz reads an ethics of freedom in Bergson, defining free acts as “those which both express us and which transform us, which express our transforming” (10). For Grosz and Bergson, freedom is not a definite condition granted to particular subjects but the indeterminacy of matter itself and the ability of matter to choose its expression at any given moment. “Life,” writes Grosz, “is the continuous negotiation with matter that creates the conditions for its own expansion and the opening up of matter to its own virtualities” (11). If Hippocrates’ daughter is trapped in a teleological narrative of a humanistic desire to return to a stable human body, her shape-shifting manifestation, the negotiation of her embodiment and the material conditions of her cave/castle, represent matter’s freedom from myths of certainty and truth, from definitive taxonomies and the oppression of patriarchal discourses.<br />
<br />
Hippocrates’ daughter invites us, then, to reconsider our own desires, and to question whether we might find liberation from humanistic discourse by embracing our materiality, by accepting the indeterminacy of bodies we only “seem” to inhabit, by following Rosi Braidotti and choosing to celebrate the raw physicality of <i>zoe </i>over the discursive regimes of the <i>bios</i>, “an idea of life that exuberantly exceeds bios and supremely ignores logos” (12). And thus the earth itself, the matter of these subterranean spaces that permit such boundary crossings, that encourage the instability of bodies, that cast their shadows upon our imaginary lines dividing species and drawing ladders of being, is a space we might celebrate, inhabit differently, take up as a thought project if we are to move away from a humanist mode of thinking that entails the inevitable destruction of this mutable world. We must encourage an accepting of the unknowable materiality of our beings, and cherish the uncertainty of life which arises in the caverns of the earth.<br />
<br />
<br />
(1) <i>The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville</i>, trans. Stephen A. Barney et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014): 300.<br />
(2) Ibid.<br />
(3)<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 15.6933336257935px;">Arguing for a renewed attention to the animal, Wolfe writes, “…the point of thinking with renewed vigor about the animal is to </span><i style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 15.6933336257935px;">disengage </i><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 15.6933336257935px;">the question of a properly postmodern pluralism from the concept of the human with which progressive political and ethical agendas have traditionally been associated. And it is to do so, moreover, </span><i style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 15.6933336257935px;">precisely by taking seriously</i><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 15.6933336257935px;"> pluralism’s call for attention to embodiment, to the specific materiality and multiplicity of the subject…”</span><i style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 15.6933336257935px;">Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory </i><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 15.6933336257935px;">(Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2003): 9.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> (4) </span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 15.6933336257935px;">Jacques Derrida, </span><i style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 15.6933336257935px;">Dissemination </i><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 15.6933336257935px;">trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1981): 212.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> (5) </span><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Ibid., 213.</span><br />
<div>
<span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">(6) </span><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Here I am thinking of Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s “material narrativity,” which they define by arguing that “literary stories emerge from the intra-action of human creativity and the narrative agency of matter.” “Stories Come to Matter” in <i>Material Ecocriticsim</i>, eds. Iovinio and Oppermann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014): 8</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">(7) </span><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“a material ecocriticism examines matter both <i>in </i>texts and <i>as </i>a text, trying to shed light on the way bodily natures and discursive forces <i>express </i>their interaction whether in representations or in their concrete reality.” Iovino and Oppermann, 2. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">(8) </span><i>Grettir’s Saga</i><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">, trans. Jesse Byock (New York: Oxford UP, 2009): 65. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">(9) </span><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Borrowing from the Spinozist Posthumanism of Rosi Braidotti in <i>The Posthuman </i>(Malden: Polity Press, 2013)</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">(10) </span><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Grosz, “Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom,” in<i> New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics</i>, eds. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham: Duke UP, 2010): 146.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">(11) </span><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Ibid., 151.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">(12) </span><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Braidotti, ”The Politics of ‘Life Itself,’” in <i>New Materialisms</i>: 208. </span><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span><br />
<div>
<span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
</div>
</div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-58375324818257490402015-01-31T12:10:00.000-08:002015-01-31T13:57:12.828-08:00Digital Compassion: Reflections on Disrupting DH #GWDH15While the range of topics explored by the presenters at the GW Disrupting Digital Humanities Symposium (#GWDH15) was vast, Eileen Joy’s call for compassion in the humanities really underscored what emerged as the – rather unexpected – unifying force behind all of the papers: a commitment to care. If thinking DH is thinking networks and digital archives, thinking projects of passion, what sustains these assemblages, then, is the compassion of their myriad communities. For Joy – and I imagine many of the other participants would agree – scholars of the humanities should invest themselves not in preserving the legitimacy and authority of an institution from which knowledge (hypothetically) trickles down like capital in Reaganomics, but in creating new venues of care and curatorship for unbound, nomadic knowledge, for thought projects unrestrained by the regulations of the University. The Humanities, imagined as a multiplicity of compassionate networks, should function not as a filter for public knowledge, but as a space for curating the experimental and playful knowledge that emerges when the potentialities of every possible platform for scholarly productions are harnessed. And these platforms are built not by individuals (though individual labor should be recognized) but communities, collectives that include the para-alt-non-academics whose work deserves to be preserved. <br />
<br />
<br />
However, as Angie Bennett Segler’s and Dorothy Kim’s projects similarly illustrate, many of these communities remain invisible – especially when the many digital archives that enable our scholastic projects are created by women and persons of color. Kim brought to our attention the labor of the “Turkers,” the underpaid women and non-white employees of major corporations like Google and Amazon who actually do the work of digitization, but who are made to remain invisible by corporate policies that force these employees to work at night and in remote buildings. The disruptive potential of projects like Bennett Segler’s <a href="http://www.angelabennettsegler.net/#!dissertation/cavi">Digital Piers </a>and Kim’s archive of early Middle English texts is the visibility of the female labor responsible for the work. If the authority of the archive, which Bennett Segler reminds us is born from the power of the institutions in which our legible things are collected (colligere) to regulate access, digital projects disrupt these isolated and male-controlled loci of power by distributing information via new technologies AND making apparent the bodies that are building these new infrastructures. <br />
<br />
<br />
Sadly, Suey Park’s personal narrative illustrates the dangers that inhere in performing this kind of cultural work in the digital realm. An activist for women of color, particularly Asian American women, Suey Park has been not only harried and trolled on Twitter, but she has received rape and death threats, been doxed (which I only just learned means having her personal information hacked and distributed), and even been targeted unjustly by an investigation which caused her to leave her state of residence until she could safely return home. If the internet provides a space for previously unheard voices and opinions, it also engenders new forms of harassment and violence. Her story stresses the urgency with which we need to create networks of compassion so that activists like Suey Park can use these democratic spheres to advocate for women of color. Our complacency creates the risk that these voices will be silenced and that internet communities will be gentrified in much the same way physical urban spaces are so frequently appropriated by the white upper middle class. <br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicXpj5h7fOiVzRRFMUaoCzFonENJvCyJFhJLSfSoMzIpY8dRNsKSrNb3M2fLRSpG6SfApE4vu3BN41lccQPPkJczmPNYDy6AHactgsU6qSVnppJr5ccS4L34_9xBzic67KbrMxJrJssJos/s1600/dh.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicXpj5h7fOiVzRRFMUaoCzFonENJvCyJFhJLSfSoMzIpY8dRNsKSrNb3M2fLRSpG6SfApE4vu3BN41lccQPPkJczmPNYDy6AHactgsU6qSVnppJr5ccS4L34_9xBzic67KbrMxJrJssJos/s400/dh.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<br />
Although I had to miss the presentations by Jesse Stommel and Roopika Risam, it was a pleasure to see Stommel lead the collective of speakers out of their chairs during the roundtable discussion and onto the edge of the stage, thereby breaking the fourth wall that marked their bodies as authoritative and their space as exclusive. This act evidenced a real commitment to the democratization of information that each of the speakers desires, as well as the group’s willingness to relinquish the power granted them by the Academy – at least temporarily. Sure, the act was rather symbolic, but it was a risk nonetheless, and one which underscores the precariousness of our field and the digital humanities as a sub-discipline. And taking risks is an essential part of developing the compassion that will not only sustain the Humanities, but help our field thrive as a collective of heterogeneous interpretive networks instead of a homogeneous and authoritative discipline. Compassion as disruption. Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-59775582963709593352014-07-07T18:38:00.001-07:002014-07-07T18:57:55.563-07:00Performing with Non-Humans: Ceremonial Objects, Animal Imitation and the Penitential Acts of Sir Gowther <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq8SkJxASYOC0t5HOUa96WJPfQExjV1JRXk1qmk0Xo21zcCgAK1pWLtbsXNExZN2ZNGQFoa-oTX-NWtdSfm6sPcisB_OV67KfwzbKF77M65rWOpyMKuk5wrrlHg0FTUhNdMg9-RIrhX_U0/s1600/IMAG1439_1_1_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq8SkJxASYOC0t5HOUa96WJPfQExjV1JRXk1qmk0Xo21zcCgAK1pWLtbsXNExZN2ZNGQFoa-oTX-NWtdSfm6sPcisB_OV67KfwzbKF77M65rWOpyMKuk5wrrlHg0FTUhNdMg9-RIrhX_U0/s320/IMAG1439_1_1_1.jpg" /></a></div>This past Saturday, having finally caught up with my quals reading and Greg off work for the first time in over a week, my partner and I felt the call to <i>aventure</i>. We responded by journeying out to Piscataway Park, just south of Fort Washington in Maryland (photos from my tour of Fort Washington, a place where each layer of its history is an almost tangible force affecting the present, can be found on my Facebook page, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/thebacchanal/photos_all">here</a>). We arrived at a bridge, a boardwalk traversing a truly sublime splendor of swamp flora - marshgrasses and cattails, orange daylilies and trumpet flowers – and a motley pageant of fauna – deep-threated toads, buzzing, iridescent dragonflies, soaring hawks and painted turtles. In other words, we walked into an American Xanadu of white, middle-class, capital-N Nature. And yet, this excursion was only made possible by the interference of human carpentry, carpentry also responsible for an artificial driftwood-shelf that protects the biodiversity of the endangered swamp from the Potomac’s tide; and so, instead of lambasting the unnecessary intrusion of humans into this space in order to manifest a Romantic dream of the great outdoors, I celebrated the enmeshment of the human and non-human engendered by such manufactured structures. <br />
<br />
Upon crossing the boardwalk, however, we unexpectedly found ourselves on the sacred territory of the Piscataway Tribe, a vast field that once supported the village of Moyaone and still holds the bones of its ancestors. A spokesperson and defender of the tribe, Turkey Tayak, was buried beneath a red cedar tree (also known as a juniper, <i>juniperis virginiana</i>) in the 70s, and a small shrine dedicated to his memory was erected before the arboreal monument. This shrine is a gathering of objects, a small circle of stones filled with totems and offerings of abundant diversity – from an owl statue and a plastic T-rex to an animal jaw bone (perhaps a fox), coins, an arrow and a petite wooden flute. Soon enough I was on the ground before this dedicatory assemblage of objects, thinking about Jane Bennett’s encounter with another peculiar gathering of things in a city storm grate (1). Although Bennett’s litany describes objects that perhaps found their own way to that grate, whereas the items before my eyes were intentionally left at this shrine, both collections of <i>things </i>vibrate with a similar allure. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlwF1jL1HTIOiept6r_QaLjru4ftRLZ7U_uUksTZEbDc6X62BPzCbATILQs00guE6DKXifLRSRscH9GmyaN9SJ5dtq44nGta-1s3oXIm7UUFEaCfrLpsNXRG4pWnToEFADcqqUXKE-kRH4/s1600/IMAG1460_1_1_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlwF1jL1HTIOiept6r_QaLjru4ftRLZ7U_uUksTZEbDc6X62BPzCbATILQs00guE6DKXifLRSRscH9GmyaN9SJ5dtq44nGta-1s3oXIm7UUFEaCfrLpsNXRG4pWnToEFADcqqUXKE-kRH4/s400/IMAG1460_1_1_1.jpg" /></a></div>Moreover, these objects, although likely selected for their symbolic resonances, because assembled for a certain ritual function, are left to perform their unique agencies regardless of the presence of intending humans. Gathered together in this way, these objects lose their for-human use value, their readiness-to-hand, and connect in a strange machinic collage, a poem of found objects, an ecology of the inanimate and non-human. They make a world as Levi Bryant describes, non-totalizing, dynamic and mutable, “fuzzy and without clearly fixed or defined boundaries and elements” (2). A world may be a stable and self-sustaining set of vectors and operations, yet just as it can survive the loss of an object transplanted out from its system, it is also open and accommodating to new objects, new machines that might make slight modifications within that world. <br />
<br />
Thus the world of this material concatenation of Native American ritual objects invited me into its space and practice, to join in the dance and calibrate myself according to its flows and outputs. The allure of its objects compelled me to perform my own oblation, and so I left to Turkey Tayak a small golden bow I found upon the shore of the Potomac just minutes earlier. A dynamic world indeed! And its boundaries stretch well beyond the shrine, for that red cedar tree under which the meat and bones of Turkey Tayak decayed is itself another ritual object, decorated with sachets of tobacco, offerings to the ancestors, prayers to the dead. These red bags adorning the tree extend into the world of the shrine, although they are also engaged with their own network of billowing branches and breezes that mingle the spicy aroma of dried tobacco (and, according to the tradition, the prayers of their makers) with the musky fragrance of juniper berries into the sky. Not all worlds are disenchanted. <br />
<br />
So what might any of this have to do with medieval literature, you ask? Of late I have been thinking quite seriously about the ways that performance theory and OOO/ANT might overlap, or at least engage in conversation with each other. Thus, the experience described above is brought to bear on my quals readings from this past week as I wonder about the nature of performance in the Middle English Breton lais and the way that non-human, and mostly magical, objects interact with human actors. This is, of course, a blog, so I will keep this relatively brief, but I would like to look at Sir Gowther, at the strange nature of his performances, his becoming-canine, and the function of the magical objects within the lai. <br />
<br />
Richard Schechner famously defines performance as “twice-behaved behavior,” and includes ritual and religious rites amongst many of the standard and obvious examples of performance behaviors in everyday life. (3) Following Schechner, then, it is safe to suggest that Sir Gowther enacts a few performances with his titular lai, both through his acts of penance, and in the triad of combat sequences into which he bears (and is borne upon) a set of magical objects that appear only for the duration of the battles. Gowther, if you recall, is the spawn of an incubus (and of the same paternal ancestry as Merlin!), and the early part of his tale recounts his heinous terrorism of his own people, from an infancy gnawing nipples of nursemaids to a adolescence of arson, rape, murder, and other acts of sacrilegious mischief. The subject of a teleological romance narrative obsessed with piousness, Gowther eventually learns his demonic heritage, receives penance from the Pope, and redeems himself through acts of virtue and piety. I am acutely interested in the penitent practices and acts of redemption, not so much as acts that summon Gowther into the Christian hegemony of his era, but as performances that rely on non-human actors. <br />
<br />
When Gowther receives his penance in Rome, the Pope directs his performance; Gowther is only to eat food he himself rends from the mouths of dogs and is not to speak until he receives a sign from God. He is evicted from the signifying order of hegemonic culture until, proving proper piety, he can be re-interpellated into medieval Christian society (or at least the imaginary monolithic Christian West). Yet, in order to prove his contrition, he must perform for an intended audience, an audience that can validate his fidelity to the Pope’s commands (of course, the proper audience is God alone, but the dictum that Gowther refrain from speech seems predicated upon the belief that Gowther will surely continue to seek human company). Surprisingly, however, Gowther’s first companion upon his leaving Rome is a greyhound, notorious friend to humankind, who brings food to the vagabond mute. <br />
<br />
The brilliant folks over at <a href="http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2008/04/gowthers-interrupted-utopia.html">In The Middle</a> have commented on the curious way this scene interrupts the telos of redemption, since Gowther is required to wrest food from the dog’s mouth, not accept food as a gift from a canine companion. I would add, however, that this is also a scene of the actor-in-training, of Gowther’s learning an alternative mode of being in the world through an affective togetherness with a non-human; when Gowther reaches the Emperor’s court, he acts like a dog (hiding under a table, sleeping under a curtain), his penance becomes a mimetic performance – which is especially strange because he was ordered only to “yet no meyt bot that thu revus of howndus mothe,” but not to also behave like a hound (4). Thus, on the one hand, Gowther enacts a becoming-dog, for his performance emerges from his cohabiting a dog’s world, and he teases out concepts of loyalty and self-sacrifice just as he teases the food from their very mouths (cruel, perhaps, but the text says nothing of Gowther’s being bitten for his theft nor of any dogs starving, so I like to think that these hounds were quite capable of procuring another meal after losing their first). Yet Gowther also chooses to behave like the non-human companion that modeled compassion for him, an animal exemplum of the “Do unto others” injunction. Gowther begins his sojourn to reconciliation with God by straddling, and thereby blurring, the boundary between human and non-human animal (5). <br />
<br />
Gowther’s next major performance is on the field of battle, for he thrice fights alongside the Emperor to keep at bay a Sultan who would have the Emperor’s mute daughter for wife (6). These battles are a part of Gowther’s penitence, and when the Emperor marches off to war, Gowther prays to God for the accoutrements that will allow him to participate. God, of course, delivers, for this salvific drama cannot unfold without its magical objects: Gowther receives armor, a shield, a spear and a horse, and altogether these objects form an ass-kicking warrior-machine. After each battle sequence and upon Gowther’s return to the castle, however, these objects disappear, only to re-appear just in time for the following military campaigns; these objects also shift colors, appearing first as black, then red, then finally white. The hues of these objects surely provide semiotic cues about the spiritual progress of Gowther, yet these things are more than human signs: they are the very things that engender the possibility of his penitential performance. Just as Gowther relies on the animal to learn moral behavior, he also depends upon inanimate things to practice righteous living; a thick mesh of object-agency, his world! <br />
<br />
The repetition of this spiritual battle also creates a strange sense of time, an asynchronicity not unlike the queer time discussed by Carolyn Dinshaw (7). For the temporality within which Gowther practices his penitence is the uncanny time of ritual, of the performance that repeats and yet is never quite the same. Gowther enters into a shared temporal landscape with these ephemeral, magical objects, and performs as a warrior for the duration of the objects themselves, the weapons, armor and equestrian companion that disappear when the play has ended. This is the circular time of ritual, a ritual that adjusts to the aleatory nature of its unstable environment. It is the uncertain time of desire, desire to revive the violence of the past (Gowther still wields the falchion he crafted as a demonic youth), as well as to rescript that violence as a battle for his soul. It is the time of magical objects, for objects themselves “time,” manifest their own temporalities as they persist in the world and couple with other objects (8). <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH51lUPoeRrXM1cCy7gjAMLgHc_u2igPOzPlBLEBtTjwb4oQbABg6mvVcRR3ksW0IHRAKykvg-pBPvpP6EmdfdKxj2qOMuy3YY2wDe1ALQ9TzDP1ryTIHf469N0ASmVeKnRdBW9VNmW-ju/s1600/IMAG1467_1_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH51lUPoeRrXM1cCy7gjAMLgHc_u2igPOzPlBLEBtTjwb4oQbABg6mvVcRR3ksW0IHRAKykvg-pBPvpP6EmdfdKxj2qOMuy3YY2wDe1ALQ9TzDP1ryTIHf469N0ASmVeKnRdBW9VNmW-ju/s400/IMAG1467_1_1.jpg" /></a></div>Objects make worlds within which humans participate and negotiate our place, but to which we are never outside or beyond. Just as I stumbled from one ahuman world into another, tangled in a web of marsh life and then invited to participate in a ceremony of object agency and thing-power, Gowther performs the tired tropes of Christian redemption narrative by negotiating canine culture and flowing with the rhythms of magical objects. So if the tidy conclusion of the lai is unsatisfying for its predictability and affirmation of a God-given, For-Human World, I take heart that at least Gowther’s journey was a messy enmeshment with unpredictable, inhuman worlds. <br />
<br />
(1) Bennet, <i>Vibrant Matter</i> (Durham: Duke UP, 2010). I would quote at length, but any reading this blog is already familiar with the passage I reference above. <br />
(2) See Bryant’s wonderful new book: <i>Onto-cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media</i> (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2014): 122. <br />
(3) See “What is Performance?” in Performance Studies: An Introduction, 3rd Ed. (Routledge, 2013)<br />
(4) “Sir Gowther,” in <i>The Middle English Breton Lais</i>, eds. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo: TEAMS Middle English Texts, 2001): line 296.<br />
(5) For more on animality, cohabitation and the medieval exemplum, see Joyce Salisbury, <i>The Beast Within, 2nd ed.</i>(Routledge, 2011), or Susan Crane, <i>Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain</i> (Philadelphia: Penn Press, 2012).<br />
(6) Had I more time, and were this not a blog, I would trace the problematic relationships the text establishes between disability, animality, and Orientalism.<br />
(7) See <i>How Soon is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time</i> (Durham: Duke UP, 2012).<br />
(8) See Timothy Morton, “Objects as Temporary Autonomous Zones,” <i>continent </i>1.3 (2011). <br />
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-62457681314819165232014-04-24T10:39:00.000-07:002014-04-24T10:45:45.366-07:00Bridging Life and Death in Parzival<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFdtFdKA4UCtwUP1i4znhfhDtlDpELZ83PSQvtGhaa0RkaBvvL72q6n_j4HEN3FEXgJ_P07noDpWF1-AYdu8-LCqK7WiEr5A3WTZvxpXRlN0vf5MvSbW7Ec-DnEKiPNlPTq0oyEurq47E1/s1600/bridge+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFdtFdKA4UCtwUP1i4znhfhDtlDpELZ83PSQvtGhaa0RkaBvvL72q6n_j4HEN3FEXgJ_P07noDpWF1-AYdu8-LCqK7WiEr5A3WTZvxpXRlN0vf5MvSbW7Ec-DnEKiPNlPTq0oyEurq47E1/s320/bridge+2.jpg" /></a></div>I have a special fondness for bridges. Walking bridges, in particular. I do not care where they might take me; it’s not the promise of futurity, it’s not the desire for the other side, but the hovering in the middle that really delights. Bridges are records of the past, marked by traces of every foot, wheel, or paw that has crossed, as well as the invitation to step, amble, run, roll or crawl towards the unseen; yet the bridge itself lingers in the present as a pause and a duration. Bridges mark a liminal space, a middle, an amorphous potentiality of after before and not yet then, they offer the thrill of stopping somewhere in between. If bridges are the infrastructure of the State that enable the transportation of goods to the very markets that erase the labor of the crossing and the matter of the making, if the motility engendered by a bridge is movement within the Big Bad Capitalist Machine, then pausing to look over the side and wondering at the life forms and plastic bottles and monstrous thieves that make <i>under the bridge</i> their home are acts of resistance, practices of everyday life (1), errant wanderings away from the neoliberal subject-making machine that siphons the agency and autonomy from living (and non-living) beings. <br />
<br />
Thus, just the other day my partner, aware that I was feeling particularly enervated, took me to a bridge in the hopes of putting a little courage back into my self-abasing animus. Together we practiced a bit of healing magic as we travelled back and forth across the bridge (pictured above), stopping and stopping and stopping to examine the peeling paint, the budding trees, the pools of tadpoles and timid painted turtles. As the weight of the past few days lifted from my chest, I suddenly felt myself transported to another bridge, the draw-bridge before Munsalvaesch in Wolfram von Eschebach’s <i>Parzival</i>, a bridge I had been, until that moment, unsure how to cross. Because, for all my talk of stasis and sitting in the middle, “bridge” is a verb as well as a noun, and eventually one makes his or her way to the other side. And in order to cross the bridge and approach “The Gral” offering its cornucopia of excess within the castle at Munsalvaesch, I needed to translate yet another bridge, one between a 13th century piece of Germanic Arthuriana and contemporary approaches to disability theory that take into consideration material agency and the neoliberal subject. <br />
<br />
It’s certainly not an achievement (and it hardly takes a bridge) to locate and access a disability narrative within the Fisher King myth. King Anfortas, the appointed keeper of the grail (spelled “gral” in the German <i>Parzival</i>, but for the sake of conformity, I’ll maintain the traditional English spelling), suffers from a lance-wound to the groin and, consequently, cannot walk or even stand. Parzival first spots the king fishing on a lake, but comes to find out that the act of fishing is really a chance for Anfortas to let his festering wound take some air (and likely offer some olfactory respite to a court that applies inefficacious healing unguents and herbs primarily to cover the reek of bodily decay). This associative link between fish and the wounded king also gestures to the flaccid nature of the king’s (in)fertility organ, as well as positioning him with the animals in a medieval animacy hierarchy that subjects the lower order of beasts to mankind’s sovereignty (2). Thus the ichthyic Anfortas, king in name but sub-human in body, is subject to the authority of his court, of his caretakers, and of the Templars that police his every move. Anfortas even wishes to die, to release himself and his kingdom from plight, but “he was made to live against his will and not die (392).” (1) If traditional readings of the Fisher King myth insist that the king’s infertility plagues the kingdom, I argue that, in Wolfram’s <i>Parzival</i>, at least, Anfortas as enfeebled and piscine human is made to suffer by the will of the able-bodied kingdom. <br />
<br />
Further, the very means by which Anfortas can be forced into prolonged existence, forced to survive without the chance to flourish, is the efficacy of the grail, for “however ill a mortal may be, from the day on which he sees the Stone he cannot die for that week” (239). Thus the members of Anfortas’s court drag him against his will before the stone, forcing their king to continue an agonizing existence he would just as soon abandon. In Wolfram’s <i>Parzival</i>, the grail is a precious stone, a virtuous gem that operates like a cornucopia, manifesting viands and libations, as well as life, for every body that comes before it. If the grail was delivered to earth by angels, there is nothing terribly sacred in its power to fuel gluttony, to give more, and more and more until the desire for <i>more </i>becomes the only possible desire of the grail’s subjects. Whereas the other agentic objects that inhabit the world of <i>Parzival</i>, from pain-inducing planets to magical healing herbs, evidence a trans-corporeal environment of things working through each other in richly material ways (4), the agency of the grail is more insidious as it becomes a machine that overwrites the desires of its subjects, just as the writing on the grail hails the next grail-king. Thus the wounded Anfortas, scripted as king by the grail and thus excepted from the polis by the very nature of political sovereignty (here summoning Agamben (5)), is reduced to a state of bare life when the hegemonic bloc of the grail-court preserve the king’s body in a powerless existence of impairment and decay. <br />
<br />
The grail, then, produces a state of dis-ease that I find analogous to Lauren Berlant’s idea of <i>slow death</i>: “The phrase <i>slow death</i> refers to the physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence” (6). Of course, Berlant refers to a condition of late-stage capitalism in which unhealthy practices like overeating and drinking become episodic escapes from the exhausting production of consumer-subjectivities within an imaginary state of individual sovereignty, and it would be entirely irresponsible and ahistorical to read <i>Parzival </i>as a pure example of this condition of <i>slow death</i>. Yet the grail’s intra-action through the bodies of Munsalvaesch engenders an entire culture of sickness eerily similar to our contemporary condition in which all bodies seem to be failing the gold standard of the State apparatus in some way. For, although (as Foucault reminds us) the medieval body was sacred and not subject to biopolitical control, for although the pre-Modern market had not yet shaped the consuming body’s desire for ‘stuff’ somehow erased of its meaning and the labor of its creation, there is nevertheless something uncomfortably modern and proto-capitalistic about this tale in which a man is <i>forced by the public</i> to suffer his wounded existence <i>despite his desire to die</i>, and in which an object creates an endless supply of food and drink, creates <i>the desire</i> for an endless supply of food and drink, a supply that has no visible means of production. No, I do not wish to map a contemporary sociopolitical plight onto a medieval text, but the conditions of life within the castle that houses the grail in this 13th century text resonate quite audibly with the notion of a <i>slow death</i> culture of subordination to a capitalist hegemony. Of course, the bodies in Munsalvaesch never actually die, so perhaps <i>un-death</i> culture is more apropos. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeh3gEJdIUF58QEeYEXrGN2AgIaASL4TxvaY_41Xu2R38WNV9fUegMXXke2cHHx8yWdQ5x8cV1mt33khZ4TgHNFoNZP2PeSugoK7w3wNr6HbNp7fSt3oSGXxO9h5RMBQcvQytbVm5wtoyY/s1600/bridge+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeh3gEJdIUF58QEeYEXrGN2AgIaASL4TxvaY_41Xu2R38WNV9fUegMXXke2cHHx8yWdQ5x8cV1mt33khZ4TgHNFoNZP2PeSugoK7w3wNr6HbNp7fSt3oSGXxO9h5RMBQcvQytbVm5wtoyY/s320/bridge+1.jpg" /></a></div><br />
What of the bodies outside this <i>un-death</i> kingdom of perpetual disability, what of the world of bodies that are permitted to die of their own accord? Moving back across the bridge away from Munsalvaesch, we find a crypt, a house of the dead juxtaposed against the castle of too much life. Within this crypt lies the body of a knight and the corpse of poor Sigune, a wretched, if beautiful, maiden whose life had been riddled with sorrow and loss. First encountered by the blithe young Parzival very early in the tale, she is found grieving over the body of her recently departed lover, Schionatulander, a prince unjustly slain by Orilus. Although Sigune and her dead prince are eventually avenged by Parzival, she nevertheless takes maidenhood and mourning as her vocation and builds a tomb for Schionatulander in the woods near the castle Munsalvaesch, where “above his tomb she led a life of pain” (223). The condition of her life is a perpetual state of mourning and suffering, a soul-deep despair that deprives her of any ability to flourish. Sigune wears the hair-cloth of mourning, her skin is moribund-grey, and “Her lover was Great Sorrow, who laid her Gaiety down and roused many sighs from her heart” (224). While lamentation and repentance were common practices of medieval female mystics, and although Sigune has taken up a life of prayer, her sorrow is surely not spiritual practice, and her utmost desire is for reunion with her mortal lover, not her divine maker. Thus, when we last encounter Sigune as a corpse interred in the same mausoleum she had constructed for her prince, we imagine she has found peace in death, that she is at last free from her suffering. Barred from ever crossing the bridge into Munsalvaesch, excluded from the Grail’s narrative of ceaseless vitality, Sigune has had the <i>privilege </i>of dying. <br />
<br />
And death does seem a privilege in the world of <i>Parzival</i>. For even if the romance concludes with the restoration of Anfortas to health and beauty, with Parzival’s ascent to the throne of the grail kingdom, might we step softly on that bridge to futurity and wonder what is to come for our hero? What if Parzival should need to defend his queen and become wounded in battle (the Grail-king becomes vulnerable when distracted by love), will he be cursed as well with too much life, forced against his will to look upon the Grail and despair? The text only <i>suggests </i>that his son is next to take the throne, and such ambiguity invites the reader to consider what conditions might obviate the passing of the crown and begs us to imagine a grey-haired and frail Parzival, crippled by a festering wound, perpetually agonizing and begging for release. For in the Grail culture of <i>un-death</i>, just as in the contemporary world of <i>slow death</i>, might <i>actual death</i> be a gift, one last truly autonomous gesture, the privilege of leaping over the bridge when one is no longer willing or able to cross? <br />
<br />
<br />
(1)Like the spatial practice of perambulating through urban spaces; see Michel de Certeau, <i>The Practice of Everyday Life</i>, esp. Chapter VII, “Walking in the City”<br />
(2)Mel Y. Chen, in <i>Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect</i>, argues that when beings are ordered according to hierarchies of animacy, linkages between human and lower-ordered bodies work to mark certain humans as non-normative and inferior, especially when racialized bodies are metaphorically compared with non-human animals and minerals. <br />
(3) All quotations from Parzival are taken from the A. T. Hatto translation, Penguin 2004<br />
(4)See Stacy Alaimo, <i>Bodily Natures</i>...but anyone reading this blog already knows this. <br />
(5) See Georgio Agamben, <i>Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life</i>, trans. Heller-Roazen – although Agamben is primarily concerned with political sovereignty and the authority to kill, the right to force a body to live is constructed along similar acts of inclusion/exclusion from the biopolitical power structure and shifting definition of “life.” <br />
(6) <i>Cruel Optimism</i>, 95Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-54093981899236543232014-04-12T17:23:00.000-07:002014-04-12T17:23:45.651-07:00The Black and the Grey: Haunted by the Inevitable in "Arrow-Odd" <i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvbz1hVDkvc2yIINA5-KYxqmqSpETUnRLu60eLBLZz5nMRgUYciHRKToACV9Sij4WC3ZheO2sNcq-WT4xQ3GEdigApMrwULcuCSir4a1NpIVFmUlKlAql5htjXY_6CyxAod1_0CNQrOHNA/s1600/Horse_Skull_side.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvbz1hVDkvc2yIINA5-KYxqmqSpETUnRLu60eLBLZz5nMRgUYciHRKToACV9Sij4WC3ZheO2sNcq-WT4xQ3GEdigApMrwULcuCSir4a1NpIVFmUlKlAql5htjXY_6CyxAod1_0CNQrOHNA/s320/Horse_Skull_side.JPG" /></a></div></i> For days I have been struggling to think not through but with and alongside the troubling Viking romance <i>Arrow-Odd</i>. It is a story that haunts, that hovers like an ephemeral ghost just out of reach, and the deeper one stretches into the story for some sort of answer, the more the tale withdraws into the darkness. Even now, this reader finds himself frozen and ensnared in its shadows. For <i>Arrow-Odd</i> is not a story to be dissected like an onion, peeled back like some fruit concealing grains of knowledge, however multi-valent and layered its narrative might be. It is not a story for thinking, but <i>being</i>, for entangling oneself in the is-ness of things, for hovering between objects like a ghost and finding one’s <i>oikos </i>in the rocky crags, the violent seas, and the wilds and wildernesses that don’t give a fuck about humanity. It is a story that demands its reader discard anthropocentric perspective and allow himself to be swept along the complex networks of living and dying as man, bear, giant, god, stone, tree or wind. <br />
<br />
I chose the verb “haunts” above because<i> Arrow-Odd</i> is fraught with the hovering shadows and ghostly-relations born of violent forces and visceral intensities. The violence of Arrow-Odd is like the violence Deleuze reads in the paintings of Francis Bacon, it is the “violence of a sensation (and not of representation), a static or potential violence, a violence of reaction and expression” (<i>Francis Bacon</i>, xxix). It is the potential violence of the fate that hangs over Odd like a cloud, for after a witch foretells Odd’s supernaturally long life, his heroic fortunes, and his death by the skull of a horse, Odd coldly executes the horse – thereby securing his inevitable demise – and journeys throughout the entire imagined world, conquering and pillaging as he establishes and defends his reputation. This reputation, like his fate, is an invisible force which engenders so much of the tale’s carnage, for Odd’s earliest deeds of violence in Permia, a land of sorcery, results in the Permians’ training a magical anti-hero, Ogmund, to seek vengeance upon Odd. Odd’s reputation, fully embodied, is the parasitic enemy always at his heels, feeding on his accomplishments, weakening his resolve precisely as it engenders his story, a story always entangled with Ogmund’s. Ogmund becomes an irrepressible force of nature, a manifestation of fire and sea, blood and bone, the brutality of contact with the more-than-human world, a world that demands suffering and loss. The violence of Arrow-Odd is the violence of co-existence, of suffering with a fully sensate environment.<br />
<br />
The sensations of suffering, painted in splashes of blood and swathes of fire, follow Odd as the brutal Viking hero navigates a world comprising improbable scales of time, space and size. Living beyond the life-expectancy of the human, Odd is ever-haunted by the impermanence of life as his friends, blood-brothers and children die off, leaving him frustratingly alive. In <i>Arrow-Odd</i>, time has not a winged-chariot, but a sluggish clubbed foot, and the impossibly slow crawl of time nudges Odd about impossibly vast stretches of space. Three-hundred years of adventure lead our hero from Ireland to Russia, Sweden to Greece, through heathen lands and Christendom, across oceans and into the lairs of giants. Odd even engenders a child upon a giantess, a giantess who perceives Odd to be an infant himself; this shift in perspective invites the reader to acknowledge that, from a monster’s point of view, the human is puny and vulnerable. Even the improbably long-lived and unimaginably well-traveled is nevertheless incredibly miniscule to something, because this is a tale (and a world) in which the improbable becomes the most-likely, in which stone ships bob afloat rivers, silks resist arrows, seas swell with ravenous leviathans, and gods whisper valuable advice but refuse to take up arms. Scale shifts and sways in <i>Arrow-Odd</i> because the world is not for human consumption, it is not an inert backdrop but an active, engaged actor comprising objects inexhaustible in their potentialities. <br />
<br />
For <i>Arrow-Odd</i> illustrates the deep ecological entanglement of being, what Levi Bryant calls a “black ecology,” in which “things are characterized by a sort of mysteriousness harboring hidden powers that hold themselves in reserve, waiting to erupt under the right circumstances when they enter into the appropriate interactions with other things” (<i>Prismatic Ecology</i>, 292-3). Although, I would add that <i>Arrow-Odd</i> also explores the eruptions that result from inappropriate interactions, because networks are messy things, rarely stable, often comprising actors unable or unwilling to find accord with one another. Thus, not only Byrant’s black ecology but a “grey ecology” as well, the grey of “exhaustion, even obliteration,” that “also reminds that death is a burgeoning of life by other means” (Jeffrey Cohen, <i>Prismatic Ecology</i>, 270). Objects are flayed and mutilated to become new objects with new possibilities and intensities; a bear-skin becomes a magical weapon, trees are regularly hewn to become clubs, and after his face is torn off by Odd, Ogmund is born into a new identity, King Quillanus, and is inscribed with a political identity and reconciled with his life-sworn enemy. The messiness of porosity and the fragility of precarious relations erupt from a background – which was never only a background – that nourishes as it decomposes. And thus Odd, at the story’s end, returns home and digs up the skull of the horse prophesied to end his days. Beneath the skull, a poisonous serpent lies coiled and injects Odd with his fated demise. The ground, the earth, our oikos is as toxic as it is nurturing, for life and death carouse in a grey debauchery beneath the soil, in a ceaseless danse macabre that hails all and spares none. <br />
<br />
“Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?” <br />
(“Lobster Quadrille,” <i>Alice in Wonderland</i>)Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-55533489379206949152014-03-31T06:37:00.000-07:002014-03-31T07:06:43.904-07:00A Patchwork Lancelot: Nomadic Spaces and Masculine Quilting in The Knight of the Cart <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJnLBl3Yqu81j4YOHJYnGXde-fAPiyfrKE7qxT9kbMRN84oeRzSz-_F1mxAwKm-NWF2ClQgBUAmxiFJxAp709euYGbheZ-DfFh2Lr6bJooHS-bGOoSOy5XSVikY39o76kX4ouU2RdWHq3E/s1600/IMAG1042_1_1_1+(1).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJnLBl3Yqu81j4YOHJYnGXde-fAPiyfrKE7qxT9kbMRN84oeRzSz-_F1mxAwKm-NWF2ClQgBUAmxiFJxAp709euYGbheZ-DfFh2Lr6bJooHS-bGOoSOy5XSVikY39o76kX4ouU2RdWHq3E/s320/IMAG1042_1_1_1+(1).jpg" /></a></div<i></i><br />
Chrétien de Troyes’s <i>Lancelot </i>unveils the uncomfortable and often uncanny overlapping and intermingling of spaces. <br />
<br />
No, let me start over: after admitting to a small group of medieval-and-early-modernists over dinner that I find muppets to be truly horrific, I began to think about the perversities of felt, which led me to Deleuze & Guattari on smooth and striated spaces, which led me to think about the patchwork rhythms of Chrétien’s <i>Lancelot </i>and, consequently, to this consideration of the various trajectories through competing, conflicting and overlapping spaces in and about which our hero, the knight of the cart, wanders. Thus, a grad student who is terrified of anthropomorphized felt wants to think about difficult spaces in Chrétien de Troyes’s <i>Lancelot</i>. Hold your mules. <br />
<br />
Step back: last week, as a way into our discussion of <i>Lancelot</i>, the director of my independent study invited me to think about beds, to move from bed to bed with Lancelot, and to consider what beds might mean, what they might do, how Lancelot’s relations with the various beds he encounters might offer an object-oriented reading of the text. We spoke briefly about the sarcophagus-as-bed, and what it might mean to resist one’s messianic calling, but now I am thinking about the more temporary beds, what is on the beds, about the fabrics that get set aflame, the sheets stained with blood, the coverlets upon which rape narratives play out; in short, the various textiles and textures upon which <i>Lancelot</i>/Lancelot writes and is written. For Lancelot is a nomad, a wanderer following his quarry – Guinevere – across un-mappable spaces and resisting again and again the invitations to familiar places written on the sheets of the beds that orient his errant aventure.<br />
<br />
Very early in Chrétien’s romance, a beautiful girl warns Lancelot NOT to sleep in a most luxurious bed that is close to her own; which is as good as telling him that he simply MUST crawl in beneath its fancy fur sheets (one might suspect the girl knew exactly what she was doing in giving Lancelot such a warning). In the middle of the night, a flaming lance pierces the bed which Lancelot has chosen and sets “fire to the coverlet, the sheets, and the entire bed,” and even grazes Lancelot’s side and removes a little skin. Flame writes a call to adventure as it ingests the flammable samite; Lancelot, however, subdues the fire and sleeps soundly through the night. <br />
<br />
A little later in the tale, after Lancelot spares the life of an enemy knight at the request of a lady, the same lady offers her lusting body as a reward. Lancelot agrees to sleep with the fair woman, and sleep, once more, is all he desires. The lady stages a rape scene upon the bed that she and Lancelot will share: Lancelot sees her bare breasts, pressed against the skin of her assailant, and in the struggle to slay the “rapist” – how unfortunate the knight she cast for that role! – Lancelot’s own top garments are severed, his chest exposed. Two half-naked bodies, blood pumping from the thrill of battle, the bed inviting them to a battle of another sort. Yet, Lancelot abstains from sex and simply falls asleep; Lancelot prefers to envelop himself in the sheets and not in the stories others try to write for him. <br />
<br />
Thus these beds are like texts upon which different invitations are written, yet Lancelot prefers to write his own slumbery stories from the words already burned into the bedframes. Or perhaps the space of the bed itself resists certain stories precisely as it engenders others. For what are beds, but comfort machines composed from bits of the animal and vegetal world, acts of carpentry, hewn and stitched together to provide solace and relief to the human. Yet something of the vegetal remains in a bed’s flammability, something of the animal obtains in its porosity; the bed invites an intimacy with the more-than-human world. To say that a bed can be a text is quite true, for sheets are as inscribable parchment, for beds succumb to flame’s appetites as swiftly as books. Might beds have their own stories to tell, stories of liminality, of the spaces between animal and vegetable, mobility and repose, the tactile workings of fabric on human flesh? Or are the beds in <i>Lancelot </i>merely sites for the re-inscription of (male) human narratives? <br />
<br />
In <i>A Thousand Plateaus</i>, Deleuze and Guattari describe smooth and striated spaces – nomadic trajectories and the sedentary political spaces of the State apparatus – by examining various fabrics. Striated space, the urban political center, the seat of sovereignty, is directional, centered, and closed. Striated space, then, is a woven blanket of vertical and horizontal paths, easily navigable, each point plotted and definite, the familiarity of genre, the locus of control, Camelot. The smooth space, on the other hand, is the patchwork quilt that stretches indefinitely with no fixed points, only nomadic wanderings – it is non-directional dimensionality, the fluid and heathen space of Gorre. Thus as Lancelot moves from bed to bed throughout the various spaces of his tale, he practices a sort of nomadic quilting; or, to put it another way, Lancelot is writing his own narrative with the materials at hand, each bed a patch on an amorphous quilt. A pattern emerges from his fabric, but Lancelot creates a rhythm of dissimilarity, a smooth space upon which trajectories can be traced but which has no overarching, organizing principle. “Patchwork, in conformity with migration, whose degree of affinity with nomadism it shares, is not only named after trajectories, but ‘represents’ trajectories, becomes inseparable from speed or movement in open space” (D&G, 477). Lancelot is a nomad, stitching together a patchwork quilt of resistance. <br />
<br />
What does Lancelot resist, whose narratives does he overwrite with his own errant trajectories? These beds are women’s spaces, the stories of female desires – perhaps locations dictated to Chrétien by his patroness, Marie de Champagne? Eventually we arrive at the romance’s ultimate bed, the sheets between which Lancelot and Guinevere achieve the long-awaited climax. Even here, however, Lancelot re-writes the story, scripting a new narrative in blood. Whereas blood on the sheets should signal a loss of female virginity, instead it is Lancelot who writes with in this sanguine script, whose bloodied hands leave an ineradicable trace on the white fabric. For this is not Guinevere’s story, but Lancelot’s; Lancelot the masochist, Lancelot who revels in the chance to rend his flesh for love. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen reminds us, S&M is not as equitable a pairing as its acronym implies; although the sadist – Guinevere – is in the sovereign position of authority, the masochist participates too enthusiastically in the system, exuberantly exceeds expectations, and thus rewrites the very laws the sovereign can only enforce (for more on Lancelot’s masochism, see JJC’s <i>Medieval Identity Machines</i>). Sadist and masochist, striated and smooth, “the two spaces do not communicate with each other in the same way” (D&G, 475). Smooth and striated spaces overlap, relating not equitably, but instead mixing dangerously; one space is always bleeding through into another. The masochist ruptures the sadist’s desiring apparatus with the spilling of his blood. <br />
<br />
Telescope out into narrative space and we find more ruptures and resistances to women’s narratives. The tale opens with Chrétien’s admission that he is in service to a patroness, Marie de Champagne, and that he is only the pen for her story, that he is only writing in the bed that she has made. But might not these moments of Lancelot’s resistance, Lancelot’s recumbence and sanguine revisions of what has been scripted for him, mark the actual author’s own aberrancy? Is Chrétien creating a patchwork of smooth space in opposition to the striations dictated by his muse? Like Lancelot’s, Chrétien’s story is the quiet refusal to take up arms or fully erect lance and, instead, sink deeper beneath the sheets, to squirrel himself away and abandon invitation – which is also to regain control of one’s own narrative, to reposition oneself outside the story in order to regain authority, to sew the patchwork quilt that is always multiple. <br />
<br />
Thus Chrétien builds a tower in the middle of his page, to which he runs to hide, to hide Lancelot, creating a striated space within the smoothness, a point emptied of time; yet the building is loosed from its architecture, it is only ever an echo of its blueprint, for we know that here, in the tower, Chrétien abandons his narrative, his hero, his patroness, and leaves the story to another: Godefroy de Lagny. The patchwork quilt, I say again, is multiple, and we know from Godefroy’s own mouth (pen) that he is only telling Chrétien’s story, with Chrétien’s approval. But wasn’t this Marie de Champagne’s story? Thus it seems by escaping from the woman’s woven tale, by moving to the smooth space outside his patroness’s authority, by walling himself away inside his tower, he achieved ultimate sovereignty through an act of ventriloquism. <br />
<br />
Muppets bleeding through…<br />
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-57233673566362120002014-03-23T11:56:00.000-07:002014-03-23T12:33:42.911-07:00Ocean is the New East: Contemporary Representations of Sea Life and Mandeville’s Monstrous Ecosystems<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMCx_i3oqVBO2ObVXzhK40IOJw1P4EVTGeLsQfevLxlprZacH-_6u4fjWMNvc7nPekGJWHE3pWsJQemd-03cbTxnxwKucolvf5EV98YvlY7DPXi-N5nQW8N_HVBcx6LZf2cHZ8HnCe7Crb/s1600/600px-Gandalfus_yunohana_by_OpenCage.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMCx_i3oqVBO2ObVXzhK40IOJw1P4EVTGeLsQfevLxlprZacH-_6u4fjWMNvc7nPekGJWHE3pWsJQemd-03cbTxnxwKucolvf5EV98YvlY7DPXi-N5nQW8N_HVBcx6LZf2cHZ8HnCe7Crb/s320/600px-Gandalfus_yunohana_by_OpenCage.jpg" /></a></div>Spring Break was, well, hardly a break at all, but I celebrated its conclusion with some friends from Ohio who were visiting for the weekend. We dined, we drank, we danced and we toured a few of the MUST SEE sights of DC. Our last stop was the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, where I reveled in the gorgeous new exhibit: The Sant Ocean Hall. The only one of our cadre enamored of oceanic discoveries, I hurried from display to display, basking in bioluminescent beings, awe-struck at extremophiles and trembling before the model of Phoenix, the North Atlantic right whale. Deeply affected by these strange strangers, I stretched my imagination towards the inconceivable and wondered at the sheer breadth of possibilities for ways of living in these still-occult abyssopelagic regions.<br />
<br />
I found solace in the evidence that so many vast and heterogeneous lives can flourish without the intrusive light of the sun or human reason, and that such animacy is possible in the darkness, in a “world where the Copernican revolution is irrelevant.” (1) I attempted to think with and alongside such creatures, to make myself uncomfortable by imagining myself breathing without oxygen, thriving at thermal vents, manifesting light with my own body, an aqueous and somewhat amorphous body squeezed and strangled by the only just bearable pressures of the deep sea. I attempted a posthumanist thought project similar to what Stacy Alaimo describes in “Violet-Black,” her contribution to <i>Prismatic Ecology</i>, in which she insists that “Thinking with and through the electronic jellyfish, seeing through the prosthetic eye, playing open-ended, improvisational language games with deep-sea creatures, being transformed by astonishment and desire enact a posthumanist practice.” (2) <br />
<br />
Responding to the highly-stylized illustrations in books from the Census of Marine Life, Alaimo finds in such affective imagery an invitation to new ways of thinking life, and consequently the possibility for the dethronement of terrestrial ideas of sovereignty. Each Smithsonian display, like each vibrantly hued illustration of marine life, defamiliarizes this planet and renders a world that simply will not surrender to humanity’s hubristic desire for authority. Each impossible way of being, now proven possible, works to dismantle what Mel Y. Chen calls the “animacy hierarchy” by begging us to reconsider just what the hell comprises an “animate” body anyway. (3) And yet, as I wandered from station to station examining these oceanic bodies summoned from the abysses of the sea, lifeless, entombed in glass jars and carefully arranged for an American viewing public, I could not forget the relation between observers and observed, nor that human science and politicking still fashion a sovereign/subject relation between humans and the myriad strangers that populate the seas. <br />
<br />
Thus as I wandered the Sant Ocean Hall, I thought about what it means to “wander,” who gets the privilege of wandering (Americans, human knowledge-seekers), and what remains the stationary object of scrutiny (the nonhuman body, the foreign object, the subject of scientific knowledge). These marvelous displays are discrete islands of monstrous creatures that underscore humanity’s desire to safely navigate strange waters. I chose the adjective “marvelous” very carefully, for my wandering about the various exhibits reminded me of a medieval journey to the marvels of the East and, more specifically, of Mandeville’s travels around the monstrous islands just past the Holy Lands and off the coasts of Africa and India. For the ocean, it seems, is the new East, compared against the way the medieval Western hegemony represented the East in its travel literature. The inhabitants of Earth’s oceans are put on display to be navigated, plundered, studied and represented by the sovereign powers of Western thought. Like Mandeville’s tale of fish that deliver themselves to the shore for human consumption, we expect the seas to divulge their mysteries for our ravenous desire to control by means of knowledge-making. <br />
<br />
In Chapter 13 of the Defective Version of <i>The Book of John Mandeville</i> (ed. Kohanski and Benson), the narrator announces that, having completed his tour of the Holy Lands, he intends to “telle of yles and diverse peple and bestes” (1380). This rather lengthy chapter is rich in peculiarity and marvel, a veritable encyclopedia of the monstrous. An allegory-generating female spirit grants riches and doles out commensurate consequences for her supplicants’ greed. Gendered diamonds mate and spawn resplendent children, challenging notions about the inertness of lithic objects. Nudists, cannibals, blood drinkers, as well as pygmies, dog-headed creatures and headless bodies with ocular and oral orifices on their chests and shoulders roam these foreign shores. Mandeville fulfills the European desire to believe the East is wholly Other, a monstrous and invitingly dangerous land abundant in resources and passively awaiting representation by the Western imagination. <br />
<br />
Yet, although his descriptions of the diverse beings of the East are certainly mythical, Mandeville also lends a certain scientific explanation for the monstrous by repeatedly attending to the extreme heat of this region; Mandeville offers a climatological cause for the wonders he claims to encounter. Ethiopians hide from the sun under feet large enough to shield their bodies; men on the isle of Ermes suffer their “ballockys hongeth doun to her shankes” (1557). In such intolerable climates precious stones spill from river banks, reptiles grow to enormous proportions and, as I mentioned above, fish are so “plenteuous” that they offer themselves up for consumption. Heat is generative, and the corporeal peculiarities of the deserts as well as the fecundity of the tropical East are, in Mandeville, responses to extreme climate - much like the extremophiles surviving sulfuric blasts of scorching heat from deep sea vents. Each coastal country and island in <i>The Book of John Mandeville</i> is a unique ecology, an oikos or home to the various and varying creatures that inhabit these spaces, and like contemporary scientific attempts to understand the porosity between bodies and ecosystems once thought uninhabitable, Mandeville offered something like a medieval ecological justification for the diversity of beings he describes. <br />
<br />
Thus I wonder if we can assume that the imaginative spaces – and the marvelous creatures inhabiting those spaces – drawn by medieval travel literature generated new ways of thinking about an environmentally and ecologically complex world. Can we not find in such texts an anxiety and ambivalence about an earth more vast and verdant than God’s rubric allowed? Although giants erupt from Biblical origins, and blood drinkers, flesh eaters and necrophiliacs may mark anxieties about their obvious Catholic analogues– remember, Christians believe a man came back from the dead, a man whose actual body and blood Catholics consume at every Mass – what of the other strange strangers that emerge from the pages of Mandeville, the Cynocephales and headless figures with sensory organs in their chest? Are these curious beings the imagined consequences of thinking through previously un-thought ecosystems? Although fictitious, these tropical creatures seems to signal the disorienting encounter with evidence that the Earth and its beings are more heterogeneous than previously believed. <br />
<br />
There is something disanthropocentric, then, to Mandeville’s imagining the wondrous creatures of the East, just as Alaimo insists that encountering the enchantingly strange creatures of the ocean’s depths is a sort of posthumanist practice. The Smithsonian’s website might argue that “It’s hard to imagine a more forbidding place than the icy cold, pitch black, crushing environment of the deep sea ocean. It’s even hard to imagine anything living there,” (4) yet, like Mandeville, we MUST imagine new possibilities of living on this Earth, we must see through the eyes of the abyssal aliens, feel the torturous heat with medieval monsters, if we are ever to dethrone Humanity from the heights of ecological sovereignty. <br />
<br />
(1)Stacy Alaimo, “Violet-Black,” in Prismatic Ecology, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: U of Minn Press, 2013): 245. <br />
(2)Ibid, 247.<br />
(3)See Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, Duke UP, 2012)<br />
(4)“The Deep Sea,” The Smithsonian Ocean Portal website: http://ocean.si.edu/deep-seaAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-17641374956268022122014-03-05T08:10:00.002-08:002014-03-05T09:01:22.696-08:00Consanguinity and Corporeal Excess in "The Knight with the Lion (Yvain)" <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQ7uiJDLJ2Rz8mUYvgBgHmOmnSN2LLFCjyHrwNrKTJE9UAjrhkKFCTLWgBjI9n8sTo_sbtkOMkg_jyOUu0GTZQomnPvrLTI7SGFIpyyT_JNpHh3o54E9o74_ZbsIAWDGLVmJn77OTIshGS/s1600/31SmoothMusc3_400X_rev.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQ7uiJDLJ2Rz8mUYvgBgHmOmnSN2LLFCjyHrwNrKTJE9UAjrhkKFCTLWgBjI9n8sTo_sbtkOMkg_jyOUu0GTZQomnPvrLTI7SGFIpyyT_JNpHh3o54E9o74_ZbsIAWDGLVmJn77OTIshGS/s320/31SmoothMusc3_400X_rev.jpg" /></a></div>In her contribution to <i>New Materialisms</i>, “The Politics of ‘Life Itself’ and New Ways of Dying,” Rosi Braidotti investigates the shifting landscape of conversations about human subjectivity in light of our contemporary bio-political makeup, and finds in place of the formerly entrenched sense of the socially constructed human spirit (<i>bios</i>) a growing attention to the very real materiality of our corporeal existence (<i>zoe</i>). Braidotti celebrates the possibility that a new ethics can emerge which preserves not the hegemonic subject as much as the heterogeneity of subjectivities. Life is more than the span of a human’s political existence; life is also the relational encounters and strange mediations between lumps of animated matter. Thus Braidotti’s rhetorical questions linger like the viscous stuffs of existence: “Are we not baffled by this scandal, this wonder, this zoe, that is to say, by an idea of life that exuberantly exceeds bios and supremely ignores logos? Are we not in awe of this piece of flesh called our ‘body,’ of this aching meat called our ‘self’ expressing the abject and simultaneously divine potency of life?” (1) <br />
<br />
Although Braidotti’s sense of the body’s materiality is informed by the techno-medical mediated bodies of the current culture of stem-cell research, cyborgs and genetic engineering, I kept thinking about her essay as I read Chretien de Troyes’s <i>Yvain, The Knight with the Lion</i>. Leaving behind medieval debates about the relation between the body and soul and the spirit’s relation to the matter of embodied existence, I find in <i>Yvain </i>something akin to Braidotti’s awe of the flesh, the corporeal “’self’ expressing the abject and simultaneously divine potency of life.” Corporeal existence is heterogeneous, is diverse and thick with a sort of chimerical materiality and beings that exceed the very categories within which they define themselves. A king is a man who eats and fucks and sleeps. A bestial peasant with “the eyes of an owl and the nose of a cat, jowls split like a wolf’s, with the sharp reddish teeth of a boar,” is also a man and “never anything else.” (2) Categories confound precisely because bodies always perform in excess of what is expected; flesh is always becoming. <br />
<br />
Thus Yvain surrenders to the excesses of the flesh when he is abandoned by his wife and goes mad. Like many madmen of his literary tradition, Yvain sacrifices the trappings of culture that constitute the “human” and runs off to the woods to perform an animal existence. Naked as all other animals, Yvain hunts in the woods like a wild predator, consuming raw and bloody flesh, the flesh and blood that mark the similarity between species. On the one hand, Yvain evidences associations of madness with the animal – associations that work, in fact, not only to maintain humanity’s stable position at the pinnacle of an animal hierarchy, but to define precisely what <i>kind </i>of person belongs within the category of the “human” – associations still fiercely combatted by contemporary disability scholarship. Yet in a strikingly curious incident, the mad Yvain finds a lone hermit in the woods and trades his freshly caught prey for bread, water, and the hermit’s culinary preparation of the meat. Although one could read this as a scene that parallels the human domestication of the animal – consequently reinforcing the species hierarchy – Yvain’s preference for cooked food over raw meat reinforces his humanity. Yvain’s madness does not evidence a descent down a species hierarchy so much as it proves the instability of any system which seeks to reify notions of human exceptionalism. <br />
<br />
Bodies are unstable and unpredictable, as matter cannot be hedged in by form. A lion participates in chivalric culture; Yvain’s leonine companion is a squire, a fighter, and something of a lover, attempting suicide after he thinks Yvain has died. When injured, the legendary animal of enormous proportions implausibly fits onto a shield and is carried like a cradled child. A giant emerges from the wilderness and lays waste to a town; he is a force of destruction incomprehensible to humanity. As Yvain rends the giant with a sword, the giant’s blood is compared to sauce, his flesh to meat for grilling. Suggesting the lion’s perspective, the text carves the giant into edible pieces. A giant is meat, prey for a lion, prey for the wild hunter dripping with the blood of his catch. The blood of consanguinity, the material excess of violent entanglements. <br />
<br />
Blood and flesh mark what Tobias Menely and Margaret Ronda call a “red ecology” in their contribution to <i>Prismatic Ecology</i>. Red ecology attends to consanguinity – Yvain’s animality, a lion’s humanity, a giant’s nutritive potential – it is the first-hand encounter with the visceral, the fleshy materiality that evidences our shared condition of fragile corporeality with non-human beings. A red ecology illuminates the way to working under the sign of the red, to undertaking symbolic acts that uncover market forces that conceal the corporeal violence of labor and production. Under the sign of red, Yvain is able to challenge and overturn a proto-capitalist system in which young women are forced into wretched working conditions to manufacture clothing – yes, a medieval sweat shop. Yvain battles two demons – hybrids born of human mothers seduced by incubi – in order to release the tired hands and shine light upon the bruised bodies erased by the market value of textile commodities. Acts like Yvain’s which rupture seamless and invisible industries, even if only fleetingly, “draw attention to the commodification of nature continually underway.” (3) <br />
<br />
Thus, the rich world of <i>Yvain </i>is one of complexity and heterogeneity, it is a viscous landscape redolent with corporeal excesses and unpredictable flows. The machinic beings of <i>Yvain </i>are mutating and unstable profusions of material exchanges, they are actors who constitute and are constituted by the ever-shifting nature of their relations. <i>Yvain </i>celebrates the exuberance of the body and the superabundance of corporeality that comprises every being while utterly rejecting any sort of species hierarchy. Like the Knight with the Lion, we must combat any attempt to conceal the abject and remain vigilantly aware of the consanguinity of the living – as well as the dead. <br />
<br />
1. Rosi Braidotti, “The Politics of ‘Life Itself’ and New Ways of Dying,” in <i>New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics</i>, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham: Duke UP 2010): 208. <br />
2. Chretien de Troyes, “The Knight with the Lion (Yvain)” in <i>Arthurian Romances</i>, trans. William W. Kibler (New York: Penguin, 2004): 298-9.<br />
3. Tobias Menely and Margaret Ronda, “Red” in <i>Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green</i>, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013): 34. Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-73487423700881269812014-02-24T06:23:00.000-08:002014-02-24T08:59:09.449-08:00A Journey to Germany with Margery Kempe<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN8hhqE1DVX1QxgpGQ3m5ly4aMby5F6u3RIy9pBVWRlTLTyWM4T6Fjzgo5DWwxloILx1o8oat7RYm5fnLKwsSQu722wd7UMIthY5DS2DVKdJjLy4zmG3KShDiofcNt39XJn0G3ImtHwP3A/s1600/Frau_Welt_Wormser_Dom_von_vorne_und_hinten.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN8hhqE1DVX1QxgpGQ3m5ly4aMby5F6u3RIy9pBVWRlTLTyWM4T6Fjzgo5DWwxloILx1o8oat7RYm5fnLKwsSQu722wd7UMIthY5DS2DVKdJjLy4zmG3KShDiofcNt39XJn0G3ImtHwP3A/s320/Frau_Welt_Wormser_Dom_von_vorne_und_hinten.jpg" /></a></div>(Before I begin, please visit last week's post about Margery Kempe <a href="http://bacchanalinthelibrary.blogspot.com/2014/02/getting-ill-with-margery-kempe.html">here</a>. Also, let me note that most of this post was typed up while I waited for 2.5 hours at the DMV for my new Virginia license, so I apologize if any of my recollections of the text are slightly off.)<br />
<br />
In Margery Kempe’s “The Later Years” – also lovingly nicknamed by this graduate student as “M.K. does Deutschland,” but most commonly known as “Book II” – we find our time-tempered and ripened female mystic more sympathetic than the emotionally volatile woman of her youth (even her insufferable wailing is mentioned less frequently). This senior Margery seems more accessible, more human, as we share in her hesitations about her divine protector when she suffers treacherous seas, as we envision a grey-haired woman over 60 having discarded her maiden whites only to find herself too destitute for anything more than a potato sack dress, yet still too ashamed to discard her rugged wardrobe in front of her impoverished traveling companions in order to pick vermin from her flesh. Most of all, we empathize with Margery Kempe as widow and suffering mother who, without confiding in anyone, absconds to Germany with her daughter-in-law, both women having lost their spouses (and for Margery, her son), both women fleeing the site of their most human tragedies, united in grief and the willingness to face the uncertain and unfamiliar after so much death. <br />
<br />
As I considered “The Later Years” alongside Carolyn Walker Bynum’s <i>Christian Materiality</i>, I discovered within it a real sense of materiality that is not as present in Book I. My discovery was surely in part because, just as Bynum evidences the majority of her investigations into relic cults, Eucharistic miracles, and sacramental worship by describing artistic traditions from the high and late medieval Germanic cultures, Margery Kempe encounters relics and Dauerwunder only here in her senior years in Germany (excepting, of course, that “staf of a Moyses yerde” she misplaces while in Leicestershire in Book I). In Book II, Margery is traveling through a region riddled with sacred objects at a time when theologians were embroiled in the paradoxical arguments defending iconography while simultaneously proclaiming their <i>contemptus mundi</i>. Margery continues to commune with the Godhead even as she frets about her material poverty – she is clothed in little better than rags – and fears rape and attack by highwaymen. Thus the more mature Margery jaunting around Germany reads a bit like a <i>Frau Welt</i>, a woman of the world at once solidly planted on this earth, haunted by the lust and pride of her youth and worrying about the sanctity of her body, while always signaling her desire to transcend the flesh that will rot and decay. <br />
<br />
By <i>Frau Welt</i> I refer specifically to the medieval Germanic iconographic statuary (most notably the sculpture at Worms Cathedral) which depicts to the viewer oriented in front of the carving a gorgeous, voluptuous, and perhaps haughty woman, while the viewer who investigates the statue from behind finds a body bored into and eaten away by worms and frogs. Allegorically, the icon signifies the evils of the material world, that no matter how many pleasures the body offers, humanity should not be distracted from spiritual determinations by the lustful desires of a flesh that will inevitably putrefy and decay. Yet the image also celebrates the paradox of simultaneously rejecting and celebrating materiality, finding divinity in the aesthetic and affective power of the mineral world which invites our touch and stimulates the artist’s desire to shape stone into story, as well as signifying with that story the mutability and instability of the body. Only the spirit transcends death; only the material ignites and inspires conscious awareness of the divine. Thus Margery Kempe, like <i>Frau Welt</i>, invites ephemeral communion with the spirit by simultaneously rejecting and relishing in the very realness of her flesh. <br />
<br />
I would love to explore the parallels between Margery Kempe and the <i>Frau Welt</i> tradition further (the literal vermin on Margery’s flesh, the paradox of an intransigent stone’s representing the mutability of the flesh, senior-citizen Margery’s continued hypersensitivity to her sexuality), but this is a blog, <i>my</i> blog, and I intend to focus on my personal reflections. Thus, as I journeyed across Germany with Margery and cataloged Christian material culture there with Bynum, I thought deeply about my ever-present anxiety an aspiring medievalist to engage continental literatures without the aid of a translator. I have long assumed I would inevitably undertake the study of French – a language I have never once attempted to learn – since the Francophone route is the way most travelled by scholars of medieval English lit; but as my mouth playfully shaped the rich acoustic syllables of words like “Dauerwunder” and <i>Das Nonnenturnier</i>, I recalled my two semesters of German-language study as an undergraduate so many moons ago and wondered if I could learn to read German instead. The trials of graduate school are already severe enough, so I hoped I could ease my burden by, at the very least, pursuing the study of a language for which I have already built a foundation, even if that foundation is obscured after years of neglect.<br />
<br />
Unlike Margery, I discussed my desire to head into Germanic territory with my advisor, who gave me his blessing while smartly advising me of the challenges I will face. The study of medieval Germanic literature is typically left to German language departments or falls under the aegis of Anglo-Saxon/Old English scholarship, but I intend to maintain my focus on English literatures of the high and late medieval periods. Thus, I will forge ahead with fewer travel companions at my side – but if I learned anything from Margery’s early years, it is that the pack will often turn against its very own, so there might be some wisdom in travelling with few companions. <br />
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-11282671899923219642014-02-12T08:24:00.003-08:002014-02-13T21:51:45.904-08:00Becoming Ill with Margery Kempe<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtrOHYKXOJq0bIbtNwbrrJIRgH986prl-Ndo13HGkG_qhOEMO2cBCLvW1bIJWV3tgbCOS3YTGfrpDIvNmg0GH7obpB5a152gdMapzZG9K7jiFBGQdx1fyRXaC2zYM7sAW4G4lQSZ6mq4CV/s1600/cellular-virus-wallpaper.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtrOHYKXOJq0bIbtNwbrrJIRgH986prl-Ndo13HGkG_qhOEMO2cBCLvW1bIJWV3tgbCOS3YTGfrpDIvNmg0GH7obpB5a152gdMapzZG9K7jiFBGQdx1fyRXaC2zYM7sAW4G4lQSZ6mq4CV/s320/cellular-virus-wallpaper.jpg" /></a></div>Last week I returned to <i>The Book of Margery Kempe</i> for the first time since I read it as a senior undergraduate, nearly seven years ago. At the time I was a much disaffected and disenchanted young man, and, like Margery’s fellow travelers on her pilgrimage to the Holy Land, I was “most displesyd for sche wepyd so mech and spak alwey of the lofe and goodne of owyr Lord” (1407-8). Although I would be approaching the text as a more savvy reader with a different set of critical tools than I once possessed, I nevertheless worried I would still be turned off by the nearly impenetrable effulgence of affect, by a performance so hyperbolized that its excesses seemed only tedious and overwrought. I wondered if, this time around, the text would have the power to enchant. <br />
<br />
Then illness struck. For three-and-a-half days I writhed and moaned on the couch as my temperature skyrocketed and hovered around 101 degrees, sweating and shaking in a feverish nightmare. Perspiration poured from my veins, chills riddled my flesh and mucus fought aggressively to carry the infection from my body. In fact, my body did not feel like my own, hijacked as it was by a virulent virus. Thus it was in this vulnerable condition that I vigorously engaged with Margery and, not surprisingly, my illness afforded me a wealth of sympathy for the afflicted mystic. Suddenly, like Margery, I was a contagious body. <br />
<br />
I do not wish to imply that Margery’s mystical experiences should be read as sickness, or I would be as guilty as the folk of her hometown of Lynn who too easily conflate her bouts of illness with her affective responses to her encounters with the divine: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><i>Sum seyde that sche had the fallyng evyl, for sche wyth the crying wrestyd hir body turning from the o syde into the other and wex al blew and al blo as it had ben colowr of leed. And than folke spitted at hir for horrowr of the sekenes, and sum scornyd hir and seyd that sche howlyd as it had ben a dogge and bannyd hir and cursyd hir and seyd that sche dede meche harm among the pepyl (2473-8).</i><br />
</blockquote><blockquote><i>Some said that she had the falling evil, for as she cried she wrested her body, turning from one side to the other, and waxed all blue and gray as if she were the color of lead. And then folk spit at her in horror of her sickness, and some scorned her and said that she howled as if she were a dog and banned her and cursed her and said that she did much harm among the people. </i></blockquote><br />
To read Margery’s weeping as illness is a dehumanizing gesture which seeks to equate Margery with objects much lower on what Mel Y. Chen would call an animacy "reference cline" by marking her as leaden and canine; Chen writes, “When humans are blended with objects along this cline, they are effectively ‘dehumanized,’ and simultaneously de-subjectified and objectified” (Animacies, 40). <br />
<br />
I also do not mean to suggest that such a hierarchy is ontologically manifest, that humans are somehow privileged and more agentic than metals or dogs. Like Chen, I am interested in slippages along this hierarchy, I hope to uncover moments when the verticality of such a subject-making system is toppled and objects are perceived along an animacy continuum. Therefore, what I do mean to acknowledge is that my illness illuminated the real material excesses of the very condition of embodied being, material excesses of which Margery is fully engaged and aware, and which her townsfolk and other peers are too obstinate to acknowledge. Margery’s metallic flesh and bestial howling disturb the epistemological structure which shapes the desire to marginalize and exclude the very matter of our existence. <br />
<br />
Although Margery Kempe’s union with the Trinity is spiritual, her experience of the divine is emphatically material and sensorial. The text relishes in the sensory details of her encounters, in the perfumed aromas of visitations, in the harmonious arrivals of inspiration, and in the corporeal extension of the body in the world, her torso thrusting itself into positions simulating the crucifixion. Her “boystows” voice (its disruptive agency thoroughly investigated by Jeffrey Cohen in<i> Medieval Identity Machines</i>) is perhaps so offensive to her interlocutors, as well as her unwilling audiences, in part because it carries all the material weight that my own contagious breath, redolent with viral particles, injects into my surroundings. Even the divine fire in her heart is more than mere metaphor, but a visceral burning she felt “as verily as a man schuld felyn the material fyer yyf he put hys hand or hys finger therin” (2063-4…or, might I add, if he should have a fever!). <br />
<br />
Like Margery’s eruptions, then, illnesses are so abjected and abhorred precisely because they evidence a materiality beyond our control; our body seems not our own <i>because </i>it is not our own, but is instead an entangled network of organic tissues and fibers that we share with billions of bacteria, with the ephemera of other corporeal beings (see Caroline Walker Bynum for more in medieval fascination with and ingestion of sacred ephemera…or, if you live with a non-human animal, inspect your body for some fur or scales), and, occasionally, with viruses. Thus, the community that I forged with Margery over the past week was built from our shared engagement with matter and all its unpredictability. Our unwieldy and terribly strange bodies are always withdrawing from any understanding we might have of them. Margery’s keen attunement to her body offends precisely because it serves as an invitation to abandon ourselves to the superabundance of corporeal entanglements and to relish, even in illness, the excesses of the flesh. <br />
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-6322041238827236592014-01-30T08:25:00.001-08:002014-01-30T11:10:14.826-08:00Quid Corpus Dicit? <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2iT4tKST_WeUIxEGcEfz_L65XnCG0TS9N2SO6JeguNddxCFxdr4sH_37cxJADolqS1WIJXGSRzOt2Jhyphenhyphenx1jQIFm0Fy7oSGcl0t1lUYhgtJhwKpZsGugiJepHHuakMWRyBgI5Rm_jB6TOD/s1600/IMAG0946_1+(1).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2iT4tKST_WeUIxEGcEfz_L65XnCG0TS9N2SO6JeguNddxCFxdr4sH_37cxJADolqS1WIJXGSRzOt2Jhyphenhyphenx1jQIFm0Fy7oSGcl0t1lUYhgtJhwKpZsGugiJepHHuakMWRyBgI5Rm_jB6TOD/s320/IMAG0946_1+(1).jpg" /></a></div>
Two days before the start of the spring semester, my partner and I visited a lesser-known – to the secular crowd at least – tourist site here in DC: the <a href="http://www.myfranciscan.org/">Mount St. Sepulcher Franciscan Monastery</a>. Like a Catholic Epcot Center, DC’s Franciscan Monastery recreates with contemporary materials various holy sites of pilgrimage in Europe and the Middle East, including the Lourdes grotto, the Tomb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Chapel of the Ascension and the Tomb of Christ in Jerusalem, and, surely of most interest to me, the Catacombs of Rome. At once pastiche and genuine commitment to touching the past (more on that turn-of-phrase to follow), DC’s own Franciscan monastery is nothing short of awe-inspiring, if also likely to inspire an irrepressible giggle when a gaggle of nuns shuffle from France to Mount Olivet in mere seconds.
<br>
<p>In the mock catacombs we encountered the enigmatic figure of St. Innocent, a child-saint sent to the monastery from Rome. Behind a glass box, low to the ground in a recessed wall, the figure of St. Innocent lay in death’s repose, immaculately concealed in pristine sartorial splendor, a death-mask of a child’s face frozen in a look that suggests an unimaginably peaceful slumber even as shriveled and blackened limbs sully the picture-perfect arrangement of the body. The juxtaposition of the sacred, unblemished relic with the gnarly evidence of the ravages of unholy time on human flesh is arresting; the imaginary is too polluted by the real. Also arresting, in a quite different sense, was our tour guide’s tale about this St. Innocent: an incorruptible (are you sure about that?), St. Innocent died as a child (no shit), and is now a patron saint of all (Christian) children. The end. Really, that was the most our tour guide was able to tell us about one of the only two actual corpses in their faux-catacombs, the other a relic with bone fragments from St. Benignus of Armagh, about whom our tour guide narrated <i>ad nauseam</i>.
<br>
<p>As I spent the following week puzzling over, and then pretty much forgetting, the fragmented and incomplete – if not wholly fabricated – story of the mysterious St. Innocent, I was given the following as my first reading assignment for an independent study with my advisor: Saint Erkenwald. Oh, the uncanniness!! Oh, the dulcet resonance!! All the questions surrounding this ‘innocent’ child’s corpse appropriated by the Catholics and entombed in a Franciscan dungeo…excuse me, <i>catacomb</i>, rushed to the fore as I thought about what it meant for an early medieval bishop to pardon the soul of a “pagan” – read Welsh or British or, <a href="http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2008/10/weeping-with-erkenwald-or-complicit.html">as Karl Steel might suggest, Jewish</a> – judge. If the text is explicitly about fulfilling the desire to assimilate the past, it also worries about the violence that occurs when we touch the past, when humans make contact with and get caught in the maelstrom of the material flows of time.
<br>
<p>Like the body of the cryptic St. Innocent, the pagan judge erupts into the narrative with an obscure story; after delving and digging “down deep into the earth" (45), miners hoping to re-establish the foundation of a cathedral built atop a pagan temple uncover a “wondrous fair tomb” (46).<sup>1</sup> The earth gives up its treasure, an incorruptible human body, to these archeologists, these re-constructors of time and history, but it also conceals its occult story; the text hewn into the marble of the tomb is indecipherable. Unlike St. Innocent, however, the corpse itself is made to speak, is granted the opportunity to narrate its own history. The text is wonderfully mimetic in its description of corpse-speak, attending to the physical barriers that a well-preserved but nevertheless un-ensouled body might have in manifesting speech-acts: “Then he hemmed a little who lay there, and let his head roll, / And gave a great groan, and grieving he spoke” (281-2). The dead judge, buried for centuries, is as much an earthy elemental being as a human corpse; like Tolkein’s ents, beings of such enormous life spans that their temporal sensibilities are almost incomprehensible to the fast-paced and relatively short-lived hobbit and human audiences, the corpse is slow to speak, its joints stiff with immobility and its face groaning with age.
<br>
<p>I do not mean to imply, however, that this body is ‘stuck in the past,’ that it is so sedimented in history that it is only an archaism, something to be excavated, studied, and assimilated. Clearly the anxiety of the text, its ambivalent temporalities (I dare you to determine precisely when it is set), the strange conditions of the pagan’s appropriation (accidental baptism?), the mixed responses of the crowd (mourning and celebrating), and the even stranger response of the body to Erkenwald’s touch and his embodied affective response (his tears, the very condition of the accidental baptism, catalyze the corpse’s rotting and turning to dust), ask us to make something more of this body, to let it continue to speak to us even after all that’s left are ashes. Although writing ostensibly about Beowulf and theory/criticism, Eileen Joy asks the following questions, quoted at length, that should be brought to bear on any conversation about the body and its relation to story and time:
<blockquote>Bodies (both dead and alive), history, and language, and all of the fiercely tangled relations between them – what do the dead want from us, what might we want from each other at any given moment, and how might we sufficiently record our past and present histories in order to lend some kind of meaning and ethical content to what some of us fear, deep down, is a kind of unscripted chaos? How, further, can the past inform our future in a way that is ethically and socially constructive? (LIII).<sup>2</sup></blockquote>
Like Beowulf – and perhaps the Gawain poet –, I conclude that the dead want to narrate their own stories, and not just stories of their past, but tales without finitude or tidy resolution; with incorrupt or eerily mummified hands, corpses continue to reach into each successive present moment and touch whatever bodies surround them. It is the responsibility of the touched to allow themselves to feel <i>with </i>the dead, and not only <i>about </i>them.
<br>
<p>After considering Jules Michelet’s embodied affective responses to the historical events about which he writes, Carolyn Dinshaw concludes, “The historian manages thus, by writing, to ‘touch’ bodies across time. Resurrection is the aim of his history, unreached but nonetheless signaled” (47).<sup>3</sup> I would add that the scholar and the lay person alike make contact with the past any time a reaction to story is corporeal, any time anyone “shudders to think about” or “trembles before” memory, recall, the historical event or, perhaps even more significantly, physical evidence. When one is confronted with a corpse, with the tangible, material evidence of a prior life, one struggles to forge a community with what was, to engender a story, whether fact or fiction – likely a mixture of the two – in order to sympathize, to feel with the imagined life that once animated the dead.
<br>
<p>Yet why do we feel the need to hunker down and dwell in an object’s history? Is not a corpse still a physical body animated by its own material flows, part of very present and very active networks? Why must we bury the corpse in frozen time and sediment its story in ‘the past’? Is a dead body no longer an agentic being in the world just because it no longer speaks? What if it can be made to speak, what then? If we dwell only on the body’s history than we are no better than an Erkenwald, appropriating its story to satisfy our presentist and perhaps nationalistic/religious/political needs. We should work instead to be like crowd of onlookers, looking with fresh eyes at the mystery of the body; just as “Much mourning and gladness were mingled together" (350) for the crowd, let us sympathize with the dead and celebrate the yet-untold stories of the corpse’s futurity.
<br>
<br>
<br>
1. All quotations from "Saint Erkenwald" taken from <i>The Gawain Poet: Complete Works</i> trans. Marie Borroff (New York: Norton, 2011): 167-183.
<br>
2. Joy, Eileen A., “Introduction: Liquid Beowulf” in The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook, ed. Eileen A. Joy and Mary K. Ramsey (Morgantown: West Virginia UP, 2006): XXIX-LXVII.
<br>
3. Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. (Durham: Duke UP, 1999).Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-8365551187896829462013-04-08T15:23:00.001-07:002013-04-08T15:28:09.045-07:00Thinking the Inhuman<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjj8HPMAwHDsh_D3W744okf1bdgjQPogI_wkfpAv_hJB1ipRK6V6C1iZnh6H5A_Q4gVs7GmiPewomgvadFFfS52tp-5qORcMnXU6p-NO8lwYzoBn6TJaCLnPkVFd1kfEH6UUfPwODogrRv/s1600/hewn+mountain.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjj8HPMAwHDsh_D3W744okf1bdgjQPogI_wkfpAv_hJB1ipRK6V6C1iZnh6H5A_Q4gVs7GmiPewomgvadFFfS52tp-5qORcMnXU6p-NO8lwYzoBn6TJaCLnPkVFd1kfEH6UUfPwODogrRv/s320/hewn+mountain.jpg" / align="left"></a>Driving home after the stimulating “Ecologies of the Inhuman” panel hosted by GW MEMSI, I was fortunate enough to have over 6.5 undisturbed hours to reflect, to worry, to chew over and to navigate the tumultuous waves of thought generated by the inspiring papers of my co-presenters and the invigorating Q&A session that followed (as well as the continuing conversations that manifested over dinner and drinks). As I looked out the window and embraced the contours and ecologies of Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio, I let my mind wander over and touch the myriad sights in the hope that my material surroundings would agitate and affect my reveries and give focus to the swarm of thoughts buzzing inside my head.
<p>
I tried to stop thinking of time and distance, realizing, thanks to <a href="http://johnjay.jjay.cuny.edu/profiles/english.aspx?key=[email]=%27vallen@jjay.cuny.edu%27">Valerie Allen</a>, that these measurements of matter tell me nothing of the things in themselves, but are only human approximations of quotidian qualities better left un-pondered. I wondered instead about the space of a mountain to the mountain itself. How might a mountain perceive its own morphology (metaphorically, of course)? Does a peak sense its base, and how might we investigate that sensation? And how little does a mountain really care (if it would even give a damn) that its slow slouching and vast expanding informs humanity’s very ability to think the slowness of deep time and the vastness of geological heaving?
<p>
As we drove through the highways that slash right through these mountain’s peaks, I couldn’t help but wonder how the lithic, the arboreal and the organic beings that constitute such peaks resist and/or desire to being so hewn. What qualities of stone and soil lend themselves to being sliced, how do the curves and crevasses of cut stone, the textures and hardness of igneous and metamorphic rock, of basalt, marble and granite inform our willingness to engage these lithic beings in our ecological thinking? And what of the road, itself a lithic body whose shape is designed by human architects? When does stone stop being stone and become the for-human paved highway? Go ask <a href="http://medievalmeetsworld.blogspot.com/">Anne Harris</a>.
<p>
Passing through the cuts in Negro Mountain (yes, that etymology of that nomenclature is as racially problematic as it sounds), I mused over <a href="http://www.bucknell.edu/x37426.xml">Alfred Siewers</a> presentation as we drove through a veritable graveyard of dead trees, its woodsy corpses still whispering of a once-thriving community of arboreal splendor. These sylvan skeletons communicate the introduction of the invasive Gypsy Moth from Europe, a ravenous insect whose defoliating of various trees and shrubs was likely responsible for this road-side necropolis. Is the Gypsy Moth a Nidhogg, devouring the life-giving and matter-structuring tree Yggdrasill? Humans are surely co-implicated in the spread of the Gyspy Moth, our tourism, industry and even wanderlust (forces responsible for the hewn mountains above) continuing to aggrandize the problem, yet how much more complex is the ecology which weighs down the world-tree?
<p>
Of course, so much of this tourism serves for the sake of human desires for recreation. Thanks to <a href="http://english.wvu.edu/facu/lowell-duckert">Lowell Duckert</a>, I am now more aware of the postures of violence implicit in our modes of relaxation. To recreate is to re-create, to tear down and ravage untouched spaces in order to create (and copy and paste) human ideas of recreational space. As we stopped at a state park for a bit of lunch, parking in a lot in front of picnic tables and swing-sets, I thought about the clear cutting and construction required to create a space for recreation. Yet, is not our continued fascination with our forests what stimulates the compassion of those who work dedicatedly to preserve and repopulate these dying woodlands? Of course, this is a very human model of preservation, and we should avoid the ethical high-ground of always assuming our intervention is necessary; we weep over dead trees but barely bat an eye as we eagerly exterminate millions of moths.
<p>
Situated somewhere off the highway in Maryland or West Virginia sat a primitive steel structure simulating Noah’s Ark. An advertisement for a church and an admonition against Christian notions of “sin,” this terrestrial barge got me thinking about <a href="http://stevementz.com/">Steve Mentz</a>’s shipwrecks and I wondered, at first, how different this planet might look if Noah had been a shit carpenter and if his ark had simply sank. Noah was always already in the midst of such a shipwreck, just as Sodom was always already doomed to its conflagration, just as we are already struggling to stay afloat in the polluted sea of our undoing. Yet, the ark itself would not likely perceive the rending and hewing of its disassembling as the cataclysmic overture we would surely fear it to be (of course, had the myth concluded this way there would be no “we” to ponder this alternative scenario), but merely a morphing and shifting of relations, a carnival game of dancing densities and displacement, and a repositioning of carbon and calcium, watery dissolving and decay.
<p>
One sees a great deal of decay and decomposition driving through the Appalachians, and I wondered whether <a href="http://www.siue.edu/~ejoy/">Eileen Joy</a> would find herself at home amidst such a jungle of abandoned post-industrial fissures and breaks being reclaimed by that capital “N” Nature. What kind of violence is this tumbling, crashing, rusting, shifting, breaking, colliding, devouring and entangling of spaces and structures abandoned by humans? Is this the sort of violence that would stimulate Eileen? Do we share in that same affinity? Is it possible to be inspired and enthralled by apocalyptic forces, to revel in the ways we bring about our own destruction, and still maintain an alignment with humanity? Faced with an impending ecological crisis, is it even responsible to preserve a human ethos?
<p>
And what of this flux, this interminable flow of material forces that engenders (imaginary) Biblical shipwrecks and the vicissitudes of time? Passing through communities built upon the shores of meandering waterways, I sorted through the debris of thoughts left behind by <a href="http://fluidimaginings.wordpress.com/">James Smith’s</a> wonderful discussion of “Fluid,” and worried over the fluid networking of geography and human ingenuity that shaped these odd entanglements of plunging yards, narrow homes, erratic roads and broken piers. The flows of a river might offer fish to feed a population, then flood farms and residences, forcing migration. Do these river dwellers have a natural flexibility, an innate “go with the flow” mindset that enables them to risk residing along uncertain shores, or have the floods themselves fashioned more malleable humans?
<p>
Stopping for gas and listening to the whirring and clicking of the fans trying to cool the engine, I realized how little I actually thought about the car itself which was working so dedicatedly to traverse the highways and with which I was so thoroughly embroiled and engaged (I was the guilty Dasein). I know nothing of cars, of the intricacies and mechanics that assemble and relate beneath the hood, but I do know that cars need oil and gasoline, they hunger for petro-carbons, and that our shameful thirst for environmentally destructive fuels does not translate into an automobile-ethos. The parts and pistons that propel the car have an affinity for petroleum-based fluids that lubricate and catalyze their connections. How do we think ecology when the objects of the world do not share in our anthropocentric ethics, the same ethics that are requisite should we wish to continue our co-habitation with all the beings (organic, inorganic, bodied, incorporeal, impossibly vast, unmeasurably tiny) on this planet? I would like to thank <a href="http://bogost.com/">Ian Bogost</a> for bringing my mind back to this dilemma.
<p>
This gas station at which we had stopped seems to have engendered a small impoverished town, a community whose sole purpose is to facilitate travel and tourism. So that we might drive through the cuts we’ve made in mountains in order to ask the challenging questions of ethics and ecology, these fueling depots and rest stops must be staffed and served by folks as often unnoticed as the homeless ambler that incited <a href="http://english.fas.nyu.edu/object/CarolynDinshaw.html">Carolyn Dinshaw</a> to think about our “shared vulnerability.” Although their mobile home communities remain hidden miles past the rest stops and gas stations themselves, these homesteads exist and it is our responsibility, even in the event of our recreations, or tourisms or even our shipwrecks, to attend to those who are so deeply entangled with the forces of materiality and often the first to suffer from our carelessness and lack of compassion/understanding of the non-hierarchical connectivity of being.
<p>
I hope I have not done a disservice to the brilliant presentations of the folks mentioned above by misrepresenting some of their arguments, but I merely mean to share the questions that manifested in my mind as I sat in the passenger seat of a silver Saturn Aura for almost 7 hours letting wonder happen. I must also express my most sincere gratitude to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen for assembling this creative congregation of eco-critical inquiry and for being the ever-gracious host and a devilishly fun companion.
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-81858390463516681392013-04-02T08:02:00.001-07:002013-04-02T12:31:05.629-07:00Dysphoric Materials, Anxious Materiality; Guest Post by M.W. Bychowski<center><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigcmioOZCADsIz62aEgh6NaiPxeKp0CdQl0jWVgzgQDY0D__rLFUsyJ9MMcTdTHMXAb_dIvM3QaDmfCyt773DqVjLnmlKmOSbdhBIiWjr7Sd2fLm5sbs5kjwMy8QuzapanAK9BMAS0fE7D/s1600/167187_735431781871_6665417_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigcmioOZCADsIz62aEgh6NaiPxeKp0CdQl0jWVgzgQDY0D__rLFUsyJ9MMcTdTHMXAb_dIvM3QaDmfCyt773DqVjLnmlKmOSbdhBIiWjr7Sd2fLm5sbs5kjwMy8QuzapanAK9BMAS0fE7D/s320/167187_735431781871_6665417_n.jpg" /></a></center>
<center><font size="4"><b>Crip Materiality: Part 2</b></font></center>
<p>
<i>“The body is not mute, but it is inarticulate; it does not use speech, yet begets it”</i>
The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank
<p>
The genesis of this project, I feel, was a simultaneous approach between Alan and me. While I sent the message first, offering another collaboration after the success of September meditation on the <a href="http://thingstransform.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-screams-of-sugar-agency-violence.html">Screams</a> (Alan) and <a href="http://thingstransform.blogspot.com/2012/09/a-thousand-little-glories-whispers-of.html">Whispers</a> (myself) of Sugar, immediately I received a reply affirming that he had been pondering the same thing and wondering if I would be interested in doing something on disability and materiality. As with many stories told from the circulation of objects, there is no one origin story and I like that. This needs to be messy.
<p>
So if we are going to get messy, throw ourselves into the dirt, it’s at least nice to know that we will have company. Between a depressive self-management and a perhaps reckless, living out of my gender dysmorphia, I would rather throw myself under the bus in a life-ditch effort to come out somewhere else than get pushed. And as Alan’s generous post kicks at me, there seems to be at any given time, far more friends under the bus than riding in it (how many of those are hostages, I wonder?). Given all the dangers not only for queers and crips, but any young scholar right now, it seems all the more worthwhile to be candid, generous, and loving of each other. If we are going down (or wherever), let’s make a life and a living out of it, and let’s do it together.
<p>
The academic body (and I here, and will continue to include those outside of formal university structures as well in this) is itself a dirty, messy, collaborative, crip-tastic thing. There are reservoirs of experience, critical modes, and I would even say, a transformative physics or meta-physics to be better unleashed in crip(l)ing-materiality. Materiality can be pitched as an abstract counter-part to materials, as theory against activism, but in general and specifically in terms of cripness, I would rather posit materiality as the way that materials speak to each other, and to themselves. Crip Materiality is simultaneously a thing and a call towards ways of thinging.
<p>
In so many ways, Alan’s post could stand alone as a beautiful and artistic articulation of these points—without the need for such manifesto-like statements or anecdotes which I can offer. If only to provide a sounding board to echo and share in the resonance of his music, I will begin. In doing so, I will try to maintain a stance of unknowing about myself. While I orbit words like gender-dysphoria and anxious-depressive status, which I hold to as useful but dangerous institutional language on my body, it is critical to note that even in their own clinical context the materiality of bodies that “look-like-mine” change over time and include a wide variety of divergent threads which once or currently meet in the node called “transgender/transsexual:”
<p>
“Lothstein, in his study of ten ageing transsexuals found that psychological testing helped to determine the extent of the patients’ pathology [sic]…[he] concluded that [transsexuals as a class] were depressed, isolated, withdrawn, schizoid individuals with profound dependency conflicts. Furthermore, they were immature, narcissistic, egocentric and potentially explosive, while their attempts to obtain [professional assistance] were demanding, manipulative, controlling, coercive, and paranoid” (Walter and Ross’s Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment).
<p>
Thus, I hope that the murmurs of my materials will mess-up in the best possible ways and escape their own internal materiality. If there is music in it, may it be an invitation to join in on the dirt.
<p>
<center><font size="4"><b>Disordered Materials</b></font></center>
<p>
<i>“Here the surface of the artifact is not just of the particular material…
But of the materiality itself as it confronts the human imagination”</i>
Materials against Materiality, Tim Ingold
<p>
“Don’t you just think we think too much about gender?” our family doctor asked me, his pen mindlessly clicking his clipboard. I sat across the room from him on the edge of a metal table, covered over in butcher paper; as a piece of meat, I thought.
<p>
When my mother scheduled this check-up, just to get a few booster shots while I was still under her healthcare insurance, she warned me that our doctor told her that he had some opinions about gender disorder (now classified as a dysphoria). As our meeting stretched on, longer than was needed to cover the details I was there to address, I realized I was going to be subject to a lecture.
<p>
“Don’t you think we think too much about gender?” he asked again, after mulling on his philosophy of medical-minimalism (the word “reductive” appeared in my mind). This time, it sounded more like a statement than a question. Responding to the content and not the premise of what he said, I told him about my image of gender as a kind of material flow, a node where people and things form logics of their own, but where currents can cut in and pull you elsewhere. He asked about my plans for surgery.
<p>
“I don’t see the point in top surgery,” he responded. “Breasts are just bags of fat, after all.” Once again, I felt the twinge of minimalism and reductivism meeting. That’s what they are made of, I thought, not what they are. Like his other questions/statements about gender I wondered first, if he was not a straight white male if he would still feel like gender talk was an inconvenience, and second, if we were not coming to my body and my materiality from very different world-views.
<p>
Little did I need to reveal the materials of my body, he saw many of them: my padded bra folded on top of my dress, the meat and fat in my chest that yearned from transformation; as well as things he did not: the blood that surged with conflicting hormones and the nervous-neurological systems that give me the internal-mapping of a woman, trapped like a phantom in bits of flesh coded with masculinity. Other materials, like the silicone I left at home or the coming edge of a surgeon’s knife, were nonetheless a critical part of my body, and not invisible but at a distance.
<p>
Yet as his comments made clear, it was not my materials that he was wholly ignorant about, the things he called “just” things, or raw things, but he knew even less about my materiality. For him, as far as he shared, the materiality of my body was a code, a map of organs and tissues that he could name and order on a diagram in med-school. The word “just” told me how little he thought of breasts or gender as more than abstract colored shapes with names attached; data he needed to do his job and pass exams.
<p>
The Materials and Materiality of Dysphoria are not so easy to distinguish for me. When I close my eyes, and the body I see disappears (the empirical fact medical science privileges), I feel my body in space; I have breasts, wider hips, and a narrower pelvis. Moving my hands towards my chest, I can feel five or six inches from my ribs, a presence of this body: warmth and pressure.
<p>
My nervous system sees and reacts to a womanhood that cannot be so easily seen from the outside, yet. Laying in bed with my lovers, I see myself transformed in their eyes as their fingers outline a body coming-to-be, but already before them. Getting dress among my sisters, our bra-straps mark an alliance, as we start a day in a male world.
<p>
“Don’t you think we think too much about gender?” he repeated as I got ready to leave. My materials answered him as I got dressed; the object(ion)s of trans-carpentry answering medical materialism.
<p>
<center><font size="4"><b>Anxious Materiality</b></font></center>
<p>
<i>“For fresisshly brought it to my remembraunce
That stableness in this world is ther noon.
There is nothing but change and variaunce”</i>
My Complainte, Thomas Hocclave
<p>
Blood smeared across my hand in flecks of red and brown. Feeling it between my fingers I looked down at the door-handle to my freshman dorm. Memory. Prediction. Panic. Time speeds ups with a multiplicity and rapidity that I cannot process everything that arrives at once:
<p>
Two days prior my room-mate had attempted suicide while I was down stairs trying to be social. On most nights I would have been there reading when he got home. Instead, I had taken an invitation from the guys on the first floor, so when my room-mate came home, full of various toxins (I never asked which) fresh from breaking up with his boyfriend, he was alone.
<p>
At the last, he panicked and opened the door, passing out in the hallway. I saw the ambulance lights from down-stairs and when I tried to get back to the room I was stopped. “Who are you?” asked a cop. “The room-mate.” They took my name and told me I had to find somewhere else to sleep that night. I got some information from those that found him, but it was over a week before I found out what happened in more detail, how his body responded, if he had lived.
<p>
Anxiety is related etymologically to death. Sometimes I can see the connection directly in experience. “Panic attacks feel like you are dying, but you’re not” I’ve often told in the midst of an attack; information I find more comforting when I am not experiencing it. Data helps anxiety, not panic. Panic feels so much worse than the thought of death, because it contains so many multiplicities that I cannot distinguish one story from another, one scenario from another, one life from another, one death from another. The materiality of panic is as a part without a whole.
<p>
Unmoored from the position of carpenter, I become a passive production within my own ontological sphere. Describing my materiality to myself does feel nice in a moment of heightened excitement or anxiety (my physiology cannot distinguish between high levels of “positive” or “negative” stress). Anxious senses and analytic thoughts process hotter than a normate body. Information floods my brain from the events around me, the proximity and demeanor of people, their clothes and level of manicure, routes in and out of a position.
<p>
This is followed by a rapid running of odds: What if X happens? What if he says Y? If I move here, what scenarios can I predict? That’s part of why I don’t like crowds: too many contingent factors, makes calculation difficult, the process of analysis which keeps me in the realm of anxiety and away from panic. In many ways it feels like I’m playing a game with death, full of enjoyment and fear. Too much data however and my processor overheats and systems reset.
<p>
For several days after my room-mate permanently moved out, I had a long quiet. No one asked me a question about it since the cop asked my name. During that time I read in the library. Come the weekend, my mum came up to see me with a care-package: sweets, a DVD and a sketchbook.
<p>
Drawing is a calming mechanism. While running odds and scenarios manages my anxiety, drawing does what sitting with a limited view of a crowd does, what writing does: focuses everything to a point. Rather than running multi-functions, I take on one. Over time my heart-rate slows. The danger here is the opposite extreme: depression, a mental and emotional singularity which holds on to me like a black-hole. Rather than seeing 3 steps ahead in multiple directions, I look further and further down this one line, 3 steps, 9 steps, 81 steps, more and more until I see a view which floods my vision.
<p>
After my mom leaves, distracting me with rhythmic conversation, I turn on the DVD: Happy Feet. It’s the first time I really give penguins (dancing or otherwise) any thought; or rather discover how they thwart my thought. No calculations, only interruptions. It is data without content, without futurity, without alternative. Anti-data. I watched this DVD many times over the next month. As the people came and left, the penguins & my books stayed up with me
<p>
<center><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigHOMqTTzjTDhjyLTMlrShdm8sAQj12hmSBFXoCQC9vlx2eScv0LF6658yn1SbHtjdCk7MhbXR4Bhs0Ecs-5SIiCwOLiISbPmTpNMJHkgTKtRv6pKa9owfcm1vMt2pY0kG1u907m39yqx0/s1600/182249_740153489531_1693112_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigHOMqTTzjTDhjyLTMlrShdm8sAQj12hmSBFXoCQC9vlx2eScv0LF6658yn1SbHtjdCk7MhbXR4Bhs0Ecs-5SIiCwOLiISbPmTpNMJHkgTKtRv6pKa9owfcm1vMt2pY0kG1u907m39yqx0/s320/182249_740153489531_1693112_n.jpg" /></a></center>
<p>
<center><font size="4"><b>Dysphoric Materials</b></font></center>
<p>
<i>“I don’t feel strange, more like haunted”</i>
the Forgotten, Green Day
<p>
$4,000 (or so, depending on the location, quality, and painlessness of the service) gets transferred out of my bank account; perhaps less if my insurance company changes their position on trans-healthcare. In that unlikely case, the money comes with the exchange of time: 1-2 years of clinical surveillance until a doctor tells the state &insurance company that I qualify for help.
<p>
Taking off my clothes in the doctor’s office, I put on a paper dress. I’m starving, my stomach emptied of food or water for at least twelve hours. The room is empty of my friends and family as I change. Then a nurse comes in and suggests I lay down on a rolling bed.
<p>
An anesthesiologist comes in and gives me two options: a gas mask or a needle. In the case of a mask: a machine that looks like a plastic propane tank attached to a bunch of tubes, dials, and making a clicking noise is brought over. As the clear plastic muzzle is strapped around my head, I feel the strange alien lung breath into me: pumping a mixture of air through the tank, a liquid reservoir of volatile desflurine, isoflurine, or sevoflourine is mixed with nitrous oxide. At first it feels like I’m breathing in steam, until the tingling in my chest becomes a sparkle in my spine and beyond my eyes, then my eyes become heavy.
<p>
Or in the case of a needle, a bladder hanging from a metal stand out of sight is brought behind me so I can’t see it. The nurse talks to me (a distraction) while a sterilized needle punctures the skin around my wrist, joining with a clip to hold it in place. Propofol (C12H18; called “milk of amnesia,” a molecule that looks like a bull’s head), Edomidate (C14H16N2O2 ; a molecule that looks like a log), Methohexital (C14H18N2O2; a molecule that looks like the big dipper) or one of a few other strange, haunting, forgotten fluids dance through the vein & into the blood stream.
<p>
Chemicals ripped from their homes in plants, rocks & pools in Israel, India, China to stay with me for a few hours to hold my hand through my material transition. Running through my circular system, the chemicals bond to proteins, particularly in my brain, and a quiet loss of feeling and care suggests that I close my eyes.
<p>
While I’m asleep, my bed is lowered into a flat position; any one of my loved ones that had ventured back into the room to stay with me through this moment of physical panic meeting chemical peace look on as I am wheeled into the room down the hall where men and women in blue masks and gowns are waiting for me. The blue garments are there to shield their clothes and skin for the blood that will escape from my chest. It is potentially dangerous for my (unfiltered) blood to mix with theirs: I contain enough dysphoric materials to unsettle their materiality.
<p>
The hands of the doctors, nurses and aids work mechanically, from years of rote training (part of what I am now paying for), and arrange my body amidst tables of shiny instruments. The anesthetic holds my consciousness down as the surgeon’s stainless chromium steel blade (formed by Swiss machines) cuts into my skin (under the arm, the breast, or nipple). The incision is slight but enough to allow the sanitized and covered finger of the surgeon to push into my body, pull at my skin like elastic, so the opening can be positioned to allow them to begin the insertion process.
<p>
A pocket of space is created either under the muscle in the chest (more stretching) or else above it and below the skin. Into that is placed a shell of silicone rubber (where the silicon and oxygen become long chains of Silicon-Oxygen-Silicon that will clump together or unravel, allowing for elasticity). Within the shell are either a sterilized saline solution (salt and water) or silicone gel (more fluid and mobile chains of silicon- oxygen, forming around a carbon-hydrogen chain).
<p>
Joining with my muscle, tissue, and blood, the silicon (one of the most common materials on earthy, after carbon, mostly found in sand, quartz and a rosy kind of geode; my breasts will literally be two beautiful squishy sand-bags and water balloons) all come together to form the basis of my transformed breast. A needle, thread, and bandages seals me up. I’m cleaned as I’m wheeled back into a room where others are waiting for the sleep to wear off. As I wake up, this dream ends and I’m in my bed at home, still a year (or so) away from this particular operation.
<p>
<center><font size="4"><b>Depressed Materiality</b></font></center>
<p>
<i>“Thu schuldist not plesyn me so wel as thu dost whan thu art in silens
And sufferyst me to speke in thy sowle.”</i>
The Book of Margery Kempe
<p>
“I don’t like answers” a priest friend told me once, “answers get people killed.” Answers bore me and when I get bored, I tend to get depressed. Logic can produce perfect circles, Chesterton reminds me, but incredibly small ones. Materiality which follows a single stance through to infinity (as my anxiety can sometimes push it towards) has the ability to shrink the circle until it becomes a loop of emotional bondage, a suffocating point. Elsewhere I’ve described it as a tense grey that has forgotten color and dimension in its perfection of shades, light, and dark.
<p>
When the weight of the whole universe is brought down on a single point, things seem to collapse into themselves. Same folds into same and the answer becomes a hollow deterministic end. Answers kill.
<p>
And yet on the borderlands of this event horizon is a brilliant, vibrant darkness. Absence dwells there and sings to us of things departed. Beings sit there in their solitude, watching the little becomings play and relate like stars in the distance. Old gods and humble daemons lean back on the relics of the universe, bringing materials and materiality so close that the distance between them hardly needs to exceed a whisper.
<p>
Walking alone at night with an iPod drained and useless, I feel a wave of melancholy wash over my body and for a moment I am quiet and still. Something has changed, something has died, and because there is no void, the beginnings of something else are creeping in to take its place. Without death, without depression, transformation would be impossible and without transition to mark a passing, without commas and periods to punctuate its murmuring, materials could not speak of the experience nor have the openness of mind to listen.
<p>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOlS9bPMbx20ZSc6zgfZhDtHnaA_lUPW4tYSKFSZjlzu0nY_vrlcWsJi2H4iatW0qVKAyF6ep4plNI_qRlT33x2g11TQZnk61hyLehssVe-Hl7XoCs5ErlB7YExc6EBJMCKurT2LiTPXKZ/s1600/msmaller.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOlS9bPMbx20ZSc6zgfZhDtHnaA_lUPW4tYSKFSZjlzu0nY_vrlcWsJi2H4iatW0qVKAyF6ep4plNI_qRlT33x2g11TQZnk61hyLehssVe-Hl7XoCs5ErlB7YExc6EBJMCKurT2LiTPXKZ/s320/msmaller.jpg" align="left" /></a>
MW Bychowski is pursuing a doctorate in philosophy in Medieval and Early Modern Literature at the George Washington University, concentrating on non-modern theories of transformation; particularly those concerned with ecology, disability and gender. In addition to her research, she directs MATCH a working group for critical theory; maintains <a href="http://thingstransform.blogspot.com/">Transliterature</a>, a blog on philosophy and cultural studies; as well as consults for campaigns in Maryland and DC on issues concerning healthcare, women’s rights and trans/queer politics.
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-47727647679901414122013-03-01T14:55:00.000-08:002013-03-02T08:27:28.232-08:00Desiring-Yonec<a href="http://beautifuldecay.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/13.jpeg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://beautifuldecay.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/13.jpeg" /></a>
<i>Initially nervous about returning to my long neglected blog with this somewhat experimental post, I reminded myself that with a blog there are no real threats, only opportunities. I lose nothing by experimenting with ideas I may never return to, but I just might gain some constructive criticism, so why not risk it? That said, I would also like to preface by acknowledging the influence of Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism & Schizophrenia on the content and style of this post. It only felt natural that after attempting to think in their erratic, elliptical and recursive syntax, I should want to write in such a manner as well; that’s just how I grok! </i>
<br>
<br>
The titular character of Marie de France’s 12th century lai, <i>Yonec</i>, is hardly the hero or primary protagonist of the tale. Engendered midway through the narrative, Yonec has just one real function in the story: to carry out the revenge plot conceived coeval with his own conception. If the lai has a hero at all, it is the unnamed shape-shifting figure who rescues the story’s damsel in distress, it is the magical being whose significations transverse the organic and the inorganic, a becoming-hawk, becoming-desire, becoming-seed, becoming-blood, becoming-ring, becoming-sword. A preponderance of evidence signals his association with Breton lai fairy cultures (animal-being, city through a hill, towers of precious metal, magical weapons and accessories); however, as the text does not explicitly define the unnamed character as “fairy,” the hero becomes that which escapes definition, something that exceeds boundaries, a series of intensities, a rhizomatic figure, a body without organs.
<br>
<br>
From its inception, <i>Yonec</i> records the desiring-production of its own generic tradition. The lord of Caerwent locks his wife in a tower, à la persecuted maiden motif, as an act of jealousy, of worry she will go astray. Is it not his own desire that will go astray if she is two-become one, if the marriage union is completed in love and trust? The tower defers and displaces desire in order to maintain that which he cannot have, just as the narrative must continuously defer our desire for resolution in order to justify the plot, the middle, the plateau. The narrative records and produces desire by disconnecting the wife-machine from the social order. The wife-machine withers, disconnected from other machines, from other flights and flows. The wife-machine desires to reconnect to a body without organs, a hero, a hawk, a reader.
<br>
<br>
The unnamed rhizomatic hawk-man-machine (given the kaleidoscopic performance of this character within the text, I deploy various appellations throughout essay to designate the ineffable protagonist) does not initially rescue the confined damsel (that would consummate and thus eliminate the desire that nourishes the plot), but instead repeatedly visits the wife-machine to plug into her (the text is fairly explicit about the frequency with which sexual intercourse is engaged). “Desire constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented. Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks the flows” (Anti-Oedipus, 5). Excesses produced by desiring-machines flow into other desiring-machines, and the spilling over of intensities from the hero-machine force a coupling with the partial object of the disconnected wife-machine, engendering further desire and extending the narrative of production.
<br>
<br>
The result of this excessive coupling and flowing is the restoration of the wife-machine’s beauty which had initially faded as a result of her being disconnected from all other social flows in her isolation. The spilling forth of the lust-hawk-machine into the wife-machine, like the oiling of a rusty motor, produces discernible changes and thus spoils the flow by introducing new intensities into the narrative; their passions are discovered and the hawk-man who has been parasiting the lord of Caerwent’s wife (in an act of metaphoric substitution by which the lord’s desire is being consummated by the hero-machine and thus rendering the lord impotent) is mortally wounded by a spike left in the window by the lord.
<br>
<br>
This violence, this interruption of the hero’s flows, introduces new desire into the narrative: desiring-revenge. The retributive desire is only possible because the means of its execution has already been produced: Yonec. After receiving his mortal wound from the spike, the hero-machine tells the wife-machine that she is carrying his child and that “[s]he was to call him Yonec, and he would avenge both of them and kill his enemy” (Lais of Marie de France, 90). Yonec is being already spilled forth from the hawkman, he is a surplus of information, a recording/production. Sperm is a flow, “produced by partial objects and constantly cut off by other partial objects, which in turn produce other flows, interrupted by other partial objects” (Anti-Oedipus, 6). The lust-flow from the hero-machine produces the retribution-machine in the form of Yonec, who in turn produces desiring-revenge which will be interrupted by the consummation of that desire and the resolution of the narrative.
<br>
<br>
At this point the narrative further develops the multiplicities and bodily excesses of the hero-machine. The mortally wounded knight, the desiring-sex-machine (a seemingly cancerous body without organs, sedimented in a strata of sex and rivalry; see A Thousand Plateaus, “How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without Organs?” 163) is made becoming-map, is a cartographic machine which leaves a trail of blood, a sanguine flow which produces a new desires in the wife-machine: the desire for death, in the figure of the bleeding hero-machine, and the desire for freedom from the boundedness of being-human. “The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification” (A Thousand Plateaus, “Introduction: Rhizome,” 12). A wounded hawk is a bleeding man is a trail to freedom is a desiring-escape. Blood is a flow, a spilling forth of intensities; it is deferral of desire, a reversal of fortune and a new channel through the narrative. It is a path to becoming-fae, a change in valence, an abandoning human discourse (again, although it is not explicitly stated in the narrative, the text does associate the knight with many of the motifs of the medieval fairy). Although a path signals a trajectory, a definable wholeness, it is merely a single tracing on the hero-map-machine. “Is it not the essence of the map to be traceable?” (A Thousand Plateaus, 13). If his hero-machine-being is the map, is cartography itself, his blood is one path, one trace, one iteration (from Latin iter, itineris: journey, road, route); it is a guide to otherness, to an Other’s symbolic realm, the valence where fairy logic transposes and disrupts anthropocentric discourse and cultivates the desire for annihilation.
<br>
<br>
The rhizomatic nature of the hero-machine is developed further when the wife-machine locates his bed chamber and receives two magical objects from him: a ring of forgetfulness and a sword of vengeance. “The knight…gave her a ring, and told her that as long as she kept it her husband would remember nothing that had happened and would not keep her in custody. He gave and commended to her his sword, then enjoined her to prevent any man from ever taking possession of it, but to keep it for the use of her son” (Lais, 91). The objects are valences, flows, traces on the cartographic machine. The knight-as-desire-deferred is becoming-ring and becoming-sword, and the ring and sword are becoming-knight, becoming-desire-deferred. The objects connect, conspire, engage, assemble, all to produce desire, to compel the narrative forward by enabling the inevitable reprisal that will eradicate desire and conclude the plot. (Although this reading of objects seems anthropocentric, an orientation I vehemently shun, I argue that although the ring and sword are purposive and ready-to-hand for human consumption, it is only one valence of their machinic-being by which they lend their agencies to the wife-machine, hero-machine and reader-machines of the tale, evidencing a lack in the human characters, a need for object-relations.)
<br>
<br>
The knight is a rhizome; each division of himself is still the same machinic identity, wholly indivisible yet multiplicative beyond a parts-to-whole relationship. He is an ever reaching and endlessly connected assemblage of hawk, man, fairy, ring, sword, blood and semen. Thus, Yorec, the excess and flow of the hero-machine, who is himself an excess and flow of animal (human and non-human) and inorganic objects, is simultaneously a new machine, a desiring-production retribution-machine, and a trace, a valence, an iteration of the coupling of the rhizomatic knight and the wife-become-mother-machine. The flows of vengeance, the desires of the readers and the trajectory of the narrative have been indelibly recorded in Yonec, the retribution-machine. When the mother-machine inevitably discloses to Yonec the truth of his parentage and the cruelty of the lord of Caerwent, Yonec slays the lord with his father’s sword, manifesting the desires of the hero-machine, the wife-machine, and the narrative itself. Thus, with vengeance enacted and order restored, the flows of desire which sustained the plateau of the text are extinguished and the lai reaches an end; there is nothing more to be desired. Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-22586603861461692352012-05-15T08:07:00.001-07:002012-05-15T08:07:21.572-07:00Kalamazoo<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOsFY6hQxUY3EoDQcBCEtO_KUolRiJDTP0hJElahYa3-_ejQQ3Dv4rmWVb69xkcZOgPmnIWO0-RBDSjWy2arJoDgcAyOc5rIvIV1-U9X5WHNzHA1tXob6XktEGpgeRH0GvEdyAPksJPKVN/s1600/alabasterfifthsignofthelastjudgement.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="320" width="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOsFY6hQxUY3EoDQcBCEtO_KUolRiJDTP0hJElahYa3-_ejQQ3Dv4rmWVb69xkcZOgPmnIWO0-RBDSjWy2arJoDgcAyOc5rIvIV1-U9X5WHNzHA1tXob6XktEGpgeRH0GvEdyAPksJPKVN/s320/alabasterfifthsignofthelastjudgement.jpg" /></a></div>
This past weekend I attended my first International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, MI, as part of the GW MEMSI panel “Ecologies.” While each and every paper presented by my fellow panelists was illuminating, if not absolutely brilliant, I was most captivated by Carolyn Dinshaw’s discussion of the ubiquitous image of the green man, that foliage enshrouded face, sometimes wearing, sometimes spewing vegetable matter, which decorates so many abbeys and cathedrals throughout Europe. The green man image has always interested me, primarily because it challenges and worries at the imagined boundary between human and non-human (in this case, vegetable) objects by illustrating a body shared equally, perhaps symbiotically, by human and plant. What I found most remarkable about her paper, however, was the anecdote about the interruption of her studying the green man by a vagabond, homeless-looking woman, a discretely human object that caught Carolyn’s attention while she was photographing the architectural ornaments. Here we are on a panel at the invitation to talk about that which is “utterly non-human,” and yet Carolyn pauses to dilate upon the meanderings of a very <i>human</i> thing, a pause which seems incongruous if not directly counter to the efforts of the panel. I was momentarily stunned.
<br>
<br>
<p>
Yet the title of the panel was “Ecologies,” and what is the promise of ecology if not an attempt to connect to, touch, relate, assemble with objects that are often left out of anthropocentric networks? And what is a homeless woman if not an object that is marginalized, abandoned, neglected, untouched, un-assembled, ejected from the most potent and puissant human networks? Thinking about this woman calls to mind Levi Bryant’s description of <i>dim objects</i>, “objects that only lightly manifest themselves in an assemblage of objects,” objects that only appear briefly and have no real political or social voices (1). Perhaps it is the duty of the ecologically minded to notice dim objects and shine a little light their way. Thus, amidst all of our work to invite non-human objects into our assemblages and to call attention to all the non-human objects that are always already at work within our networks, Carolyn reminds us that there are a great many human objects whose agency is often overlooked and who need to be enveloped and embraced by larger social bodies.
<br>
<br>
<p>
Perhaps I was so taken by this brief anecdote, this passing mention of the homeless woman, because I felt myself very much an example of a <i>dim object</i> at Kalamazoo. I arrived alone, an “Independent Scholar” with no relation to an institution; I spent hours wandering the WMU campus with no <i>mæg</i>, no <i>mamaþþumgyfa</i>, and no <i>meoduhealle</i> to call my own(2). Things relate, touch, connect, but as I walked through the various Goldworth Valley buildings searching for the registration table, as I squeezed through crowds and skirted by laughing, smiling, conversing storms of conference attendees, I felt utterly and absolutely withdrawn, like I had completely receded from view, and I wanted to scream “Would someone fucking touch me already?!” A hand on the shoulder, a brush of an elbow, a look in the eye; as focused on and interested in non-human relations as I am, I was surprised at how ravenous I was for a simple <i>human</i> connection.
<br>
<br>
<p>
Fortunately I had made the very wise decision to attend Thursday evening’s postmedieval roundtable discussion; Jeffrey J. Cohen, the person responsible for my being a lonely, dim object in Kalamazoo in the first place (the effusions of gratitude will come later in this post), was in the audience, and upon noticing my lone figure sitting in the back of the theater, he invited me to sit with his cadre of GWU graduate students and professional colleagues. I diffidently approached this motley coterie, doubting they would warmly receive a man of no mead-hall, and, to my deepest surprise, I was instantly enveloped by so much warmth and conviviality, I was so unwaveringly invited to join this little cabal, that I recognized my isolation had been primarily self-imposed. Inspired further by the theatrical performance of The Material Collective, which was delivered by various bodies scattered throughout the audience and complimented by free wine, and their message of the need for unity and strong relationships amongst those wanting to brave unconventional, theoretical, interdepartmental academic work, I determined to spend that night and the following day building as many relationships and connecting to as many medievalists as I could.
<br>
<br>
<p>
At a conference like Kzoo, things once assembled quickly disassemble, then re-assemble, never as the same assemblages they once were; micro-assemblages and swiftly shifting networks are the status quo, so keep up. I felt like alabaster, which is moist and malleable when first harvested, but swiftly loses its water molecules, hardening mere minutes after it is excavated. Yet hardened alabaster is still pliant, still soft, still supple; it is easily scratched and easily carved. Alabaster wants to be touched, it wants to connect with hands and tools and, never losing its chemical desire to recombine with water, it welcomes transition and transformation (3). Thus, like a raw chunk of alabaster, I left myself open to being touched and shaped and changed, and I fortunately fell into a crowd of eager hands: those involved with BABEL, postmedieval, and/or GW-MEMSI. These folk are all hands (curious hands, but not lecherous ones), they reached out to a chunk of rock eager to connect and, while respecting its qualities and chemistry, polished its rough edges and carved indelible marks into its surface.
<br>
<br>
<p>
This cadre of medievalists reminds me of Bryan’s rogue objects: “These are objects that aren’t locked in any particular assemblage or constellation of objects, but which rather wander in and out of assemblages modifying these assemblages in a variety of ways”(4). I don’t mean to speak for the individual actors that constitute the BABEL/postmedieval family (especially if they would disagree with me here), but <i>rogue object</i> seems a perfect appellation for this group. Instead of shaking its fists at the institution, it passes through, wanders, engages, disrupts, jars, slices, shifts, mutates and upsets the rigid status quo of the capital “U” University by modifying it from the inside via brief, roguish acts of unconventional scholarship. And its members are very much a family, nurturing, supporting, embracing each other and welcomingly receiving new friends into the fold.
<br>
<br>
<p>
I would love to wax on about my too brief experience at Kzoo 2012, but I fear this blog post would just turn into some mawkish gushing about the remarkable people who made my first medieval conference such a valuable, validating and entirely unforgettable experience (assuming it already hasn’t). I do, however, want to express my utmost thanks to the two individuals who made my experience a true success: Jeffrey J. Cohen and Eileen Joy. Jeffrey’s unwavering confidence in me and his enthusiastic support for my work got me to Kzoo in the first place, and Eileen, well, Eileen is just a fucking rock star. Thank you both for teaching me that academia can be collaborative and not just competitive. Let the cut-throats cut each other, we have sweet music to make (yes, that is a somewhat veiled allusion to my “Ecologies” roundtable paper).
<br>
<br>
(1)Coffield, Kris. "Interview: Levi Bryant". Retrieved 14 May 2012.
<br>
(2)No kinsman, no treasure-giver, and no mead-hall, O.E. from The Wanderer…obviously.
<br>
(3)I am indebted to Anne Harris whose passion for alabaster is infectious.
<br>
(4)Coffield, Kris. "Interview: Levi Bryant". Retrieved 14 May 2012.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-64040631325282757782012-05-03T08:33:00.001-07:002012-05-03T08:33:55.447-07:00Human<p> Next weekend I'll be losing my Kalamazoo virginity at the 47th International Congress on Medieval Studies! So, I figure a little foreplay is desirable, no? Thus, I am posting the text of the 6-minute talk I will be giving as part of the George Washington University Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute (MEMSI) panel, "Ecologies." To briefly describe the panel, I will borrow directly from the e-mail invitation I received from Jeffrey Cohen: "By exploring how environment and the nonhuman (with an emphasis, perhaps, on that which seems utterly nonhuman) matter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, we hope to map out new ways of thinking about bodies, elements, agency, and place." I decided that, instead of focusing exclusively on the "nonhuman," I would instead try to make the human itself seem nonhuman. Hopefully, I've succeeded. Enjoy, and PLEASE COMMENT so I can improve this baby before Kzoo!
<br>
<br>
<p> One of the most unsettling, disanthropocentric acts we can attempt is to envision a more capacious definition of “human” by looking at ourselves from the perspective of non-human units. When we can acknowledge the shapes and features that we share with other objects, when we see ourselves through the literal or imaginary eyes of other <i>things</i>, we look utterly strange and alien. As Timothy Morton declares, “All organisms are monsters insofar as they are chimeras, made from pieces of other creatures. The strange stranger is strange to herself, or himself, or itself”(1). If we can see ourselves as monsters, chimeras, aliens, if we know our bodies are not human bodies, but composites of pieces that belong just as equally to other beings, we can de-locate the human from the singular position as subject of an impossible correlationist reality, the illusion of a Cartesian duality will fade and we can begin to see how utterly enmeshed we are with all other <i>things</i> in the universe.
<br>
<br>
<p> Following the lead of Ian Bogost’s project to “see” the material world through the eyes of non-human units, as detailed in his recent work <i>Alien Phenomenlogy</i>, I propose that we investigate what other objects perceive when they interact with and engage humans. Although it is unarguably impossible to ever know the subjective experience of another being, to sense what an undulating wave senses or to perceive what a gamma ray perceives, these acts of sensation and perception are themselves unique objects that we can worry over and that tell us more about the unique experiences of objects. As Bogost states, “The experiences of things can be characterized only by tracing the exhaust of their effects on the surrounding world and speculating about the coupling between that black noise and the experience internal to an object” (2). By investigating the black noise produced by the relationship between non-human and human objects, we will begin to understand how other units interpret humans and, consequently, see ourselves as both more and less than the sum of our current self-awareness.
<br>
<br>
<p> Literal noise graces the brutal narrative of Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, in which a young Christian child is murdered by Jews for his singing of the Marian antiphon <i>Alma redemptoris</i>, and yet whose body continues to sing post-mortem. In <i>Music, Body and Desire in Medieval Culture</i>, Bruce Holsinger explores the material agency of music in the Prioress’s Tale as it is embodied and commits violence against human flesh through the medieval pedagogical tradition. He argues that, “the Prioress’s Tale exposes the horrific acts that music is capable of provoking, sustaining, and, perhaps most insidiously, aestheticizing for its medieval listeners and modern readers”(3). While his work is admirable for its validating the independent role of music as a Latourian actor in often brutal human narratives, his study never relinquishes the position of <i>human-as-subject</i>, always imbricating the agency of music within explicitly human networks (e.g. the pain of striking and beating a body to produce sound, or corporal punishment as a form of musical pedagogy). What happens if, instead of assuming music is inextricably linked with violence against the human body, we look instead from the perspective of music itself, if we look at the particular iteration of music, the <i>Alma redemptoris</i> hymn, as a subject that works to perpetuate its own existence regardless of what type of material within which it finds itself embodied?
<br>
<br>
<p> Investigating the behavior of the <i>Alma redemptoris</i> is much like following the path of a virus (4); a song needs, a priori, a host from which to germinate, and the song enters the narrative as it erupts from the throats of school children, organic bodies who perform as instruments for the manifestation of the song. But a song will emerge stillborn from its sire if there is no other body to hear it; thus, like the song of a siren, the <i>Alma redemptoris</i> exerts its self-sustaining agency as it captivates the “litel clergeon” and draws him “ner and ner” (520)(5). The instant it graces his ears, the pathogen-like song infects the protagonist and ratchets itself so deep within his memory that he cannot forget the tune, even though “Noght wiste he what this Latyn was to seye” (523). The Prioress’ child becomes a captive of music’s indelible need to perpetuate its own being.
<br>
<br>
<p> Once infected, the “litel clergeon” shares his physical body with the <i>Alma redemptoris</i>; “twies a day it passed thurgh his throte” (548). The Prioress’s boy is simultaneously an instrument for the production of music and a host from which the Alma redemptoris continues to replicate. Even after the human body is murdered and cast in a privy, the musical instrument that shares the very same parts, the very same space, continues to produce and spread the <i>Alma redemptoris</i>. The song is not so much “embodied” within a human frame, but completely enmeshed with the organs and relations that we so anthropocentrically call human. Thus, when the body “with throte ykorven lay upright, / He <i>Alma redemptoris</i> gan to synge / So loude that al the place gan to rynge” (611-3), it is only a palimpsest of a human while it simultaneously expresses its full being as a musical instrument and sonorous body. When we acknowledge the subjective experience of the song, we encounter the child’s body as a chimera, a creature at once part human and part music. It is, to humans, a corpse, but to the Marian hymn, it is an able and resonant instrument. Amidst the muddle of mourning and the miraculous, the anti-Semitism and divine intervention that conclude the Prioress’s Tale, the <i>Alma redemptoris</i> simply persists; it retains its host body and perpetuates its <i>being</i>, still germinating, still infecting its audience and imbricating even the readers in its pathogenic net.
<br>
<br>
<p>Thus, from the perspective of the <i>Alma redemptoris</i>, the human drama collapses and we find ourselves instead floundering about only for some form, some object, some instrument from which to manifest our sound, anything capable of producing our melody, anything which resonates or reverberates, moving like a plague which hungers only for perpetuity and transmission. A song sees no difference between life and death; it does not care for boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, but situates itself comfortably in the liminal space between the two. A musical body can be living or dead, often both; what is a harp, to our eyes, but a sonorous Frankenstein-like corpse of harvested tree and gut string, or, as Holsinger has illustrated, the crucified body of Jesus, his ribs and sinews like reverberating strings? (6) But for music, the harp is a mother, a sire, a creator; music finds life in death, just as the <i>Alma Redemptoris</i> perpetuates itself in the “ycorven” throat of a child’s corpse in the Prioress’s Tale.
<br>
<br>
<p> 1. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Harvard UP, 2010), 66.
<p> 2. Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or what it’s like to be a thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 100.
<p> 3. Bruce Holsinger, Music, Body and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001), 291.
<p> 4. I defend my decision to use an extended metaphor by citing Bogost himself, who argues that “alien phenomenology accepts that the subjective character of experiences cannot be fully recuperated objectively…[thus] the only way to perform alien phenomenology is by analogy” (Alien Phenomenology, 64).
<p> 5. The Canterbury Tales, VII 520. All quotations from Prioress’s Tale are taken from Larry D. Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
<p> 6. Holsinger, Music, Body and Desire. See Ch. 5, “The Musical Body in Pain: Passion, Percussion, and Melody in Thirteenth-Century Religious Practice.”Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-41927150879924313112012-03-16T13:13:00.000-07:002012-03-16T14:19:46.199-07:00Surviving Elemental Relations<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBLNXtg66hdye6KI5PW9y2EZv1CTv3Le7CgVEdJtGkHzeZfVWWfIRCYoDmCFNaOZYeij4JGUiCH-uQuBmCfEYzceyaaF_f4J-EGY3EjMs-FDkpah0-If2SRnLg_MxpzMhOgJOPXPosO3E/s320/tornado_warning.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="200" width="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBLNXtg66hdye6KI5PW9y2EZv1CTv3Le7CgVEdJtGkHzeZfVWWfIRCYoDmCFNaOZYeij4JGUiCH-uQuBmCfEYzceyaaF_f4J-EGY3EjMs-FDkpah0-If2SRnLg_MxpzMhOgJOPXPosO3E/s320/tornado_warning.gif" /></a></div>
Yesterday I drove 142 miles to attend the JNT Dialogue at Eastern Michigan University, at which Eileen Joy, Jeffrey Cohen and Timothy Morton planned to speak on non-human ecologies. Although the subject itself is interesting enough to make the drive well worth the cost (in gas), my primary motivation was the opportunity to meet, face-to-face, three scholars who have not only constructed the foundation of the academic work I plan to pursue in graduate school, but who have also inspired me personally and, in the case of Jeffrey, in an almost mentor-like capacity. And while I would love to wax on about how marvelous, warm, inspirational, welcoming and downright fucking funny they are, I must forge ahead and talk about the most surprising guest to show up at the Non-Human Ecologies Dialogue: an F3 tornado.
<br>
<br>
Barely five minutes into Jeffrey’s talk about the agency of elemental forces and the paradoxical role of fire as a composer and destroyer of narratives the session was interrupted by news of a tornado warning and instructions to evacuate the room and seek shelter in stair wells or the auditorium in the center of the building. Flustered and dumbfounded, many of the group, myself included, wandered around directionless until eventually making our way to the auditorium, viscerally red and womb-like in its humidity, never quite certain what to make of the storm; and even with news reports airing on the auditorium’s film screen, it was never truly possible to ascertain just what type of threat we were facing. After nearly an hour-and-a-half of sitting in this sweltering uncertainty, we were finally permitted to return to the third-floor room and finish the Dialogue.
<br>
<br>
During and after the chaos of the storm, many remarks were made along the lines of, “talk about elemental relations, we’re having them right now!” It was difficult to ignore the overwhelming sense of the uncanny. As Jeffrey and Timothy gave abbreviated versions of their planned talks (Timothy, with permission from the audience, only abbreviating his breaths and the pauses between words in order to deliver the entire content of his paper with remarkable speed), both couldn’t help but acknowledge how frequently their papers made reference to storms and tornadoes. After about 20 minutes, both speakers finished, a lively Q&A followed, snacks were served and, by this point, the tornado was merely memory. However, during the Q&A, one question stood out for me above the others, primarily because the person who proffered it must have somehow remained oblivious to the events that had transpired over the past two hours. His concern, loosely paraphrased, was how an object-oriented ontology is relevant to more practical matters affecting social bodies constructed entirely of human members, how thinking about the agency of non-human objects has any real bearing on human politics and human ethics. Apparently he wasn’t present during the tornado.
<br>
<br>
From a staunchly anthropocentric perspective, the tornado was a jarring and unwelcome event that interrupted the human trajectory of the evening, an out-there distraction from the more pressing concerns of the entirely human social-body collected in room 310A that had gathered to discuss elemental relations. While its agency was apparent, the tornado's relationality to the social body was as an outsider, an intruder. And Jeffrey and Timothy both averred that anthropocentrism is inescapable; just as a plastic bottle cannot escape its plasticbottlecentric perspective, a human cannot ever really stop participating in the world from the subject position of a human. However, by increasing awareness of the roles of non-human bodies within social networks, humans can mediate their anthropocentric perspective and welcome more equitable relationships with non-human objects. Thus, from a more moderate and object-oriented vista, the tornado is perceived as an (uninvited) actor introducing its own vibrant materiality into the social body, affecting and altering that body but not necessarily interrupting any perceived trajectories. If we can think the tornado as vibrant matter, a wandering vagrant that enters into social networks with other human and non-human bodies (albeit more brutishly and vigorously than some other objects might), we can appreciate that we were treated to a first-hand narrative related by the very elements Jeffrey, Eileen and Timothy were giving voice to in their discussions.
<br>
<br>
While I am aware that the delay imposed upon the Dialogue by the precautionary measures the university staff employed during the storm was justifiably frustrating for the speakers (as well as the students eager to get their credit for attendance and jettison the talk as quickly as they could), by accepting the natural state of anarchy in which all objects operate, I was able to focus instead on the types of relationships that formed because of the presence of the storm, not in spite of it. As the members from social body 310A packed into the auditorium, it merged with other social bodies, a collection of young poets, a children’s program, a study group, and became a temporary zone for establishing relationships that would not have likely occurred without the presence of the storm. Huddled together, anxious and uncertain in that steamy, garishly red sauna, some of the children merged with a study group to play a game of duck-duck-goose on the stage, the poets temporarily had an entire auditorium as an audience for some improvisation, and nearly everyone was using this time to call family, text friends and tweet about the excitement. The uncertainty and impatience shared by every member of that temporary social body was as tangible as the sweat dripping down all our faces, an almost physical anxiety irreducible to the individual persons filling that auditorium, an anxiety that belonged to the social body as a whole, an anxiety that would not have manifested had we all not collected in such heat amidst such a storm of uncertainty in such a red, red room.
<br>
<br>
And in such a state of heightened emotion, in a room full of so much material vibrancy you could literally see it steaming off the bodies of humans like a noisome odor (and there was plenty of that too), new bonds of friendship were forged and sealed with sweat as personal “bubbles” were burst and we all became closer and warmer in fear of, what, exactly? I drove those 142 miles primarily for the opportunity to meet Jeffrey Cohen and Eileen Joy, hoping for little more than a handshake and a chance to put a face with a name. Instead, in that state of anarchy (that only seems so anarchic until we realize that it is just the natural state of all objects) I was able to set the foundations of what I hope will become lasting friendships with Jeffrey and Eileen. When humans are no longer capable of ignoring the state of anarchy, their appearances begin to drop and that rift between essence and appearance begins to rise to the surface; and what occurs when you see someone’s ‘rift’ is much like what occurs when you see someone’s naked body: a certain threshold of familiarity and honesty is established and the moment is unforgettable and likely to remain a thick stew from which to siphon good memories and, hopefully, laughs. Therefore, I have nothing but gratitude for the unexpected, uncanny, tempestuous arrival of that strange tornado on that strange evening in that too red room.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-68435267870008369222012-03-14T07:45:00.002-07:002012-03-14T08:07:51.633-07:00What Sir Gowther Ate<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-pO_-kEE-lsg/Tw6fVL6_XVI/AAAAAAAACuQ/ObUemt4qDLE/s400/The+Virgin+Nursing+the+Christ+Child%252C+Rubens.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="300" width="300" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-pO_-kEE-lsg/Tw6fVL6_XVI/AAAAAAAACuQ/ObUemt4qDLE/s400/The+Virgin+Nursing+the+Christ+Child%252C+Rubens.jpg" /></a></div>
For at least a week now, Sir Gowther’s mouth has been plaguing my thoughts, spontaneously interrupting my morning cup of coffee, the tranquility of my showers and that ephemeral, reflective period right before I drift into slumber. I can say I am being ‘haunted’ by that mouth, if one can be haunted by such an orifice. Of course, one can be haunted by a poorly digested meal, “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese,” (Dickens, <i>A Christmas Carol</i>) a past that refuses to stop acting on the present (as if any such ‘past’ could stop acting on any such ‘present’), so perhaps I am haunted less by the mouth of Sir Gowther than by his meals. I am having trouble digesting an excess of breast milk, a masticated nipple; I can’t seem to swallow this wine from the dog’s mouth.
<br>
<br>
The haunting may have started even before reading <i>Sir Gowther</i>; in fact, I’m sure it started when I first encountered a grisly essay Karl Steele was kind enough to share with readers at In The Middle, a work scattered across 4 blog posts that deals, in part, with food, food and death. Please read <a href="http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2012/02/wormfood-abysses-swallowing-abysses.html">HERE</a> (and be sure to follow the work to its conclusion). These notions of infinite abysses, of the eater being eaten, of humans as food, colored my reading of <i>Sir Gowther</i> and likely inspired my heightened attention to the the dietary habits of the lay’s titular hero (I wouldn't dare assume that this bit of writing even approaches the complexity and genius of Steele's work; I just mean to acknowledge my influences). The “how” and the “what” of his eating, the ways in which he uses his mouth and the role of that which he consumes in the creation and reception of his identity, these are the questions that now haunt me, and this blog post is, hopefully, an exorcism.
<br>
<br>
As Jane Bennet writes in <i>Vibrant Matter</i>, “in the eating encounter, all bodies are shown to be but temporary congealments of a materiality that is a process of becoming, is hustle and flow punctuated by sedimentation and substance” (49). That which eats and that which is to be eaten are both changed by the encounter; neither the consumer nor the consumed is the primary actant; instead, eating is an assemblage in which all parties express their unique agencies and influence each other member of the eating-machine. When talking about a human’s diet, this way of thinking serves to de-anthropocentrize perceptions about the process of eating; it reminds us that to eat is not to dominate, but to subject oneself to the agency of that which is eaten.
Of course, if all members of the eating-machine are humans, if humans are both that which eats and that which is being eaten, any notion of anthropocentrism is further displaced. Acts of cannibalism are perhaps so taboo because, during such an eating encounter, even the most staunchly human-centric perspective must compensate for a seeming paradox as the all-consuming human-subject is digested in the bowels of another all-consuming human-subject, as glorious Man becomes sediment and substance in the intestines of another. What, then, of breast milk, of our species’ first meals that flow directly from the bodies of our human mothers? It is certainly not an act of cannibalism, but recognizing our need to nurse from the nutrients of another human’s body works nearly as well to shatter the notion that during the eating encounter humans are always the ones doing the eating.
<br>
<br>
Sir Gowther, then, further shifts humans out of the driver’s seat of the eating-machine when he turns breast-feeding into an act of cannibalism. After his father provides the insatiable infant with the best wet nurses in the land, “He sowkyd hom so thei lost ther lyvys, / Sone had he sleyne three!” (113-4; He sucked them such that they lost their lives, soon he had slain three). He manages to consume the spirit straight from the breasts of his nurses; more than just nutrients, Sir Gowther sucks the very vitality from his human meal. The text refers to these wet nurses as “melche wemen" (110; milk women), further displacing their agency as human subjects and reinforcing the idea of human-as-food. As food objects, the vital forces of these wet nurses cause the young Gowther to grow fast, and not just in size, but also in ill-repute (grieving the recent loss of their wives, a confederation of recent widowers begged the king to stop offering up nurses to the ravenous infant).
<br>
<br>
Sir Gowther also consumes the fleshy part of humans when, nursing from his mother’s own nipple, “He snaffulld to hit soo / He rofe tho hed fro the brest” (129-30; He suckled to it so that he ripped the nipple from the breast). Not only is the spirit of humans edible, but the very flesh of his mother’s body becomes meat (O.E. <i>mete</i>- food, item of food), the materiality of humans is also ripe for consumption. Thus the role of humans within the eating-machine shifts and congeals and erases itself as one human eats another; the eating encounter becomes an equation with like variables that cancel each other out and leave only raw, faceless material as a remainder. We have seen that such a diet directly correlates to a rapid rate of growth for the child, but, after such a meal, we are also left with spare bits of material that direct us towards the identity of Sir Gowther. By consuming body and spirit, Sir Gowther has consumed that which is human about himself; everything that is identifiably human has been eaten and yet something remains: his fiendish heritage. That these acts of cannibalism also occur in the text so near to the revelation of Sir Gowther’s paternity serves to reinforce his identity as half-demon. By presenting this paradox of human as simultaneously the diner and the meal, we are left to focus on that which is non-human about Gowther. Thus, food not only transforms the material of the body, but its identity as well.
<br>
<br>
To be continued…Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-64301895613377547782012-01-28T13:43:00.000-08:002012-01-28T14:49:43.617-08:00Le Morte; or, a withdrawn temporal part of objects.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/Edward_Burne-Jones.The_last_sleep_of_Arthur.jpg/320px-Edward_Burne-Jones.The_last_sleep_of_Arthur.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="214" width="320" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/Edward_Burne-Jones.The_last_sleep_of_Arthur.jpg/320px-Edward_Burne-Jones.The_last_sleep_of_Arthur.jpg" /></a></div>
Since having read <a href="http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/a-brief-remark-on-four-dimensionalism/#more-5750">this recent post by Levi Bryant</a> about the 4-dimensionality of things, I’ve been thinking about death as a temporal part of objects. The notion of the withdrawal of objects from other objects and from themselves is still perplexing to me, but thinking about temporal parts of objects makes such an idea more palatable and comprehensible. If moments past, memories, changes, shifts, and actions that have already occurred are literally parts of objects and not just processes, then those parts are always withdrawn from the objects themselves. Object-ontology proposes that time is a property of objects, but the events of objects, though they have influenced the present status of an object, and, though they may be recalled by objects with memories, are forever inaccessible to the object because they have always already occurred. Here I am merely rephrasing most of what has already been said by Bryant.
<br>
<p>What Bryant's post does not touch on, however, is the future of objects, everything that eventually will happen to an object, and, should we talk about living objects (to keep things simple, by ‘living’ I only refer to things that fit a rigid biological conception of a carbon-based life-form), death is almost always an inevitable moment in the future and, thus, a temporal part of living objects. However, death is always withdrawn from the object, because, although it may be inevitable, it is impossible to predict or foresee the circumstances and details that describe, manifest, surround, influence, and color an object's death. In the case of an anthro-object (my neologism for ‘human’), it cannot know whether it will be hit by a car, die in its sleep, or, as it most likely for any anthro-object born in the 20th century, die from some form of cancer (a spatial/temporal part of an anthro-object or a distinct object itself? Or both?). The anthro-object also cannot know what will occur to it post-mortem; will it be incinerated and cast to the winds, pumped full of chemicals and buried, or <a href="http://www.eternalreefs.com/">mixed with cement and dropped to the bottom of a gulf to build an artificial reef</a>? That moment, although expected, is forever withdrawn from the object until its moment arrives, and even then it remains inaccessible because the object is, well, dead.
<br>
<p>In Le Morte Darthur, the titular protagonist is forewarned by Merlin of the conditions of his death, is given details about his murderer*, and tries yet to subvert his fate, in similar fashion of King Herod (at least according to the Gospel of Matthew) by infanticide, by setting to sea all children born on May Day. He tries to preclude a future that is withdrawn even if it is foreseeable. Like all anthro-objects, Arthur knows his death is an inevitable part of his being, a temporal part that will manifest itself at some unknowable moment, but also like all anthro-objects, he struggles to obviate the inevitable. Death is always just out of arms reach.
<br>
<p>Thus, the text reminds us that death cannot be averted and we learn that Arthur’s son Mordred survives the calamitous trip to sea and eventually becomes a traitorous, weapon-wielding warrior. After Arthur is struck a seemingly mortal blow “upon the syde of the hede” (686:9) with Mordred’s sword, his dying body is put aboard a boat sailing towards the ephemeral isle of Avalon. Approaching the death itself, the event remains withdrawn, literally, from the figures upon the shore and the readers of the text, for the last image of Arthur is of his as-yet-living body sailing away upon its barge seen through the eyes of Sir Bedwere. Arthur himself speaks, just before sailing away, “For I [wyl] into the vale of Avylyon to hele me of my grevous wounde-and if thou here nevermore of me, pray for my soule” (688: 14-16). Even as his body makes its symbolic journey to its post-life, the death itself remains as withdrawn from Arthur as from the cast upon the shore, as he is unable to admit or acknowledge to moment of passing itself and that temporal part of his being is still withdrawn, still intangible and un-manifested. The reader is further distanced from the death event by the coyness and uncertainty of the narrator, and by the esoteric and ambiguous statement that, “here in thys worlde he chaunged hys lyff.” Arthur remains an anthro-object, still present as a being within the text, whether alive or not, but that temporal part of Arthur, his death, remains elusive and withdrawn.
<br>
<br>
*“for Merlyon tolde Kyng Arthure that he that sholde destroy hym and all the londe sholde be borne on May Day.” Sir Thomas Mallory , Le Morte Darthur, ed. Stephen H. A. Shepherd (New York: Norton, 2004), 39: 21-23.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-39107388764380716822012-01-24T09:32:00.000-08:002012-01-24T09:32:39.472-08:00<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ecIxMRD8k68" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
We should not ask whether the maiden in the mor is a Marian allegory or a Germanic river nymph, but instead ask how the figure of the maiden is informed by water and flower. Is she distinguishable from the mor? Or is there no clear boundary between the maiden and the mor, is she fully enmeshed with the mor and its flora, an assemblage and an entirely new object? She is an anthro-object indistinguishable from water and plant; just as anthro-objects are themselves nearly 70% water, the maiden in the mor is engulfed in the water of a marsh for a full 7 nights..and a day.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-80725544114394112952012-01-06T08:06:00.000-08:002012-01-06T08:10:21.520-08:00Anthro-Instrument / Soriah + Ashkelon Sain music vid<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/y-tjFUWDzXo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Throat singing blurs the already hazy boundary between anthro-objects and musical instruments, the voice hardly recognizable as being ‘human’ and sounding much more like a didgeridoo. The anthro-object is itself the tool for evoking what, from the perspective of the anthro-objects themselves, is “music.” Music is omnipresent, empyrean, the divine harmony that regulates the universe (according to medieval Christian theology/philsophy, at least). Music becomes embodied within the anthro-objects (see Holsinger, <i>Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture</i>, 2001), thus making the anthro-object nearly indistinguishable from music. Even if they are withdrawn from each other, they are so thoroughly “enmeshed” (see Morton, <i>The Ecological Thought</i>, 2010), that music informs any attempt to define the anthro-object. Soriah, the throat singer in this video, uses costume to conceal his humanness, and the music of Ashkelon Sain creates an ambience, a framework within which Soriah’s singing is even less identifiable as human.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-13225675766610455382011-10-17T07:42:00.000-07:002011-10-17T07:42:55.102-07:00Irreduction<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhurgS5YLG8HO5RK_9gYFUtQSOVd0JQ2UydkUmF1wH96CBTU-ct-W0nkovLR4M43uk3aDrLpN8455SQPmMZDLy1i03lcK1azioaNyXBnSVALAQP55EYiVnkTAqL9h1fri6YK4J58dSrLa_M/s1600/halo+with+a+straight+line.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="320" width="191" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhurgS5YLG8HO5RK_9gYFUtQSOVd0JQ2UydkUmF1wH96CBTU-ct-W0nkovLR4M43uk3aDrLpN8455SQPmMZDLy1i03lcK1azioaNyXBnSVALAQP55EYiVnkTAqL9h1fri6YK4J58dSrLa_M/s320/halo+with+a+straight+line.jpg" /></a></div><br />
I have lived in the Cleveland area for over 7 years now, and yet yesterday was the first time I ever visited MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art). I often stumble and utterly fail to apprehend or assimilate contemporary/modern art; it all seems so meta- and hypertextual, and aside from a passing familiarity with pre-17th c. Western artists, my knowledge of art history and technique is scanty at best. When I stand before some esoteric canvas splattered in paint and string and mud and blood and appearing to have been bludgeoned with a hammer, I feel like an immigrant learning English for the first time and being asked to really comprehend the poetry of T.S. Eliot. But occasionally I encounter a contemporary artist whose work transcends that inbred, art-community-only kind of work, and yesterday (before a fun and fennel-filled trip to Whole Foods) I did just that. <br />
<br />
The artist is Ursula von Rydingsvard. Her massive sculptures, painstakingly constructed by gluing together small blocks of cedar into craggy, twisting monuments of wood and graphite, reminded me of Latour’s Principle of Irreduction as expounded by Harman in Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (2009). Irreduction rejects the materialist idea that the physical world can “be reduced to a final layer of tiny pampered physical elements that are more real than everything else” (161). Object ontologists believe instead that nothing can be reduced to anything else, just as each von Rydingsvard sculpture cannot be reduced to its cedar pieces. Although one can see the individual chunks of wood that are used to construct the objects, like Legos or atoms, to focus only on the pieces is to miss the monuments themselves. The vitality of her works is only felt when they are perceived as whole objects, not just assemblies of parts. <br />
<br />
Standing before her <a href="http://www.ursulavonrydingsvard.net/site/selected_sculpture/detail/18.html">“Weeping Plates,”</a> I noticed the way the vertical planks of wood pull the gaze down towards the mass of ligneous tears accumulated at the base of each eye-like disc; but to focus only on those strips of cedar is to miss the potency and melancholy of the plates. The violent texture of “Halo with a Straight Line” (pictured here) is the product of the chaotic jamming together of those individual chunks of wood, but the intimidation I felt standing before that awe-inspiring phallic tower was induced by the object as a whole, not by its parts. To see only the fragments of <a href="http://www.ursulavonrydingsvard.net/site/selected_sculpture/detail/collarwithdots.html">“Collar with Dots”</a> is to miss the play between the ordinariness of a woman’s lace collar and its resemblance to a massive, threatening but familiar uterus. While it is true that I am constructed of billions of atoms swirling and dancing about in the unique dance of the sentient creature, the real Alan-object emerges as a whole being with a vitality that cannot be explained away by the micro-particles from which I am composed. If I were nothing more than the atoms and the spaces between those atoms, there would not exist a difference between myself and von Rydingsvard’s <a href="http://www.ursulavonrydingsvard.net/">“Ocean Floor,”</a> and thus I could not be an actor that finds comfort in the shallows and shadows of that paradoxically tumultuous yet pacifying structure.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-41963515765457687362011-08-23T17:06:00.000-07:002011-08-23T17:06:37.045-07:00Human ObjectsWow, it's been far too long since I've updated my blog, and I honestly have no excuses (translate: apathy). I feel that I owe it to my readers (me...maybe 1 or 2 others), to compose something remarkable to make up for my silence, but I've nothing astonishing or profound to say at the moment, so I present instead this brief selection from an e-mail I sent to J.J. Cohen regarding a topic I would like to address as part of the GW MEMSI discussion panel "Ecologies" at KZoo 2012: <br />
<br />
"The term ‘nonhuman’ has been bugging me lately; although OOO theorists often address the implications of the human-as-object, applications of OOO to medieval lit seem only to focus on the non-human. I think that such a definite exclusion of the human from studies of objects might actually polarize humans vs. other objects, perpetuating the idea of human as possessing some unique ontological status. I thought perhaps I could re-introduce the human into medieval discussions about OOO, open a channel to discuss the various ways that humans can be nonhuman or can perform/function in assemblages in nonhuman capacities. Humans as equipment, humans as tools, what is left when the human has receded from view and what the implications might be if humans are recognized as objects in ways that seem nonhuman. A contemporary example would be J.G. Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, in which humans are assemblages of sex acts and photographs and geographic landscapes and medical instruments and weapons and roadways. I’ll obviously include numerous examples from medieval lit in my presentation."<br />
<br />
To be honest, I'm only posting this so I don't forget what I wrote to Jeffrey in the likely circumstance I delete the e-mail from my sent mailbox. <br />
<br />
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-30162112828790982432011-05-30T07:11:00.000-07:002011-05-30T07:11:33.368-07:00In defense of anthropomorphism/pathetic fallacyIn an early critique of my rough draft (for which I am exceedingly grateful), the critic accuses my work of anthropomorphizing its subject and its writer for employing pathetic fallacy. The problem here is that she finds fault with my describing stones that "speak" and have "voices" and thinks I don't really mean to use anthropomorphism but, perhaps since I am still such an inchoate academic, I lack the experience/education to know not to use 'human' verbs when referring to 'objects'. Yet the papers is <i>about</i> the ability of stones to communicate, and it is my <i>intent</i> to use anthropomorphic language to describe the different ways stones communicate. I've been stressing about this matter a few days now, especially because I know that if this former instructor of mine finds fault with my use of pathetic fallacy, so too will many of the essay's readers (ie acceptance committees). However, if I don't use active verbs like "mutter" or "whisper" in describing these stones, I'm simply shoving them to the very background from which I am trying to rescue them! <br />
<br />
This morning, as I was reviewing some recent posts to Levi Bryant's blog <a href="http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/">Larval Subjects</a>, I stumbled upon this marvelous defense of the use of anthropomorphism when writing about objects:<br />
<br />
<i>These anthropomorphisms– rife also in evolutionary theory, sociology, and Marxist thought –are not intended to suggest that things really have aims and purposes, but merely to draw attention to the contributions that nonhuman things make in the world and to us. They are designed to break the bad anthropocentric habit of treating nonhumans as passive stuffs upon which we project meanings and which merely obstruct us.</i><br />
<br />
Thank you Levi Bryant. Perhaps I will cite your blog early in my essay so future reviewers won't be so jarred when my stones start shouting.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5629247341619841037.post-2116410089653872882011-04-12T06:54:00.000-07:002011-04-12T07:09:37.618-07:00What's So Funny About Dropping the Soap?Last evening an advertisement that assaulted me before my last.fm radio station would load got my mind a-racing. Perhaps it was for Jimmy Johns (advertising narratives have gone so far from product promotion I honestly am not confident the ad was for sandwiches at all), but some boy walks into a prison and as he passes the cells the camera, operating from his perspective, displays a series of stereotypical prison-types all eying the subject lecherously. The humor depends upon the culturally pervasive images of male prison rape, the ubiquitous jokes about 'dropping the soap' and the shared belief in the new-prisoner-initiation-through-buggery narrative. But I find two things especially curious about all of this: <br />
<br />
1. Why has male rape become a site of humor?<br />
<br />
AND <br />
<br />
2. How do the images of hyperbolically straight males hungry for gay anal intercourse subvert established beliefs about homosexuality? <br />
<br />
I simply haven't read enough queer theory to respond to this adequately, nor do I have any studies/statistics on the prevalence of male rape in American prisons, but I believe this would make for a frighteningly subversive investigation. American cinema and television have perpetuated the idea that any smallish, typically white male in prison will be raped, but I'm seeing a sort of teleology in this imagery:<br />
<br />
We start with the rape scene in American History X, a horrific, bloody, brutal offense. The well-muscled and sinuous body of Edward Norton is not an object of sexual desire but the male desire to possess that body, the privileged hetero male viewer sees himself AS the Edward-Norton-well-oiled machine, thus the male viewer experiences the horror of having his body queerly and forcefully penetrated. <br />
<br />
Then we move to the HBO television series OZ, in which the rape scene becomes common and is translated as an entertaining spectacle, like a car explosion during the chase sequence of 'generic-action-film'. OZ also adds sexual desire to the usual assortment of possible instigators of rape (punishment, humiliation, establishing social order), and given the juxtaposition of the homosexual male romantic relationship on the show, male rape is simultaneously horrific and erotic. And common. <br />
<br />
Now we have SNL skits in which Keenan Thompson, acting in a pseudo 'scared straight' program, fails to intimidate petty underage 'criminals' with threats of the abuses of prison life, mostly having to do with male rape. Dropping the soap. We also have this aforementioned advertisement which I just hunted down and am now certain is for Jimmy Johns. After a petit 20-something white male is escorted into a prison and the camera switches to the boy's own gaze, the viewer becomes the object of the queer carnal leering of 5 or 6 very large biker types and 1 black midget in a blonde ladies' wig (how many Others can we fit into one body for our amusement?). The slogan: Fresh Meat. <br />
<br />
I accept the idea that much of the male rape in prison systems has to do with the 'pecking' order, so to speak. If I commit such and such transgression, I will be raped by X, Y can not rape me becomes I am Z's bitch, etc. And perhaps it really does happen as often as media would have us believe, but I'm not sure I buy it, and I certainly don't believe it is the only explanation. I also questioned a heterosexual male friend of mine about it last night at dinner and he supplied the other typical response to the 'why' of male prison rape: they haven't had sex with a woman in years! To which I retorted: "So, if you haven't had sex with a woman in 6 or 7 years, you'd have sex with men?" I think his response goes without saying. So why the hell do men purchase into the idea that after being sex-starved for years they will have sex with other men, but as soon as you ask them to really consider what they are saying they balk? <br />
<br />
(Don't worry, I also see the holes in my line of reasoning here)<br />
<br />
Here is where sociological data would shed some light on my uncertainty, but since I am left to speculate, I imagine that when prison rape does happen, it occurs more similarly to the American History X scene, in which it is a form of punishment and humiliation and not just a run-of-the-mill occurrence, not some right of initiation every new prisoner has to go through. So WHY ARE WE OBSESSED with this idea? Why does the MEDIA want us to associate prison with buggery? And is this a subversive imagery? Homosexual intercourse (although forced and under-eroticized) between heterosexual males? Performatively gay acts committed by men who perform strictly as heterosexual. If gay men can now be identified by a certain swish in the hips, the shine of daily moisturizer on the face and a pair of next-seasons shoes this season (oh wait, that was a 'metrosexual' I just hit on, oops), how do we respond when the ideal of heterosexuality in his biker jeans and his beard as thick as tree bark and the whiff of cheap beer on his breath engages in anal sex with another man (funny, this pervasive heterosexual male image is strikingly similar to the man of "Appalachian descent" and to most of the guys I've seen in gay leather bars...)? <br />
<br />
Perhaps rape was horrific when hegemonic belief about homosexuality still gave credence to the idea that homosexuality is a transmittable disease and that gay men will do everything they can to subdue and force sex upon straight men, but today's hegemonic beliefs about what constitutes "gay" have created a nice and neat boundary around homosexuality to preserve the sanctity of heteronormativity (and define a new consumer group that is often childless and has plenty of capital to throw at superfluous goods and sevices). People no longer fear homosexuals because they can be explained..if you'll just take a look at this exhibit over here, you'll see the gay couple in their unfathomably tidy loft apartment, and over here you can see their two pugs, and here is a rare Chinese vase, look how the red lacquer compliments the muted sage of the window trim...Gay men are too busy decorating and shopping and getting their hair styled to bother with raping straight men. <br />
<br />
So I can understand why gay prison rape scenes are no longer threatening...but what I don't understand is why they are FUNNY??? Do we laugh because we are uncomfortable with the subversive images of men who perform heterosexuality but engage in performatively homosexual acts? Do we laugh because the image is no longer subversive? <br />
<br />
Or do we laugh because white males are still so privileged it is ironic that they could actually be the victims of rape? Men do the raping, they can't also be the object of rape.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07095165632314654634noreply@blogger.com0