*Notes (or what spewed forth from my mind after a shower) towards a possible introduction for the essay I hope to use as the writing sample for my grad school applications. This means I'm pretty sure I know now what I want to write about. Of course, Fortune's fickle wheel is always a-turning, I know things might not work out the way I'm hoping, but that's no reason to start planning an evacuation just yet.
**Oh, and I'm certain to change the one-line introductions to the main theorists who inform the critical perspective of this essay, I just like the way an early introduction like this allows me to juxtapose their works immediately so the reader already has a map of the journey ahead. And those little one-liners only really refer to a single work by each author which I'll cite.
A visit to the Smithsonian’s National Gem Collection is bound to fill one with wonder and awe and the radiating beauty and delicate intricacies of precious stones and crystals. A crowd always surrounds the Hope Diamond, as fantasies of limitless riches and deep time co-mingle into an experience of the sublime. Light bounces off the collections diamonds and gemstones in a splendid dance that captivates our imaginations. The stones in this room become vibrant, alive. Unfortunately, any awareness of material vibrancy is actually and only the result of a carefully choreographed theatrical experience; the sensations we feel are pre-determined by orchestrations that dictate what we see and how we respond. We enter the theater of the collection, and each stone and mineral is framed behind clear glass, is fore-grounded against matting that seems to disappear in its contrast to the gem, light dances because bulbs are positioned to create this effect, and placards are provided to give viewers appropriate contexts of luxury or deep time. We have become blind to vibrancy, to the affecting nature of objects, and curators cautiously craft a mise-en-scene that captivates and contextualizes material vibrancy by informing us that these precious stones and hard minerals exist and perform to serve us, whether their service is dazzling us in a controlled museum environment, or to represent and display our wealth, or, as many placards tell us, to help us craft our tools and build our machines. Always anthropocentric, we miss the calling of vibrant materials until we understand what they can do for us.
The past 300 or so years of philosophy has limited the scope of ontology and foregrounded epistemology as first philosophy; as a result, perception of life and the universe consistently asserts mankind as the dominant actant and observer. Objects become secondary, they perform as tools in the service of man, if they exist at all. Occasionally they are granted an ontic status, but often they are reduced to mere phenomena and often excluded from the brackets of our consciousness. Fortunately, contemporary Continental philosophy is re-introducing a return to ontology that focuses on the true power of objects as distinct and performative whether or not they are used for human ends. Bruno Latour reminds us that objects can be actants in a network whether or not humans are operating or even present in the assemblage. Graham Harman, by means of a surgically careful reading of Heidegger, argues that we must create an object-oriented ontology to become aware that objects not only exist but act completely independent of humanity and our awareness of them. Levi Bryant gives an outline for an object ontology by defining an Ontic Principle and offering a Principle of the Inhuman. And Jane Bennett reinvigorates things with a material vibrancy and proves that only by our awareness of thing-power can we align our political concerns with the ecological care we need to restore the health of the planet.
As this new-wave of philosophy and object-ontology pushes us forward and strives to construct a future of thing-awareness, it simultaneously creates a new reading of the past. Or perhaps the past offers new ways of reading the present. Either way, there is a growing assemblage of academics and scholars aware that the literature of the medieval and pre-modern is teeming and redolent with instances of and insights into the vitality of matter and the power of things. New journals like postmedieval and conferences like the "GW MEMSI: Animal Vegetable Mineral" are engaging medieval texts in light of contemporary object-ontology. This emerging criticism argues a medieval world aware of thing-power, an era that senses the vibrancy of materials and reproduces that vitalism in its literature. The inorganic of the pre-modern world is as alive and affecting as the organic and one form of matter that is particularly vibrant in medieval literature is stone.
Showing posts with label Jane Bennett. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jane Bennett. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Catalogs as Assemblage-Making Devices
As I was reading Sir Gawain last night, I couldn't help but let my mind wander back to Jane Bennett every time the narrative dilated into a cataloging of events, and I realized that catalogs as a rhetorical technique allow the reader to assess objects as parts of a greater assemblage.
This vibrant example from Bennett describes the obesity assemblage :
The problem of obesity would thus have to index not only the large humans and their economic-cultural prostheses (agribusiness, snack-food vending machines, insulin injections, bariatric surgery, serving sizes, systems of food marketing and distribution, microwave ovens) but also the strivings and trajectories of fats as they weaken or enhance the power of human wills, habits, and ideas.
Such a list reveals the obesity epidemic as a swarming array of people, objects, forces, directions, and processes that are in themselves parts of other assemblages.
Thus I was struck by the cataloging of the post-hunt spoils cleaning and carving scene in Sir Gawain (unfortunately I am using a modern English translation for my examples because it has proven too difficult to copy middle English into a Blogger/LiveJournal post):
(From stanza 53)
Next they slit the eslot, seized on the arber, / shaved it with a sharp knife and shore away the grease; / next ripped the four limbs and rent off the hide. Then they broke open the belly, the bowels they removed / (flinging them nimbly afar) and the flesh of the knot...Then they shore out the shoulders with their sharpened knives / (drawing the sinews through a small cut) the sides to keep whole
(From stanza 54)
Both the head and the neck they hew off after, / and next swiftly they sunder the sides from the chine, / and the bone for the crow they cast in the bows. / Then they thrust through both thick sides with a thong by the rib, / and then by the hocks of the legs they hang them both up; / all the folk earn the fees that fall to their lot. / Upon the fell of the fair beast they feed their hounds then / on the liver and the lights and the leather of the paunches / with bread bathed in blood blended amongst them. Boldly they blew the prise, amid the barking of dogs, / and then bearing up their venison bent their way homeward, / striking up strongly many a stout horn-call.
This catalog sews together actions, tools and trajectories just as it rends apart the flesh of the deer. The organs of the beast comingle with the knives of the hunters, bone becomes food, becomes an offering, meat is divided according to station, blood and bone and waste and animal are vibrant actants in a meat-making assemblage. And all this is presented in much the same way Bennett writes a fat-making assemblage.
Another catalog spoke to my animal interests, the hunting of the fox:
(From stanza 68)
The fox flits before them. They find him at once, and when they see him by sight they pursue him hotly, / decrying him full clearly with a clamour of wrath. He dodges and ever doubles through many a dense coppice, / and looping of the lurks and listens under fences. / At last at a little ditch he leaps o’er a thorn-hedge, sneaks out secretly by the side of a thicket, / weens he is out of the wood and away by his wiles from the hounds. Then he went unawares to a watch that was posted, / where fierce on him fell three foes at once / all grey. / He swerves then swift again, / and dauntless darts astray; / in grief and in great pain / to the wood he turns away.
A catalog constructed almost entirely of verbs. The fox is not an animal but a river of motion, a lurking, listening, leaping flow that sometimes pauses and sometimes rushes through the wild wood. The fox is each flitting moment of its movement, it is each obstacle in its path and each obstacle it overcomes, it is an unpredictable trajectory. Jane Bennett’s Derridean observation applies: “things in the world appear to us at all only because they tantalize and hold us in suspense, alluding to a fullness that is elsewhere, to a future that, apparently, is on its way.” The fox is unfulfilled promise and impossibility.
Of course, none of this is surprising if we read the fox hunt as parallel of the human seduction scene occurring back at the castle! But I’m really digging this flow of the vibrant animal assemblage as metaphor for sexual seduction.
And I can’t forget to mention another master of the catalog-as-assemblage-making-rhetorical-device: Ballard. Consider this collection of materials that represents the human animal/machine Karen Novtony in Travis’ schizophrenic world:
(1) Pad of pubic hair, (2) a latex face mask, (3) six detachable mouths, (4) a set of smiles, (5) a pair of breasts, (6) a set of non-chafe orifices, (7) photo cut-outs of a number of narrative situations – the girl doing this and that, (8) a list of dialogue samples, of inane chatter, (9) a set of noise levels, (10) descriptive techniques for a variety of sex acts, (11) a torn anal detrusor muscle, (12) a glossary of idioms and catch phrases, (13) an analysis of odour traces (from various vents), mostly purines, etc., (14) a chart of body temperatures (axillary, buccal, rectal), (15) slides of vaginal smears, chiefly Ortho-Gynol jelly, (16) a set of blood pressures, systolic 120, diastolic 70 rising to 200/150 at onset of orgasm.
The Karen Novotny sex-act-machine is presented much like the deer-corpse-becomes-food machine: processes and tools mingle with meat and organ, objects move between assemblages in a dissection-as-construction trajectory. Sex is the rending of animal flesh from bone, an offering to crows or a moment captured in a photograph. It is the blowing of horns and the screaming of orgasms. And much like a fox is a river of leaps and bounds, wiles and seductions, a Karen Novotny is an ocean of pumping blood and sexuality.
1. Ballard, J.G. The Atrocity Exhibition. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.
2. Bennet, Jane. Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
3. Tolkein, J.R.R., trans. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. New York: Ballantine Books, 1980.
This vibrant example from Bennett describes the obesity assemblage :
The problem of obesity would thus have to index not only the large humans and their economic-cultural prostheses (agribusiness, snack-food vending machines, insulin injections, bariatric surgery, serving sizes, systems of food marketing and distribution, microwave ovens) but also the strivings and trajectories of fats as they weaken or enhance the power of human wills, habits, and ideas.
Such a list reveals the obesity epidemic as a swarming array of people, objects, forces, directions, and processes that are in themselves parts of other assemblages.
Thus I was struck by the cataloging of the post-hunt spoils cleaning and carving scene in Sir Gawain (unfortunately I am using a modern English translation for my examples because it has proven too difficult to copy middle English into a Blogger/LiveJournal post):
(From stanza 53)
Next they slit the eslot, seized on the arber, / shaved it with a sharp knife and shore away the grease; / next ripped the four limbs and rent off the hide. Then they broke open the belly, the bowels they removed / (flinging them nimbly afar) and the flesh of the knot...Then they shore out the shoulders with their sharpened knives / (drawing the sinews through a small cut) the sides to keep whole
(From stanza 54)
Both the head and the neck they hew off after, / and next swiftly they sunder the sides from the chine, / and the bone for the crow they cast in the bows. / Then they thrust through both thick sides with a thong by the rib, / and then by the hocks of the legs they hang them both up; / all the folk earn the fees that fall to their lot. / Upon the fell of the fair beast they feed their hounds then / on the liver and the lights and the leather of the paunches / with bread bathed in blood blended amongst them. Boldly they blew the prise, amid the barking of dogs, / and then bearing up their venison bent their way homeward, / striking up strongly many a stout horn-call.
This catalog sews together actions, tools and trajectories just as it rends apart the flesh of the deer. The organs of the beast comingle with the knives of the hunters, bone becomes food, becomes an offering, meat is divided according to station, blood and bone and waste and animal are vibrant actants in a meat-making assemblage. And all this is presented in much the same way Bennett writes a fat-making assemblage.
Another catalog spoke to my animal interests, the hunting of the fox:
(From stanza 68)
The fox flits before them. They find him at once, and when they see him by sight they pursue him hotly, / decrying him full clearly with a clamour of wrath. He dodges and ever doubles through many a dense coppice, / and looping of the lurks and listens under fences. / At last at a little ditch he leaps o’er a thorn-hedge, sneaks out secretly by the side of a thicket, / weens he is out of the wood and away by his wiles from the hounds. Then he went unawares to a watch that was posted, / where fierce on him fell three foes at once / all grey. / He swerves then swift again, / and dauntless darts astray; / in grief and in great pain / to the wood he turns away.
A catalog constructed almost entirely of verbs. The fox is not an animal but a river of motion, a lurking, listening, leaping flow that sometimes pauses and sometimes rushes through the wild wood. The fox is each flitting moment of its movement, it is each obstacle in its path and each obstacle it overcomes, it is an unpredictable trajectory. Jane Bennett’s Derridean observation applies: “things in the world appear to us at all only because they tantalize and hold us in suspense, alluding to a fullness that is elsewhere, to a future that, apparently, is on its way.” The fox is unfulfilled promise and impossibility.
Of course, none of this is surprising if we read the fox hunt as parallel of the human seduction scene occurring back at the castle! But I’m really digging this flow of the vibrant animal assemblage as metaphor for sexual seduction.
And I can’t forget to mention another master of the catalog-as-assemblage-making-rhetorical-device: Ballard. Consider this collection of materials that represents the human animal/machine Karen Novtony in Travis’ schizophrenic world:
(1) Pad of pubic hair, (2) a latex face mask, (3) six detachable mouths, (4) a set of smiles, (5) a pair of breasts, (6) a set of non-chafe orifices, (7) photo cut-outs of a number of narrative situations – the girl doing this and that, (8) a list of dialogue samples, of inane chatter, (9) a set of noise levels, (10) descriptive techniques for a variety of sex acts, (11) a torn anal detrusor muscle, (12) a glossary of idioms and catch phrases, (13) an analysis of odour traces (from various vents), mostly purines, etc., (14) a chart of body temperatures (axillary, buccal, rectal), (15) slides of vaginal smears, chiefly Ortho-Gynol jelly, (16) a set of blood pressures, systolic 120, diastolic 70 rising to 200/150 at onset of orgasm.
The Karen Novotny sex-act-machine is presented much like the deer-corpse-becomes-food machine: processes and tools mingle with meat and organ, objects move between assemblages in a dissection-as-construction trajectory. Sex is the rending of animal flesh from bone, an offering to crows or a moment captured in a photograph. It is the blowing of horns and the screaming of orgasms. And much like a fox is a river of leaps and bounds, wiles and seductions, a Karen Novotny is an ocean of pumping blood and sexuality.
1. Ballard, J.G. The Atrocity Exhibition. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.
2. Bennet, Jane. Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
3. Tolkein, J.R.R., trans. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. New York: Ballantine Books, 1980.
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