Irreduction

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.

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.

Standing before her “Weeping Plates,” 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 “Collar with Dots” 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 “Ocean Floor,” and thus I could not be an actor that finds comfort in the shallows and shadows of that paradoxically tumultuous yet pacifying structure.

Human Objects

Wow, 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:

"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."

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.

In defense of anthropomorphism/pathetic fallacy

In 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 about the ability of stones to communicate, and it is my intent 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!

This morning, as I was reviewing some recent posts to Levi Bryant's blog Larval Subjects, I stumbled upon this marvelous defense of the use of anthropomorphism when writing about objects:

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.

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.

What'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:

1. Why has male rape become a site of humor?

AND

2. How do the images of hyperbolically straight males hungry for gay anal intercourse subvert established beliefs about homosexuality?

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:

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.

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.

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.

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?

(Don't worry, I also see the holes in my line of reasoning here)

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...)?

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.

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?

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.

Narrowing my interest, or, HELP me find the right grad program!!!

This is sort of a response to Karl Steel, but this is also something I've been meaning to do for awhile.

I’ve been trying to isolate graduate programs I should apply to for months now and I’m still having a less than optimal success in narrowing down my options. The only schools I know with absolute certainty I will apply to are Cornell and GWU. Others I’m presently investigating are Berkeley, UCLA, UC Davis (if only to work with Timothy Morton!), Harvard, and Yale. I know it is imperative I keep an open mind regarding location of the school, the education is more important by far than region, but I have to take into consideration my partner who is a public official in the Democratic political scene and would flounder in some of the very red environments in which many of the Ivys are, unfortunately, located. I can make exceptions if the school is exceptional AND I know I can perform strongly in the program, but I also need to consider schools in more diverse or more “blue” areas.

That being said, I should focus most on finding schools where I will be a good match with the faculty and will be able to select a special committee that will support my research interests. I also want to find a job after I graduate, so I am also looking at schools with a strong job placement record. But before I can figure out where I will fit best with the English faculty, I need to identify my interests within the discourse.

Thus, I will attempt to catalog just what I wish to study and what kind of research I want to conduct as a grad student. The following is a very facile rendering of my interests, just an attempt to try and understand why I want to become a medieval scholar. Clearly this does not resemble anything I would write for a statement of interest, it’s just a casual attempt to help me understand myself a little better.

 I am most interested in materialism, object-ontology and thing theory. I want to explore the relationship between medieval people and the objects around them, not just how objects were used, but to remove the anthropocentric focus and understand what agency and trajectories existed in the (representations of) objects themselves. I want to understand how humans perceived objects from a pre-Enlightment perspective, before the divide between man and object, before objects were foregrounded and philosophy shifted from a primarily ontological study to a primarily epistemological concern. I accept a vibrant materialism and I wish to study the way medieval literature reinforces the idea of the de-centering of the human and an awareness of the vitality of non-human things, how humans interact with other non-human actants within assemblages beyond a simple human/tool relationship.

 I am interested in animals, environments and ecocritical readings. I believe in Timothy Morton’s theory that the concept of Nature only preserves and reinforces the divide between man and the environment, and I find that in medieval literature the divide is hardly as substantial. I believe exploring transitions of how man perceived the natural world and his/her place within it during the middle ages can help our understanding of our present ideas about a (n)ature/(N)ature binary and how best to redact the present anthropocentric world view that prevents us from overcoming the current ecological crisis.

 I am interested in monsters and hybrids, queers and Others, in liminal spaces and non-linear trajectories. I am interested in ebbs and flows, fluid motions and horizontal worlds that oppose teleologies. I am interested in visionary literature when it opens to possibilities of queer relationships and subverts heteronormative hegemonies. I am interested in queer ecology as Timothy Morton has introduced it and I anticipate his continued research and publication as I believe it will support research into subversive non-human sexualities (human-object, human-animal, animal-animal, animal-object, human-plant, etc.) that continue to disrupt the (n)ature/(N)ature divide.

 I am interested in how cinema and other media construct contemporary medievalisms. How might contemporary representations of medieval monsters, non-human beings, spaces, and (n)ature effect our reading of medieval literature/culture? How can digital media be worked into pedagogy to engage students and re-ignite interest in the humanties?

 I am most interested in 12-16th centuries. Not sure yet where I might dilate within such a large span of time, but it may be that for the purposes of my graduate work/dissertation, I won’t need to scale that down. We shall see.

It feels good having written that down.

Perhaps now I can start narrowing down graduate programs. Unfortunately, without great access to scholarly work, I am often limited to looking at faculty CVs and lists of graduate courses to try and figure out which programs resonate best with me and where I might flourish. Thus, if you are reading this, perhaps you can offer advice as to where the person who wrote that jumbled mess above might find the graduate program he needs.

Notes Towards an Introduction (3/24/11)

*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.

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.