There is No End Without Beginning: Reflections on BABEL’s Inaugural Conference and a Live-able Humanities
by EILEEN JOY
There is no end without beginning. How could the end be known as end if it weren’t recounted by someone?–Jean-Francois Lyotard, Soundproof Room
I argue that we can find a certain dignity in what we are doing if we maintain absolute fidelity to the incalculable and unreckonable event of the university to-come, the university without condition.–Michael O’Rourke, “After”
It has taken me almost two weeks to recover from the BABEL Working Group‘s inaugural biennial conference at the University of Texas at Austin [4-6 November 2010], “After the End: Medieval Studies, the Humanities, and the Post-Catastrophe” [and I can only say now that whatever went on at the closing Saturday night party at Mike Johnson’s house after midnight, I do not recall, and please contact my lawyers if I offended you or damaged your personal property, and yes, Heather Love and Ann Cvetkovich wore costume wigs and danced and I made a pact with Neville Hoad to drive to Mexico the following day but daylight brought more sober thoughts, and brakes]… [Read the rest at In the Middle]
postmedieval volume 1 issue 3: Critical Exchanges
Volume 1, Issue 3:
Critical Exchanges: ‘Bruce Holsinger’s The Premodern Condition’ / ‘The State(s) of Early English Studies’
This issue features two clusters of essays.
Bruce Holsinger’s critically lauded 2005 book The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory presented an elegant excavation of the medieval influences undergirding the work of some of the most brilliant thinkers of the postwar French intelligentsia, elaborating the ‘medievalisms’ that are so deeply constitutive of modern theory. In the first critical exchange, Louise D’Arcens, Claire Monagle and Stephanie Trigg, three scholars who work, from various angles, in medievalism and medieval cultural studies, discuss The Premodern Condition, with a response from Bruce Holsinger.
‘The State(s) of Early English Studies’ forms a series of dispatches from some of the ‘fronts’ of Old English and Anglo Saxon Studies, asking how we might sketch out some of the futures (with an emphasis on the plural) of an early English studies that is not (and never really was) a realm apart from either later periods within literary-historical studies or from contemporary life and thought. ‘The States(s) of Early English Studies’ is collaboration with The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe, and the remaining essays in the cluster can be read free online in that journal.
BABEL Conference 2010: Conference program
1st Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group
“after the end: the humanities, medieval studies, and the post-catastrophe”
4-6 November 2010
University of Texas at Austin*
*co-sponsored by the BABEL Working Group, University of Texas at Austin, College of Charleston, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and Palgrave Macmillan
CONFERENCE PROGRAM
[for information on how to register, where to stay, how to get around, where to eat, etc., go HERE]
Abandoned Mining Town (Kolmanskop, Namibia)
*all images in program are from artificial owl: the most fascinating abandoned man-made creations
*Thursday and Friday sessions @ AT&T Center; Saturday Sessions @ University Teaching Center
Thursday, November 4th
REGISTRATION: 11:00 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.
AT&T Center @ Amphitheater
* * * * *
1:00 – 2:30 p.m.
Session 1. Technologies of Narration
AT&T 102
Organizer: Scott Garbacz, University of Texas at Austin
Chair: Scott Garbacz
“Technologies bombard human beings with a ceaseless offer of previously unheard-of positions — engagements, suggestions, allowances, interdictions, habits, positions, alienations, prescriptions, calculations, memories. Generalizing the notion of affordance, we could say that the quasi-subjects which we all are become such thanks to the quasi-objects which populate our universe with minor ghostly beings similar to us and whose programmes of action we may or may not adopt.” –Bruno Latour, “Morality and Technology: The End of the Means”
It has long been recognized that reading acts and processes are both culturally produced and culturally productive. Yet as we move further into the 21st Century, “New Media” technologies are changing the array of possibilities for storytelling — and in the process, as Latour points out, violently reshaping the array of (now clearly interdependent and non-rational) subject positions available. Modes ranging from blogs to guerilla marketing to ratings-driven television to massively multiplayer video games are taking on new cultural prominence, challenging the previous dominance of the printed word (the prime constitutive technology of the so-called “modern” period, driving productions ranging from Shakespeare’s sonnets to Joyce’sUlysses). As we consider life and consciousness “after the end” of print culture’s methodologies and verities, it is worthwhile also to consider pre-modern technologies of cognition and visual imagination, whose explicit intertextuality and alien cultural matrix may shed new light on potentialities for the intersection of narrative and consciousness. Read more 
BABEL Conference 2010 Call for Papers
1st Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group
after the end: medieval studies, the humanities, and the post-catastrophe
4-6 November 2010
University of Texas at Austin
[co-organized by the BABEL Working Group, University of Texas at Austin, College of Charleston, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, andPalgrave Macmillan]
[See conference program here]
abandoned building, post-Chernobyl disaster (Prypiat, Ukraine)
That a major shift in the role and function of the intellectual is occurring is clear. What it will have come to have meant is an issue upon which those in the University should attempt to have an impact. An attention to this problematic is necessary. How we pay attention to it is not determined. Therein lies the freedom and the enormous responsibility of Thought at the end of the twentieth century, which is also the end of what has been the epoch of the nation-state. (Bill Readings, The University in Ruins)
One thinks in the Humanities the irreducibility of their outside and of their future. One thinks in the Humanities that one cannot and must not let oneself be enclosed within the inside of the Humanities. But for this thinking to be strong and consistent requires the Humanities. (Jacques Derrida, “The University Without Condition”)
This conference will bring together medievalists with scholars and theorists working in later periods in the humanities in order to collectively take up the broad question of what happens “after the end,” by which we mean after the end of the affair, the end of the world, and everything in between. After gender, sex, love, the family, the nation-state, the body, the human, language, truth, feeling, reason, ethics, modernity, politics, religion, God, the nation-state, secularism, liberalism, the humanities, the university, teleology, progress, history, historicism, narrative, meaning, the individual, singularity, theory, practice, what else is there? Here, we mean to hopefully inspire a set of discussions and debates relative to the “post” of the subjects we study within (and beyond) the humanities: can we really ever be “after” anything, and if so, in what (productive and/or perilous) ways, and what next? We are also interested in cultivating some ruminations upon Teresa de Lauretis’s call in 2o03 at the symposium organized by Critical Inquiry, that
now may be a time for the human sciences to reopen the questions of subjectivity, materiality, discusivity, knowledge, to reflect on the post of posthumanity. It is a time to break the piggy bank of saved conceptual schemata and reinstall uncertainty in all theoretical applications, starting with the primacy of the cultural and its many “turns”: linguistic, discursive, performative, therapeutic, ethical, you name it. . . . Perhaps there can be no survival without the gnawing, dull pain of betrayal. Perhaps only betrayal leads to the apprehension of otherness and another cognition of the now. But do not ask me how or what, not yet.
Further, for medievalists especially, but also for modernists, can we really ever be “after history” or “post-historical,” and if so, what would now count as the Real of our studies; if not, in what ways do history and historicism still matter? Read more
