BABELcredo

Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

—The Red Queen to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland

Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.

—Plutarch, Life of Sertorius

But when we sit together, close . . . we melt into each other with phrases. We
are edged with mist. We make an insubstantial territory.

—Virginia Woolf, The Waves

The BABEL Working Group is a non-hierarchical scholarly collective and post-institutional desiring-assemblage with no leaders or followers, no top and no bottom, and only a middle. Membership in the BWG carries with it no fees, no obligations, and no hassles, and accrues to its members all the symbolic capital they need for whatever meanings they require. BABEL’s chief commitment is the cultivation of a more mindful being-together with others who work alongside us in the ruined towers of the post-historical university. BABEL roams and stalks these ruins as a multiplicity, a pack, not of subjects but of singularities without identity or unity, looking for other roaming packs and multiplicities with which to cohabit and build glittering misfit heterotopias.

More conventionally, the BABEL Working Group, founded in 2004, is a collective and desiring-assemblage of scholars (primarily medievalists, but also persons working in other areas, such as early modern and Victorian studies, critical and cultural theory, film and women’s studies, new media studies, critical sexuality studies, and so on) in North America, the U.K., Australia, and beyond who are working to develop new cross-disciplinary alliances between the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and the fine arts in order to formulate and practice new critical humanisms, as well as to develop a more present-minded medieval studies, a more historically-minded cultural studies, and a new misfit multiversity.