Speculative Medievalisms: A Laboratory-Atelier [Forthcoming from punctum books]
Edited by The Petropunk Collective (Eileen A. Joy, Anna Klosowska, Nicola Masciandaro, and Michael O’Rourke)
Proceedings from the two Speculative Medievalisms symposia, held at King’s College London (Jan. 2011) and The Graduate Center, City University of New York (Sep. 2011), and organized by The Petropunk Collective (Eileen Joy, Anna Klosowska, Nicola Masciandaro, and Michael O’Rourke). These interdisciplinary events were dedicated to dialogue and cross-contamination between traditional concepts of speculatio, present-minded medieval studies, and contemporary speculative realist and object-oriented philosophies. In its medieval formulation,speculatio signifies the essentially reflective and imaginative operations of the intellect. Here the world, books, and mind itself are all conceived as specula (mirrors) through which the hermeneutic gaze can gain access to what lies beyond it. “To know is to bend over a mirror where the world is reflected, to descry images reflected from sphere to sphere: the medieval man was always before a mirror, both when he looked around himself and when he surrendered to his own imagination” (Giorgio Agamben,Stanzas). Correlatively, speculative realism, as the term suggests, is characterized by the self-contradictory intensity of a desire for thought that can think beyond itself – a desire that proceeds, like all philosophy, in a twisted and productive relation to the phantasm of the word. Aiming to rise above and tunnel below the thought-being or self-world correlation, speculative realism “depart[s] from the text-centered hermeneutic models of the past and engage[s] in daring speculations about the nature of reality itself” (The Speculative Turn). Speculative Medievalisms, like some weird friar-alchemist in an inexistent romance, plays the erotic go-between for these text-centered and text-eccentric intellectual domains by trying to transmute the space between past and present modes of speculation from shared blindness to love at first sight. Possibly succeeding, the volume brings together the work of a motley crew of philosophers and medievalists into prismatic relation. Read more 
postmedieval FORUM I: Historicity without Historicism? Responses to Paul Strohm
FORUM I: Historicity without Historicism? Responses to Paul Strohm
October 2011
FORUM I features responses to Paul Strohm’s review essay, ‘Historicity without Historicism?‘, which appeared in postmedieval vol. 1, issue 3.
Introduction
Holly A. Crocker
A Methodology of Postmodern Historicism?
Bettina Bildhauer
Time to Reach Out
Brantley L. Bryant
Historicism, Sexuality Studies, Psychoanalysis
Ruth Evans
Historicism: Six Theses
Larry Scanlon
Enchanted Historicism
Tara Williams
Everything We Think Can in Principle Be Thought By Someone Else: A Plea for Open, Collective Scholarship
by Eileen JoyAt the end of my working day, I am almost always depressed. Mine is not a straight path like an engineer’s, it’s not A to B. I make a very curly road just by the restrictions of goals and materials. . . . Everything we think can in principle be thought by someone else. The real ideas, as evolution shows, come about by chance. Reality is very creative.–
Theo Jansen, creator of the Strandbeests
Although it often feels otherwise, we do not think alone. We never have. Every second of every day, there is a virtual crowd inside of our head, multiple voices, all vying for attention, and even as babies we come into this world carrying the histories of previous generations and their experiences inside intricate chains of nucleic acids that inhabit every cell of our bodies. I’ve long ago given up on the idea of a unified, autonomous “self” [thank you, Derrida, Foucault, Francesco Varela, Andy Clark, and also Katherine Hayles], but every day, our particular and unique minds touch reality and become real, to paraphrase the political philosopher George Kateb [“The Idea of Individual Infinitude,” The Hedgehog Review 7.2 (2005): 42–54, at 49], while at the same time that “reality” represents, to cadge from Timothy Morton, an inescapable “mesh”: “a complex situation or series of events in which a person is entangled; a concatenation of constraining or restricting forces or circumstances; a snare” [Oxford English Dictionary]. 
I agree with Morton that “everything is interconnected” and therefore “there is no definite background and . . . no definite foreground” [The Ecological Thought, p. 28]. But as Morton also asks,
If there is no background and therefore no foreground, then where are we? We orient ourselves according to backgrounds against which we stand out. There is a word for a state without a foreground-background distinction: madness. [The Ecological Thought, p. 30]
The fact of the matter is, in order to guard against this “madness,” we imagine all sorts of background-foreground distinctions all of the time: we need them, and they are necessary, even consoling, fictions. A life has to be livable, after all. I feel the same way about love: I know I’m making this up as I go along with a lot of props from others in history who have also been making things up as they go along. The trick is not to stop believing in individual lives, or in love, or even persons, but rather, to generously expand our conceptions of what counts as a life, what counts as loveable, what counts as a person. The ultimate aim is to work toward increasing, as much as is in our power, the general well-being of as many inhabitants [animate, inanimate, whathaveyou] of this world as possible. Or as Pablo Neruda once put it, much more eloquently than I ever could, “I don’t know who you are. I love you. I don’t give away thorns, and I don’t sell them” [Love Sonnet LXXVIII]. Read more
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.
Peer Review, Once More, But This Time With Feeling
by EILEEN JOY
Figure 1. Eco Pods, Boston
[Architects: Howeler + Yoon]
As some of you may know already,postmedieval is about halfway through a 2-month open “crowd review” of its forthcoming special issue on Becoming-Media, co-edited by Jen Boyle and Martin Foys, and you can see what has been happening with that, and also participate yourself, here:
Crowd Review: Becoming-Media Issue
In all honesty [and yes, I know I am an impartial judge], I have been thrilled with how this crowd review has been progressing thus far–if you follow the link above, you can see for yourself that, in just under four weeks, we have had a fairly robust response, with really thoughtful and expansive comments from a wide variety of commentators [the issue’s editors, junior faculty, more senior faculty, graduate students, and one imagines, some independent scholars]. Of course, we have to reflect that the essays were solicited in advance by the issue’s two editors and received some expert review by them before emerging into the crowd review context, and some of the essays may have received comments in other contexts prior to being received by Jen and Martin [I know, for example, that Whitney Trettien blogged and tweeted portions of her essay in the past and also maintains a public wiki where she keeps all of her notes, annotations, and bibliography relative to her various writing projects]. I belabor this point because it is not the mission of this crowd review to ask potential reviewers to assess whether or not these essays are worth publishing or not. To a certain extent, that has already been decided by the issue’s editors, although, just as with an edited volume of essays, all of the authors involved understand that the crowd review process does serve as a form of “external” review of their work for this special issue of the journal, and I assume they will revise accordingly with Jen and Martin’s expert guidance [but also with their own sense of which comments best serve the purposes of their separate essay projects: in other words, the authors still maintain sole control of the overall direction and content of their individual essays]. But something also really different and importantly valuable is going on here, and it is worth reflecting upon further. Read more
postmedieval volume 2, issue 2: The Medievalism of Nostalgia
CURRENT ISSUE
Co-Editors:
Helen Dell [University of Melbourne], Louise D’Arcens [University of Wollongong] and Andrew Lynch [University of Western Australia]
- Editor’s Introduction: “Nostalgia and medievalism: Conversations, contradictions, impasses”
- Helen Dell, University of Melbourne
- “The nostalgic moment and the sense of history”
Linda M. Austin, Oklahoma State University - “Nostalgia, medievalism and the Vínland voyages”
Geraldine Barnes, University of Sydney - “Laughing in the face of the past: Satire and nostalgia in medieval heritage tourism”
Louise D’Arcens, University of Wollongong - “‘Yearning for the sweet beckoning sound’: Musical longings and the unsayable in medievalist fantasy fiction”
Helen Dell, University of Melbourne - “Negotiations of nostalgia: Strangeness and xenodochy in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe”
Melinda Graefe, Flinders University - “Nostalgia and critique: Walter Scott’s ‘secret power'”
Andrew Lynch, University of Western Australia - Response Essay: “Medievalism and its discontents”
Renée R. Trilling, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign - Book Review Essay: “Nostalgia on my mind”
Carolyn Dinshaw, New York University
Crowd Review LIVE: Becoming-Media Issue of postmedieval
New York Public Library
- Seeta Chaganti, “Danse Macabre in the Virtual Churchyard”
- Eddie Christie, “Writing in Wax, Writing in Water”
- Arne Flaten, “Reproducible Media(s) in the Early Fifteenth Century (Mostly Italian)”
- Julia Lupton, “Thinking with Things: Hannah Woolley to Hannah Arendt”
- Eugene Thacker, “The Wayless Abyss: Mysticism and Mediation”
- Whitney Trettien, “Becoming Plant: Magnifying a Microhistory of Media Circuits in Nehemiah Grew’s Anatomy of Plants (1682)”
In step with the mission of the journal, this issue represents a wide range of fields and subjects, including performance studies (dance), architecture, art history, poetics, medieval literature, history of printing and engraving, the decorative arts, movement studies, history of taste and judgment, object-oriented studies, intellectual history, new media and technology studies, composition studies, mysticism, philosophy, botany, the history of books, history of science, the vegetal, the animal, theology, etc. What all of the essays have in common, in the words of the special issue’s co-editors, Jen Boyle and Martin Foys, has something to do with
our dependence on the recursive circuitry and tangle of technologies, bodies, narratives, spaces, and mediating technics, across historical periods and across literary, scientific, philosophical, and theological modes of expression. Read more
postmedieval volume 2, issue 1: The Animal Turn
Volume 2, Issue 1: The Animal Turn
Co-Editors:
Peggy McCracken [Univ. of Michigan] and Karl Steel [Brooklyn College, CUNY]
Articles
- Introduction: Moving Forward, Kicking Back: The Animal Turn
Cary Wolfe, Rice University - Legible Skins: Animal and the Ethics of Medieval Reading
Sarah Kay, Princeton University - Aesop’s Symposium of Animal Tongues
Peter W. Travis, Dartmouth College - ‘A Stede Gode and Lel’: Valuing Arondel in Bevis of Hampton
Gary Lim, The Graduate Center, CUNY - Chivalry and the Pre / Postmodern
Susan Crane, Columbia University - Editors’ Epilogue: The Animal Turn
Karl Steel, Brooklyn College, CUNY and Peggy McCracken, University of Michigan - Book Review Essay: Posthuman Theory and the Premodern Animal Sign
Sarah Stanbury, College of the Holy Cross
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Speculative Medievalisms II: A Laboratory-Atelier
Segal Theater
The Graduate Center, CUNY
16 September 2011
Co-sponsored by: BABEL Working Group, Petropunk Collective, and the Doctoral Program in English and Medieval Studies Certificate Program, The Graduate Center, CUNY
experiments [conference schedule now available]
Anna Klosowska [Miami University of Ohio], “Aristotelean Aesthetics, East and West”
Allan Mitchell [University of Victoria], “Cosmic Eggs, or, Events Before Everything”
Kellie Robertson [University of Wisconsin-Madison], “Abusing Aristotle, from Phyllis to Graham Harman”
Drew Daniel [Johns Hopkins University + Matmos], Response to Kellie Robertson
Julian Yates [University of Delaware], “Kitchen Shakespeare”
Liza Blake [New York University], Response to Julian Yates
Jeffrey Cohen [George Washington University + In The Middle], “Sublunary”
Ben Woodard [Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, University of Western Ontario + Naught Thought], Response to Jeffrey Cohen
Graham Harman [American University in Cairo + Object-Oriented Philosophy], “Aristotle With a Twist”
Patricia Clough [Queens College, CUNY], Response to Graham Harman
for the precis of the project, plus the program and audiofiles for Speculative Medievalisms I [held at King’s College London in Jan. 2011], go HERE
And here are details on the week-plus of “Speculative September NYC” (Speculative Realist- and Object Oriented Ontology-related) events starting on September 8.
Kalamazoo 2012: BABEL & postmedieval panels
47th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University
10-13 May 2012 Kalamazoo, MI
I. BABEL Working Group panels:
1. Fuck This: On Finally Letting Go (Roundtable)
Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) and Myra Seaman (College of Charleston), Co-Organizers
Myra Seaman, Presider
This session is designed to open up a broad and collective discussion on the dark affects and erotics of the concept, situation, scene, gestures, trauma, dilemma, psycho-dynamics, historicity, aesthetics, physics, materialism, ecology, etc. of finally leaving, getting rid of, abandoning, refusing, and letting go of potentially toxic “love-objects,” with “love-objects” here denoting any possible object: ideological, methodological, disciplinary, textual, art historical, codicological, artifactual, historical, archival, literary, geographical, archaeological, etc. More specifically, some of the remarks will be pitched toward disciplinary, methodlogical, and historical objects (e.g. “Fuck Philology” or “Fuck Deep Reading” or “Fuck the Middle Ages” or “Fuck Chaucer”), or they will be aimed at specific scenes within medieval texts that illustrate in certain striking and illustrative ways the concepts, gestures, acts, and scenes of “finally letting go” and how those textual moments might productively intersect with certain intellectual and professional concerns currently circulating in the larger discipline of medieval studies.
2. Fuck Me: On Never Letting Go (Roundtable)
Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) and Myra Seaman (College of Charleston), Co-Organizers
Eileen Joy, Presider Read more
