Kalamazoo 2011: BABEL & postmedieval sessions
46th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University
12-15 May 2011 Kalamazoo, MI
I. BABEL Working Group panels:
1. Madness, Methodology, Medievalism (Roundtable)
Mo Pareles (New York University) and Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), Co-Organizers
Eileen Joy, Presider
Historicizing madness produces two-fold definitions. On one hand, medieval literature and history is populated with those who were sometimes tormented by demons and beatified by visions. What we may now call schizophrenia, some medieval texts perceived as contact with the divine. Saints self-mutilated and starved themselves (“holy anorexia”), turned a supposed abhorrence of sex and the body into super-charged modes of holy eroticism, and were visited by wracking anxieties and irresistible compulsions, not to mention episodes of psychosis. On the other hand, madness was hardly an empty empirical category in the premodern period. Medieval views of madness, while not coextensive, do overlap with our own. They provoked doubt about the visions of some, generated compassion for the sick, and led to ruminations on (among other things) the consequences of sin. In our own time genius has been closely coupled with mental illness (Nietzsche to Eve Sedgwick) and even suicide (Woolf to Deleuze to David Foster Wallace), and scholars (especially in queer studies) have found in sorrow, depression, schizophrenia, trauma, and other forms of negative affect the grounds and inspiration for critique—and even new critical modes. Others reject the romanticization or valorization of mental illness, personally experience it as crippling and devastating to productivity, or embrace optimism and sanity in their scholarship. Read more
You Are Here: A Manifesto
You Are Here: A Manifesto
Eileen A. Joy
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects in the Early Modern and Medieval Periods
Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, George Washington University
11-12 March 2011
[audiofile available HERE]
The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real. It is the same with an act of love. . . . The authentic and pure values—truth, beauty and goodness—in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object.—Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
I. Ideation Without Bodies/The Drowned World
The strangest thing is that I am not at all inclined to call myself insane, I clearly see that I am not: all these changes concern objects. At least, that is what I’d like to be sure of.—from the notebooks of Antoine Roquentin[1]
In J.G. Ballard’s short story, “The Overloaded Man,” the main character, Faulkner, is “slowly going insane.”[2] In a nutshell, he’s become dissatisfied with life in general, and having quit his job, he waits impatiently for his wife to leave every morning so that he can engage in his daily secret ritual. Living in a development called “the Bin”—a “sprawl of interlocking frosted glass, white rectangles and curves, at first glance abstract and exciting . . . but to the people within formless and visually exhausting”[3]—Faulkner is eager to de-materialize his surroundings. Read more
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects [GW MEMSI March 2011]
11-12 March 2011 Washington, DC
George Washington University
MEMSI Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute
*Go HERE for abstracts of featured plenary talks
BABEL Working Group & postmedieval panel:
Wondrous Cosmology: Physics, Poetics, Biology
Liza Blake (New York University) and Daniel C. Remein (New York University), Co-Organizers
Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) and Myra Seaman (College of Charleston), Co-Presiders
Panel Description:
It was not in natural processes that the Greeks first experienced what physis is, but the other way around, on the basis of a fundamental experience of being in poetry in thought, what they had to call physis disclosed itself to them. –Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics
The above epigraph for this session is not meant as a doxa to be specifically proven, contested, or adhered to directly by any of the session’s papers, but as an attempt recall recent new materialisms and object-oriented philosophy to the question of physis as a question which ineluctably links concerns for what is sometimes called ‘matter’ with poetics. The session will thus attempt to think some of the concerns which an approach to cosmology from models considering physics, poetics, and biology share with the turn to vital, vibrant, or related materialisms and object-oriented philosophy. Specifically at issue will be the question of how the task of these supposedly different (poetics—productive/making, physics as descriptive science of what one already assumed is ‘there’) orientations to matter might coincide on the question of cosmology. Read more
punctum books
punctum books is an open-access and print-on-demand independent publisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry and writing across a whimsical para-humanities assemblage. We specialize in neo-traditional and non-conventional scholarly work that productively twists and/or ignores academic norms, with an emphasis on books that fall length-wise between the article and the monograph—id est, novellas, in one sense or another. This is a space for the imp-orphans of your thought and pen, an ale-serving church for little vagabonds.
Forthcoming titles:
Dark Chaucer: An Assortment, ed. Eileen Joy and Nicola Masciandaro
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen
On an Ungrounded Earth, by Ben Woodard
Leper Creativity: A Cyclonopedia Symposium, ed. Ed Keller, Nicola Masciandaro, and Eugene Thacker
Queering Speculative Realism, by Michael O’Rourke
Wlite: i englisc boc be missenlicum þingum wrætlicum, Vol. 1, trans. Daniel Remein
Thomas Meyer’s Beowulf, ed. David Hadbawnik
thN Lng folk 2go, by The Confraternity of Neoflagellants
Find further information at the punctum books website and the punctum books blog.
Follow punctum books on Twitter!
while you’re here
why not take a moment and
- if you’re not already a member, join BABEL by emailing a short bio about yourself to be added to the gallery of members. email seamanm[at]cofc.edu
- if you’re already a member, then go check out your profile, which probably needs some updating and may be lacking a photo. email updates and/or a photo to seamanm[at]cofc.edu
- donate to BABEL, which would be an enormous benefit as we gear up for the Speculative Medievalisms II conference in September, the annual party at Kalamazoo in May, and (especially!) the 2nd BABEL conference in 2012! Somehow, all of this requires money, and BABEL has precious little of it.
Donations can be made through Paypal by following the “Donate” button above, or the old-fashioned way by sending a check made out to “BABEL Working Group” to:
Myra Seaman, Treasurer, BABEL Working Group
c/o Department of English
College of Charleston
26 Glebe Street
Charleston, SC 29424
The BABEL Working Group is a non-hierarchical scholarly collective and post-institutional 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.
Audiofiles: Speculative Medievalisms @ King’s College London
After a whirlwind of 3-1/2 days in London, which included a side-trip to Cambridge, and then returning to Saint Louis to jump into teaching, I have finally posted, at the Internet Archive, the audiofiles of the talks and responses delivered at Speculative Medievalisms: A Laboratory-Atelier, held at The Anatomy Museum at King’s College London two Fridays ago, Jan. 14th. The event represented a really interesting convergence (or collision) between medievalists (Kathleen Biddick, myself, Anna Klosowska, and Nicola Masciandaro) and scholars working in later periods in religious studies (Anthony Paul Smith, Univ. of Nottingham), economics and international relations (Nick Srnicek, London School of Economics), media and technology studies (Eugene Thacker, The New School), cultural theory and the audio unconscious (Scott Wilson, Kingston Univ.), philosophy of nature (Ben Woodard, European Graduate School), queer theory and continental philosophy (Michael O’Rourke), and Marxist theory and literature (Evan Calder Williams, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz). [Read more and find audiofiles at In the Middle.]
Speculative Medievalisms I: A Laboratory-Atelier (London, January 2011)
Speculative Medievalisms: A Laboratory-Atelier
14 January 2011
10:00 am – 6:00 pm
King’s College London
Co-Conspirators: BABEL Working Group, Urbanomic, Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies (King’s College London), and the Petropunk Collective (Eileen Joy, Anna Klosowska, Nicola Masciandaro, and Michael O’Rourke)
FEATURED SPEAKERS:*
Kathleen Biddick, History, Temple University
Anthony Paul Smith, Theology & Religious Studies, University of Nottingham
Nick Srnicek, International Relations, London School of Economics + Speculative Heresy
Eugene Thacker, New Media, The New School
Scott Wilson, Cultural Theory, The London Graduate School (Kingston University) + amusia + Journal for Cultural Research
So the medieval studies I am thrown into is a gravely levitating scholarly being, the lovely becoming light of weight in all senses: metaphoric, literal, and above all in the truest most palpable sense of the phenomenal poetic zones of indistinction between the two. This means, in tune with the Heraclitan oneness of the way up and the way down, not flight from but the very lightening of gravitas itself, the finding or falling into levitas through the triple gravities of the discipline: the weight of the medieval (texts, past), the weight of each other (society, institutions), and the weight of ourselves (body, present). Towards this end I offer no precepts or to-do list, only an indication of the wisdom and necessity of doing so, of practicing our highest pleasures, in unknowing of the division between poetry as knowledge and philosophy as joy, in opposition to the separation between thought and life that best expresses “the omnipresence of the economy,” and in harmony with the volitional imperative of Nietzsche’s “new gravity: the eternal recurrence of the same”: “Do you want this again and innumerable times again?” This Middle Ages? This medievalist?
—Nicola Masciandaro, “Grave Levitation: Being Scholarly”
Speculative Medievalisms is a collaborative and interdisciplinary research project focusing on the theorization and practical development of the speculative dimensions of medieval studies. The term “speculative” is intended to resonate with the full range of its medieval and modern meanings. First, speculative echoes the broad array of specifically medieval senses of speculatio as the essentially reflective and imaginative operations of the intellect. According to this conception, the world, books, and mind itself were all conceived as specula (mirrors) through which the hermeneutic gaze could gain access to what lies beyond them. As Giorgio Agamben explains, “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.”[1] Read more
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