Manning & the Politics of Touch: Aleatory Reading, Picky Reading

Over at the always interesting Larval Subjects [LS], there was a post that articulated precisely my own reading habits:

One should never read a single book at a time. In the act of reading multiple texts, aleatory encounters between texts are produced like sparks arcing across two separated wires. There is no method here. Where and when such a spark will leap is not subject to calculation or prediction. Rather, such sparks are purely a product of chance. And, of course, it is necessary to add the caveat that it is impossible to read a single book at a time. As Freud famously observed in his allegory of the Roman city, and Bergson in his cone of memory, the past co-exists with the present, such that any act of reading is necessarily saturated with all the previous texts one has encountered. Yet even here the points at which texts touch one another, the point at which virtual texts and actual text touch in singularities, is entirely aleatory and without calculation. It is always an event. Perhaps there must be an Idea, Problem, or Multiplicity at work– in Deleuze’s sense of the word: a problematic field –that presides over the genesis of such relations. The principles of auto-synthesis are murky.

Although I've read parts of Dinshaw's Getting Medieval for years now, I had surprisingly not read the entire text from cover to cover, which I finally did a little more than a week ago. After finishing Dinshaw, I found myself compelled to pull Erin Manning's recent book, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (University of Minnesota, 2007), off my "to read" shelf. Alongside Manning, I am also reading a number of works in medieval queer studies/theory, writings on temporality, and Seth Lerer's A Portable History of English, among other things. What LS calls the "aleatory sparks" that occur when reading multiple books simultaneously, the way different texts "touch in [their] singularities," seems particularly arresting in relation to Dinshaw. Despite the 'murkiness' of the "principles of auto-synthesis," I will attempt in my next post to read Dinshaw alongside and across Manning; to allow these two texts of very different historical moments to reach-toward one another. What makes such an experimental reading so suggestive is not only the obviously shared concern of both authors with a metaphorics of "touch" but also the ways in which Manning uses certain theorists (esp., Deleuze, Derrida, and Nancy) to complicate precisely what such a sensing body does. There are moments when I read Dinshaw's text where, despite my own profound affection for her project--I find Dinshaw utterly arresting in both her prose and her theoretico-political imaginings--I am left feeling empty. Something seems absent from the text, a something that I think Manning begins to help us reach-toward. My next post will formulate these ideas.

But first, I want to be a slightly picky reader. There is, to my theologically trained former self, an error at n13, p. 167. The text as printed reads:

"The Word: (o logoß). Logoß is from legw, an old word in Homer to lay by, to collect, to put words side by side, to speak, to express an opinion. Logoß is common for reason as well as speech. Heraclitus used it for the principle that controls the universe (Oxford English Dictionary)."

The note itself is glossing a discussion of the opening verse of the prologue from John's Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." The error itself is typographical. Before commenting further, let me say that I find Manning's text to be theoretically astute, and so I offer the following correction in a spirit of charity.

Firstly, the phrase "o logoß" fails to take account of what in Greek are called "breathing marks." These, like accents (which Greek also has), affect pronunciation. In the Greek text, they appear as inverted commas standing either over the minuscules (lower case letters) or next to the uncials (upper case letters) at the beginning of a word. The letters requiring such a mark are: a, e, i, o, u, w, r. These marks are of two types: smooth and rough. Technically, the smooth mark has no real affect on the pronunciation, while the rough signals a required "h" sound at the beginning of the word. This may sound trivial, but there are certain words in Greek that are spelled identically and are only differentiated by a smooth or rough breathing mark. That scenario isn't present in Manning's text; rather, one of the most elementary words in Greek is the definite article "the" which is transliterated as "ho" and not "o."

Secondly, the typography of both the nominal and verbal forms of logos are incoherent. The sigma ( an "s") that ends the nominal form isn't the German letter "ß"; rather, in Greek there are two minuscules for sigma, employed depending on where in the word the letter falls. The most common form is "σ," and occurs in all letter positions except if the sigma concludes the word, at which point the alternative form, "ς," is used. Similarly, in the verbal form the final letter is written "w," when in transliteration it should appear as a long "o," since it is in Greek an omega (ω) and not an omicron (ο). [Note that the Greek alphabet differentiates between long and short vowels for certain letters.] As it stands, typography for the verbal form appears to be some kind of hybrid, neither really a transcription nor a transliteration.

Ok, I know, maybe this is TOO picky. I apologize if this comes off as unwarranted nagging. Thoughts? Am I just being, well, a you know what? .... I will confess that my Greek is fairly rusty, but that I was still able to notice these errors even on a first glance.

Swansea Recap

While there have already been a number of posts elsewhere on the recent gathering of the New Chaucer Society in Swansea, Wales (see, e.g., here, here, and here over at the medieval group blog ITM, along with several on the Humanities Researcher), I wanted to add my own reflections before too much time elapsed. I came to NCS immediately after the major Gower conference in London -- even traveling with a buss load of Gowerians from London to Swansea! The Gower conference itself was an amazing success thanks to the extraordinary work of Bob Yeager, John Hines, and Bev Stewart. Bob mentioned to me that a volume will be produced from this conference, which I think will be an important contribution to Gower scholarship. I gave papers at both the NCS and Gower conferences, and will comment on those experiences and their content later. Now onto Chaucer.

This was my first NCS, and I enjoyed it very much. I was able to meet a number of very interesting people, many of whom attended the earlier Gower conference, so that it felt like I was vacationing with a large group of great friends. I generally felt that the atmosphere was convivial, but can understand how some might feel that there was posturing going on, although anytime you bring academics together in such an intimate setting I think such posturing is inevitable. I also feel, along with Jeff Cohen, that many of the papers seemed not very (or at all!) rehearsed. This certainly added to much frustration. Other major conferences I attend supply printed or online abstracts that make it more helpful in determining whether a paper is worth attending or not, since titles are so amorphous and often altered.

Since I'm a compulsive note-taker, I had my trusty moleskin with me. What follows are summaries, based on my notes, along with my some interjected commentary. Much attention has already been given by bloggers to the amazing papers by Carolyn Dinshaw and Chris Baswell. I will deal with Baswell in a separate post, but I do want to say something briefly about Dinshaw's paper and her session as a whole.

Carolyn Dinshaw's "The Lay of the Land: Queer Love in A Canterbury Tale," used the 1944 Powell and Presburger film referenced in her title to consider the questions: "What's so strange about a man who loves his land? What makes this so traditional of affections queer?" With characteristic elegance, she attended to the manifold ways in which the "down-hearted antiquarian" Culpepper is a "queer conservative coopted for nationalist" by unpacking the relations between person, place, and perversion. The film's operative companionability, as described by Dinshaw, was one of an "interdependence of the human social world and the natural world," where such "nature [was] animated by the touch of the human." This haptic quality is also a bounded temporality, since the "land as touched by humans" is also "what remains from that earlier touch into the future." To this end, the "mutual love of place isn't individual but social," and from this Dinshaw teases out how the materiality of place is an affectional, even erotic, preference. The title character, Culpepper, wants to bring men to love of land, and he does this through extremely misogynistic acts of nocturnal discipline. Here, to me, the "ugly disenchantment of war" seems to coalesce with the maniacal energies of a queer national imagining. Still, with her most seemingly of innocent opening questions, Dinshaw asked us to think deeply about the possibilities of "queer love of place," even and perhaps especially when such love finds itself in the negative grip of nationalist longings. But Dinshaw also demonstrated how what she termed this "most traditional of affections," the relation between person and place, resists and even repels absorption into any liberatory scheme. Despite his seemingly conservative desires, Culpepper's love of and kinship with place so exceeds and transgresses the properly objectal relations of place and person. So, Dinshaw helps us, once again, to see the operative perversity within the ostensibly normal. There can thus be something enabling about contemplating the disruptive perversions of local desires for place.

The last day of the conference featured an interesting panel on "Gender vs. Sexuality." I offer below some thoughts, comments, and summaries of some of the work its panelists presented.

Bob Mills, "Back to the Future, or Temporal Drag"

• "What's queerest about the category of sodomy is its tendency to overlap with other categories" (e.g., religion, nature)
• "What does it mean to feel the backward tug of certain critical terms?" In asking this, Mills pointed us toward Beth Freeman's work on the potential productivity of the temporal tug backward.
• In an aside, Mills noted how medievalists have much to contribute to the history and theory of transgender.
• Reminded us anew that sexual modes of dislocation are not isomorphic with sexual activity; that it's "not just a field of love objects but an intersectional field of bodies, objects, and spaces/times."

Catherine Sanok, "Temporal Virgins"

• Invoking Butler's work, Sanok asked us to consider anew rather than assuming whether gender is an effect of sexuality in the Middle Ages. In Sanok's reading, the medieval is a crucial period during which gender becomes an effect of sexuality. The suggestion here, as I understand it, is to consider gender as detached from sexuality.

Glenn Burger, "Becoming Undone"

• Burger pointed how "thinking in terms of oppression and resistance has lead to the recovery of marginal voices but [that] it also obscures what might be asked of this evidence."
• So, rather than operate according to the "binaristic logic of the 'versus'" Burger suggests "turning to a logic of the 'beside'" (as this is articulated in Sedgwick's Touching Feeling).
• Much of Burger's talk was taken up with his current project on the "good wife" within the theater of marriage. In his analysis, the "good wife" and the "good man" are co-articulated regimenting principles; that the wife's body is an extension of the husband's such that there is a transgendered dynamic inscribed within the gendered logics of male-female desire; that masculine authority is always articulated in conjunction with femininity; that we see the "good husband" within wider discourses.
• Her concluded by invoking Butler's recent work on being "undone" as a way of rethinking/remaking the human.
  

Diane Watt and Clare Lees, "Queer Talking: Sex, Gender, and Collaboration"

• This co-delivered paper seemed principally focused on what's at stake in collaborating on projects about gender and/or sexuality where what is critical is the creation of "place where disagreements can be productive rather than threatening." These presenters wanted to resist that assumption that "underlying the act of collaboration [is] an imperative to concur."
  
• Lees pointed how how Old English studies is slow in discussing the affectivity of/in religious texts
• Asked us to consider not only where but whose are the Middle Ages.

There's so much more than can be noted, but I will leave that for other posts. What strikes me most about these papers, as I look over my moleskin notes, is how much they coalesce around thematics of affect and time. More to come on this....