AAR, Montreal -- Paper Accepted

Although I still have work to do in preparation for next week's glossing conference at CUNY, I did receive the good news a few days ago that my paper proposal for the next meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Montreal next fall was accepted. I submitted to a consultation that was new last year, "Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Premodern Christianity." This year they were particularly interested in projects that explored its key terms at the nexus of scriptural interpretation. For those not familiar with the AAR process, individuals must submit a 1000-word proposal along with a 150-word abstract. I've included below only the abstract, and will provide more details about my paper later. I have to have it completed by mid-September, since the consultation chairs have secured Harvard's Amy Hollywood as our respondent.

The Solitary Vices of Medieval Discernment

The biblical injunction to “test the Spirits” (1 John 4:1) gave hermeneutical warrant for church officials to codify affects of vigilance and skepticism into forms of institutional mistrust called the “discernment of spirits.” This paper offers a reconsideration of medieval discernment literature by arguing that it is isomorphic with those moral rhetorics surrounding masturbation. Operative in both discursive registers is a fear of unregulated solitude. Examining scholarship on discernment literature alongside the cultural history and analysis of masturbation, I re-read selected passages from the writings of Jean Gerson and Middle English Chastising of God’s Children. The regulatory aims of these texts index the erotic power of thought to captivate and redirect a believer’s (sometimes unwilling) consciousness. Compelling both the solitary visions of the aspiring mystic and the “solitary vice” of masturbation are forms and languages of erotic pleasure that official theology fears are actually forms of selfishness.

Oh the Trials and tribulations...

Dear Readers,

To say that these last several months have been hectic and upending would be an understatement. But I'm here to assure you that my disappearance is over, although I will be without my macbook for a bit since I've had to send it off for repairs. I have planned a number of posts on a range of topics, including a few series: one about the current state of humanities (especially graduate) education, and another on the "home." Also, I'm planning at least two politically oriented posts, one of which will feature a return to my own juvenilia by re-engaging Melville's "Bartleby." And look for a post around Easter. In addition, I have been lucky enough to secure a few guest bloggers.

In the meantime, I've uploaded a full listing of UT-Austin affiliated folks who are participating in the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo. Although I'm not on tap this year, I'm planning to attend. Speaking of conferences, I'm very excited about the upcoming "Glossing Is a Glosrious Thing: The Past, Present, and Future of Commentary," which will be April 9-10 at CUNY. I'm delivering my paper on the 9th at 1:30pm. I've included the original abstract below. As I said to Nicola back at the SEMA gathering, I'm still not thrilled about my own title (yet). I'm very much looking forward to spending a few days in NYC with some great folks, and then I'll be extending my leave a bit by visiting friends in New Haven and Boston. Can't wait to see everyone!


After Print: On the Biopolitical Marginalia of Affect and Attachment

This paper argues that prior to any semiotics of the page necessitating decipherment, there is always already an ontology of the page determining, via sets of anterior structural acts, the grids of intelligibility through which meaning might emerge. Supplementing Giorgio Agamben’s work with the recent efforts of Judith Butler and Lauren Berlant on attachment and affect, this paper aims to develop an optics wherein the book’s material status is shown to make possible more than its constituent materiality. Not only does the manner of our concernful relations to objects determine what those objects are but also the very legibility of these attachments is itself a structurated mode of being.

In Arts of Possession, D. Vance Smith posits that “writing histories of the forms of living requires us at least to understand practices of having” (xiii). But the morphology of these possessive practices obtains within a technological field of thought, wherein technology is never simply about the uses to which specialized tools and machines are put but refers to an entire comportment toward the world that alters our relations to that world’s constituent beings. To technologize is to install an optics of criterial control.

Glossing offers itself as particularly useful in thinking about the ontological structuring of presentative appearances. This paper considers what happens to the commentatorial apparatus of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis as it transitions from manuscript to printed page. What appears in manuscript as a single column Middle English text surrounded by rubricated Latin verse and marginalia becomes in Caxton’s printing a two-columned, typographically unified space that shifts the marginalia into the main text. Accounting for this presentative shift requires not a pre- to post-technological causality but an ontologically contingent relation disclosing how entities are made or possibilized as present. A book does something because something has been done to a book. Here glossing practices become a formed relation informing epochal shifts in the conditions for scenes of reading.

As I continuing writing the paper, I find myself leaning more on more not only on Agamben but especially on Heidegger.

A Future to Defend?

Over at ITM the past few days, there's been a really generative and stimulating discussion on "defending" medieval studies. The conversation was prompted by JJC's posting of a missive he received soliciting some advice. What was intended to be and initially prompted more pragmatically focused discussions quickly became a more wide-ranging conversation not just about the institutional prospects of medieval studies but about the very morphology of a futural frame. This was itself prompted by JJC's own rearticulation of the missive's concerns in the form of "the existential question: why must we be?"

I made a few contributions to the conversation, in which I tried to discuss how academic norms not only govern and normalize but also delimit the field of intelligible action/knowledge/pleasure and the viable ways of living such delimited fields enable and sustain. My suggestion was for a strategic engagement with such norms. Readers familiar with Judith Butler's work will quickly recognize its formative impact on my thinking in this area, especially as she's raised such concerns in Undoing Gender. I especially recommend reading Eileen's two amazing comments/posts. But here are just a few tasty morsels of that conversation:

JJC's institutionally tested wisdom:

• "Medievalism is a medievalist's friend."
• "[M]ake the argument [to administrators] in language they know, touching upon topics they already recognize as worthy, so that you can bring them to a place at which they would not have anticipated arriving in advance."
• "In order to get projects funded -- in fact sometimes just to keep a position or project alive -- you have to speak with a certainty about the future that you don't actually possess."

Eileen's joyful prospectus on curriculuar/institutional arrivants:

• "compile a kind of narrative bibliography of the increasingly important role that medieval studies is playing in important contemporary fields such as queer studies, postcolonial studies, and Continental philosophy, as well as in the *historical* development of critical and cultural theory more broadly."
• We "(1) work strenuously to delineate all the connections as well as fissures and cracks that inhere in various representation-event matrices....(2) explore the slower and semi-still currents of deep historical time that inhere in present cultural formations....(3) enter into active collaboration with scholars working in more contemporary fields of cultural studies and cultural theory."
• "By continuing to hang on to periodization as the number one way we define our curricula as well as our job hires, we will always run the risk of what I would call the law of diminishing returns as well as planned obsolescence."
• "we have to think of ways to both protect that kind of work [what I would call the right to the freedom of intellectual inquiry and historical research] while also better integrating it into new curricular models that don't simply re-inscribe little specialist ghettos"
• "Any form of autonomy, held on to too tightly and defended from a too narrow trench, ultimately makes its future viability more vulnerable. Knowledge for its own sake will always be an important mantra and even an end in itself that should be vigorously defended, but when funding is the bottom-line issue, better integration of individual knowledge fields into a heteronomous university is the key. There should also be room within traditionally-structured colleges and universities for experimental/temporary "centers" or "Institutes" that would not solidify into permanent units and whose contours would always be shifting in different directions."
• "Nobody ever actually gets to any one subject or idea "first"... and sometimes two or more scholars are having the same thought simultaneously in different places and with no knowledge of each other's existence, and theory, in my mind, really develops asynchronously, rhizomatically, etc., and sometimes I wish we had more scholarship that tried, as strenuously as possible, to take account of this [a more full genealogy or archaeology of ideas and forms of idea]....No one ever thought of anything "first." Ever. So it's not question of acknowledging who got anywhere "first," so much as it is a question of better efforts on our part to be paying attention to what practitioners are doing on work that we can say we always have "in common," regardless of period."
• "I can only think the medieval backwards, as it were, through contemporary moments. I like to make connections, but I never claim they are illuminating as regards a "whole" history or even a continuous one. My method has always been asynchronous and anti-teleological and I mainly do it because it's pleasurable...."

Karl's rhizomes of academic desiring:

• attend to the significant and continually important role of the medieval within/for current cultural formations and artifacts
• How our "work and professional interest is always already caught up in desiring networks....[and that] we ourselves are cross-disciplinary. In that sense, the disciplines could be thought to inhibit the real conditions of our existence, our becoming."
• on the limiting nature of a "hunt for origins": "any notion of 'first' is at its heart teleological."
• "[I]t's much better to think of multiple expressions of this thing we call the 'responsible subject' rather than any simple binary of before and after interiority. The 'modern subject' is not a culmination, but a different manifestation of a set of concerns and interests that might be entirely new, but perhaps which manifested themselves differently at different times, places, and professions in the MA. I think we need a non-teleological history--even a history of a single moment in all its discursive and temporal heterogeneity--of the boundaries of the self."

Mary Kate on how life in the university is predicated on forms of belonging, of being-together.

Holly Croker's timely remarks on the problematic tendency to "conflate period, time, and field," and how difficult but necessary is the challenge to think outside narratives of linear progression.

• "it seems to me worthwhile to think about the differences between temporality, periodization, and professional field. Maybe we can abandon linear temporality, but study periodization as an interpretive practice (with a history, no doubt). Then we can ask better questions about the professional politics that might result from such practices."
• "When does overlooking someone else’s work cease to be oversight and take on the political power of exclusion from a professional field?....But when is that practice something that we medievalists need to redress (because we are being erased from the larger discourse), and when is it simply a byproduct of different scholars asking the same questions in different fields? Can we be okay with other scholars working on parallel questions without explicit acknowledgement? To be alongside one another, do we need recognition, in sum? If so, how do we ask for such recognition without getting tangled up within a dialectic of mastery?"

And the conversation continues there ...