It is not normal today to think of “inanimate objects” as possessing a lively capacity to do things to us and with us, although it is quite normal to experience them as such. Every day we encounter the power of possessions, tools, clutter, toys, commodities, keepsakes, trash. Why this tendency to forget thing-power, to overlook the creative contributions of nonhumans and underhear their calls?

Oliphaunt Books, an imprint of punctum books, is THRILLED to announce the publication of Jeffrey Cohen et alia’s Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, the essay collection that grew out of the symposium by the same name hosted by George Washington University’s Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute last March, and featuring essays by Valerie Allen, Jane Bennett, Eileen Joy, Sharon Kinoshita, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Peggy McCracken, Kellie Robertson, Karl Steel, and Julian Yates, with Response Essays by Lowell Duckert, Nedda Mehdizadeh, and Jonathan Gil Harris. You can download the book for FREE or purchase the print edition [for a mere $17.00] HERE.

Speaking of purchasing the book, may I make a gentle plea? Although you may, of course, download the book for free [punctum books is an open-access press and we're behind the open-access movement all the way], will you please consider buying one [or two! then give that one away! send books into the world!] copies of the book? If you do, you will be making an important contribution to punctum books which will go a long way toward helping us with our publishing venture: by which I mean, you will be helping us to publish more authors, to foster more work, and to further promote, as we say at punctum, radically creative modes of inquiry and writing across a whimsical para-humanities assemblage. While open-access publishing does herald a brave new world of seemingly wide open, free access to what I hope will be a larger, more capacious, more generously imagined, and more vibrant field of intellectual and cultural work within the humanities, it is not really “free” in the sense of the immense amount of labor and time that goes into each individual book.

Many many many many hours and drops of sweat and care [and the hands of many unpaid assistants, some former students of mine, some current students of mine, some simply the most generous people imaginable -- grad. students at other institutions, post-graduates without jobs in the academy, other professors, and independent artists -- who have volunteered to assist the work of punctum books] go into each one of our books, and it has to be said that we also still believe in the book. In the future, when the power goes out and the last drop of gasoline has been squeezed into the last gasoline can, we’ll start writing letters again, and we’ll have our books. Celluloid film, reel to reel tape, cassette tapes, CDs, DVDs, floppy disks, thumb drives, I could go on: friends, these are the media of the days gone by, but do you know what remains? The book. We still want it. We still have to have it. Information wants to be free, and by golly, we’ll give it to you for free. But if you also want a book, we’ll continue to make those as well. And to make them beautiful. You look gorgeous to me, and so does this book. The medievalists are the humanists of the future! Please do your part to help me make that a reality.

And now: carry on.

[note: punctum books will be publishing a collection of essays by Aranye Fradenburg, Staying Alive, in late 2012/early 2013]

by EILEEN JOY

. . . obscure / forces are at work / like a radio left on / On the outskirts of / identical cities.

~Ben Lerner, “Doppler Elegies”

Like a radio left on, in the poet Ben Lerner’s parlance, on the outskirts of identical cities — and also, like the strains of a Lushlife Project downtempo “Budapest Eskimos” soundtrack emanating from a diamond mine — Aranye Fradenburg’s work has operated as a groovy and “obscure force” in medieval studies for the past 20 or so years, both as a powerful and palpably explicit influence upon work in Middle English literary [especially Chaucer] studies, especially those inflected by psychoanalytic and symptomatic and “discontinuist”/non-alteritist historicist approaches to the Middle Ages, but also, I would argue, as a potent and insistent voice [not always fully registered or acknowledged as such in our field and beyond] on the “arts” of living, on eudaimonia ["flourishing"], on the importance of pleasure/enjoyment [in its lighter and darker valences], on sentience/sensation + the “feeling” arts, on techniques of living + care of the self, and most especially, on the “living on”-ness of the always-traveling and transitive and open-ended and transgressive and non-linear signifiers and processes of signification that enable [and sometimes disable] the inter-subjective formations between various actors, living and dead, “past” and “present,” so crucial to our desires, to our sufferings [passions], to our ability to “affiliate” with and “relate” to others, and thus, to “living our [shared] lives,” for better and worse. It should be mentioned, too, that the “obscure force” that Lerner speaks of in his “Doppler Elegies” is love, a subject which has played no small role in Fradenburg’s intellectual, and I would also say, political-humanist concerns.

Fradenburg has also been a particular hero of mine for insisting, over and over again throughout her writings, that, in all times and places, we misunderstand ourselves, and therefore, unknowing — and the self-fictionalizations [some constructive, some destructive] predicated upon that unknowing — have to be taken into account, whether we are studying the past or just trying to understand ourselves and our own experiences. As she put it so eloquently in Sacrifice Your Love, with regard to medieval studies, we “cannot confine the work of knowing the Middle Ages to replicating, however hopelessly and/or heroically, medieval cultures’ self-understandings. We also should explore how medieval cultures, like all others, may have misunderstood themselves” [pp. 77-78]. And with regard to our own self-understandings, and in a way that is resonant with many of the discourses circulating in the university today under the aegis of object-oriented philosophies and various strains of post/humanist thought, Fradenburg wrote in the same book,

. . . the effect of subjectivity is produced by the interplay of insentience with sentience. . . . The telescopes that help us see the stars, the buildings that house the shelters that are our bodies, are insentient; and yet we extend sentience through them. But the more we make the machines and products that extend subjectivity into the world, the more insentience is part of us, or we are part of it. Forces are at work within us that do not “mean” anything; parts of ourselves cannot account for themselves. The work cannot account for itself, or disclose anything about itself, or even be questioned. [p. 13]

This excerpt is part of a much longer and very complex discussion having to do with the alienation produced by labor, modes of production [scholarly and artistic], aesthetics, courtly love, desire, libidinal economies, the Law, enjoyment, sacrifice/loss, political ethics, and community, and I can’t do justice to all of that here, and in any case, Fradenburg’s theoretical project in this book, especially with regard to, say, Chaucer studies and medieval chivalric literature and culture more broadly [in its broadest temporal dimensions, then to now], is well known and registered across so much scholarship that has been done since this book and under its influence. My own continual return(s) to the passages cited above have more to do with my own interest in and use of Fradenburg’s thinking, which, of unconscious necessity or intention, is highly idiosyncratic and personal. So, for me, these passages have long operated as watch-phrases for my own work, where I have striven to always keep in mind the unavoidable blind spots of everyone’s understanding of everything, including ourselves. Scholarship of medieval literature, or any literature, really, for me, becomes a valuable project of tracing productive errancies and sites of incoherence and crafting creative critical approaches that, in Eve Sedgwick’s memorable formulation, aim to be “additive and accretive,” desiring “to assemble and confer plenitude on an object [such as a text or textual object or author-object] that will then have resources to offer an inchoate self” ["Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading," in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, pp. 27-28]. This has something to do as well with what Bryan Reynolds has called a transversal poetics that defies “the authorities that reduce and contain meanings,” and that seeks to “understand and empower fugitive elements [in texts and other artifacts, and in particular spaces] insofar as doing so generates positive experiences” ["Transversal Poetics and Fugitive Explorations: Theaterspace, Paused Consciousness, Subjunctivity, and Macbeth," in Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations, pp. 1-26]. And this sort of work might be crucial for the future, if we agree with Frandeburg [and I do] that,

To be able to anticipate, plan, project a future or into a future, we have to not know for sure, because we have to suspend judgment even while exercising it, knowing that we don’t know (everything). Ethics—and ultimately psychoanalysis—emerges from a willing of this suspension, a paradoxical knowing of non-knowing. ["(Dis)continuity: A History of Dreaming," in The Post-Historical Middle Ages, ed. Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Frederico, p. 96]

I must admit that I was drawn to write this post because, partly due to my own personal project to spend some time over the next few years re-visiting Foucault’s late writings on the “care of the self” and biopower [because of THIS, THIS, and THIS], I have been returning [a lot] recently to Fradenburg’s 2002 book Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer and I have been struck both by how apropos to “our moment” and compelling this book still is [10 years later, and gee, 10 years isn't that long ago, anyway, but we have a tendency to "forget" stuff all of the time in our scholarship] and also by how Fradenburg’s entire oeuvre seems to continuously circle back [with important renovations of thought] to this earlier book’s project to draw attention to the important inter-relations between embodiment and signification, between pleasure and virtue, between subjectivity and Otherness, and between art and what she calls, in her essay “Living Chaucer,” the “living process” [p. 64; see below for full citation]. It feels timely to me, therefore, to spend some time now thinking about Fradenburg’s trajectory of thought over the past ten years or so, especially as it culminates, or expresses itself, in this essay.

I offer one cautionary note here, therefore, to say that I am not attempting in this blog post to offer a comprehensive account of Fradenburg’s whole body of work, nor to assess all of its merits [of which there are many] in relation to the larger field of medieval studies. As with other blog posts I have written in the past, here I merely celebrate the originality and importance of a scholar who has urged me [successfully] to think, and also to feel, differently — about my field [medieval studies], yes — but more importantly, about the world in which I live. Over the years, I have come to value and to gather close to me, with a certain ardor, the work of scholars who have helped me, not just to think, but to live more creatively [more on which, below], and in this sense, Fradenburg joins Sara Ahmed, Zygmunt Bauman, Jane Bennett, Leo Bersani, Kathleen Biddick, Judith Butler, John Caputo, Thomas Carlson, Iain Chambers, Jeffrey Cohen, Michel de Certeau, Deleuze and Guattari, Carolyn Dinshaw, Michel Foucault, James Earl, Cary Howie, Anna Klosowska, Jonathan Lear, Emmanuel Levinas, Michael Edward Moore, Martha Nussbaum, Bill Readings, Joan Retallack, Claude Romano, Eve Sedgwick, and Simone Weil as writers who always hover nearby in my study. This list is highly personal and idiosyncratic, of course. The work of some of the scholars in this list also stands out — for me, anyway — for their attention to and care for the role of the humanities, and of creative thought more generally, in relation to personal and social life, and thus has also been crucial to me and others in relation to the projects of the BABEL Working Group. Fradenburg, along with Bennett, Nussbaum, and Readings, is particularly noteworthy in this regard. When reading Fradenburg closely, no matter what the specific texts or subjects under close scrutiny [Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, the Knight's Tale, Troilus and Criseyde, whatever], what she seems to always be talking about is something she says more explicitly in her essay, “Group Time: Catastrophe, Survival, Periodicity” [in Time and the Literary, ed. Karen Newman, Jay Clayton, and Marianne Hirsch], that “enjoyment is the matrix of knowledge, and knowledge is not diminished thereby.” Further, “Interpretation and explanation are activities central to libidinal structuration and vice versa. . . . We thereby reclaim our technical work [the humanities] as the work of desire, and desire as that which makes the world” [p. 232]. 

Fradenburg has become one of our most important advocates for the importance of the “liberal arts” [and of literature/the fine arts/creativity/confabulation/play, especially] to personal and more broadly social “thriving” [this goes way beyond medieval studies, I might add, which is why I also think she should be read more broadly outside of our field] and thus, Fradenburg’s recent essay, “Living Chaucer,” published in Studies in the Age of Chaucer [and originally presented at the 17th Biennial Meeting of the New Chaucer Society in Siena, Italy in 2009], feels like both the consummate culmination of her career’s various theoretical trajectories thus far, while it also offers [within the context of her more recent forays into neuroscience and evolutionary biology] a striking and enlivening departure for a couple of reasons — first, because she moves closer than she has in previous work to embracing the value and necessity of “shared minds” [and thus, for all of its precariousness and dangers, somatic-affective community-assemblages], and second, because she also moves closer to admitting that literature/language is not ONLY a signalling system that only-always defers/devolves to other signalling systems [which are therefore in continual Derridean slippage that, perhaps, never admits of a Real, or is always pointing to the ways in which language can only ever be falling away from that Real -- blah blah blah, I'm so tired of/bored by these theories of "lack"/non-coincidence between language and everything else], but may actually have the power to change history, and even more so, possesses a “presence” that is not negligible with regard to how we are affected by the past [or even to how we understand and negotiate our "selves" and our experiences in the present]. As Fradenburg herself puts it in “Living Chaucer,”

undead life seems more apt a description of the signifier’s mode of existence (as Derrida himself thought) than does simple absence or nonexistence. I wrote in Sacrifice Your Love about this form of ‘‘being-as-signifier’’: given how susceptible we are to the signifier’s designs, there is more connectedness than we think between living subjects and dead letters. Nature’s signifiers vary in their realizations, but something, a shape, insists. [p. 44]

by Marget Long

Knowledge comes only in flashes.

–Walter Benjamin

Flash + Cube (1965-1975) is an artist’s book about the Sylvania flashcube—the space-aged, flash photography device, revolutionary in 1965 and nearly obsolete by 1975. Assembled from a wide range of archival materials—a “terrorist letter,” G.I. photographs from Vietnam, Sylvania flashcube advertisements, as well as Long’s photographs and photomontages—the book explores the links between light, war, history and photography.

Apart from its circulation as a novelty item online, the flashcube is largely forgotten. The history of photographic flash is also often relegated to a footnote and is strikingly under-analyzed. Yet flash’s blinding effects and military genealogy, and the flashcube’s precise contemporaneity with the war in Vietnam make this a rich analytical object with which to reflect on the cultural, political and economic imperatives of its moment. As Long’s deft work with this archive shows, the flashcube is good to think with.

Why this object? The flashcube was a mesmerizingly beautiful and utopian source of light. It was manufactured by the millions, for amateur use at a time when photography was radically expanding as a domestic practice. The cool, contained cube marked an important break from the burn-prone, open-faced flash devices of the 1940s and 1950s. Its shiny, Warholian surface encapsulated the counter cultural zeitgeist of the late 1960s; after firing, the flashcube’s blasted interior looks like the devastated landscape of an atomic age.

FORTHCOMING: Summer 2012

Figure 1. Marget Long, Sylvania Flashcube (Used), C-Print, 40 x 30 inches, 2009.

Marget Long works with photographs, video, and text to explore questions of historiography, the limits of photographic representation and the physical experience of photography itself. She received a BA from Harvard University and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she was the recipient of the T.C. Colley Award in photography in 2002. She lectures frequently on photography, most recently at Yale University’s Photographic Memory Workshop and at NYU’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. Her work has been screened and exhibited at many venues including Anthology Film Archives, Art Institute of Chicago, Exit Art, Cinders Gallery, Kunsthaus Bregenz, American Cinémathèque in Los Angeles and in an upcoming group exhibition at Hasted Kraeutler Gallery in New York.

Love/Desire

by Lauren Berlant

Dead Letter Office (for BABEL Working Group).

In the study of gender and sexuality, one might expect work on desire and love to be about sexuality, identity, and intimacy:  about sexual object choice and erotic practice, the disparate dramas lived by various genders, and the centrality of intimate inclinations, emotions, and acts to the assessment of a person’s happiness.  Ideally such a study would confirm what you already know about desire and love, as there is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory. Yet the ways in which we live sexuality and intimacy have been profoundly shaped by theories — especially psychoanalytic ones, which have helped to place sexuality and desire at the center of the modern story about what a person is and how her history should be read. At the same time, other modes of explanation have been offered by popular and mass culture.  In these domains, sexual desire is not deemed the core story of life; it is mixed up with romance, a particular version of the story of love.

In this small theoretical novella, Lauren Berlant engages love and desire in separate entries. In the first entry, Desire mainly describes the feeling one person has for something else: it is organized by psychoanalytic accounts of attachment, and tells briefly the history of their importance in critical theory and practice. The second entry, on Love, begins with an excursion into fantasy, moving away from the parent-child scene of psychoanalysis and looking instead at the centrality to desire of context, environment, or history. Whether viewed psychoanalytically, institutionally, or ideologically, love is always deemed an outcome of fantasy. Without fantasy, there would be no love. The entry on Love then describes some workings of romance across personal life and commodity culture, the place where subjects start to think about fantasy on behalf of their actual lives.

. . . there is no way definitively to capture desire. This is why critical thought about what desire is almost inevitably becomes theoretical thought about thought itself: the minute an object comes under analytic scrutiny, it bobs and weaves, becomes unstable, mysterious, and recalcitrant, seeming more like a fantasy than the palpable object it had seemed to be when the thinker/lover first risked engagement.

In order to explain some things about desire and love, Berlant does not even attempt to claim to understand their essential structure. Thinking about relations of desire and love as intensified zones of attachment, she gives us ways to identify their activity, track their movement, and map out the marks they make on people and the world in which they circulate.

FORTHCOMING: Summer 2012

Lauren Berlant is George M.Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Her national sentimentality trilogy — The Anatomy of National Fantasy (Chicago, 1991), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Duke, 1997), and The Female Complaint (Duke, 2008) — has now morphed into a quartet, with Cruel Optimism (Duke, 2011) addressing precarious publics and the aesthetics of affective adjustment in the contemporary U.S. and Europe. A co-editor of Critical Inquiry, she is also editor of Intimacy (2000); Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest (2001); Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (2004); and On the Case (special issue of Critical Inquiry, 2007). She blogs at Supervalent Thought and is also a founding member of the art/activist group Feel Tank Chicago.

It’s springtime in New York City [and elsewhere, of course], and what better time than to wander into a gallery temporarily dressing itself up as a bookstore and browse some titles from the not-so-secret underworld of independent para-academic publishers? Miguel Abreu Gallery, with Sequence Press, will be opening their doors as a bookshop and reading room, from Wednesday, April 18th through Tuesday, April 24th, with selected titles from punctum, such as Leper Creativity and Intimate Bureaucracies, as well as from

• PPP Editions
• Univocal
• Sequence Press
• Dexter Sinister
• Primary Information
• D.S. al Coda Records
• Capricious
• GSAPP Books

Miguel Abreu Gallery is located at 36 Orchard Street (between Canal & Hester), New York, NY, 10002, and their hours are 11:00 am to 6:30 pm. SUBWAY: F to East Broadway; B, D to Grand Street; J, M, Z to Delancey/Essex Street. SO HERE’S AN IDEA: first, on Tuesday night, April 17th @7:00 pm, join punctum, Sequence Press, continent., Whiskey&Fox, Cabinet Magazine and others for a panel & party devoted to para-academic publishing thrown by The Public School New York and Observatory:

The Para-Academia Series: Panel Discussion and Party on Para-Academic Publishing

And then, we’ll see you at Miguel Abreu Gallery-cum-Bookstore. Cheers.

Figure 1. images from William E. Jones, Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration (PPP Editions, 2010)

by Milcho Manchevski

Dead Letter Office (for BABEL Working Group).

[still images on front cover from Street by Milcho Manchevski, ©1999]

Reflecting upon his experience making his 2010 feature film Mothers, a cinematic triptych interweaving three narratives that are each, in their own way, about the often tenuous lines between truth and fiction, and one of which actually morphs into a documentary about the aftermath in a small Macedonian town where three retired cleaning women were found raped and killed in 2008 and the murderer turned out to be the journalist covering the story for a major Macedonian newspaper, the Oscar-nominated Macedonian-born and New York-based writer-director Milcho Manchevski writes that,

“Most of us look at films differently or accept stories in a different way if we believe that they are true. We watch a documentary film in a different way from the way we watch a drama.  We read a magazine article in a different way from the way in which we read a short story.  Sometimes, we even treat a film that employs actors differently than a regular drama because we were told that it is based on something that really happened. We treat these works based on truth or reporting on the truth in different ways.

“Why?

“What is it in our relation to reality or in our relation to what we perceive to be reality that makes us value a work of artifice (an art piece) differently depending on our knowledge or conviction of whether that work of artifice is based on events that really took place?”

Further, Manchevski writes,

“Every piece of art has to contain the truth. But, not the truth of what happened.  It needs to contain the truth of how things are — and the difference between what happened and how things are is in what is important. Is it the events (and by extension the facts) of what happened, or is it the emotional and conceptual underpinning and thus understanding of how things are?”

In this extended essay, or letter, Manchevski ruminates the different ways in which both filmmakers and audiences create, experience, and absorb the cinematic narrative with a certain trust and faith in the artwork to render, not the factual truth, per se, but the importantly shared experience of trusting “the plane of reality created by the work itself,” such that “we trust its inner logic and integrity, we have faith in what happens while we give ourselves to this work of art.” Truth becomes a question of what artist and audience can see and feel together: what feels real becomes the world we inhabit.

PREFACE by Adrian Martin: “Truth Approaches, Reality Affects”

FORTHCOMING: Spring 2012

Milcho Manchevski has written and directed the feature films Before the Rain (nominated for an Academy Award and winner of over 30 film awards, including the Golden Lion for Best Film), Dust, Shadows and Mothers, and over 50 short forms, including Tennessee for Arrested Development. He has also been a director on HBO’s The Wire. His fiction, essays and op-ed pieces have appeared in New American Writing, La Repubblica, Corriere Della Sera, Sineast, The Guardian, Suddeutsche Zeitung, and Pravda, among other publications. He has authored a (very small) book of fiction, The Ghost of My Mother, and two books of photographs, Street  and Five Drops of Dream, which accompanied two photo exhibitions. Manchevski has lectured at a number of universities, cinematheques, art museums and art institutes, most notably as a Head of Directing Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts’ Graduate Film program.

Jeffrey Cohen blogged at In The Middle a few weeks ago about the Exemplaria conference, held in early February at University of Texas-Austin, on “Surface, Symptom, and the State of Critique” ["Surfaces That Are Never Shallow"], which I also attended, and I have had several presentations and discussions from that conference much on my mind lately while I have also been fretting a little bit over, not so much “the state of critique” as the “state of the [future] university,” maybe primarily because there are so many things I want to see happen and the pace of change within institutions is often glacial at best. I am also not sure what to think about the changes that are already somewhat high [or is it low?] upon the horizon, such as MITx, MIT’s new online [and free] learning initiative [just think: a course with potentially 50,000 students!]. I actually think this is a very cool idea, while at the same time I feel pretty strongly that having actual bodies gathered together in various learning environments [however constructed] will continue to be important [for certain quality of life purposes but also because I believe in the affective-embodied aspects of teaching, but I also know that I can reach more people online than I do in my classrooms at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, as I am doing right now, and so I don't think this is ultimately about choosing between online and more brick-and-mortar, face-to-face-type learning environments: I think it might be about trying to have it all, and I want both]. And there is the concern, too, of the economics of everything: can every institution of higher learning that exists now really sustain itself or be fully sustained by various funding sources [whether state governments, private investments, tuition and other fees, and the like], forever, into the distant future? Likely not [to whit, on this point, go HERE].

I had a really bizarre moment at the Exemplaria conference that was kind of a first for me; but first, on the third day, I was a little bit in overload mode [so many papers, so many provocative moments, so little sleep, so many cocktails], and my head was buzzing with so many moving/arresting moments [these are LOOSE quotations, I might add, scribbled in hangover hazes]:

“The one term we really need to address/critique in the university today is love.” [George Edmondson]

“Practices of enjoyment and of skeptical, supposedly aloof critique are actually always entwined.” [Geraldine Heng]

“We need to be fierce in defending our discipline [medieval studies]. We need fierce reparative reading; we need affective reading to allow ruptures of hope.” [Noah Guynn]

“Discomfort is also a gift. It gives rise to anxieties but is also constituitive of community. We are fellow travelers in our crisis.” [Noah Guynn, cadging from Ann Anlin Chang]

“Critique is an important component of play.” [Patricia Ingham]

“Creative generalizations are critical to argumentation in our discipline. . . . We need criticism that is a form of poeisis and making; we need affirmative theories that enjoin things, not just pull them apart. . . . Cultivate drifting and distraction and free-floating mindfulness as a way of seeing things anew. Sleep less; generalize more.” [Henry Turner]

“Talent is courtesy toward matter.” [Henry Turner, quoting Jean Genet]

“We don’t know when we might need the past for our own survival.” [Ruth Evans]

“Reading is also reading FOR something, on behalf of something.” [Ruth Evans]

“Looking closely at amateur scholars helps us to broaden what we think we mean by ‘professional.’ . . . Amateurism is a bit queer, especially in its unabashed attachment to things in a climate of detachment.” [Carolyn Dinshaw]

“Critique is not just skeptically ideological and eliminative; it can also be about weighing options to choose one that’s more inclusive. . . . Nothing passes through us uneventfully and everything changes and is changed by its passage through us. . . . [Let's go for] appreciation over derogation of networked, relational, rhizomatic, trans-affective sentience. . . . Confabulation may not be delusional but rather a crucial tool for understanding one’s experience. . . . The mind needs its plasticity, its vagaries and uncertainties, to get us through this world. . . . The cultivation of everyday thinking is the task of the humanities today.” [Aranye Fradenburg]

“When in crisis, you always need critique; you need judgment. . . . Critique is the ability to distinguish the difference between the crisis that befalls us and the situation that includes us. . . . The symptom is event-ful; it befalls all of us and no one escapes it. . . . Maybe instead of avoiding symptoms, we could fall into them together, including all of the creatures? We are all creatures of befallen-ness.” [George Edmondson]

“When we consider the active propulsions of nonhuman objects in narratives, we raise the ethical stakes. . . . We need a slowness of velocity or even a mode of hesitation to see the movements and propulsions of objects.” [Jeffrey Cohen]

“The process of reading texts collaboratively across disciplines is deeply transactional, and requires transactional reading modes. . . . We need to read, not just the surface, but what sticks out/sticks to us, the things in/on texts that ask/beg to be read and thread things up. . . . ” [Geraldine Heng]

“I belong to the slow thought movement.” [Geraldine Heng]

“I don’t want to explain Hamlet; I just want to make it interesting. We should make texts more interesting, however we can.” [Ben Saunders]

“If we hit upon a meaningful metaphor, reality might actually change. . . . The purpose of scholarship is to explain things that are weird.” [Michelle Warren]

“Let’s stop diagnosing everything, and instead keep working with theory.” [Ben Saunders]

Wow: that was a lot. Delicious. What was I saying? I think I was saying something like, I had this really bizarre moment on the third day of the symposium when, for the first time in my life, I felt kind of . . . OLD. As in: there are so many things I want to do, and I may only have something like 10-15 years left to accomplish those things. Or maybe one week, or one day, if, like, I get hit by a bus [which I think about a lot]. For just a moment, my heart stopped. State of the field: everything is just fine; everything is more fucked up than you could imagine. What will we do? With Ben Saunders, I don’t want to diagnose any more whether our hearts are still beating or we are already dead, whether everything is always already under the thumb of something [power: choose your flavor] or bending-warping just to the left of my angle of vision; with George Edmondson, I say let’s fall into something together. We need to start swimming, while also leaving at least one person behind to keep a light on in the watchtower. We need to start making wrong calls and keep the e/stranged others on the line with us. Because, the thing is, as stimulating and as important as I think the Exemplaria conference was, we also have to stop “meeting” like this, having “meetings” like this where we gather the best minds of a generation to talk to each other about “what to do,” always “what to do” . . . in here.

The university is a beautiful place; don’t make me tell you all the reasons why. I could spend my whole life working on behalf of the humanities and all of the ways in which the humanities [especially the humanities vis-a-vis the longer perspectives of premodern studies] make the world a better place, and maybe that’s precisely why I think we should steal the [premodern] humanities away, take them underground, or . . . over there, somewhere. We need the university in all of its brick-and-mortar incarnations, but I also think it’s time for a kind of subter-fugitive, vagabond, gypsy para-humanities. Let’s “get lost” together, taking the humanities with us like so many suitcases, portable libraries, and sacks of diamonds. Let’s figure out inventive ways to sustain the humanities, the university, by absconding with them to the streets, alleys, market squares, ateliers, coffee shops, bookstores, wine bars, clubs, kitchens, bedrooms, galleries, dive bars, park benches, garages, living rooms, and basements. In short, let’s start over, let’s re-boot, let’s situate ourselves, like Diogenes on the outskirts of Athens, on the edges of our cities and towns, never losing sight of the places [and institutions] we love, while also saying, “fuck THIS.” Let’s get cosmopolitan; let’s embrace a radical, polyglot cosmopolitanism that enunciates a “shaggy heart,” where we will have “no fixed abode” and be “nowhere a foreigner” [Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, p. 140].

It’s late, as T.S. Eliot once said, and to paraphrase [or literally quote] Rilke, “whoever has no house now will never have a house.” This blog post is a time-stamped resignation letter: I am packing my bags and shuttering the windows of my house(s). I am storing everything in the root cellar in the case of [un-event-ful] returns. Or rather, I am acting as if everything is fine and am continuing to collect my paychecks while I am also furtively looking for the nearest exit. I am navigating a holding pattern; I am self-medicating; I am trying to wake myself up; I am just now waking up. I need allies; I need partners in [para-institutional] crimes. So this blog post is also like a love-resignation letter, or something like a “help wanted” ad:

punctum books [http://punctumbooks.com] needs volunteer proofreaders, copy editors, graphic and web designers, typesetters-formatters, software/app engineers, type-font experts, illustrator-artists, and expert reviewers [and also: benefactors]. We have more work than we can handle. That’s a good thing. Contact us at: punctumbooks@gmail.com.

That’s also Step One. Step Two is: you tell me. Meet me outside.

punctum books is happy to announce that Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism has a new website, which you can visit HERE, and where you can access free PDF downloads of the first two issues and of individual articles, as well as purchase print editions of whole issues.

Featuring writing by Michael Austin, Levi Bryant, Nathan Coombs, Peter Gratton, Fabio Gironi, Graham Harman, Robert Jackson, Timothy Morton, Michael O’Rourke, Christopher Vitale, and Ben Woodard, among others, the journal aims to show that, “to be a ‘speculative realist’ means—if anything—to place oneself in an interstitial position where theorizing about reality is unconstrained by the limits imposed by both common-sense and dogmatic forms of philosophical realism. To paraphrase a traditional Zen saying, before philosophy there are mountains and rivers, whilst doing philosophy mountains and rivers disappear, but when philosophical dogmatism is replaced by speculation the mountains are once again mountains and the rivers once again rivers.” Further, as the editors of Speculations (Michael Austin, Paul J. Ennis, Fabio Gironi, Thomas Gokey, and Robert Jackson) assert, “Basic standards of rational argumentation and intellectual integrity are not exclusive possessions of ‘scientistic’ thought but are desiderata for any kind of intellectual production, especially so in an historical conjuncture that offers new generations of philosophers the possibility of constructing skepticism-proof bridges between the continental and the analytic tradition. Witnessing the discipline of philosophy under attack from governments across the ‘developed’ world—more interested in fast revenues and immediate ‘impact’ than in slow and careful thinking—it is more than ever imperative to make common cause against the bureaucratization of knowledge and to assert clearly the importance of critical thought.”

I just thought I would share with everyone here a talk I recently delivered at George Washington University as part of a symposium on “Ecological Movement,” sponsored by GW’s Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, and which also featured remarks from Jennifer James, Lowell Duckert, and Stacy Alaimo. I share it in the spirit of the type of creative para-academic alliances and assemblages and aesthetic movements that punctum books is interested in fostering:

Oceanic Sorrow: An Elegy for Detroit 

Eileen A. Joy

I’m truly excited [am I ever not excited? should I be less excited sometimes? what's wrong with me?] to announce that on TUESDAY, APRIL 17th, starting at 7:00 pm, punctum books and The Public School New York will be co-hosting in Brooklyn, at Observatory, a panel discussion on para-academic publishing and also a “show your wares” party. The participants will comprise representatives from punctum books [me and Nicola Masciandaro], the totally rad new alt-lit-cult journal continent. [Paul Boshears], Sequence Press [Katherine Pickard and Miguel Abreu], Cabinet Magazine [Sina Najafi], Whiskey & Fox + PELT [Daniel Remein], and Peanut Books [Valerie Vogrin]. Here is how we describe the event [and go HERE for TPSNY's web-page on the event, where you can also sign up to attend]:

The term ‘para-academic’ captures the multivalent sense of something that fulfills and/or frustrates the academic from a position of intimate exteriority. Para-academia is that which is  beside academia, a place whose logic encompasses many reasons and no reason at all (para-, “alongside, beyond, altered, contrary,” from Greek  para-, “beside, near, from, against, contrary to,” cognate with Sanskrit  para “beyond”). The para is the domain of: shadow, paradigm, daemon, parasite, supplement, amateur, elite. The para-academic embodies an unofficial excess or extension of the academic that helps, threatens, supports, mocks (par-ody), perfects and/or calls it into question simply by existing next to it. Following a series of classes organized through The Public School New York on the subject of “Para-Academia and Theory Fiction,” this event brings together a group of editors whose work in publishing falls within the para-academic, in one sense or another. Presenters will address the practice and theory of para-academic publishing, its relation to various areas of life (art, pedagogy, politics), and present some of their recent titles.

Pursuant to this forthcoming “springtime in New York!” event, I would also like to share with everyone that we have some exciting titles forthcoming and already published from punctum books’s Dead Letter Office, Glossator Special Editions, and Oliphaunt imprints, and you can see more about that HERE.