violence and the slippery slope

Three seemingly unrelated events occurred this past week:

1. While preparing my students for the written final exam for history of theatrical space/design, a student complained that courses (like mine) that require a fair amount of writing a) bring down his grade point average, and b) are a waste of time since they will not make him a better electrical engineer. After pointing out that a reason for "a" could be the assumption of "b," I explained the not-too-revolutionary concept that a functioning democracy requires good critical thinking skills on the part of its citizens.

2. 26 women and children were killed by a deeply troubled individual with a semi-automatic assault weapon.

3. The first public figure "brave" enough to defend the current federal laws on gun ownership after the massacre--Louie Gohmert, Republican, congressman from Texas--argued (via fallacy) that restrictions on assault rifles are wrong because "Once you start drawing the line, where do you stop?"
___________

If more U.S. citizens demanded sound reasoning from their leaders, perhaps life in the U.S. would be less absurdly violent.

Is Stephen Greenblatt a victim of his own method?

There has been a piling on effect in criticism of Stephen Greenblatt's 2011 love letter to the European Renaissance.  There is much head-scratching and outrage in this LA Review of Books: Swerve article and the blogasphere (In the Middle) about the awards that have been heaped upon a book full of historical inaccuracies, oversimplifications, and barely disguised anti-religious rhetoric--an argument based on antithesis, a sermon on the evils of medieval culture that will soothe its reader with a sense of historical certitude.

Therefore, I commit myself to piling on.  But I also want to raise a question that may not have been mentioned yet.  To put it blandly (and I'm not sure New Historicism deserves a subtler spin), if the works of individuals or intentional communities do not contribute to the construction of the archive, and the contours of culture are formed on the surface of insidious, unrecognized micrologies of power only, is it possible too that historical narratives can emerge from a Foucauldian morass without the benefit of intentional, self-aware scholarship? As a tenured professor at Harvard, Greenblatt has been afforded oodles of time to catch up on fifty years of medieval scholarship that has sunk the boat of the dark "Dark Ages."  How did he miss the sinking boat?  Maybe we should give him the benefit of the doubt and suggest that as a diagnosed (but untreated) New Historicist, Greenblatt should not bother to consider counter-narratives, since, in the end, the currents of history and history-telling will inevitably push us where they will, despite our own best efforts.

simulation and imitation

A phrase that often slips (too easily) off my tongue during a class session is "in the real world" (i.e., "someplace other than this classroom").  The classroom is both simulation and imitation.  The hours of labor arbitrary, the intellectual groups randomly assembled.  A space for play, technology, and introspection.  If simulation means imitation without human (or thing) presence, the classroom can do that too.

The video is of a fictional World Cup match between St. Kitts and Mexico on FIFA soccer.  Vacillating between innovation and pure mimesis, this video game does a phenomenal job of recreating offensive strategies, defensive attacks, and multiple trajectories of the ball.  The Scottish accent of the announcer brings the viewer right to the edge of "the real world," arousing a sense of competitive excitement.

Which is more enjoyable to watch: the video simulation or a video recording of a match between humans?  Both offer their own set of pleasures.  But I suggest that the simulated version might work better in a jock classroom.  Unlike human players, these avatars never get tired and they ALWAYS know the right place on the field to occupy when they are without the ball.  Watch the Lilliputian players from Mexico from 2:45-3:10: stacking one beautiful passing triangle on another as they go up the field.  Barcelona's Ineista and Xavi might come close to this kind of brilliance, but they will never surpass it.  An archetype and prototype extracted from concrete moments of play.  How better to describe inductive reasoning and information coagulation in the classroom?

The Dark Ages ;)

history, method, and teaching

I've always been a firm believer in following a leaderless pack.  Which is why I want to join with my current undergraduate students and embrace research on the internets machine.  My students read plays and articles and take lecture notes on their phones.  When I say "get the book," they think "read it on google" or borrow the file from another classmate. Why would I make them read from any other media?  I may enjoy flipping pages made of reconstituted wood pulp, and I especially enjoy handing sheepskin.  Despite post-structural critiques of the archive, I believe there is value in engaging sensorially with old stuff.

But why would I make my undergraduates do the same?  I possess certainly luxuries for considering histories and texts through multiple frames and by way of multiple media that they do not... mostly, time.  Many have jobs, a number have families, and a handful lost their homes to hurricane Sandy. But there's another problem (and here comes the universal academic groan). Their current knowledge-base of world history is either feeble, imperceptible, or flawed.  How can our students interpret, build, deconstruct, reconstruct, synthesize, abhor, or embrace history and texts when a middle school understanding of world events (circa 1980) simply does not exist at the undergraduate level?

Enter the internets!  I like these modules by the nerd blogger and young adult author John Green.  He's selling the stuff in a middle-America white loser vernacular, which is not exactly what my CUNY students are used to, but he is able to quickly provide a basic structure for undergrads to hang their hats on before they begin reading Petrarch or analyzing colonial Mexica codices.  His lessons are fast and funny, and even in this condensed format he is able to suggest multiple and counter narratives.

Here's one Americans of every age would benefit from:

Some thoughts on actor-network theory and object oriented ontology. Actor-network theory is Bruno Latour's concept -- and it has nothing to do with stage actors. Latour is a sociologist. His project is to create a new(ish) analytical method that assumes all objects, animals, and humans (animate and inanimate) are equal actants in the network of social relations. There are a number of intersections here with object oriented ontology (Graham Harman, esp. ) -- although Harman is a philosopher, not social scientists. Jane Bennett is another main player. A group of medievalists -- mostly from English departments -- have become very interested in Harman and Bennet and have published widely: JJ Cohen, Eileen Joy, Karl Steel, etc.

I don't find the philosophical material very useful for my own work. Harman plays around with Aristotle -- so it is interesting to medievalists (premodern matter and transformability). However, it's a highly conceptual ontology of the universe and so it may be difficult to find practical uses in historiography. Latour, on the other hand, presents a dynamic method for analysis. His ideas are meant to be transhistorical, in a sense, which is both good and bad. He's not a Marxist, and so that doesn't present a hurdle when looking at medieval subjects. A network of social objects and actants that includes humans and objects is very attractive to me and I think has great potential for medieval performance and ritual.

All of these people are coming out of phenomenology and Heidegger, but its more radical in that it proposes study of affects and relations beyond human senses and awarenesses. The best introduction to Latour is Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.

One of the benefits of expanding a sociology of theatre to include inanimate objects (via Bruno Latour) is that such a maneuver might also open up medieval performance to sociological observation. Pre-modern histories have been somewhat resistant to sociological analysis, perhaps because consideration of class and critiques of industrial and global capitalism have been central to the discipline. This is not to imply that relationships between objects and humans have been exhausted of the fetishized object of late capitalism. It is only to say that additional layers and networks of actors--some of which function within ritual structures within feudal societies--may expand beyond systems of economic exchange.

Automaton figure of a monk, Spain, c. 1560