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.