Burn After Reading: Calling All Hands for Help with BABEL's and postmedieval's 2012 [and Beyond] Kalamazoo Sessions

Figure 1. from Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

by EILEEN JOY

2. Forget About Good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.

16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.

--from Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

Paperwork for sessions for the 2012 Kalamazoo Congress on Medieval Studies is due TOMORROW, June 1st, and the BABEL Working Group and postmedieval are keen to have as much input as possible for the description of sessions planned for next year's Congress, and also ideas and suggestions for sessions in the Congresses after 2012 as well. Please also consider this post a kind of "call to arms" for participants: in other words, if you have any interest in speaking on either the BABEL or postmedieval sessions, please send me an email at: ejoy@siue.edu.

To recap from our business meeting at the most recent Congress just a couple of weeks ago, we have in mind for the two BABEL sessions two inter-linking roundtables, with ten participants in each [each of whom would have approx. 5-6 minutes to speak], organized under these two rubrics:

"Fuck This: On Finally Letting Go"

"Fuck Me: On Never Letting Go"

Our ideas, at present [based on conversations at Kalamazoo and elsewhere], for each of these sessions is very loose and looks something like this: participants on the "Fuck This" panel would explore the concept, situation, trauma, dilemma, efficacy, scene, action, cost, gain, psycho-dynamics, historicity, etc. of finally leaving, getting rid of, abandoning, refusing, dumping, and letting go of what might be called [potentially toxic] "love-objects," with "love-objects" here denoting ANY possible object: ideological, methodological, textual, art historical, codicological, artifactual, historical, archival, literary, disciplinary, etc. More specifically, the remarks could be pitched toward disciplinary/methodological/historical/geotemporal objects ["fuck philology" or "fuck deconstruction" or "fuck the Middle Ages" or "fuck Chaucer" or "fuck the humanities"], or they could be aimed at specific SCENES within medieval and other texts that illustrate in certain striking ways the concepts, gestures, acts and scenes of "finally letting go" of the [toxic] love-object. Or they could do both, or they could do something we haven't even though of yet. Participants on the "Fuck Me" session would also have wide leeway to explore the concept, situation, trauma, dilemma, scene, etc. of NOT being able to ever let go of the [potentially toxic] love-object, which love-object, again, could be a text, an author, a methodology, an artwork, etc. Or the remarks, again, could be aimed at specific SCENES within medieval and other texts that illustrate in useful ways the situation, or dilemma, of never being able to "let go" of the love-object.

Ultimately, we would like to collectively explore two extreme, affective gestures, if you will--that of letting go and refusing something that one has, for a long while, considered a "beloved" [perhaps even a so-called "toxic" beloved] and also of never being able to let go of a "beloved," especially one that we might say "isn't good for you." A subset of our interest here might also be to explore what some would call "dark attraction" and "dark attractors." How do certain things, objects, practices, persons [fictional and otherwise], places, etc. both call to us with a certain allure yet also lead us astray, dominate us, harm us, ruin us, etc.? But what are we missing here, too? We would be most appreciative if everyone could jump in here and add further thoughts relative to the description of these two sessions, which we could then work into the final paperwork and also into our more broad Call for Papers.

As regards our one postmedieval session, we have in mind a kind of rowdy roundtable, this time with 20 participants [each of whom would have approx. 3 minutes], titled--

"Burn After Reading: 20 Miniature Manifestos for a Future Medieval Studies"

--where we would invite ANYONE who is so inclined to offer a brief precis of a possibly fruitful future direction for medieval studies. How might we flesh out a more full description of this session, and what would you like to see addressed in the description of such a session? [And speaking of manifestos, we really like Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, from which we clipped an excerpt in our image above.]

Finally, in our meeting at Kalamazoo, we had other suggestions for future sessions: "Cleavage: Into The Breach" [inspired by China Mieville's novel The City and the City]; "Exquisite Corpse," where 10 or so participants would add to a composition in sequence by following a question [e.g. "What is the usefulness of the term medieval in the present?"] and also by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed [this collaborative composition would be written ahead of the Congress and "performed" collaboratively at the Congress as one long narrative]; "Tantrum," where 10 or so participants would get up and rant and rave about ... whatever; and "What Is Diversity in the Middle Ages?"

And so I also finally ask: what other suggestions does everyone have for future BABEL and postmedieval sessions? We would very much like for our session planning to be as collective a process as possible, so by all means, please pitch in. And you can't possibly hurt our feelings either if you think the sessions described above suck. Just tell us what you think!