Speculative Medievalisms: Discography S PECULATIVE M EDIEVALISMS D ISCOGRAPHY Edited by The Petropunk Collective punctum books ✶ brooklyn, ny S PECULATIVE M EDIEVALISMS : DISCOGRAPHY © The Petropunk Collective [Eileen Joy, Anna K ł osowska, Nicola Masciandaro, Michael O’Rourke], 2013. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit: http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0, or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This work is Open Access, which means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that you in no way alter, transform, or build upon the work outside of its normal use in academic scholarship without express permission of the author and the publisher of this volume. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. First published in 2013 by punctum books Brooklyn, New York http://punctumbooks.com ISBN-13: 978-0615749532 ISBN-10: 0615749534 Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress. Cover Image: detail from Voynich Manuscript (15 th /16 th c., unknown provenance), folio 86v; General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Facing-page drawing by Heather Masciandaro. Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books , an independent no n - profit press, @ http://punctumbooks.com/about/ If you’re reading the e - book, you can click on the image b e low to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciat ed and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Co n tr ibutions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’ t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our ad/venture is not possible wit h out your support. Vive la open - access. Fig. 1 . Hieronymous Bosch, Ship o f Fools (1490 - 1500) e for Anaximander F P REFATORY N OTE We do not step beyond anything, but are more like moles tunneling through wind, water, and ideas no less than through speech-acts, texts, anxiety, wonder, and dirt. —Graham Harman, “On Vicarious Causation” This book, or ‘discography,’ comprises the proceedings of two laboratory-ateliers on ‘Speculative Medievalisms’—a sort of mashup, or collision, or ‘drive-by’ flirtation between pre- modern studies and Speculative Realism (SR)—that took place at King’s College London (14 January 2011) and The Graduate Center, City University of New York (16 September 2011). The philosophy (if we can call it that) and thinking behind the two events is included as a ‘Précis’ in this volume, and here we mainly want to thank those who helped us to stage the symposia: the BABEL Working Group, Clare Lees, James Paz, the Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies (King’s College London), Glenn Burger, Steven Kruger, The Graduate Center, CUNY, the Doctoral Program in English (CUNY), and the Medieval Studies Certificate Program (CUNY). We also wish to thank our presenters for the creativity, liveliness, and provocations of their remarks and for their generosity in allowing us to share those in this volume. For those wishing to contact or geo-locate the Petropunk Collective, they are in the attic. Please be careful on the ladder. The Petropunk Collective Cincinnati, Ohio | Brooklyn, New York | Dublin, Ireland T ABLE OF C ONTENTS u London.01.14.2011 0 | Speculative Medievalisms: A Précis The Petropunk Collective 1 | Toy Stories: Vita Nuda Then and Now? Kathleen Biddick 2 | Cryptomnesia: Response to Kathleen Biddick Eileen Joy and Anna K ł osowska 3 | Divine Darkness Eugene Thacker 4 | Per Speculum in Aenigmate: Response to Eugene Thacker Nicola Masciandaro 5 | The Speculative Angel Anthony Paul Smith 6 | Lapidary Demons: Response to Anthony Paul Smith Ben Woodard i 1 15 27 39 45 65 7 | Abstraction and Value: The Medieval Origins of Financial Quantification Nick Srnicek 8 | Srnicek’s Risk: Response to Nick Srnicek Michael O’Rourke 9 | Neroplatonism Scott Wilson New York City.09.17.2011 Speculative Portfolio: Photographs Öykü Tekten 10 | Transmission by Sponge: Aristotle’s Poetics Anna K ł osowska 11 | Cosmic Eggs, or Events Before Anything J. Allan Mitchell 12 | Abusing Aristotle Kellie Robertson 13 | Lynx-Eyed Aristotle: Response to Kellie Robertson Drew Daniel 14 | Shakespeare’s Kitchen Archives Julian Yates 73 93 103 121 143 159 173 179 15 | A Recipe for Disaster: Practical Metaphysics: Response to Julian Yates Liza Blake 16 | Sublunary Jeffrey Jerome Cohen 17 | Casting Speculation: Response to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen Ben Woodard 18 | Aristotle with a Twist Graham Harman 19 | Three Notes, Three Questions: Response to Graham Harman Patricia Ticineto Clough 20 | Obiectum: Closing Remarks Nicola Masciandaro 201 207 219 227 255 261 Z Speculative Medievalisms A Précis ii S PECULATIVE M EDIEVALISMS : P RÉCIS So the medieval studies I am thrown into is a gravely levitating scholarly being, the lovely becoming light of weight in all senses: metaphoric, literal, and above all in the truest most palpable sense of the phenomenal poetic zones of indistinction between the two. This means, in tune with the Heraclitan oneness of the way up and the way down, not flight from but the very lightening of gravitas itself, the finding or falling into levitas through the triple gravities of the discipline: the weight of the medieval (texts, past), the weight of each other (society, institutions), and the weight of our- selves (body, present). Towards this end I offer no precepts or to-do list, only an indication of the wisdom and necessity of doing so, of practicing our highest pleasures, in unknowing of the division between poetry as knowledge and philosophy as joy, in opposition to the separation between thought and life that best ex- presses “the omnipresence of the economy,” and in harmony with the volitional imperative of Nietzsche’s “new gravity: the eternal recurrence of the same”: “Do you want this again and innumerable times again?” This Middle Ages? This medievalist? —Nicola Masciandaro 1 Speculative Medievalisms is a collaborative and interdiscipli- nary research project focusing on the theorization and practical development of the speculative dimensions of medi- eval studies. The term “speculative” is intended to resonate with the full range of its medieval and modern meanings. First, speculative echoes the broad array of specifically medie- val senses of speculatio as the essentially reflective and imaginative operations of the intellect. According to this con- 1 Nicola Masciandaro, “Grave Levitation: Being Scholarly,” The Whim [weblog], May 10, 2009: http://thewhim.blogspot.com/2009/ 05/grave-levitation-being-scholarly.html. T HE P ETROPUNK C OLLECTIVE iii ception, the world, books, and mind itself were all conceived as specula (mirrors) through which the hermeneutic gaze could gain access to what lies beyond them. As Giorgio Agamben explains, “To know is to bend over a mirror where the world is reflected, to descry images reflected from sphere to sphere: the medieval man was always before a mirror, both when he looked around himself and when he surrendered to his own imagination.” 2 This sense of speculative, which also gestures toward the humanistic principle of identity between world-knowledge and self-knowledge, becomes crucial for the development and institution of medieval studies as a disci- pline oriented to the past as both mirror and inscrutable site of origin. Like Narcissus, who at the fount falls in love with himself as another, modern Western culture gazes at the Mid- dle Ages as a self-image that impossibly blurs the distinction between identity and alterity. The speculative principle is ac- cordingly written into the title of the medieval studies journal, Speculum , published by the Medieval Academy since 1926. Speculum ’s first editor E. K. Rand explained the aim of the journal via this principle in the inaugural issue as follows: Speculum , this mirror to which we find it appropriate to give a Latin name, suggests the multitudinous mir- rors in which people of the Middle Ages liked to gaze at themselves and other folk—mirrors of history and doctrine and morals, mirrors of princes and lovers and fools. We intend no conscious follies, but we recognize satire, humor and the joy of life as part of our aim. Art and beauty and poetry are a portion of our medieval heritage. Our contribution to the knowledge of those times must be scholarly, first of all, but scholarship must be arrayed, so far as possible, in a pleasing form. 3 2 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Cul- ture , trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 81. 3 Quoted in Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and