Increasingly, I find academic freedom to be the most vital, but also most elusive, element of academic (and para-academic) life. There is no academic freedom, per se; it is not even a *right*. What it is, instead, is a kind of practice that we have to work at (vigilantly) every day (for ourselves and for others), and at the same time, it is also a state of being, a sort of ontological ground without which practically nothing new could ever emerge: one must be free from worry, free from debt, free from hunger, free from predators, free from ill health, free from bullying censure, free from oppression, free from harm, free from grief, and so on, before one can even begin to feel safe enough to express oneself, or even to *work* at all as a thinker and researcher.
Eileen Joy; “The Connection of Desire to Reality Possesses Revolutionary Force: Going to Harvard”
Eileen Joy interview with The Funambulist - publishing, medieval studies, and much more
Eileen Joy interview with The Funambulist – publishing, medieval studies, and much more
This interview was conducted by Léopold Lambert in September 2013, and made available on Archipelago: The Podcast Platform of The Funambulist in January. I’ve just made time to listen. Very interesting insights on publishing, medieval studies and much more.
Every publishing house constructs an editorial line of its own. Sometimes it has to do with the topic, sometimes with a question, sometimes…
An object-oriented [...] approach to literary works would not (in its supposed de-centering of historical-materialist critique) necessarily be an apolitical or ethically vacuous project, as some might suppose, but is rather focused on (and maybe even affirms) a pluralism of being and worlds [...] Making things (such as a novel, or a poem) that are weird even more weird is, I will argue, an ethical act, invested in maximizing the sensual and other richness of the world's expressivity.
Eileen Joy, "Weird Reading" (Speculations IV, 2013)
We'll call this reading for the weird [which] will entail being open to incoherence as well, as one possible route toward a non-routinized un-disciplinarity that privileges unknowing over the mastery of knowledge. The idea here would be to unground texts from their conventional, human-centered contexts, just as we would unground ourselves, getting lost in order to flee what is (at times) the deadening status quo of literary-historical students at present, aiming for the carnivalesque over the accounting office.
Eileen Joy, "Weird Reading" (Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism IV, 2013)
1. Questions of temporality -- for my purposes I'm particularly interested in thinking about possible connections with work being done on queer temporalities (Dinshaw's "heterogeneous now," perhaps?).
2. A related question, maybe, would be how identity politics or identity-based forms of criticism fit into ooo (see, for example, Bogost on ooo and politics).
3. What does an object-oriented ethics look like? What about an ooo politics? This seems to have a lot to do with #2 (see Levi Bryant for a good set of starter questions, Bogost again on the claim that ooo abandons questions of human suffering, and Theoretical Living's immensely helpful breakdown of this debate from a sort-of-outsider perspective + some interesting connections to Levinas and Foucault).
4. ooo/speculative realism's interdisciplinary bent -- in addition to the obvious players (literary criticism, philosophy), there seem to be some very interesting/productive links to be made with architecture, ecology, feminist theory (esp. deep ecology and ecofeminism), posthumanism, etc.
5. The critique of Derrida muahahaha. I'm always looking for philosophical frameworks that will help me articulate why I find him so troubling (see Graham Harman on Derrida's anti-realism).
6. Developing a mode of object-oriented literary criticism. Harman has tackled this question explicitly here but I don't find the article very suggestive. Far more provocative, I think, is Eileen Joy's writing on speculative realist literary criticism, which Bryant has summarized and elaborated on here. This line of inquiry resonates very strongly with my own interests in Beckett's late prose (Leslie Hill's work has really shaped my thinking here). I'm also interested in exploring possible links between object-oriented lit crit and Heather Love's new stuff on surface reading & literary ethics. I haven't had time to delve very deeply (ha) into her stuff yet, but perhaps this might offer a way to tie all this back into the queer & affect theory I've been doing this semester.
Yesterday I went to a class taught by my best friend from 6th grade, Eileen Joy, who is now a Medievalist and academic reformist, having started her own digital press, Punctum, and, with other breakaway members of the profession, a working group called Babel that, from what I can tell from only a cursory acquaintance, promotes a wonderful wildness and also a new return to rationality in the ivory realms. Here is Punctum's capsule description:
Para-humanities?
Para = "prefix appearing in loanwords from Greek, most often attached to verbs and verbal derivatives,with the meanings “at or to one side of, beside, side by side” ( parabola; paragraph; parallel; paralysis ), “beyond, past, by”( paradox; paragogue ); by extension from these senses,this prefix came todesignate objects or activities auxiliary to or derivative of that denoted by the base word ( parody;paronomasia ), and hence abnormal or defective ( paranoia ), a sense now common in modern scientific coinages ( parageusia; paralexia ). As an English prefix, para- 1,may have any of these senses; it is also productivein the naming of occupational roles considered ancillary or subsidiary to roles requiring more training, or of a higher status, on such models as paramedical, and paraprofessional:, paralegal; paralibrarian; parapolice .
(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/para-)
I like it. I think I've been trained all along as a para-professional. But that's a whole other story.
The original title of this post, The Cruel Optimism of Eileen Joy, was wrong, though I like bringing together cruel, optimism, and joy in one title. So I changed it to Un-Cruel because that is indeed what she is. Very un-cruel, in a really interesting way.
Cruel Optimism is the name of the book by the guest speaker at yesterday's seminar, Lauren Berlant. She is a prof in the English Department at University of Chicago. I went to check her out. I wanted to know, above all, what the expression "cruel optimism" meant.
Lauren Berlant speaks fast. She has a breadth of knowledge and a speed of speech and a sparkling verbal presentation that reminded me of Avital Ronnell - though her work is less dependent on the kind of metaphorical flourishes that stitch together Ronnell's books, like The Telephone Book, a book of sparkling and eclectic theoretical poetry.
So I went because I was curious, also because I was a bit skeptical. Because lately I have been trying to train myself into a basic optimistic outlook, I felt like I had to figure out how optimism could be cruel. I know pessimism can be cruel. My own, which has included liberal doses of cynicism, irony, cultural reference and blithe and jokey assumption of living in end-times, has got me nothing but friends. (Which is not nothing, come to think of it.)
My pessimism, when it has dominated me, has mostly turned out to be a self-fulfilling attitude. No more needs to be said on that subject.
The academy, in its pure ivory-towered incarnations, has sometimes taken the pessimism of urban sophistication and woven the most sophisticated theory from it. Lauren Berlant is no exception, though her sophistication is laced with the most wonderful understanding, also self-understanding. I understood why she is hot. Right now, she is hot as professors can be hot, in demand, requested and rampantly publishing.
During the lecture, I had been placed right next to her, which felt wrong -- so I went and sat in a more comfortably invisible place in a corner. Berlant turned to me and said, what I've got cooties? And I said, this is where I belong.
I felt, I'm not part of the class and the students, really smart young grown-ups from Northwestern and the U. of Chicago and elsewhere, who were so visibly and avidly in the process of professionalization. Not para-professionalization. They are taking up the modes of professorial composure. (Berlant says her next book is on the distribution of composure, something like that, which is FASCINATING to me. I think about that a lot, how the tamped-down person holds the power. The book The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene is a great book that also talks about withholding as a mode of power.)
In any case, Eileen said, there's no in or out of the class here, so I went reluctantly back to the table next to Berlant, who was close enough to kiss. I thought about kissing her, for some reason, because her presentation is somehow flirtatious, her theory flirtatious, the whole focus of the class flirtatious -- sex was the continual subject, especially in its queer and trans literal and metaphorical expressions.
When I was in graduate school, this sex-focus was just beginning. I had forgotten the aggressively professional way in which sex has entered academic discourse in the humanities. You have to really be there to get the strangeness of people speaking soberly about x, y or z (examples withheld) with the exact same gravity with which diction and metre, beauty and love were once -- and are still -- spoken about. You have to be there. It's something that description cannot do justice to. And to watch students working at acquiring the ability to interpellate x or y into literary analysis, to see the awkwardness around it as they are in the process of acquiring it, is even more... what? painful, funny, fascinating, cruel?
So what is cruel optimism? From what I understand - and this is inevitably not the whole picture - it's about that never-ending hope you put in a person, an institution, an object or what-have-you. It's a love that doesn't stop when it is unreciprocated. It's desire, but even beyond the Lacanian preoccupation with lost objects, which has a tragic flair, it's desire that's stupid because it refuses to un-attach in spite of the risks of loss. It's comic, somewhat, in its stupidity.
Underneath it all is this phrase: Damnit, I love you in spite of the fact that you will probably reject me.
That is underneath it all, although the basic dynamic of cruel optimism can be applied to politics and to everything else supposedly valuable in this human life.
Throughout there is that "self"-excoriation that has become normal in the academy - "we" are collectively dumb, following desires for normativity in professional achievement (no need to point out the ironies here), in love, in everything. The only exceptions-that-are-not-really-exceptions (as the spiel goes) is that those who understand and can articulate our love-stupidness in sparkling ways are able to have a bit of control through foresight over the losses that will inevitably come our way.
As I write this, my 11-year-old daughter is on the computer watching Beyonce roll around seductively on the Superbowl arena floor and I can't help but wonder if I would wish it upon her, this knowledge of optimism's cruelty. She is at a borderline, age-wise, and her optimism, when she displays it, is precious to me. It's precious to me even if her goal in life turns out to be rolling around seductively in front of millions of people. At the same time, I know she will be hurt, she will be be disappointed, she will not be Beyonce. There is cruelty in the fact that she is visibly and unstoppably barreling towards these disappointments.
What I am trying to get at here is that I love optimism, even if it is cruel. I feel I have to, in order to get by. And whereas "theory" often gestures towards a utopia of "some other way(s)" and "new and un-thought-of-ways-of-being," I am committed to living in this life and loving the stupidness of love.
I only came to this through having a child.
Watching my daughter I also remember my year spent with Eileen in Arlington, Virginia when we were 11 and my father was on sabbatical from Columbia University. It was a magical year for me and the suburbs were magical after a childhood in Manhattan with no outside in which to walk around freely. Eileen and I started a secret club called the "Make-You-Smile-Department" that distributed candy to neighborhood kids anonymously. We'd get up early and creep around giving out candy and notes with utter pleasure in our secret mission to spread this particular form of kid-centric happiness.
We were optimistic, it's true, and it's not hard for me to see those avid little creatures that we were in our para-professorial grown-up selves today.
