what is "hot" in English today?

[thatjewishgirl]

Mercyhurst2010, do you think religion and literature has staying power?

[thestage]

It's not about escaping the human point of view. It's about acknowledging that an alternative point of view exists at all (which humanism, traditionally, has not done--hence post-humanism).

in the writing and reading of literature, there is no non-human point of view. no non-human concerns, no non-human anything. I know we no longer like literature in our study-of-literature, but some boundaries are simply present in ways that you cannot theorize out of existence. literature is an expression of the being and non-being of humanity, actualized through linguistic technique, which is itself the irreducible core of humanity. good luck. you can argue for non-human perspective; you can say language is "non-essential," that in fact nothing is essential in humanity, whatever you would like. that is a philosophical treatment of a philosophical topic. within literature, it is not approachable, because literature is not an objective or externalized world, it is a spectacularly artificial phenomenological construct. it does not even exist outside of the human inter and intra-personal space. to equate the literary object or experience with some idea of reality in general so that one may apply whatever one may like from the latter sphere to the former is, in fact, as spectacularly "humanist" an action as you could possibly imagine. you are "working" on a problem that is fundamentally non-existent.

Edited March 22, 2013 by thestage

[ComeBackZinc]

in the writing and reading of literature, there is no non-human point of view. no non-human concerns, no non-human anything. I know we no longer like literature in our study-of-literature, but some boundaries are simply present in ways that you cannot theorize out of existence. literature is an expression of the being and non-being of humanity, actualized through linguistic technique, which is itself the irreducible core of humanity. good luck. you can argue for non-human perspective; you can say language is "non-essential," that in fact nothing is essential in humanity, whatever you would like. that is a philosophical treatment of a philosophical topic. within literature, it is not approachable, because literature is not an objective or externalized world, it is a spectacularly artificial phenomenological construct. it does not even exist outside of the human inter and intra-personal space. to equate the literary object or experience with some idea of reality in general so that one may apply whatever one may like from the latter sphere to the former is, in fact, as spectacularly "humanist" an action as you could possibly imagine. you are "working" on a problem that is fundamentally non-existent.

[antihumanist]

So animal studies/posthumanists discuss how their efforts are impossible. What else is new? Philosophy does that all the time, and it leads us nowhere. That's why things like phenomenology were invented, to analyze and describe things in a way that can actually be useful... or maybe useful isn't the word, but at least not so circular and pointless.

 

In response to the idea of literature and mathematics: Didn't they already do this a long time ago? Like for example in Lewis Carroll?

Did you even see my post?  Posthumanism suggests that the more that we work on understanding how things, animals, and environments change us, the more we can effect real change on our own cognition, subjectivity, and life world.  That's the furthest thing from "impossible."

[thestage]

I wish I could find the existence of a magical discipline between English, where absolutely everything and anything must be "respected" because people need to find something to work on in order to get tenure, and current Philosophy, which out of hand dismisses anything that doesn't boil down to algebra, to the point where they question their own analytic methodologies by apply analytic methodologies to them, and where scholars will literally spend their entire careers dreaming up instances of X that will make some equation involving X false.

Edited March 22, 2013 by thestage

[planesandtrains]

in the writing and reading of literature, there is no non-human point of view. no non-human concerns, no non-human anything. I know we no longer like literature in our study-of-literature, but some boundaries are simply present in ways that you cannot theorize out of existence. literature is an expression of the being and non-being of humanity, actualized through linguistic technique, which is itself the irreducible core of humanity. good luck. you can argue for non-human perspective; you can say language is "non-essential," that in fact nothing is essential in humanity, whatever you would like. that is a philosophical treatment of a philosophical topic. within literature, it is not approachable, because literature is not an objective or externalized world, it is a spectacularly artificial phenomenological construct. it does not even exist outside of the human inter and intra-personal space. to equate the literary object or experience with some idea of reality in general so that one may apply whatever one may like from the latter sphere to the former is, in fact, as spectacularly "humanist" an action as you could possibly imagine. you are "working" on a problem that is fundamentally non-existent.

it's not called "non-humanism," it's called "post-humanism," and is generally acknowledged to be within the humanist project. if you think that sounds contradictory, that's a signal that you don't know what it is, and should maybe do some basic reading before getting all haughty about it. you're using "human" like it's an unimpeachable, natural category, when in fact the way it's defined and where its boundaries are placed is far from stable and is actually quite culturally and historically specific. posthumanism is about questioning those boundaries and thinking about how literature enacts that questioning. Edited March 22, 2013 by planesandtrains

[Fishbucket]

I wish I could find the existence of a magical discipline between English, where absolutely everything and anything must be "respected" because people need to find something to work on in order to get tenure, and current Philosophy, which out of hand dismisses anything that doesn't boil down to algebra, to the point where they question their own analytic methodologies by apply analytic methodologies to them, and where scholars will literally spend their entire careers dreaming up instances of X that will make some equation involving X false.

 

I propose we call this new field "Studies Studies", and have an anything-goes policy, and dump all the dreck out of English and into there.

[champagne]

it's not called "non-humanism," it's called "post-humanism," and is generally acknowledged to be within the humanist project. if you think that sounds contradictory, that's a signal that you don't know what it is, and should maybe do some basic reading before getting all haughty about it. you're using "human" like it's an unimpeachable, natural category, when in fact the way it's defined and where its boundaries are placed is far from stable and is actually quite culturally and historically specific. posthumanism is about questioning those boundaries and thinking about how literature enacts that questioning.

 

But how can we (allegedly) define and execute those boundaries if we've never palpably been outside of them? Sorry if I sound misinformed on post-humanism. It's because I am. 

[planesandtrains]

But how can we (allegedly) define and execute those boundaries if we've never palpably been outside of them? Sorry if I sound misinformed on post-humanism. It's because I am. 

the point is that that sort of absolute, non-socially-constructed boundary between "human" and "non-human" does not exist. how do you define "human"? our bodies are made of microrganisms. we use technology in a way that makes it an extension of our selves. our minds behave in ways other matter does. the more we learn about animals, the harder it becomes to nail down ways we are different. writers have noticed these things throughout history, and represented them in literature.

[antihumanist]

the point is that that sort of absolute, non-socially-constructed boundary between "human" and "non-human" does not exist. how do you define "human"? our bodies are made of microrganisms. we use technology in a way that makes it an extension of our selves. our minds behave in ways other matter does. the more we learn about animals, the harder it becomes to nail down ways we are different. writers have noticed these things throughout history, and represented them in literature.

This.

 

Also, it's not about firm and clear breaks between human and posthuman.  Rather, it's understanding the ways that mixtures between nature and culture, man and machine, human and nonhuman,  produce social conditions.  I'm basically cribbing A Manifesto for Cyborgs at this point though, so I'll just wait until fishbucket shows back up.

[Fishbucket]

For all of you who keep saying the rest of us are ill-informed, and don't know enough to criticize the field, etc, nothing you've said has convinced me that this is a field at all worth pursuing. It still ignores the basic fact that we earthlings, or whatever you want to call us (perhaps not "humans") are all we have as reference -- our thoughts, our feelings, our intellectual interests which lead us to create our fields that we study. There is no getting beyond that. Quibbling with the semantics of what you want to call "human" isn't a profound shift. We're always, in the end, just projecting our consciousness onto other things. That is what phenomenology will tell you.

 

The only thing that you prove by saying "we have microbes in our bodies" or "our brains are made out of matter that reacts like other matter" is the depth of everything we don't understand, and probably can never understand, about OURSELVES. Not the depths of what we CAN understand about what life is like for objects or animals or microbes or machines.

Edited March 22, 2013 by Fishbucket

[thestage]

it's not called "non-humanism," it's called "post-humanism," and is generally acknowledged to be within the humanist project. if you think that sounds contradictory, that's a signal that you don't know what it is, and should maybe do some basic reading before getting all haughty about it. you're using "human" like it's an unimpeachable, natural category, when in fact the way it's defined and where its boundaries are placed is far from stable and is actually quite culturally and historically specific. posthumanism is about questioning those boundaries and thinking about how literature enacts that questioning.

Which is another way of saying it is a specific permutation of general postmodernist theory. Which is interesting, because everyone working in X Studies is always quite fond of telling me that postmodernism is dead.

You are describing a paradigm in which "post" is the key concept, not "humanism"--and certainly not "post-humanism"--and yet delineating a field in which certain foundational concepts are immutable, taken as the structure of a field simply by the act of naming the field (see: Derrida on "the proper," etc.). Whether or not this is a "contradiction" is irrelevant, because the philosophical backbone here does not admit of the immutable logical invalidity of contradiction, or, in fact, of the episteme that would privilege any or all of those three words. That is the entire point of the philosophy. I need neither animal studies nor posthumanism-in-literature to tell me about culture and enthnocentrism, relativity and the phenomenological human condition, transcendental philosophy and the episteme, because those ideas predate, preconfigure, and outstrip the bubble of scholarship to which you are appealing. Naming a field neither closes it nor makes its rules or its existence something that must be acknowledged as intellectually valuable. We have this thing in English, where actual thinkers, artists, or scholars come to a certain topic as a matter of course, as something that they treat along the road of their philosophical or methodological development, as a means of funneling or actualizing specific patterns of their thought; and then others walk down this now paved road, they see the scenery along the roadside--and they stop. They construct spectacular edifices around this scenery, and then they no longer move. While poor old Diogenes wanders around the countryside, they live in castles. The path is lost in the haste to codify some field around a specific instance of its development, and then that field is cultivated by serfs who do not have knowledge of or interest in anything but the crops they are pulling out of the ground. So that instead of looking at "how literature enacts questioning" at all, or what is even meant by that question, by literature, language, questioning, etc., as concepts or as principles that organize our intellectual being; in short, instead of developing scholars capable of living up to literature, we invent some little nook wherein we get to talk about animals in Victorian literature or what could possibly be gay in Dante: a theology, and turn our discipline into category bingo, into the work of finding X in Y, where the instances of those variables are deified--where it is possible to talk of "what is hot in English"--but the structure of the act, of X and Y qua X and Y, are treated as grotesque monstrosities. All the while, there is no intellectual common ground through which to see a forest as anything more than a series of trees--let people do as they like! We invent problems in the name of politics. Which is, you'll note, preposterously backwards.

Edited March 22, 2013 by thestage

[Mercyhurst2010]

Mercyhurst2010, do you think religion and literature has staying power?

 

Great question, and one that I've asked myself hundreds of times. I think what keeps me interested in this discourse, though, is that one can pick up almost any novel from any historical period (particularly since the Enlightenment) and analyze, in very interesting ways, the overlap between religious and secular ideology, symbolism, politics, etc. Additionally, the rise of literary criticism as a discipline owes much to the emphasis on developing scholarly methodologies for the study of sacred texts, particularly in Reformation-era Protestantism. (Hermeneutics, for instance, is a word often attributed to biblical exegesis just as regularly as it is to phenomenological strains of philosophy.) Then there's the fact that so many of the world's religions have developed around narrative and text, and that religion and literature both invite interpretive and imaginative engagement with the world, in stark contrast to the reductive positivism prevalent within a largely technology-and-market driven society.

 

So, in many ways, I think one could easily make the case that religion and literature are like estranged cousins--unique to each other and yet sharing the similarities that emerge out of a common ancestry, so to speak--and that an interdisciplinary reintegration of the two would do much to invigorate both fields. While I have no pretension to imagine that the current work I am interested in right now will have any more staying power than any other movement in theory, I do think that the issues such a study takes up have the capacity to be replenished with renewed vigor with each new wave of theoretical innovation.

[thestage]

So, in many ways, I think one could easily make the case that religion and literature are like estranged cousins--unique to each other and yet sharing the similarities that emerge out of a common ancestry, so to speak

Could easily make? It's something like the first possible tenet of cultural anthropology, and emerges as one of the organizing principles of, say, post-Renaissance thought, which had to reconcile a veneration of the Greeks with a fundamentally Christian perspective (a duality that first exists, I suppose, in the Middle Ages).

[Fishbucket]

Thestage, that was such a beautiful metaphor. Seriously why aren't you writing books already?! Leave these serfs to post on their forums, and go crank out your novel!

 

It really does seem like a lot of these "new" movements are just rebranded, renamed, slightly dumbed-down versions of old theories and concepts.

Edited March 22, 2013 by Fishbucket

[antihumanist]

>There is no getting beyond that. Quibbling with the semantics of what you want to call "human" isn't a profound shift. We're always, in the end, just projecting our consciousness onto other things. That is what phenomenology will tell you.

 

Then where is the seat of consciousness?  It's not a theater of the mind - modern cognitive science suggests that it's only through the overall network that humanity/subjectivity/the mind even can exist in any recognizable form.  So, what "special neuron/section of the brain" houses you - there isn't one.  Additionally, the brain itself isn't the only factor - the embodied nature of the flesh and blood body combined with the tools we use (beginning with language as the first tool for cognitive scaffolding ending with smartphones) produce what we call the human.  However, historically, this is not at all what has been perceived as human and thus the "post" in the name.

 

And it's not simply projecting our consciousness onto other things - our consciousness is the things themselves.  To an extent posthuman theory might borrow from Plato, Heidegger, etc - but takes these things as natural and in fact positive (so it's an embrace of these things ).  So writing is no longer the debased form of speech that ruins your natural memory - it is an essential cognitive offloading that's part of a process we're always in the middle of and have been since we discovered language.

 

And like I've been saying - this is important because since our cognition is literally bound up in the things that we use and spaces we inhabit, this opens the door to designing new tools, spaces, etc that can effect actual change in both our subjective experiences and broader life world.

 

And in this post I'm simply cribbing Andy Clark.  Should I crib Agamben for my next post to explain it in another light?

[Taco Superior]

dammit--out of upvotes.

[Taco Superior]

Man, we really take up this question in a... let's say LIVELIER tone than the history people do.

 

Anyway, this question is directed mostly towards the "already attending" types because I assume you may have a better gauge: what seems to be the average duration of a period of "hotness" for a theoretical approach in English? Seems to me its about 12-15 years--seem right to you?

 

(obviously it then gets digested and reincorporated into new "hot" approaches etc, but I mean its time of really hot hotness)

Edited March 22, 2013 by Taco Superior

[thestage]

Leave these serfs to post on their forums, and go crank out your novel!

I never said I wasn't one of them. I don't know who or what I am, or when or if I ever will chance upon that kind of knowledge. I only say that to be one of them, if I am to be one, would be, for me, a source of endless consternation. We are not owed anything in this life, miracle though it may be that we were born in this seat of consciousness, able as we are to delineate our relationship to our robo-insect compatriots.

[Taco Superior]

our robo-insect compatriots.

 

You may be cantankerous, but you're not without lols.

[ComeBackZinc]

I think this is all very revealing, in a variety of ways. Two things above any other: if you're unhappy even with the existence of fields and subjects you don't like (or think you don't like) being influential or respected, please, don't go to grad school. I say that for your sake and for the sake of the people who will work with you. There's a lot of wiggle room in graduate education, but one of the no-bullshit, non-negotiable realities is that people and ideas you don't find that impressive are going to be elevated all the time. I think anybody who's been exposed to grad school, from all across the university and its many disciplines, can tell you that there's a lot of people who are perpetually miserable because they're angry about other people's prominence and success. There's a real "misunderstood genius" problem in the academy, of people who feel neglected because they don't respect the work that's getting published or rewarded. We all feel critical about other people's success sometimes. But for me, that was one of the first things I had to let go. Because it's never going to change, not even if/when you get tenured. If you can't stand the thought of these subjects becoming prominent, you should seriously reconsider if you're a good fit for grad school.

 

Second, you guys keep trying to find some argument by which it's responsible or useful to prejudge entire fields of inquiry while admitting you haven't read them. You can't, because that's juvenile and unfair. You're operating from a position of ignorance and should let it go.

[TripWillis]

I propose we call this new field "Studies Studies", and have an anything-goes policy, and dump all the dreck out of English and into there.

But would you two be okay on your own like that?

 

Just going to say it again -- the people who are "critiquing" posthumanism and animal studies in this thread have never read any of it and have no idea what it really is.

[planesandtrains]

For all of you who keep saying the rest of us are ill-informed, and don't know enough to criticize the field, etc, nothing you've said has convinced me that this is a field at all worth pursuing. It still ignores the basic fact that we earthlings, or whatever you want to call us (perhaps not "humans") are all we have as reference -- our thoughts, our feelings, our intellectual interests which lead us to create our fields that we study. There is no getting beyond that. Quibbling with the semantics of what you want to call "human" isn't a profound shift. We're always, in the end, just projecting our consciousness onto other things. That is what phenomenology will tell you.

 

The only thing that you prove by saying "we have microbes in our bodies" or "our brains are made out of matter that reacts like other matter" is the depth of everything we don't understand, and probably can never understand, about OURSELVES. Not the depths of what we CAN understand about what life is like for objects or animals or microbes or machines.

 

what's making you sound uninformed about posthumanism is that you keep using arguments against it that don't contradict anything in its premises, or anything about what others are telling you it is. you've decided that posthumanism means we are no longer concerned with humans. everyone keeps telling you that's not the case, but you continue to argue that posthumanism is dumb because it disregards the human. no, it just thinks about how "human" is continuous and not separable from things we have traditionally thought of as "non-human." it's not deep to say everything we know comes from our own perspective, that we perceive from our own bodies. i've read phenomenology from the '40s, too. posthumanism goes a step beyond that and asks what that means to perceive from a body, and doesn't take all those categories for granted. it says we can learn things about ourselves from things we can perceive about other matter.

 

you're also forgetting that as literary scholars, we have to draw our methods from the literature we study. writers have been challenging the boundaries of human, and thinking about how we can think about otherness, for ages. that's all posthumanism means. thestage, i'm not making an argument for this being a new mode of thought. if it were totally new and had no historical precedents, it wouldn't have much use for me as a literary scholar, since i study pretty old literature and have an historicist bent. but it's a new, useful way to name a mode of thought that it is possible to trace through history, so that we can have a conversation about it (and have a way of tracing it and talking to each other). you can trace it back to rome! it is especially interesting now ("hot") because new technology, environmental disaster, globalization, etc. have posed interesting new dilemmas about the boundaries of the human. we're always interested in the past for how it speaks to the present. that's why, for example, "intellectual property" is a hot field right now - it's not like that as a fraught category hasn't always existed, but it's especially interesting now because the internet has made the question especially pressing. so we name it and have conversations about it.

 

basically, both of ya are flinging invective against posthumanism without actually coming up with a critique that touches it. fishbucket, if you don't get why it's interesting, take another poster's suggestion and engage with it, instead of trying to get posters on an internet forum to define and defend it for you and taking a hostile position against it (and them) from the beginning. you can't learn that way.

[TripWillis]

Which is another way of saying it is a specific permutation of general postmodernist theory. Which is interesting, because everyone working in X Studies is always quite fond of telling me that postmodernism is dead.

You are describing a paradigm in which "post" is the key concept, not "humanism"--and certainly not "post-humanism"--and yet delineating a field in which certain foundational concepts are immutable, taken as the structure of a field simply by the act of naming the field (see: Derrida on "the proper," etc.). Whether or not this is a "contradiction" is irrelevant, because the philosophical backbone here does not admit of the immutable logical invalidity of contradiction, or, in fact, of the episteme that would privilege any or all of those three words. That is the entire point of the philosophy. I need neither animal studies nor posthumanism-in-literature to tell me about culture and enthnocentrism, relativity and the phenomenological human condition, transcendental philosophy and the episteme, because those ideas predate, preconfigure, and outstrip the bubble of scholarship to which you are appealing. Naming a field neither closes it nor makes its rules or its existence something that must be acknowledged as intellectually valuable. We have this thing in English, where actual thinkers, artists, or scholars come to a certain topic as a matter of course, as something that they treat along the road of their philosophical or methodological development, as a means of funneling or actualizing specific patterns of their thought; and then others walk down this now paved road, they see the scenery along the roadside--and they stop. They construct spectacular edifices around this scenery, and then they no longer move. While poor old Diogenes wanders around the countryside, they live in castles. The path is lost in the haste to codify some field around a specific instance of its development, and then that field is cultivated by serfs who do not have knowledge of or interest in anything but the crops they are pulling out of the ground. So that instead of looking at "how literature enacts questioning" at all, or what is even meant by that question, by literature, language, questioning, etc., as concepts or as principles that organize our intellectual being; in short, instead of developing scholars capable of living up to literature, we invent some little nook wherein we get to talk about animals in Victorian literature or what could possibly be gay in Dante: a theology, and turn our discipline into category bingo, into the work of finding X in Y, where the instances of those variables are deified--where it is possible to talk of "what is hot in English"--but the structure of the act, of X and Y qua X and Y, are treated as grotesque monstrosities. All the while, there is no intellectual common ground through which to see a forest as anything more than a series of trees--let people do as they like! We invent problems in the name of politics. Which is, you'll note, preposterously backwards.

 

1) "Which is another way of saying it is a specific permutation of general postmodernist theory. Which is interesting, because everyone working in X Studies is always quite fond of telling me that postmodernism is dead." -- Well, I will apparently be the first person working in x studies to tell you that all those "dead" theories are actually residual, a la basically every sub-field of inquiry since 1920 and WAY before that, too.

 

2) "We have this thing in English..." -- who is "we?" Presumably you and fishbucket? "...where actual thinkers, artists, or scholars come to a certain topic as a matter of course, as something that they treat along the road of their philosophical or methodological development, as a means of funneling or actualizing specific patterns of their thought." Straw men, everywhere! Again, who are these hypothetical people who take theory and enclose it as dogma? I don't know them. You'll have to introduce me. I think you'll find that with people who take an interest in x studies or theory y that the process you describe is no different. I am interested in the genealogies of certain themes and ideas that I tend to privilege in my research; I find this approach works better for me than a strictly period-based approach. I assure you though that the cart does not come before the horse (no animal studies pun intended).

 

3) "I need neither animal studies nor posthumanism-in-literature to tell me about culture and enthnocentrism, relativity and the phenomenological human condition, transcendental philosophy and the episteme, because those ideas predate, preconfigure, and outstrip the bubble of scholarship to which you are appealing" -- What do you know about animal studies/posthumanism besides what you've read off of a wikipedia page? Further, it's not that anyone needs these categories, nor takes them to be metonymic for an entire field of inquiry -- they're just convenient discursive taxonomies and ways of theorizing how one might begin to talk about or operate on these issues. Apparently, this is the most offensive thing in the world to you, that people who are mutually interested in a topic might congregate around a field of inquiry and (gasp!) have events and teach classes and god forbid publish! THE HORROR. ENGLISH IS RUINED.

 

4) "serfs" -- Revealing.

 

5) "in short, instead of developing scholars capable of living up to literature, we invent some little nook wherein we get to talk about animals in Victorian literature or what could possibly be gay in Dante: a theology, and turn our discipline into category bingo, into the work of finding X in Y, where the instances of those variables are deified" -- I think you're misunderstanding how theory works, and again, I have no idea what graduate level scholars you're talking about because I've never met them. Do you also have a problem with studying themes in literature?

 

Edit: Little known and unrelated fact -- Foucault anticipated and welcomed posthumanist discourse in 1966's The Order of Things. It's an interesting path of influence; it's not at all without precedent or rigor.

Edited March 22, 2013 by TripWillis

[ErnestPWorrell]

 

The hottest thing in English today is a new club called Sylvia's Daddy.