Towards an Erotics of Reception

So for a long time me and my esteemed colleague at the University of Toronto, Anna Wilson, have been putting together a call for papers for a conference next July, which is going to be about loving texts.

From my point of view, the conference comes partly out of my interest in the relationship between sex and language. They're intimately related, of course, in that language can be highly eroticized, and in that our language has some effect on (if it doesn't determine) the way we think about and experience our bodies and our sexualities. But at the same time sex and language can be understood to be completely different: language as cerebral, virtual, unreal, representative, sex as bodily, real, true, authentic, nonrepresentational: sex as an 'outside' to language and power, or sex as the site where we are most intimately engaged with language and power. That's something that's gone on intriguing me for more than a decade, and which partly explains my interest in writing about sex. (I'm also interested, as several years of my students have been mildly-to-profoundly shocked to discover, in sex as a metaphor for writing, as in Calvin Thomas's wonderful essay Must Desire Be Taken Literally? on Helene Cixous, writing, and anal sex.)

I'm also someone who loves books, writing, language, someone who writes fanfiction, someone who gets crushes on books and authors and characters, and someone who teaches literature: so I'm also interested in the way that whole messy range of responses to texts and writings gets cut up and organized institutionally. Me, I feel like writing within a fictional universe and writing an analytic essay about a book are both ways of loving texts, but I know lots of people think that analysis and love are opposed (cf this really beautiful poem by U A Fanthorpe), and that intrigues me too, not only for what it says about literature but for what it says about love.

So I'm really excited to be organizing this conference: not only will I get a chance to talk for a whole day to other people from around the world who are interested in love and desire as modes of making textual connections, but it's going to be the basis for an application for a Research Network grant, so hopefully there will be a whole series of research events on this theme. In the short term, though, I'm particularly delighted that Carolyn Dinshaw (whose book I blogged about here) has agreed to be our keynote speaker. I'm excited to meet her, and to start what I hope will be an ongoing conversation with her and with everyone else who participates!

Here's the Call for Papers. There'll be an official web page for the conference at the University of Bristol website soon, and I'll let you have that link as soon as I can, but in the meantime, please pass on the news to anyone who might be interested, and feel free to link to this post!


DESIRING THE TEXT, TOUCHING THE PAST: TOWARDS AN EROTICS OF RECEPTION

A one-day conference co-organized by

The Bristol Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition & the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto

University of Bristol, 10 July 2010

Keynote Speaker: Professor Carolyn Dinshaw, NYU

CALL FOR PAPERS

In reading Cicero's letters I felt charmed and offended in equal measure. Indeed, beside myself, in a fit of anger I wrote to him as if he were a friend and contemporary of mine, forgetting, as it were, the gap of time, with a familiarity appropriate to my intimate acquaintance with his thought; and I pointed out those things he had written that had offended me. (Petrarch, Rerum Familiarum Liber I.1.42)

Love, desire, fannish obsession and emotional identification as modes of engaging with texts, characters and authors are often framed as illegitimate and transgressive: excessive, subjective, lacking in scholarly rigour. Yet such modes of relating to texts and pasts persist, across widely different historical periods and cultural contexts. Many classical and medieval authors recount embodied and highly emotional encounters with religious, fictional or historical characters, while modern and postmodern practices of reception and reading - from high art to the subcultural practices of media fandom - are characterized by desire in all its ambivalent complexity. Theories of readership and reception, however, sometimes seem unable to move beyond an antagonistic model: cultural studies sees resistant audiences struggling to gain control of or to overwrite an ideologically loaded text, while literary models of reception have young poets fighting to assert their poetic autonomy vis-a-vis the paternal authority of their literary ancestors.

This conference aims, by contrast, to begin to elaborate a theory of the erotics of reception. It will bring together scholars working in and across various disciplines to share research into reading, writing and viewing practices characterized by love, identification, and desire: we hope that it will lead to the establishment of an international research network and the formulation of some long-term research projects. In order to facilitate discussion at the conference, we will ask participants to circulate full papers (around 5,000 words) in May 2010.

We now invite abstracts of 300 words, to be submitted by email by 30 November 2009. Abstracts will be assessed on the basis of their theoretical and interdisciplinary interest. We particularly welcome contributions from scholars working on literary, visual and performance texts in the fields of: history, reception studies, mediaeval studies, fan studies, cultural studies, theology, and literary/critical theory.

Some ideas which might be addressed include, but are not limited to:

* Writing oneself into the text: self-insertion and empathetic identification
* Historical desire: does the historian desire the past?
* Hermeneutics and erotics
* Pleasures of the text, pleasures of the body: (how) are embodied responses to the text gendered?
* Anachronistic reading: does desire disturb chronology?
* Erotics and/or eristics: love-hate relationships with texts

This conference is part of the 'Thinking Reciprocity' series and will follow directly from the conference 'Reception and the Gift of Beauty' (Bristol, 8-9 July 2010). Reduced fees will be offered to people attending both conferences.
If you have any queries, or to submit an abstract, please contact one of the conference organizers:

Dr Ika Willis (Ika.Willis@bristol.ac.uk)
Anna Wilson (anna.wilson@utoronto.ca)

No I Am Not On Facebook

Can someone who is on Facebook check this out? I have never joined Facebook, and I know full well there isn't anyone else called Ika Willis, but on the other hand I am clearly not important enough for anyone to join Facebook pretending to be me, so I am flummoxed. (And secretly hoping that I am important enough to have someone impersonating me, obviously.) But presumably Facebook has just harvested my name from, I don't know, staff web pages or Google blogs or something, and set this up without telling me? Or maybe they did tell me and I ignored them, because I ignore all Facebook-related email. Whatever, I am mildly irritated, because I want not only not to be on Facebook but actively to be a person without a Facebook page.)

Letter to WisCon

You know, one thing I feel kind of embarrassed about is that I don't actually know what WisCon is. 'Some kind of awesome fat-positive feminist trans-friendly queer anti-racist SF convention' is how I think of it in my head, although I'm also aware that it doesn't live up to that tag. Anyway.

But this letter! This letter is lovely.

Talking about issues of race and access makes everyone uncomfortable. There’s a particular expression of that discomfort in the sf community, where we have the hope that race is one of the differences between humans that will cease to matter in our brave new future, and that the best way to hasten that future is to act as though we don’t ‘see’ race [see note]. But, as Chip Delany has said, someone who can’t see something that threatens his life is not going to be his best ally...

This high level of discomfort squashes dialogue and leaves people feeling that race is still an issue, but it’s somehow shameful to even speak about it. As feminists we’ve had a parallel experience in trying to raise awareness and organize around issues of feminism. Feminism has developed a time-tested way of dealing with such silencing, which is to first take a little private time and discuss the issues amongst ourselves, without the need for constantly allaying the dominant group’s anxiety at every step.

Anyway. This is mostly for my own reference, so I can model my own teaching and talking practice on this kind of sweet, straightforward tone, wherever possible. (Not that I am going to give up ranting, don't worry--)

And yeah! I'm in Melbourne. I've been to two conferences in July, I haven't blogged about either of them, or about Australia, at all. I feel a bit hampered by the fact that I brought the wrong camera lead so I can't upload photos--

there were people of colour in the past, too!

Thinking about Benjamin and writing the introduction to Now & Rome, which currently closes with the quote from Carolyn Dinshaw about the past as a site of identification and cultural connection, with unpredictable but powerful effects on the future, has brought something into focus for me which is really interesting. (I mean, really interesting to me, not really interesting as a kind of cutting-edge expansion of thinking about race, or anything.) Anyway, this post has been brewing for a while, but I notice it's International Blog Against Racism Week this week, so it seemed like a good time to post it.

So over the last few years I've noticed some things about talking/thinking about race and racism in the UK, and particularly in relation to teaching post-colonial theory and literature. I should probably contextualize by saying that post-colonialism is not the focus of my teaching, but something that gets touched on in most of the units I teach: I specialize in reception/appropriation, and I work mainly with Latin and English literature, so the history of imperialism and resistance is a crucial part of the way I think about literature and our relationships to it as authors and readers. For example, in the Critical Issues unit I teach to first-year English students, we have a week or two on Jane Eyre, talking about how the politics and metaphorics of imperial racism actually underpin the plot and the emotional drive of the narrative, even though this is not ostensibly a novel 'about' race and indeed, arguably, has no non-white characters. Then I teach a unit on Contemporary Literature, in which we read Derek Walcott's Omeros and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, and I also teach Omeros in my unit on the Legacy of Classical Literature.

So one of the things I've noticed in both my teaching and my observation of the culture in the UK more widely is a tendency in white British people to behave as if accusations of racism were more serious than, well, racist behaviour. So it's okay for white people to say pretty much anything we like about race and/or people of other ethnicities: we might, like Martin Amis, be 'experimenting with the limits of permissible thought' when we say we think perhaps all British Muslims should be rounded up; or we might, like Sacha Baron-Cohen, be doing edgy comedy by perpetuating racism (in order to laugh at it); or we might be performing any number of intelligent, thoughtful, experimental, unserious, free speech acts. But when someone calls a white person (or their behaviour, or the things they say/write) racist, that's a terrible, and terribly serious, accusation, and we have to jump through an impossible series of hoops to prove that they really are racist before we say such a terrible thing.

And there's such a huge disconnect here - I don't want to call it a failure of empathy, because I don't really think that's what's going on, and because of the excellent work by people like, I think, Sara Ahmed* on empathy as disabling critical responses to racism by white students ('I cried when I read Beloved and that means I am totally able to understand the life experience of poor black women in the UK, and if they say I can't they're wrong!'). But it's a huge double standard, and its invisibility to my students (and to me, before I struggled to figure out what was going on) is extraordinary.

One of the ways I notice this is in a persistent motif in student essays on Jane Eyre, which is that we can't, mustn't, or shouldn't say that the book or the author 'is racist', because Bronte lived in 'the past', where 'they didn't know' that it was bad to be racist. So again, it's much more important to be fair to Charlotte Bronte than it is to engage with the ways in which her text constructs race and power, and vice versa (the ways in which race and power construct Jane Eyre, beyond or outside Bronte's ability to control the language she uses). Part of this is about the way the figure of 'the author' still persists in our thinking about texts (who cares whether Bronte was racist, as a person, or not? She's been dead like a hundred years!), and I think also that perhaps students are trained at school to think that 'critical judgement' is not about analysis but about evaluation (this is a Great Book, this is Populist Trash). But part of it is straightforward racism, of a kind that's so entrenched in (my) white consciousness that it's taken me a long time to see how simple it really is:

There were people of colour in the past too. To say that a book is 'not racist' because it was written in the past and 'they didn't know any better' is to do history from the point of view of the oppressor to a really startling degree. Because, you know, who didn't know any better? White people who dehumanized black people, and profited from the dehumanization. The African slaves working on the sugar plantation which provides the basis for Jane's financial independence and therefore her successful/model marriage? They knew better.

Getting people to think of racism solely as a diagnostic tool for ranking the goodness, rightness, and therefore authority/prestige, of white people, rather than as a system of violent oppression of people of colour: that must count as one of the biggest victories for the anti-civil-rights backlash.

Another thing that's interesting is the way my students have learned somewhere that racism is always in the past, so that one of them wrote of Derek Walcott's Omeros that at first the critical response was a straightforwardly racist one, that the poem was bad and didn't count as an epic, but later, when we had all made a bit more progress towards equality, everyone realized that it was a great poem and totally did count as an epic. Now this is just simply not true: Omeros came out in 1990, and Walcott won the Nobel in 1992; and US/UKian public/critical culture has not really become noticeably less racist since 1990. I think the student was referring to an essay in a special edition of South Atlantic Quarterly - in 1997, incidentally - about the politics of calling Omeros an 'epic', and whether 'epic' is essentially a European genre or whether that in itself is a racist appropriation of a genre shared by, say, Yoruba narrative/mythological poetry. But that essay was very clear that this debate is ongoing - two simultaneous positions - while this student had obviously been under very great cultural pressure - great enough to mean they had not been able to hear what I had said about Omeros, or read what David Farrell Krell had written - to translate this into a diachronic narrative: there was racism, and now there is colour-blind appreciation of great poetry.

And so much of my teaching - because it's about cultural change and appropriation and time and reading - seems to engage with students right at the intersection of these two cultural pressures: to translate and flatten currents of thinking and power and reading into a simple diachronic narrative of progress ('we used to be racist but we're all right now'), and to think of racism as a bad character trait. (I actually saw an anti-racist white friend on the internet describe racism in precisely those words recently.)

I think there's another move that needs to be made here, about quite what that intersection does to history: I think it whitens it, along the lines of Benjamin's vision of history as a long procession of the victors. So that the lines of transmission of history, of the past, are themselves white, and so that the transformative power of the past, and in particular the possibility for identification with people of colour across time, is denied. I need to think about this more, perhaps.

One thing I do have to say before I finish is that I was helped so much in my thinking here by a post I can't now find again, very annoyingly - if anyone knows what I'm referring to, could you link me? It was about how one of the key differences between privileged and unprivileged positions is that people in privileged positions aren't used to being told they're wrong. So people of colour live in cultures which tell them all the time, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, that the way they understand the world is wrong, but white people (qua white people - obviously gender, ability/disability, sexuality, etc have huge impacts on the way we experience privilege/unprivilege) have a constant little flow of reassuring messages that whiteness is normal, attractive, empowering, and, crucially, not-to-be-remarked-on. So it feels, maybe, to a white person, and particularly to a white person who's used to being told they're intelligent, perceptive, and sensitive (like most of the students I teach), really bad to be called a racist, because we all 'know' that racists are the opposite: ignorant, wilfully blind to reality, and insensitive. So that's where some of that giant disconnect that I talked about above comes from, I think.

*Sarah Ahmed, 'The Politics of Bad Feeling', Australasian Journal of Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 1 (2005): 72-85.

going away

Travelling, then holiday, then Violence conference. Normal service will be resumed around 27 July, from MELBOURNE!!!

Back in Bristol 29 August.

violence 2

so now I am reading Agamben's State of Exception, and where he writes

Obviously, it is not a question here of a transitional phase that never achieves its end, nor of a process of infinite deconstruction that, in maintaining the law in a spectral life, can no longer get to the bottom of it. The decisive point here is that the law - no longer practiced, but studied - is not justice, but only the gate that leads to it. What opens a passage towards justice is not the erasure of law, but its deactivation and inactivity - that is, another use of the law

I have written in the margin YES YES - LUCAN.

Given that what I am doing is making notes for my paper on violence and law in Lucan, I really wish I had the slightest idea what I'd been thinking when I wrote that --

violence

I'm starting work on the paper I'm giving in Brisbane on 23 July (yes, yes, about time too) and am rereading Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence', the 1921 essay where he makes a distinction between 'lawmaking violence' and 'law-preserving violence'. (I think he is actually still friends with Schmitt at this point,* and there's a strong similarity between some of the ideas here and some of the ideas in The Nomos of the Earth.) Anyway, Benjamin is talking about how 'a totally nonviolent resolution of conflicts can never lead to a legal contract' (because any legal contract 'confers on both parties the right to take recourse to violence in some form against the other, should he break the contract'), and he goes on to say:

When the consciousness of the latent presence of violence in a legal institution disappears, the institution falls into decay. In our time, parliaments provide an example of this. They offer the familiar, woeful spectacle because they have not remained conscious of the revolutionary forces to which they owe their existence.

I have no idea whether I agree with that or not.

(All quotes from Benjamin, 'Critique of Violence' [1921], in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz [New York: Schocken, 1978], pp.277-300).

(I should actually be blogging about this conference, which I went to last weekend and which was marvellous, but in the countdown to setting off to Oz next Wednesday - by which time I have to have written the Introduction to Now and Rome, checked all the Latin in the manuscript, sent it off to beta-readers, and written the Brisbane paper, not to mention dyeing my hair and going to the spa with my best friend H - things are getting rather squeezed.)

*I looked this up on Google and found this extract from an essay by Horst Bredekamp in Critical Inquiry 25:2 (1999), which has some of the details about Benjamin's relationship with Schmitt, including the letter Benjamin sent Schmitt together with a copy of the Trauerspiel (The Origin of the German Mourning Play). Wikipedia (yes, I know, shush) says that, according to Agamben (States of Exception, pp.52-55),

Schmitt's conceptualization of the "state of exception" as belonging to the core-concept of sovereignty was a response to Walter Benjamin's concept of a "pure" or "revolutionary" violence [in 'Critique of Violence'], which didn't enter into any relationship whatsoever with right.