That Stage of Term

Hey -

I'm evolving a long and thoughtful post about queerness in children's literature, and about the queer child (as) reader, but I don't know when I'm going to get to write it up. On the back burner, also: to follow the links in, and think about the mechanics/techniques of blogging put forward in, this post on Going Somewhere?

I'm busy and tired, and sick of being in That Stage of Term where I can barely get done what I need to do and then go into serious down-time in order to reproduce my labour: in the last week I have watched two-and-a-half seasons of Scrubs, and on Friday night I had to stop knitting because I'd gone beyond my hands' capacity to continue. I mean, I like knitting - and I love Scrubs - but I would like to be starting to plan next semester's teaching, and reading around for this essay on queer intergenerational sexuality in Derrida's The Post Card, and writing fiction, and blogging, and keeping in touch with friends, and Not just marking, and reading for classes, and photocopying handouts and formulating basic questions for seminars, and then resting. Maybe I'll catch up with myself soon, and get some spare energy which doesn't just get cycled back into work.

In the last week, I have...

Flown to San Francisco, given a paper at a workshop on ancient and modern imperialisms at Stanford, asked questions about many interesting and exciting papers at said workshop*, eaten many delicious meals including J's birthday dinner (tasting menu at Junnoon) and a lunch with my brother who happened to be in San Francisco (delicious veggie splendour at Green's), flown back from San Francisco, crawled onto campus to photocopy bundles of stuff for today's teaching, taught a two-hour seminar on ideology and Frankenstein and a one-hour seminar comparing Chapman's translation of the Odyssey to the opening of Walcott's stage version of the Odyssey, eaten some sushi, read my personal email, opened my work email (and despaired and closed it again without reading anything), and caught up on some blogs. A fine sense of priorities, I think.

And so hence I give you this link,

Conceptual Terrorists Encase Sears Tower In Jell-O

via gaylourdes: when the Onion is good, it's really good. I don't even have any commentary on it, it's so good.

Okay, now I have twenty-five minutes before my next class (another two-hour seminar on ideology and Frankenstein, followed at 4:10 by a research paper on Catullus and the gift which sounds awesome, so I hope I can stay awake for it - of course it will only be 8am in California, but then by that logic I did start teaching at 1am), so I had better go and... do something. Answer all that email, I suppose.


*But I think the clear winner was Alastair Blanshard, with a paper on Arcadian imagery in Australian art, which was probably the most thought-provoking paper at the workshop and also the most entertaining and energizing. Which is cheating.

My life is so glamorous

You know that Pet Shop Boys song, Being Boring, that ends:

I never dreamed that I would get to be
The creature that I always meant to be?

Well, tonight I am going to dinner with (in alphabetical order) Charles Butler, Diana Wynne Jones, and Jenny Pausacker.*

I am simultaneously dumbstruck with joy at the glamorosity of my own life and dumbstruck with awe at being in such august company.**

Hmm. I don't know how successful I will be as a conversationalist.

*And I even get to go home with one of them at the end of the night! (I don't get to pick which one, though.)

**okay, particularly about Diana Wynne Jones, who (a) I don't know as well as the other two and (b) is the only one I actually read as a child.

Agamben emergency

I'm giving a paper at a workshop on 'Ancient and Modern Imperialisms' in a couple of weeks, called 'Terminal Man: Agamben's Homo Sacer and the end of the Aeneid'. It's an investigation of the links between Agamben's argument in Homo Sacer about sovereignty and biopolitics (Agamben argues that the sphere of politics 'captures' biopolitical bodies - bodies exposed to sovereign violence)and an incredibly strange, ambiguous, and dense scene at the end of the Aeneid which seems to assemble all the elements of Agamben's argument: Aeneas, a refugee from Troy who is fated to found Rome in Italy,* has now arrived in Italy and is at war with the indigenous inhabitants (the Latins). At the very end of the poem, Aeneas is in single combat with a Latin prince, Turnus. Turnus throws a boundary stone at him - moving a boundary stone is one of the things that makes you a homo sacer in Roman law -and Aeneas stabs him to death. The verb Vergil uses for 'stab' at this point is the same verb used for the foundation of a city.** So the end of the Aeneid foregrounds a relationship between city-foundation and a body exposed to sovereign violence through sacratio. Which is all very nice and Agambanien, and what I wanted to do next was take this forward via Agamben's consideration of life and death as a political boundary, together with Virilio's fantasy of 'terminal man' (a fully technicized human body in a new political space inaugurated by real-time communications technology: 'the witness's own body becomes the last urban frontier', says Virilio).

But - apart from the fact that Vergil very annoyingly put a big sign on Turnus's head at the end of the Aeneid saying NOT A HOMO SACER, KTHXBAI and thus buggers up my whole argument - it's occurring to me that I'm not entirely sure I know what Agamben's argument about life and death is at the very end of Homo Sacer. And it's important, because what's emerging for me from this rereading of the end of the Aeneid is a whole argument from Vergil about dead people as political agents. So... can any of you guys help me with this? Or pass this post on to someone who'd be interested in talking about it over the next couple of weeks?

Towards the end of Homo Sacer, Agamben talks about the 'overcomatose person', and points out that the current state of life-support technology and transplant techniques means that the decision on life and death can no longer be taken by the 'ancient criteria' (the stopping of the heartbeat and the cessation of breathing), so that now there is a 'no-man's-land' between life and death. He writes (p.164) that 'life and death are not properly scientific concepts but rather political concepts, which as such acquire a political meaning precisely only through a decision. The "frightful and incessantly deferred borders" [between life and death]... are moving borders because they are biopolitical borders'. And later, on p.187, he writes:

'In its extreme form, the biopolitical body of the West (this last incarnation of homo sacer) appears as a threshold of absolute indistinction between law and fact, juridical rule and biological life. In the person of the Fuhrer, bare life passes immediately into law, just as in the person of the camp inhabitant (or the neomort) law becomes indistinguishable from biological life.'

This is the bit that I get, or nearly get: that the problem of power, of sovereignty, is that it produces subjects/citizens/people as bare life (zoe), as purely biopolitical: there isn't a 'ground' into which bios or political life is inscribed, and which could therefore resist inscription, inscribe differently, etc. Life itself is what is captured in the sphere of the political. Yes? Is that right? But then... I guess my question is so what? How does the life/death border, as the border of the political, relate to, say, material borders, material spaces on the ground? How does this insight - that the life/death border is the site of the foundation of the political, if I'm right - transform the way we do (or think about) politics?

I thought this paper was going to be so easy, that I'd done all the thinking for it already. And I guess it's nice to find out that it's not, to be challenged to come to a new understanding of the material, but on the other hand I really have quite a lot of other stuff to do this week...

*remember? Eric Bana gives him the Sword of Troy? (JUST KIDDING)

**and, actually, the composition of a poem.

Masculinity conference

Damn. Looks like I've missed the deadline on this one, but doesn't this look interesting? Especially the second question in the title, which isn't asked as often as the first one (and the first one isn't asked as often as it should be, either).

What is Masculinity? How Useful is it as a Historical Category? conference at Birkbeck next May. I've just asked the organizer if he's accepting late proposals - I might use this as a trigger to write something about Iphis, the transman (but is he a transman?) in Ovid's Metamorphoses, who I've been vaguely meaning to think about for a while.

Week 0

Still not a substantial post from me, I'm afraid. It's Week 0 (Fresher's week) and the last few days have been solidly busy, but things are starting to come together: I actually have students on the MA in Reception and Critical Theory, and I'm very much looking forward to starting the real work of teaching after two years of planning and form-filling and determining 'learning outcomes' and 'unit aims'. (Please do spread that link around to potential students, by the way - we're looking to increase our number of MA students.)

Things I've been thinking about lately include a theory of reading/reception based on the idea of 'pellets' or 'rewards'. What intrigues me about, eg, deconstruction and reader-response theory is that you can read any text as meaning anything, in theory: so how, in practice, do readers make meanings out of texts? And at the moment I think one of the ways is that readers get rewarded by the text for certain interpretations: it's like video games unlocking levels or giving you 'easter eggs' if you figure out how to do a secret task. Like if you think the main romance in Singin' In The Rain is the Don Lockwood/Cathy Selden one, you get a treat at the end of the movie, you get to see your pairing kissing on a hill; if you think the main romance is Don Lockwood/Cosmo Brown, you don't get a treat. Which is, of course, where fanfiction comes in: we give ourselves treats for our own readings! We don't rely on The Man Author to do it for us! We own the means of production of treats!

I've also just started reading 1000 Plateaux, or at least reading bits of it that I hadn't read before: I always forget that Deleuze & Guattari are actually really good, because they got taken up mainly within a particular, very macho, style of academic discourse which annoys me. But I'm reading about nomadology and the war-machine and smooth and striated space, and thinking that really this needs to get integrated into Now and Rome immediately.

It's Wednesday!

And the system is already broken, today, because of... stuff I don't even have time to blog about.

But the only thing that I really have to tell you is that I have a new haircut and it is excellent. Photos will perhaps come, once I've dyed it (off to do a skin test with the bleach before a fannish friend arrives for our semi-regular vegan-food-and-slash date...)