Steve Mentz – Page 35

Globalization, Utopia, and the Future

February 5, 2013 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Ortelius’s map of Utopia (via theopenutopia.org)

What if we build it and leave the door open? Will everybody come inside?

That’s the gambit of Stephen Duncombe’s new site, The Open Utopia, and somewhat also a motto for these first few weeks of my current grad class. Last week’s question was, what does Utopia have to do with globalization? The class is built around three imaginary places — Utopia, Faerie Land, and Paradise — and we aim to mash these literary archetypes up against the massive surge of information, maps, first-hand accounts, misrepresentations, propaganda, and assorted other fictions that maritime voyages brough back to Europe in the early modern period. Reading assorted bits from Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1598-1600) alongside More, Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, and others helps recall that geography always appears alongside and entangled with fantasy.

Two quick thoughts this week:

1. Globalization needs utopia, especially in our catastrophe-driven era, because we need to remember our duty to futurity. Not just in a hope-and-change progressive way, but as a pressure, force, and burdon. It’s there, waiting for us, and we can’t not travel forward, even though it’s not an easy road. If it’s a direction, it’s also a fantasy about a wiser past or less brutal future.

2. Ecologically speaking, I’m struck on this reading by how much More emphasizes the relative dearth of natural resources in Utopia — little iron, relatively infertile soil, no gold or gems (which the Utopians despise anyway). Is the beautiful place / no place also already depleted? Human capital, used and shared, makes up for this lack, but as we contemplate the scarcity of natural resources in the 21c and impending struggles over arable land, fresh water, oil, and other commodities, perhaps we can find in More a way to think about adaptation?

I’m also enjoying the prospect of Richard Hakluyt, a later-generation humanist clergyman, engaging in dialogue with More’s Utopian table talk. From humanist skepticism to expansionist boosterism, in just a few generations!

Here’s Hakluyt, on how he came to write his book of maritime histories:

…it was my hap to visit the chamber of Mr. Richard Hakluyt my cousin, a gentleman of the Middle Temple, well known unto you, at a time when I found lying open upon his board certain books of Cosmography, with a Universal Map: he seeing me somewhat curious in the view thereof, began to instruct my ignorance, by showing me the division of the earth unto three parts after the old account: he pointed with his wand to all the known seas, gulfs, bays, straits, capes, rivers, empires, kingdoms, dukedoms and territories of each part, with declaration also of their special commodities, and particular wants, which by the benefit of traffic, and the intercourse of merchants, are plentifully supplied (Epistle Dedicatory to the first ed. 1589).

The Suit at BAM

February 3, 2013 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Walking out of the theater after this brilliant, unsettling show last Tuesday night, I didn’t know exactly what had happened. Ben Brantly’s Times review had prepared me for a play that “breaks your heart” with a light and musical touch, but not for the pleasurable disorientation I felt.

The minimalist set, deftly managed by Peter Brook with clothes racks and hangers, as well as intricate lighting and inventive music, presented a semi-abstract vision of the South African township Sophiatown, which was soon bulldozed after the events of the play. With moving parts and jury-rigged partitions, it resembled a transparent, open closet, a window into confined lives and imaginations.

The play had opened with husband and wife, Philomen and Matilda, slouching against each other on chairs arranged into a threadbare marital bed. It ended in precisely the same place, despite the intervening discovery of the wife’s adultery, the husband’s insistance that as penance for her infidelity she care for the suit her fleeing lover left behind, and the husband’s final public exposure of the suit’s secret after she has invited local guests, and a few lucky audience members, into their home to hear her sing.

During the play I kept thinking about how the meanings of adultery expanded and tumbled over themselves as the play went on, from the thin edge of disbelief that cracked open the love we’d seen on Philemon’s face in the opening scene, to a political allegory of life under apartheid, to the slow emergence of Matilda from frustration into art as she joins a “cultural club” and allows herself to learn to sing. None of these schemes quite captured the play’s rich ambivalence, the semi-Beckettian combination of abstraction and human desperation. It didn’t matter so much what the suit meant, which of the many meanings the play would finally settle upon. We were watching lives entwined with not-quite-knowable symbols, and never knowing, never settling, seemed perfectly fine.

Sometimes one side of the meaning-whirlpool appeared to surface by itself, The peak moment of political allegory came when the play’s narrator, played by Jared McNeill, sang Billie Holiday’s brutal song of lynching in the American South, “Strange Fruit.” His piercing, pure voice, unadorned, spoke to the entanglement of emotions and repression.

But that piercing protest, while perhaps the most stunning of the half-dozen songs performed, seemed to me to have been a sideways move away from the human center of the play. The transatlantic shift to pre-Civil Rights America globalized the story, but most of our attention remained on Philemon and Tilly, their see-through house, and his refusal or inability to let go of the suit and its explosive memory.

The ending mystified me — and not just me, I asked around and others were confused too — so much that I had to google the original story, by Can Themba, to be sure that the sleeping wife wasn’t going to wake up after the applause stopped. The story related a tragedy, though I wasn’t sure of that when I walked out of the theater. Philemon’s compulsion to remember, to expose, to force the suit back into view, had killed his wife.

Is is a problem that I wasn’t sure what had happened in the moment? Or might this ambiguity represent one of the stranger, fuller, more deeply integrated combinations of tragic loss and comic endurance that I’ve seen in a while? I do like a tragicomedy, if given my choice.

I’m glad I caught this one during its brief trip to Brooklyn.

Anthropocene v Homogenocene

January 25, 2013 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Some interesting discussion in class last night about the different contexts of the terms anthropocene and homogenocene.

For anthropocene, which seems to be a fast-becoming the default term — see Timothy Morton’s blog — we poked around on a spiffy new website and talked about what happens when you keep “anthropos” at the center of things, even as villain rather than hero. If the big story of the 21c is anthropic climate change, driven by the carbon we’ve been pumping into the atmosphere since the early industrial period (or long before, as some argue), then that’s still a human-centered world picture, a planet built, or in this case trashed, by us. It’s a different story from the civilizing mission of colonialism, but the central actor remains essentially the same.

The homogenocene, by contrast, isn’t about people. If the big story — I adapt this argument from Charles Mann’s 1493 — is about the homogenization of biological life after the physical reintegration of the once-isolated ecosystems of the Americas, Eurasia, and Africa after the late 15c, that’s a different story. Human beings are still instigators, even infamous characters like Columbus, Cortez, Pizzarro, and the others. But the key actors in this story aren’t just admirals or conquistadors; they also include mosquitos tobacco, viruses, plant and animal species such as potatoes, tomatoes,, and other things. (If I were rewriting the story I’d emphasis ocean currents and wind patterns — but that’s the sort of salty stuff I like.)

The homogenocene seems the more neutral term, and certainly it exerts less political pressure on the present. But I wonder if it’s not the more complex and problematic way to understand globalization and perhaps even modernity. A process of mixing, of bringing together things — people, plants, animals, viruses, insects — that were once mostly separate. It’s not a peaceful process at all, as the uncountable deaths of native Americans to European and African diseases shows most drastically. But even if humans perhaps started it, it’s pretty clearly outside of human hands now, and has been for a long time.

Mann’s version of this eco-story does something interesting to figures like Columbus and Cortes. They certainly aren’t the heroes of 19c histories, but they also aren’t purely colonialist villains. In some ways they seem like fools, ineffectual and not in control for all of their massive ambition and the world-changing consequences of their lives.

I suppose the homogenocene tells a posthuman variation on the eco-story.

Shakespeare’s Globalization

January 24, 2013 by Steve Mentz 1 Comment

Starting a new grad course this evening with the above title. I wonder if the students will be disappointed that there will be more globalization than Shakespeare? Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest, among assorted other literary and historical texts. But tonight, we’re starting with Charles Mann’s 1493 and his explanation of what Alfred Crosby calls the “Columbian Exchange”; with some discussion about the different valences of the terms “anthropocene” (which seems to be catching) and “homogenocene” (which hasn’t, but may be more accurate, and maybe more threatening); and eventually with some gorgeous maps — which probably won’t show up all that well in the blog. First, Wright-Molyneux (1599):

And, of course, Waldseemuller (1507):

Three Nows for Temporal Thinking

January 18, 2013 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

This post has been hanging around half-finished since the periodization kerfluffle some time ago. I’ll post it now as a place-holder for more thinking about that slipperiest of temporal modifiers, “now.” As in, right now, exactly now, this particular time — but that just-spoken now is gone & then, not now anymore.

Here are three quick literary markers (hatches?) for thinking the now —

1. Iago’s “now, now, very now” — an erotic, off-stage and unforgettable time, never visible but always happening. Rounding out the familiar line — “An old black ram…” — leads now down so many pathways of human errancy: sex, race, animals, the struggle for dominance…

2. Hardy’s world historical “Now!” from “The Convergence of the Twain”: “Till the Spinner of the Years / Said “Now!” And each one hears, / And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.”

3. Borges’s polytemporal “now” from “The Garden of the Forking Paths”: “Then I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is happening is happening to me…” (Labyrinths 20)

Swimming & Teaching

January 13, 2013 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

A chat on Facebook yesterday got me thinking about swimming & teaching, two things I’ve been away from for a few weeks but will plunge back into soon. I’ve enjoyed the short winter break away from the classroom, though the holiday ailments that have kept me also out of the water have made this a strangely shapeless couple of weeks, punctuated by family visits, a couple bouts with different kinds of flu, and some pretty extraordinary back pain that’s just now getting under control. I’m looking forward to both the pool and the classroom.

Swimming is like teaching in that it begins suddenly, with a kind of transitional shock, the sudden icy grip of water on skin, and then you’re all wet, and moving, and the whole process has begun again before you know it, and it won’t be over for a long time. A 15-week semester, a 45-minute pool workout, 10 km around Harrington Sound — in any case, you’ll stay wet for a long time. And once you’re wet there’s no drying off before you’re done; that’s why I’m still anxious before the first day of the semester, and why most of the time I can’t sleep that night. It’s not about preparation — I prepare a lot for my classes, but I don’t have any illusion that preparation is what makes great teaching. It’s a catch-and-throw exchange, improvisational theater, a relationship built in real-time. As one of my first teaching mentors told me, back in Los Angeles in the early 90s, you can’t teach until you know what they are ready to learn — and you can’t know that til you see the whites of their eyes.

That was a joke, I suspect, but I still like it. It reminds me how much of teaching emerges in the encounter — it doesn’t live in books or notes or course outlines. It’s not an information transfer, but a human exchange.

Teaching should be like swimming, or at least that’s what I tell myself. I wish I could get from my students in the every-semester Shakespeare class the same sort of commitment, the same struggle with fear and physical discomfort that I used to get when I was teaching 8 year olds how to dive into the cold water of a Maine lake. Tuck your chin, I’d tell them, let the weight of your body carry you down toward the water, and then push forward and let your legs fly– and you’re in. I’d watch them struggle with it, sometimes pulling their heads up so that they’d land on their bellies with a red-making smack. Then get out and try again.

Water can seem an unforgiving tutor — the only way to learn to dive is to do it, eventually — but if you relax it floats you back up.

I’ve got some good classes coming up: an u/g Shakespeare class that will use the Henry VI plays, Richard III, and Antony and Cleopatra to think about performance and civil war. We might talk about “Lincoln” on the first day, to think about how Civil War gets memorialized in modern American culture, how such disunion both threatens and defines a national consciousness. I suppose I should go see the film first.

The grad class will be on early modern globalization, with at least as much of an ecological as a Shakespearean focus. I’m going with what seem to me the three essential places for globalization theory: utopia, Faerie Land, and Eden. That should be a fun one.

The week before class starts is like standing at the water’s edge, not yet sure of the temperature. In a short time it won’t matter — we’ll be in — but right now it looks daunting, and a little fragile. It’s important to get started the right way.

The Weather, Kayak Morning, and Bataille’s Peak

January 11, 2013 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Being sick in the early days of 2013 has me behind in January’s writing, syllabus-making, and other chores — but before it gets too late I wanted to put some notes in on a few of the good books I read in the second half of 2012.

Lisa Robertson, The Weather

A book of experimental poetry that I bought at Powell’s in Portland on the suggestion of Dan Remein (I think), this is a smart & unsettled look at how the weather gets under our skin and into our consciousness. A few notable lines —

Lurid conditions are facts (6)

My purpose here is to advance into / the sense of the weather, the lesson of / the weather (24)

Every surface is ambitious; we excavate a non-existent era of the human (30)

The word double is written on our forehead (39)

It is too late to be simple (76).

Roger Rosenblatt, Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats

A very different feel comes from Rosenblatt’s memoir about kayaking near his home in Quogue and thinking about the recent death of his 38-year old daughter. This formless memoir has some very deft moments, esp when he’s paddling and thinking about water, culture, family, mortality. Sometimes he says things I very much agree with, like this: “Too much is made of the value of plumbing the depths. The nice thing about kayaking is that you ride the surface” (55). Also: “words mixed with water lose their bite” (54).

I found this one via my friend John Gillis, author of The Human Shore, a great new maritime history that I’ll blog about soon. He suggest it to me after reading Rosenblatt’s comments about water and the English language:

So many references. A loose cannon. A drifter. Sea legs. The English language, it seems, is water based. Other languages too, I guess. The world talks to itself from the sea, ship to shore. I recently learned that ‘rival’ comes from rivers, or streams, meaning someone on the opposite side of the same stream. (71)

In places this book seems oddly willing to traffic in its own intimacy, to sell its insights in a way that perhaps lessons their value. But in places the writing rests happy with the spaces left open, in between —

Water is groundless. It has no basis, like art. It is the answer to no one’s question. I love the feel of it. (104)

Allan Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability

I found this one too late to sneak a reference into my PMLA essay, “After Sustainability,” but it’s a smart & lively excursus into what might come after “fossil fuel humanism” (xiv). Bataille’s counter-proposal is an ethics of excess, for which the central problem isn’t hoarding energy but dissipating its excess: “so too in the future we can posit sustainability as an unintended afteraffect of a politics of giving” (142). “Ecoreligion,” in Bataille’s terms, requires a “sacrificial relation between humans, animals, plans — the ecosystem,” as well as “the recognition of the relatively minor position of humanity, finally, in the concentration and expenditure of the energy of the universe” 178). Or, to put it more starkly: “The human community’s physical survival (through sacrificial consumption) in this model is the fundamentally unplanned aftereffect of a sacred ‘communication’ with the animal (179).

Some parts of this seem unnecessarily abstract, though the contrast between the automobile as figure of modernity — “In the car we do not need a body” (184) — and the bicycle as post-modern challenge to that system — “The cyclists body is little more than an open wound” (192) — brings the focus directly back to the visible world. What Stoekl calls “a regime of eroticized recycling and bicycling” (193) seems very much worth thinking and rethinking.

103.61 miles

December 31, 2012 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

That’s my yearly total in the water, according to my flog (fitness log), courtesy of the US Master’s Swim Program. Probably more than I’ve swum since high school, I think.

Best month was June = 17.65 miles

Worst was September = 3.94

My Progress for Go The Distance 2012

Month	Total Distance
Jan	6.45 miles (=11,350 yards, =10,378 meters)
Feb	12.02 miles (=21,150 yards, =19,340 meters)
Mar	6.42 miles (=11,300 yards, =10,333 meters)
Apr	8.75 miles (=15,400 yards, =14,082 meters)
May	15.28 miles (=26,900 yards, =24,597 meters)
Jun	17.65 miles (=31,072 yards, =28,412 meters)
Jul	7.36 miles (=12,950 yards, =11,841 meters)
Sep	3.94 miles (=6,930 yards, =6,337 meters)
Oct	7.90 miles (=13,900 yards, =12,710 meters)
Nov	7.73 miles (=13,600 yards, =12,436 meters)
Dec	10.11 miles (=17,800 yards, =16,276 meters)
Total	103.61 miles (=182,352 yards, =166,743 meters)

Other swimming highlights —

Best swimming hole was in the Peneda National Park in Portugal, courtesy of Luis Barros.

PGNP swimming hold

Best long-distance swim was 4.4 miles across the Chesapeake Bay in early June.

Next year I’m thinking about some of the NYC Swim events, including the Little Red Lighthouse 10 k or maybe the Governor’s Island swim.

USA by night

December 28, 2012 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

City lights by night, over the course of 2012.

By contrast, here’s the Land of Oz — those are forest fires in the northwest, which the satellite picks up by accident.

Swervin’: Modernity is not History

December 7, 2012 by Steve Mentz 6 Comments

Last weekend’s periodization discussion made a sharp turn when Stephen Greenblatt’s modernization parable, The Swerve, won the MLA’s first annual Lowell prize for fiction. Those who, despite the seasonal upwelling of darkness-into-light stories at this time of year, remain unconvinced by zombie myths of Dark Ages and sudden lurches into modernity, have been outraged. Much cleverness and knowledge on display in the aftermath, including some lively FB & blog threads and on twitter, where Bruce Holsinger (@burnablebooks) warmed up the wires with a brilliant series of self-immolating tweet-quotations exposing the sillier claims of the book: see #TheSwerve.

The heart of this swervin’ exchange lays bare the conflict between two things: an objectively false feel-good story of “how the world became modern,” and a better-informed sense of what went on before Poggio found that copy of De rerum natura. The first thing is narrative, or perhaps myth; the other draws on the historical record.

I wonder what happens if we disentangle these threads? What if we rethink “modernity” as something other than a historical phenomenon? What if it’s a story?

The modern might not be a thing that “begins,” but a narrative humans tell about the felt experience of change. Discontinuity challenges any kind of systemic thinking, and “modernity” as a story makes sense of discontinuous change through the metaphor of the Break, the once-and-for-all transformation of what was into was is, or at least what is-becoming. This story gets told in crude and less crude formulations — The Swerve deserves mockery b/c it’s careless in its characterizations — but the modern-story can, perhaps, be retold to accommodate better representations of what precedes a modern-moment. A richer modernity story should also embrace the post-break fluidity that we mostly call postmodern. As Jameson sagely observes, any conception of modernity that cannot also explain postmodernity is pretty useless.

The four maxims Jameson lays out in A Singular Modernity (2002) are all pretty thought-provoking, actually. A quick paraphrase: “We cannot not periodize” “modernity is a narrative category” “modernity is not about subjectivity” “we need a modernity that also understands the postmodern.”

History itself does not and need not follow this modern parable. Any narrative about historical change-and-continuity must, in order to be a narrative, do some violence to the plenitude of the historical record. Some narratives are better than others; some work and others do not. I always prefer the flexible and recursive to the abrupt and enlightening, but that may be as much a generic preference for complexity and connection as an affinity for “reality,” that elusive thing. History overfills all human narratives; that’s why in addition to “facts” we need poetry — and geometry, statistics, economics, plasma physics, interior design, geoclimatology, the Hubble Telescope… Objects and alliances of all sorts, human and not.

I’m deeply sympathetic to the many eloquent defenses of medieval plenitude and cultural brilliance — the latest ones I’ve read include Anne Harris’ letter to the New Yorker when the pre-Swerve exerpt appeared, and Kellie Robertson’s scholarly prebuttal of Greenblatt before the book reached print (Kellie Robertson)– but I retain interested in something like “modernity” (maybe we need a different word?) as a flexible narrative category that responds to cataclysmic change. The narrative of modernity, of course, needn’t be new in 1517 or any other special time; we can see its traces all over the literary-historical record, from Boccaccio to Chaucer, in Ovid, Lucian, and Achilles Tatius, and many others. I’m not an Anglo-Saxonist, but I read The Wanderer as a lament about the human pain that attends cultural change.

Whatever heroic story of “the modern” you want to tell — bold explorers, brilliant textual scholars, brave Lutherans, lethal viruses, high-caloric American food crops feeding China or Ireland — will exclude and misrepresent aspects of the historical record. That’s a reason to tell more complex and less triumphant stories.

My own favorite story about what it feels like to live inside modernity is shipwreck, which might be a Break but usually isn’t a triumph. Or at least it doesn’t feel like one at first.

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING