retractions – some words about me and a recent issue of Speculum

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I am quoted twice in a recent issue of Speculum. In a Chaucerian mode, and so forth, here is me walking things back. I say nothing against the articles themselves, which are up to their own business. This is just about me, narrowly.

I appear in Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy and Myra Seaman’s “Why, Sometimes We’ve Believed Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The BABEL Working Group” where I am quoted as saying:

I think BABEL might have helped carve out space for work in medieval studies even into the present (I am thinking of Seeta Chaganti’s fuck the police plenary at the U of Virginia’s Medieval Academy: she wasn’t BABEL that I remember, but I also don’t think that would have happened without that)

This is in response to a survey, and hence the first fruits of a response, iirc, to a google form. I retract “I also don’t think that would have happened without that.” Now that I’m seeing this in pdf, and then, I presume, in print, assuming my medieval academy membership is still current, I don’t like the claim I’m making here. What Chaganti did reminded me of some of what BABEL was doing, but reminiscence is merely analogy, and not at all indicative of a cause: if I were pushed to give an answer now, I’d presume Chaganti had her own route to her Medieval Academy plenary that was an outgrowth not of BABEL nor any tendril of BABEL but rather of her various activist circles. What I stumbled into here is something like “The Tyranny of Morphology.” My apologies.

And then, the Material Collective’s “In Praise of Collectivity: Why Radical Solidarity Is Our Only Hope,” quotes me like so:

In a similar vein, Karl Steel asks what we might substitute in place of the specter of “academic rigor,” of “the passport of proper credentials,” and other such gatekeeping mechanisms of academia. He offers

attention,

time,

empathy, and

care.

What if we truly listen as our colleagues speak and then think with them in our attempt to understand before we respond?

I’m afraid I come off otherwise than I intended in this quotation. Less dialectical. Again, without remarking on the article as a whole, I just want to say, here, that this passage belongs to “my short program against innocence, of whatever form.” For me, that’s crucial. The program  falls at the end of a paper I wrote and never bothered to try to publish, because I didn’t know what to do with it, that I delivered at the Fourth Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group at the University of Toronto, 2015, at a session called “Amateur Hour.”

Expecting that everyone else would give papers in praise of amateurs, I did something different, with an exploration of the word and concept of “rigor.”

Here is the full paper. Because this dates to 2015, I’m not sure I stand behind everything in it now, but in the interests of, well, self-interest, I’m giving it below as it was:

Academia cleaves amateurism from rigor. Amateurism, Dinshaw tells us in How Soon is Now, is characterized by its “constant attachment to the object,” without the “scientific detachment” (22), her words, or the as such relationship, my words, sort of, required for a suitable disinterest. The temptation would be to respond to this demand for rigor by titling ourselves the Champions of Amateurism. We could duel with the enemies of the “creeping anti-intellectualism” of the often “narcissistic” promotion of “affect” as a critical mode; we could wrestle with those who sigh at its pretense of noninstitutional “innocence,” with those who feel it lacks the rigorous dialectics of quote thought unquote.[1]

But in this venue, I don’t think amateurism needs my help, nor do I even need to take on Dinshaw for not sufficiently worrying about the forced amateurism of the academic precariat, compelled to do what they do for love because the money’s not there. Dinshaw’s reviewers have already done that, as Dinshaw already did herself, in her book (23).

Instead, I’ll be dealing with the word “rigor” itself, creeping backwards from the point just before “rigor” became a compliment, without, however, creeping myself into demanding that we junk rigor entirely. Because that would be a mistake too.

It took a long time for “rigor” to be considered a good thing. For its current reputation, We may have no one to blame but ourselves: you know, academics. For an advanced degree, several German Universities still require the examen rigorosum – under this or some other name. [2] It could take many forms: the candidate might have been required to lecture and then submit to interrogation on two topics chosen by the faculty — Heidegger, for example, did his on mathematics and physics – and, in the mid nineteenth century, he might be asked to begin his lecture with a brief autobiography encompassing his religious convictions, delivered, as you might expect, in Latin.[3] The name of the examination comes directly from the medieval university, where, for example, the cartularies of the University of Paris list one student after another who reached the rank of Master by graduating cum rigore examinis.[4]

Less savory usages can be turned up readily: in 1935, one Nazi historian praised war as “the examen rigorosum of the state[5],” while a late seventeenth-century Franciscan jurist, famous for his treatise on the detection of demons, used the phrase as a synonym for “torture.”[6]8 So, here we have the establishment of a relationship between “rigor,” credentialism, and from credere to certainty, whether of a candidate, or a people, or a witch.

The phrase “scientific rigor” likewise has its defenders. My initial research tells me that they appear first in the eighteenth century, along with the new German developments in systematic moral philosophy.[7] So we find, for example, the praise of Johan Ernst Gunnerus, in 1752, of “a philosophical science of rigorous understanding.”[8] Meanwhile, in a letter to Fichte in 1799, Jacobi condemns Kant’s “rigorously scientific” moral system, which petrifies life, deafens the conscience, and tears out the heart of our free will.[9] Perhaps worth citing, too, is Felix O’Gallagher’s 1785 Essay on the Investigation of the First Principles of Nature, which argues against the “scientific rigour” that would bar us from the truths of scripture and the ancients; from these inspired insights, joined with his rigorous winnowing of natural phenomena, O’Gallagher proves that light can be nothing else but a fluid.[10]

Other key uses in this earlier period associate “rigor” with insincerity and mere stylistic exactitude. Here, “academic rigor” recalls the “ore-nice pedantry” dismissed by Margaret Cavendish’s 1653 “The Clasp,” which prefers a “free, and Noble stile / Which seems uncurb’d, though it be wild.” Thus Henry Fuseli’s 1801 Lectures on Painting perhaps shock us with an audacious dismissal of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, little but a “gratif[ication] of dauntless execution and academic [r]igour.”[11] In the early 1840s, Thomas de Quincey praises Philippe Stanhope, Fourth Earl of Chesterfield, for a style free of both “bookish rhetoric” and “the stiffness of pedantry or academic rigour,” a freedom this empyrean class happily shared with both tutors of children and women as a whole.[12]

In the eighteenth century, the word “Academic” itself tends to be associated more generally with pedantry. In 1761 “academic hack” crops up.[13] “Academic” even works as a kind of proto-nerdery, as when a character in a 1789 epistolary novel complains that he “cannot bear the idea of being the academic of the company,” as this makes him “an awkward novice in the circle of the courtly graces.”[14] In French, where the term “academic rigor” may have originated, we find it similarly suspected. In the later 1770s, one of the Count of Mirabeau’s letters to his beloved Sophie strikes back against the accusation of weighing words: “but do you believe that I’m writing with an academic rigor [une rigueur académique]? I have a half-hour to trace a few lines; my heart beats so strongly, that it’s as if it wants to leap out of me!”[15]

Finally, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, rigor was chiefly known not for pedantry or precision in intellectual architecture, but for mercilessness. Our key witness is Cicero’s adage “summum ius, summa iniuria,” translated in Thomas Cooper’s 1578 Latin grammar as “extreeme rigour is extreeme wrong.”[16] During the period, “rigour” most frequently finds itself modified by the adjectives “great,” “utmost,” “full,” “cruel,” “excessive,” and of course “extreme,” and, far less frequently “grammatical,” “philosophical” and “moderate,” the latter which likens a perfect government to what we might call the grumpy balance of the four elements.[17] In a Scottish petition complaining about the mindless application of the law, we even find, of all things, “peevish rigor.”[18] Still earlier, “rigour” is personified in the early sixteenth-century pseudo-Chaucerian “Court of Love” as an unpleasantly impartial enforcer of love’s twenty precepts;[19] and in Robert Henryson’s late fifteenth-century fables, a mouse protests when a lion condemns her to death for the crime of having trod on him during his slumber: “without mercy,” squeaks the mouse, “justice is cruelty … when rigor sits in the tribunal / who may uphold the equity of the law?”[20]

Note that: “When rigor sits in the tribunal.” Rigor does what it does not for the sake of the doer — that would be egotistical — nor for the sake of the object of rigor — that would be partial — but for the sake of rigor itself, external and watching, ensuring that the judge acts correctly. Rigor therefore has the structure of a joke, in the Freudian sense, where the victim of the joke is almost incidental to the joker’s performance for his male friend. In Freud’s account, the victim of the joke is, of course, a woman, or, more accurately, feminized, a point we might take up later during our conversation.[21] My point for now is that Rigor Itself is always just off-stage, interested, and insatiable.

The practice of rigor therefore tends towards an illusion of impartiality, because it cares less about its object than about its judge; it therefore may be accused of insincerity, because it is always looking over its shoulder for approval, and of thoughtlessness, because it itself pretends not to be doing the thinking. Or, for that matter, the feeling. To most thing, it is numb, yet another early meaning of rigor.[22] Rigor simply applies the law, without regard for circumstances.[23] We might adapt the insights of Derrida’s “Before the Law” to say that “rigor” installs itself in the place of an actual decision, or substitutes itself for the miracle of a true response. Rigor erects itself, rather stiffly, as the idol of “good conscience.” Yet as Jonathan Hsy observed on twitter, it’s fascinating how often rigor pairs with “notions of excess.”

The temptation would be to offer up sincerity, feeling, and mercy as somehow better than rigor. This is a temptation of innocence, just like rigor itself, and I want no part of it. Those of us who know medieval Christianity’s self-regard, and who know its relations to Jews, know what it means to praise one’s own confidence in mercy over their law, and what follows from that belief in one’s exclusive capacity for free choice, for love, and for an openness to a true future. That will not do.

A few years ago, towards the end of a New York medieval dinner, getting deeper into my cups, and sitting across from Dinshaw herself, I made a dismissive comment about medievalists who spend their careers collating manuscripts. Isn’t it sad, I suggested, that they’re not doing something more fun. Clearly I meant the kind of work I did, and clearly I was flattering myself by thinking I meant Dinshaw too. She said — and here I’m certainly paraphrasing — that our collators are probably also having fun. Wise, correct, and even kind. The larger point is that there’s no escaping pleasure, and that even a rigorous account of pleasure has its pleasures too. We can note that although Germaine de Staël observed in 1810 that nothing could be more severe than Kant’s moral system, she also observed that however rigorous a moralist may be, there is always something sure to stir us up when our conscience is addressed.[24] She then scrambles to differentiate sentiment from egotistical emotional sensibility: but I’m unconvinced.

The still larger point, my last one, is that if we’re going to divide good work from bad, we’re going to need to do it with something other than “rigor,” “sincerity,” or even the passport of proper credentials. Here then is my short program against innocence, of whatever form:

attention,

time,

empathy, and

care.[25]

Thank you.

  1.  D. Vance Smith, “The Application of Thought to Medieval Studies: The Twenty-First Century.” Exemplaria 22.1 (2010): 85-94. ↑
  2.  For a brief comparative history of the development of US and German Universities, Anne J. MacLachlan, Lost in Translation: The Flow of Graduate Education Models between Germany and the United States. pp. 79-90. The examen is still in place under its old name at Hungary’s Central European University. ↑
  3.  British Medical Journal March 19, 1864, “Medical Education in Germany” ↑
  4.  Jacques Vergers, “Teachers,” in Universities in the Middle Ages, ed H de Ridder-Symoens; Brundage, Medieval Origins of Legal Profession, 259; and, for later times, Thomas H Broman, The Transformation of German Academic Medicine, 1750-1820. ↑
  5.  Quoted and translated in James Westfall Thompson’s delightfully harsh review of Eugen von Frauenholz’s Der Heerwesen der germanischen Frühzeit [The Early German Military System], in the American Historical Review 41.1 (1935), 123 [122-24] ↑
  6.  Louis-Marie Sinistrari d’Ameno, De la Démonialité, appendix Probatio Dæmonialitatis, 5 (probably late 17th-c, rediscovered in 19th c.), and Practicae Criminalis, Chapter 19.V.(1703) paragraph 104, p 695. ↑
  7.  Version of this appears in 1790, from Karl Leonhard Reinhold, “On the possibility of philosophy as a rigorous science,” “Über die Möglichkeit der Philosophie als strenge Wißenschaft,” in Beyträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Mißverständnisse der Philosophen, Volume 1, Jena 1790 ↑
  8.  “eine philosophische Wißenschaft im streng in verstande sein” ↑
  9.  Via Germaine de Staël’s translation, “Si vous voulez établir un système universel et rigoureusenment scientifique, il faut que vous soumettiez la conscience à ce système qui a pétrifié la vie : cette conscience doit devenir sourde, muette et insensible, il faut arracher jusqu’auxmoindres restes de sa racine , c est-à-dire, du cœur de l’homme.” The German is available in Walter Jaeschke, ed. Transzendentalphilosophie und Spekulation. Quellen: Der Streit um die Gestalt einer Ersten Philosophie (1799-1807), 17. ↑
  10.  An Essay on the Investigation of the First Principles of Nature, Part II (Dublin, 1785) ↑
  11.  printed with a v, here and elsewhere, but which I suspect must have been, in Fuseli’s own hand, an r. In The Scots Magazine, 63, 1801, 670. [Fuseli archives in London should be checked.] ↑
  12.  Historical and Critical Essays, “Style,” reprinted in de Quincey’s Writings Volume 2, 78. women “cling to the ancient purity of diction” and as do “people of rank” ↑
  13.  G Pearch, A Collection of Poems in Four Volumes, “Verses on the Expected Arrival of Queen Charlotte,” dismissing the bad poetry of others. ↑
  14.  Richard Cumberland, Arundel, 2 and 46. ↑
  15.  Choix des lettres de Mirabeau à Sophie (Paris, 1811), 155-56. “Non, non, vertueuse Sohie, Si n’était pas une question : mais crois-tu donc que je t’écris avec une rigueur académique? j’ai une demi-heure pour te tracer quelques lignes : mon coeur bat si fort, qu’on dirait qu’il veut s’élancer hors de moi” ↑
  16.  Thesaurus linguæ Romanæ & Britannicæ tam accurate congestus (1578) ↑
  17.  The French academie Fully discoursed and finished in foure bookes, Peter de la Primaudaye, trans Thomas Bowes), “And as the fire and the earth were first created to make the whole frame subiect to sight and feeling, and then the water and the aire mingled with them, that the dissimilitude of those extremes might bee tempered according to proportion: so fortitude and iustice are first required in the ordaining of commonwealths, because they cannot continue without law and strength; and next prudence and temperance being ioyned with them, moderate rigour and remisnesse of both….Moreouer, as the elements are bred one of another, & alter to and fro, going into, and returning continually from the first matter, which receiueth them into it selfe, for which cause they cannot be seene simple, but mixed: whereupon ariseth such a temperature of all things, that they wither not by drought, nor borne with heate, neither are ouerwhelmed with two great moisture, nor grow stiffe with excessiue colde: so these vertues whereby cities are instituted, must be mingled one with another, and agree together for the mutuall preseruation, wisedome being President ouer them.” Thank you to Matthew Harrison, Aaron Pratt, and Heather Froehlich for help with constructing searches at http://corpus.byu.edu/eebo/ ↑
  18.  James Stewart, 1672, An accompt of Scotlands grievances by reason of the D. of Lauderdales ministrie humbly tendred to His Sacred Majesty., a complaint about excesses of laws, “4thly. that the exception of banishments, imprisonments and confynments, wherein a few Phanatick ministers are mostlie concerned, appears to be an unseasonable reserve of a peevish rigour: and 5thly. that the style of the proclamation” ↑
  19.  “An officer of high auctorité, / Cleped Rigour, made us swere anon / (He nas corrupt with parcialyté, / Favor, prayer, ne gold that cherely shone): / ‘Ye shall,’ quod he, “nowe sweren here ecchone, / Yong and old, to kepe in that they may, / The statutes truly all aftir this day.” (TEAMS edition online, 505-12) ↑
  20.  “The Lion and the Mouse,” “Quhen rigour sittis in the tribunall, / The equitie off law quha may sustene?” (TEAMS edition online, 1472-73) ↑
  21.  Gallop, Jane. “Why Does Freud Giggle When the Women Leave the Room?” Hecate 10 (1984): 49-53 ↑
  22.  OED, first definition; MED cites Lanfranc from 1400, “Arrigor is no þing ellis but as it were a prickynge of nedelis, or ellis of netlis, in þe fleisch, & if þis rigor come wiþ a feuere, or ellis without feuere, it is þe worste signe tokene of deeþ” ↑
  23.  A France, “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread” ↑
  24.  “quelque rigoureux que soit un moraliste, quand c’est à la conscience qu’il s’adresse, il est sûr de nous émouvoir” From her On Germany. ↑
  25.  See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (1982), where calls for an ethics not of fairness but of care, that “arises from conflicting responsibilities rather than competing rights and requires for its resolution a mode of thinking that is contextual and narrative rather than formal and abstract” (quoted in Josephine Donovan, “Attention to Suffering: Sympathy as a Basis for Ethical Treatments of Animals,” in Donovan and Adams, The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, 186 ↑

 

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