Cruising in the Ruins

This small book showcases the program of the 2nd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, hosted by Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts from 20-22 September 2012, and co-hosted by Boston College, College of Charleston, George Washington University's Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, Harvard University, M. I. T., Palgrave Macmillan, punctum books, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and Tufts University. Featured Speakers: Jane Bennett, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Carolyn Dinshaw, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, David Kaiser, Marget Long, and Sans façon [Charles Blanc and Tristan Surtees]. Sessions: The Inter-Discipline of Pedagogy; Getting Medieval on Medieval Studies; Medieval Touchscreen; Families Old and New; Going Postal: Networks, Affect, and Retro-Technologies; Digging in the Ruins: Medievalism and the Uncanny in the University [I & II]; Future-Philology; Intellectual Crimes: Theft, Punking, and Roguish Behavior; Impure Collaborations; Enjoying the End (Again); Textual Fault-Lines; All In a Jurnal's Work: A BABEL Wayzgoose; Ecomaterialism; The Urmadic University; Synaesthetics: Sensory Integration Against the Disciplines; Hoarders/Hordes; Parts, Wholes, and the New; Will It Blend? Equipping the Humanities Lab; What Is Critical Thinking?; #Occupy Boston: Humanities and Praxis; Se7en Undeadly ScIeNceS: The Trivium and Quadrivium in the Multiforking University; Wild Fermentation: Disciplined Knowledge and Drink; The Historiographic Ghost. The university and the disciplines traversing it (and the disciplines traversed by the university as super-structure) are phenomena with medieval roots and uncertain futures. Medieval university studies were ostensibly contained by the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy), but the meanings of, and divisions between, these subjects were under constant interrogation and revision, even as older, newer, and alternate designations (dialectic, philosophy, theology, natural science, forensic, polemic, etc.) continually remade, and eventually unmade, the traditional taxonomies. "cruising in the ruins" seeks to engage both the architectonics and mobility of knowledge; the cleavages between ways of knowing; the impurities of cross-contamination between disciplines and fields and temporalities; the threat/promise of post/humanism and the post/humanities; the shape(s) of disciplinary crisis today; the aesthetics of scholarship; discipline & pleasure (and pain); the secession or amputation or orphaning of the humanities; how to foment disciplinary glamour; what the Situationists can tell us about pedagogy; DIY medievalist agitprop; the personifications of knowledge; intra-university affects; town and gown; the reservoirs of metaphors in other people's jargon; what the "uni-" in "university" and "universe" might mean; what the "after" in "after inter-disciplinarity" might portend; what misfit heterotopias might be possible in a new multiversity; what the "cruising" in "cruising in the ruins" might invite. We gathered medievalists, humanists of all stripes, scientists, social scientists, and artists to experiment with performing their respective methods in proximity to one another. This is a speculative practice because, despite being uncuttable or irreducible, we're falling through space and time, falling into one another, and always in the process of swerving. What we do next is uncharted. So let's not reduce disciplinary difference to one yawning crack between the humanities and the sciences. The divisions of disciplinary knowledge are legion and manifold, capillaried and filigreed. The idea is to have a conference in which disciplinary and field differences are sharpened as we converge on shared objects, subjects, terms, genres, tools, materials, concerns, methods, and approaches