Short Essay Postmedieval fecopoet[h] ics

To understand the ethical aspect of paying attention to waste, this article is grounded in the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas, who argues that an openness to the ‘Other’ is a sign of the ethical. If we are complacent, we cannot act ethically. The horror, fear, shock and disgust we feel when confronted by waste jolts us out of our complacency. We recognize in waste not only the humanity of the other, but also the affinity the other has to us. Waste is everywhere and deserves, indeed insists on, moral attention. Ethically informed literary criticism may help us to understand how we theorize, manage and are implicated in waste. Only through that understanding might we change our hearts and hope for social action, justice and responsibility. An examination of the Old English poem Beowulf illustrates how we might read in this way. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2010) 1, 150–156. doi:10.1057/pmed.2010.6 Can and should literary criticism be politically and/or ethically driven, and if so, how much? Some fear that literary-critical concerns can be forgotten in the flurry to enact ethical and political understandings of texts. Using presentist theory can be threatening. In the 24 April 2009 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Edmundson rails against the use of ‘readings,’ by which he means ‘the application of an analytical vocabulary y to describe and (usually) judge a work of literary art.’ While Edmundson goes on to perform readings explicitly allied with Longinus, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold and Sontag – who presumably are not tainted as are the enemies he cites [‘Marx, Freud, Foucault, Derrida, or whoever’] – he clearly feels under siege, threatened r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 150–156 www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/ and disappointed in the turn away from what he calls, for example, an ideally Blakean reading of Blake’s verse or an ‘Eliotic’ reading of T.S. Eliot’s verse (Edmundson, 2009). How we can achieve such readings is not specified. We can, after all, only read as we are able in our own time. The reclamation of aestheticism and formalism in the early twenty-first century, after a perceived theory overload in the late twentieth century, responds to the real and abiding angst that theory as a process is suspected of having decayed; hence the recent and pending special issues of Critical Inquiry and the PMLA which respond to anxieties about the future of theory. There seems to be a sense that presentist theory obfuscates the past and enables us to even disremember the past. The philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas can provide guidance for how ethical literary criticism can challenge appropriative readings of the past. Lévinas argues that an openness to the ‘Other’ or ‘Face’ is a sign of the ethical. Such openings provoke moral agency. He writes, ‘I become a responsible or ethical ‘‘I’’ to the extent that I agree to depose or dethrone myself – to abdicate my position of centrality – in favour of the vulnerable other’ (Lévinas, 1995, 192). Lévinas’s writings can alter how we read literature, not to create a closed system of analysis, but as a way into seeing the utterance of literature as an ethical event. Ethical criticism is dialogical, is ‘interpretation as interruption’ (Eaglestone, 1997, 167). Ethics is constituted by a regard and perception of the Other and a decentralization and destabilization of the self. Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty argues that beauty and beautiful objects take us out of ourselves and allow – ultimately – for ethical and just action. But does beauty alone play this role? Why should beauty be privileged? Could waste, which is not generally considered to be beautiful, perform a similar function? A new model for critical theory that I propose is Waste Studies, a field that focuses on filth, rubbish, garbage, litter, refuse, and, yes, even excrement. The split between the mind and body articulated by the Cartesian slogan ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ reinforces a hierarchy that privileges reason over matter. In an amusing anecdote from 1789, Christoph Martin Wieland describes sitting on the toilet and using scrap paper to wipe his bottom, only to discover the following words inscribed on the sheet next destined for his posterior: ‘What is enlightenment?’ (Schmidt, 1996, 78–79). The juxtaposition of enlightenment with the act of defecation produces disbelief, outrage, humor – anything but placid acceptance. Read as impurity and disorder, the most virulent subset of dirt – feces – coalesces the most emotional and extreme reactions to filth and manifests in the figuring of excrement as shit: low, horrifying, disgusting. Waste Studies borrow from those writing on rubbish, garbage and excrement to offer ethical and moral frameworks for us to pay attention to, understand, and act on bodily, cultural and societal waste – material aspects of our world. While waste may initially offend us aesthetically in that it is excessive, aesthetics comes, by definition, from a Greek word meaning ‘to perceive through the Postmedieval fecopoet[h]ics 151 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 150–156 senses.’ Doesn’t our own waste and waste production cause us to sense and sense deeply? Art is not benign, but contains what Jonathan Dollimore calls ‘dangerous knowledge’ (Dollimore, 2003, 45), such as Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca machines and Andres Serrano’s disturbing and controversial photographs of human excretions. Indeed, as Oliver Marchart points out in his book, Cultural Studies, culture can be characterized as the medium of conflict, even as a ‘whole way of struggle,’ as Edward P. Thompson contended (Thompson, 1959, 54). The cultural is anything but harmless. Waste Studies force us to confront our own ethics, ethical position and subjectivity. Waste studies do not deal with signs or signifieds, but deal with materiality and the outcomes of that materiality, forcing us to confront our responsibility. Fecopoetics – the poet’s use of scatological discourse – emerges from the embodied mind and acknowledges the porous boundaries of the contingent body. My project, molded by concerns raised by the BABEL Working Group, would propose to explore a humanism that ‘takes the human to be an openended and mutable process’ (Halliwell and Mousley, 2003, 2). I would like to fashion a critical humanism that explores the ethical ramifications that the binary human/non-human has had, a binary that has shaped the humanities until recently. For me, a key question is, ‘Who, what and where is the embodied human in Posthumanism?’ The space where university humanities thrive nurtures (post)humanism. The origins of our cultural legacy, sedimented in waste, have had and will continue to have repercussions for the Anglophone canon. We see waste, both literal and figurative, everywhere: from Grendel’s arm to Yorick’s skull to the ‘dust’ in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. We can learn from literature that deals with waste what models might best contribute to ethical relationships with the world around us. The process of history creates waste by disposing of inconvenient moments from the past. In Beowulf, for example, political victors discard their victims: the monster Grendel and his mother are aggressively defeated by the mercenary Beowulf. The poem emerges from a period concerned with the establishment of a new religious order: Christianity after paganism. Yet traces from the original period exist, littering society and culture. Waste stalks Beowulf – in the many deaths of living beings and in the decay and destruction of culture and civilization. Cultural artifacts become trash, insignificant in the wake of violence. Like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, we see ‘wreckage upon wreckage’ piling up, and the ‘pile of debris y grows skyward’ before us (Benjamin, 1968, 257–58). The famous ‘digressions’ in Beowulf – the detritus, rags and tatters, recycled moments from the past – remind the poet’s listeners of tragic events that haunt the present. Waste provides us with a reason for acknowledging affinity among people, one we normally deny. The display of Grendel’s arm in the hall, like a hunting trophy, is the visible sign of culture’s triumph over the monstrous (ll. 833b–836b). As Benjamin points out, ‘Whoever has emerged victorious Morrison 152 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 150–156 participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate,’ and ‘[a]ccording to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession [or, in the case of Grendel’s arm, hung on the wall of Heorot]. They are called cultural treasures,’ yet, as Benjamin also cautions, we need to contemplate them with horror: ‘There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’ (Benjamin, 1968, 256; see also Joy, 2009). Only by destroying Grendel’s bodily integrity can the humans reassure themselves of their own. The hanging of Grendel’s arm serves to reinforce the fictive wholeness of the human body. The monster is partial and disturbing, making ‘us’ seem whole and ‘normal.’ Yet Grendel, constructed as a monstrous other, as waste, by the humans, is oddly similar to those who seek him out for destruction, as the horrific discovery of Æschere’s head exposes (see Cohen, 1999, 4). We are all simultaneously whole and fragmented; we all contain the potential to become – inevitably– trash. Waste is the great leveller, linking us all through elective affinities. Anyone could become an exile; anyone could become ‘monstrous.’ As Eileen Joy has argued, ‘[T]he poem keeps in perpetual motion what Levinas defined as one of the more distressing tasks of alterity: defining ‘‘who is right and who is wrong, who is just and who is unjust’’ ’ (Joy, 2009, 64). Though Grendel is viewed as waste, as garbage and dispensable, he, like his counterparts, the human colonizers who invade, kill, raid and conquer, exists as part of a cycle of destruction and mastery within which human achievement is, in its turn, doomed to failure. Any triumph is temporary, fleeting and caught up with barbarous acts, implicating any present victory as unethical brutality. The poem enjoins us to remain thoroughly mindful of our own inevitable decay. Part of our civilizing process is to recognize the value of that which we deem uncivilized and to see ourselves in that threatening, filthy alterity. What Norbert Elias termed the ‘civilizing process’ is just that – a process – never a finished state. This, then, may explain the anxiety by some toward an exploration into waste. Myra Seaman has characterized the human as ‘presumed by traditional Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment humanism’ as a rational male being with independent agency situated at the center of the world (Seaman, 2007, 246). My ‘waste human’ – who has more in common with a mama’s boy monster living in a dank mere than with a triumphant, ‘unified, cohesive ‘‘human’’ ’ – adheres to the posthumanist emphasis on ‘mutation, variation, and becoming’ (Seaman, 2007, 247; see also Cohen, 2003, xiii). A fully embodied human – even to the extent that she defecates – is repulsive and disturbing. Those who handle filth, literally or figuratively, become tainted by it morally and socially. But as Seaman points out, ‘without vulnerability, a society of extremely rational beings experiencing no loss to decay or disease would find little need to express their experiences, their individual selfhood through art y . [I]dentity does not seem possible without stories’ (Seaman, 2007, 269). Waste is 1 Joy also writes,