Steve Mentz on Speculative Medievalisms

Somehow I missed THIS POST for nearly a week. Mentz is largely positive about the event and also has some questions. A few quick responses:

*“OOO (pronounciation uncertain).”

Personally, I say “Triple O.” It’s the easiest way to say it. (By analogy with “Triple A” for the automobile club AAA.)

*“Graham calls these ‘Latour lists,’ but I think of them as coming first from Borges.”

The phrase “Latour Litanies” was coined by Ian Bogost a couple of years ago. Latour obviously didn’t invent them, he’s simply very good at them. Latour Litanies can be found far back in ancient literature: in the catalog of ships in Book II of the Iliad, in Hesiod if memory serves (though I haven’t read him since undergraduate years), in much Buddhist literature with its wild descriptions of parades of multiple Buddhas and bodhisattvas and animals, and all over the place in Walt Whitman. Lovecraft has dozens of bizarre Latour Litanies as well. A Latour Litany is not meant as a discursive “argument,” as some sour-faced critics have pretended, since it would obviously fail as a discursive argument. Instead, it is a simple rhetorical/stylistic technique, setting up a framework in which the mind must pay attention to countless different entities inhabiting the same space. And by rhetoric and style I don’t mean “mere” rhetoric and style– Aristotle already knew that the enthymeme lurks behind any explicit argument, and that the engineering of enthymemes is the key not just to tricking unwary gullible people, but to thinking adequately in the first place (McLuhan pushes this even further). This is why style is of such importance in philosophy, and why bad style almost always indicates a shoddy brand of cardboard cutout thinking that plunges head first into the pre-established intellectual trench wars of the day, as if denouncing “irrationality” were some sort of fearless intellectual act. (None of this applies to Mentz, of course. He just got me thinking.)

*“It’s a good challenge and prod to get outside of humanism, to move to what some other OOO-ers (Levi Bryant?) call the ‘great outdoors.’ But it also seems to me — and perhaps here I risk outing myself as too humanist to sit with the cool kids at the lunch table – that’s it’s not quite possible for literary culture to make this move the same way philosophy does.”

The phrase “great outdoors” was coined by Meillassoux in After Finitude.

As for how literary culture can make an analogous move, I’ll mostly leave that to the professionals (though I was asked to write something differentiating OOO from new historicism and thing theory, and will try to work out my thoughts there). But it’s worth remembering that OOO does not exclude the human realm from the realm of objects, nor does it exclude literary works, characters, and phrases from the realm. Quite the contrary. But on the whole, I don’t like legislating, and the medievalists in New York had a lot more to teach me than the reverse, I thought. That was an outstanding group of papers and responses, and all of it got me mentally stirred up to such an extent that I couldn’t always process it quickly enough.

There is also THIS POST by Charles Altieri, suggesting an exhaustion with recent trends in literary theory. Do with that what you will.