*This sounds exactly like what happened whenever I left my university and went to hang out and chatter about way-cool stuff at science fiction conventions. I always liked the sci-fi conventions better (naturally), but without the rigor of the university, they made no sense. When it's all fiction and no science, you might as well just eat hallucinogens.
*And these are medieval scholars, for heaven's sake. These guys are supposed to be working on dusty parchment with goose quills, not championing ontological anarchy. This is scaring me. Where is our sense of cultural continuity? Those who settle the ruins will wake up as ghosts.
http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2011/06/cruising-in-ruins-call-for-sessions-2nd.html
(...)
"We seek 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:
archive, body/embodiment, crux, gene, map, matter/hyle, memory, mind/mentality, museum, narrative, relic, trope, record, life, bios/zoê, surface/plane, autopoesis, geometry, encyclopedia, gender, trial, principle, disease, parasite, immanence, physics/physis, adaptation, speed, study, laboratory, element, animal, angel, posthuman, experiment, species, reproduction, genius, ledger, laboratory, classification, tool, semblance, earth/ground, recess, affect, demon, ontogeny, machine, deconstruction, ipseity, fold, frame, collective/assemblage, trans-, virus/viral, architecture, vein, geometry, depth, creature/creaturely, camera, set, ecology, dwarf, outside, exemplarity, network, cyborg, proof, book, time, immunity, web, surplus, logic, force, mesh, neighbor, environment, planet, contingency, psyche, liminal, digital, mineral, haeccity, architecture, ghost, word, page, pocket, artifice/artificial, humanism, dream, sovereignty, calculus, program, animate/inanimate, monster, residual/remainder, complexity, code, case study, plant, waste, anomaly, queer, being, speculum/mirror, form, intelligence, star, thing, self-organizing, space, dualism, history, abstract, image, person/homunculus, media, metaphysics, dynamism, tradition/history, organic/inorganic, vitalism, computer, prosthesis, wild/wilderness, perspective, velocity, avatar, chart, virtual, liquid, theorem, random, splicing, techne/technology, sex, chaos, etcetera.
(((You know what? I would be ideal facultyfor a demented fractal exploration of this kind. Because I can do that stuff all day every day, in perfect comfort. That's not good. You don't WANT an intellectual world where rambling, idiosyncratic grab-bags like this blog are a classical canon. Science fiction writers aren't scholars, they are speculators, trend-spotters, popular entertainers, and auto-marginalizing mountebanks. Nothing wrong with that, they were great in the role they once had, but you put guys like that in charge and you get Newt Gingrich. You get Glenn Beck. You get intellectual ruin, you get blathering hucksters who pretend to be prophets and Presidents while meandering off on Greek cruises.)))
"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.
"Think about sessions as working groups, as demonstrations, speculations, drag shows, hypotheses, clinical trials, love letters, conservatories, plea bargains, theorems, performances, séances, salons, discographies, bills of sale, slams, manifestos, postcards, recording sessions, lab reports, embassies, mash-ups, and other experiments that aspire to make strange or re-estrange the chosen object of study via close-reading or any other techne currently practiced or yet-to-be-imagined: distance studies, the new materialism, materialist history, a demography of things, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, deconstruction, networkologies, genome mapping, hermeneutics, discontinuist histories, hypothesis, post-historicism, carnal phenomenology, vibrant materialism, guerilla metaphysics, morphology, Latourian sociology, anachronism, case study, queer touching, taxonomies, machine reading, dark ecology, eliminative nihilism, erotohistoriography, the fine arts, philology, science-technology studies, rhetorical readings, codicology, thin and thick description, flat ontology, new scholasticism, ludology, etc. — and let’s not forget the nominalists. And when in doubt, consult Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto for Growth...."
"Please send us e-proposals for sessions by 15 December 2011* to Kathleen Kelly and Eileen Joy at: [email protected]. Our goal is to offer a variety of presentation and performance formats—anything but the standard panel with 20-minute papers, please. Sessions of 4-5 papers at no more than 10 minutes apiece would be ideal, but we’re open to any number of configurations that can be imagined. In your proposal, provide a title, name(s) and contact information of organizer(s), and a 250-500-word description of the session's aims, objectives, and format."
