Interview: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
When director Robert Zemeckis and award-winning author Neil Gaiman adapted the epic Beowulf for performance capture animation, in 2007, they took some liberties with the narrative. A lot of liberties. Perhaps the most, er, striking difference between the original poem and the film is the latter's portrayal of Grendel's mother as a succubus, a temptress worthy of being played by Angelina Jolie. Not surprisingly, that's exactly who got the part.
Nonetheless, Jolie's seductive characterization poses a question: Is the line dividing the sublime from the monstrous really all that clear? According to the filmmakers, not so much. Jeffrey J. Cohen, director of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute at George Washington University, agrees. In the interview below, Cohen argues that monsters inhabit a liminal space in medieval literature, whereby the social orders from which they've been exiled become sites of continual contestation. Think the same could be said of the "monsters" hiding beneath our uniquely American mattresses?
Q: Taking seriously the idea that alterities, in terms of identity constructs, are not monolithic, what do the monsters in Beowulf—Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon—reveal about the mediation of estrangement in the medieval English imaginary, and how does that fit within more general trajectories of 'the inhuman'?
A: Thanks for the invitation to make a grand, transhistorical (and ultimately insufficient) claim about the state of being human. Humanity has never been all it's promised to be. We are always already estranged. But that's not a bad thing: Our distance from ourselves, our essential inhumanity, is a source of joy and art, as well as anxiety.
Cultures tend to think of themselves as set apart from others, as unique and likely superior. Heroic individuals carry an extra burden of differentiation within that group. The monster threatens to swallow those fragile differences—sometimes quite literally, as Grendel is fond of ingesting his cannibalistic meals all the way to hands and feet. This forced becoming-monster of the warriors he ingests suggests that the line between the two was always tentative, always inadequate. And look at his mother: What has she done wrong? She is angry that her only son has been killed. She attacks the hall to take proper vengeance for her loss, one life for one life. She retrieves her son's arm to keep with his cadaver, rebuking its use as a mere trophy (its use as a part of someone else's story, not hers). For this comprehensible act she is murdered in her underwater hall. Grendel and his mother are the closest thing we get to an aboriginal presence in the text. They inhabit the murky and discomforting space where one people explores its foundational violence toward others.
The dragon is just as complicated. He guards his treasure as a dragon should and takes vengeance when his precious objects are plundered—that is, when he is drawn into a human story from which he'd prefer to remain aloof. It's unclear that the elderly Beowulf (who admittedly has had his home burned) should attack the creature in return. At least, that's what the survivors assert, since they are facing genocide as a result of his death at the dragon's fangs. The poem Beowulf is entrancingly ambivalent, loving the things it consigns to oblivion. It's as bleak as King Lear, but a song of mixed elements, unlike Shakespeare's drenched play.
So, when you ask about the general trajectories of 'the inhuman', all I can say is that if monsters are always knocking down the doors we've barred against them and ravaging our homes, then their repeated arrival might also being telling us that we've never been able to possess solitary and circumscribed lives for long.
Q: Sticking with Beowulf for a minute, you've previously written that Grendel "is a cultural Other for whom conformity to societal dictates is an impossibility because those dictates are not comprehensible to him." Can you expound upon the threat posed by monsters, like Grendel, to social authority, particularly with regard to the role of abjection in narratizing selfhood?
A: I'd want to qualify that statement by underscoring that I meant that Grendel is imagined as the one for whom law and the social order are incomprehensible. He's a projection of a dominating culture's values onto an outsider, an indigenous figure, perhaps, whose supposed ignorance of how the world works is what allows the taking of his land and life. But from another point of view, Grendel understands exactly what he is doing. He intrudes into the hall of Heorot just as the creation narrative of Genesis is being sung. That story, if it had been continued, would turn to Cain's murder of Abel and the curse that God places upon him as a result. Let's not forget that Cain doesn't accept his curse quietly—"My punishment is greater than I can bear!" he declares, and God listens to him, marks him, and preserves him. Does Grendel, son of Cain, get to complain? A little: As he dies, he delivers an unrecorded song (the Old English word is sweg). Though typically translated as "howl" or "scream," the word has to do with melody, and I don't think those dying words lack content, even if no one wants to hear what he sings. So, the threat of the monster might be to expose the violence through which social orders are established and the abjections by which community solidifies. Grendel's song is rather similar, I think, to Cain's complaint, except no God is attentive to him.
Q: Can medieval monsters be said to inhabit a similar space as Agamben's homo sacer, whereby they are included within the homopolitical, social, or even juridical order by their exclusion from these realms, such that monsters not only disfigure, but mirror the normative politics from which they've been expelled?
A: The short answer is yes. In my own work I haven't used Agamben's writing all that much, perhaps because I am less interested in biopolitics (which can end up being anthropocentric in ways that render arguments foregone conclusions) than what is being called "speculative realism" and "object-oriented ontology." I'm finding writers like Graham Harman and Levi Bryant (and before them, Bruno Latour) more useful for itinerant modes of thought.
So, the monster is a regulatory device: It warns us to adopt proper modes of relating to the social or risk outlawry, loss of humanity. But the monster is also an invitation. He or she compels us to tread the paths that are supposed to be forbidden ("Stay off the moors!") and to wander sublime spaces where maybe our lives are in peril, but maybe also a more capaciously framed mode of experiencing reality is evident. One way to look at the werewolf is as a normalizing mechanism—control your body or risk animality. But there is another way to see that creature (and I love that word "creature" because it means a thing that will have been created; creature has the future perfect tense of the the Latin verb "to create" embedded within it). The werewolf is the one who knows the pull of the moon, the pleasures of the sublunary, the vastness of the world at night, the fact that the wilderness is not external to the city or the civilized body. We don't have to choose rejecting or romanticizing the monster, since both of those possibilities are inevitably in play.
Q: Okay, switching gears. How can an understanding of medieval cultural heterogeneity and identity formation create space for re-ontologizing postcolonial temporalities and pluralizing postcolonial futures?
A: Like all of your questions, that's a difficult one, more worthy of a book than a brief response. I have tried in my work to develop the idea of the 'midcolonial': We are never post-anything, strictly speaking; temporality is thick; the present carries within it a multiplicity of nonsuperseded pasts and is pregnant with numerous futures that can connect to those pasts in various ways. My colleague, Jonathan Gil Harris, is good at mapping the potential explosivity of such temporal touching in his book Untimely Matter, one of my favorite investigations of time's substantiality. The Middle Ages as middle to nothing in particular is useful for making these points as well. Even if medieval theologians tended to think of time as a bounded eternity outside of which God sees all (thus eroding the distinction among past, present, and future), there were also more speculative modes of thinking about time's complicated machines, typically in genres like romance, secular history, and ethnography. The Middle Ages were just as complicated and just as midcolonial as this future of theirs that we inhabit right now.
Q: How has medieval theory rehistoricized signifiers of political contestation—race, gender, nationalism, etc.—in a manner that amplifies competing, even agonistic, discourses, without abrogating material objects or corporeal difference?
A: Any medievalist who pays sufficient attention to colleagues in fields like postcolonial theory, critical race studies, disability studies, gender theory, you name it, knows that race, gender, nationalism, identity are (1) always Big Designators that hide a diversity of competing interests; (2) knowable only in their local interactions through analyses that foreground the uneven workings of power; (3) nonetheless heavy with history in ways that demand that local specificities be in constant conversation with longer durations. Look at any identity category long enough and it breaks down into conflict, competition, heterogeneity. Bodily difference and materiality don't get abrogated through such analysis, but attended to.They speak.
Q: Finally, media- and state-sanctioned security metanarratives often describe international conflicts, like the "War on Terror" in terms of religious tension, particularly with regard to a perceived "clash of civilizations" between the West and Islam. What does medievalist scholarship teach us about the Eurocentric bias and false homogenization the heart of these views, as well as the origins of modern Orientalism?
A: That question has preoccupied some very smart medievalists, most notably Bruce Holsinger and (in an excellent essay just out in PMLA) Geraldine Heng. Suzanne Conklin Akbari also has a very good book on how medieval orientalisms differed from, yet still connect to contemporary ones. Stephanie Trigg and Tom Prendergast have done a convincing job of arguing that medieval studies itself is a form of medievalism, so why not embrace the fact that our profession is part of current, as well as ancient, history, and bring our expertise to bear upon urgent issues like how the clash of civilizations model arose, why it circulates, what damage it accomplishes. The question of who will listen to us at a time when anti-intellectualism is rampant is salient, but that doesn't mean we should stop talking.
And no matter what our topic, no matter what its relevance to international conflicts and noxious prejudices, I do think that medievalists (like all who make their living as intellectuals) are called to a conversation without end about what constitutes an ethical and humane world, and how we bring about a more just future, and how the study of the distant past can assist that project.
Jeffrey J. Cohen is Professor of English and Director of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute at George Washington University. He is the author or editor of numerous books about the Middle Ages, including Monster Theory, Medieval Identity Machines, Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain, and The Postcolonial Middle Ages. You can read more of his work at www.jeffreyjeromecohen.com and www.inthemedievalmiddle.com, and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/jeffreyjcohen.
Posted by Kris Coffield at 6/12/2011 1:29 AM 
Categories: Interviews
Tags: jeffrey jerome cohen midcolonial medieval studies
Categories: Interviews
Tags: jeffrey jerome cohen midcolonial medieval studies
Okay, I'll break with an open question - what's the significance of the refiguring of "Beowulf" to the present-day European political mind? Beyond saying that the adaptation that the clip is taken from testifies to the poem's transhistorical longevity, what does the act of reinterpretation say about the culture itself?
I guess I'm contrasting "Beowulf" with Shakespeare's works in terms of forging a Western identity. Shakespeare is taught in from 7th grade forward in most schools, at least one play each year. So Shakespeare has had a huge impact on the identity structures of the West, and not just in the literary sense. I find it interesting that Cohen compares the "ambivalence" of "Beowulf" to Shakespeare, since the Bard is known for muddying class, gender, racial boundaries, but in a way that sometimes seems critique misguided monarchical authority as being out of touch with some external civility, rather than engaging in more fundamental normative critique.
I think my question is textual. Does "Beowulf" as an ambivalent text open up space for us to perform dialogical readings, rather than dialectical interpretation, where the first process describes an intersubjective reading experience and the second, by contrast, refers to fixing of the distance between reader and text, and therefore initiates a reterritorialization of the reader's ideology onto the text, a colonization of his or her identity onto the interpretive act? Hope that makes some sense.
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I'll have to come back to comment on the rest of the interview (amazing, as always) after letting it digest, but I want to take issue with the line, "why not embrace the fact that our profession is part of current, as well as ancient, history, and bring our expertise to bear upon urgent issues like how the clash of civilizations model arose, why it circulates, what damage it accomplishes."
I completely agree that medievalists, like all intellectuals, should engage with urgent issues. No questions. And I agree that it should be done no matter what the intellectual climate. But I question Jeffrey J. Cohen's use of the word "expertise." Doesn't that reify the power/knowledge situation (discussed so often on this site) underscoring the very systems he spends most of the interview critiquing?
I suppose he's simply contending that urgent issues like postcolonialism, security, temporality, etc. can be read through the medieval period, which is his area of specialization. But I also think there's something to be said for Edward Said's notion of perpetual amateurism, since once you discuss "expertise" you're necessarily fixing a body of knowledge as concrete, as an empirical substance, unmoving, over which one can claim mastery. To borrow the pervious commenter's words, you are no longer allowing the area of study be a subject of dialogue, to do work on you.
Seeing perpetual amateurism as a sort of "inbetweenness," I think we can choose to suspend ideological hardening through continual questioning of, most importantly, our own textual and ideological assumptions, such that the role of the intellectual is to constantly problematize, to "live in the hypen" as it were. I realize that this places a premium on subjectivity, but in order to achieve any sort of material transformation, or dislodging of one specific identity construct - American, white, capitalist, human, or whatever - we must be sure to remain open to idea of movement, since both we and the text are always in motion. In other words, the text (and I mean that in the general, Derridaean sense) is of equal status to ourselves, not something we can dominate, and thus has its own identity which we must respect.
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This is probably an extremely obvious assumption and I come from a discipline and institution that's no sanctuary for progressive theory, but regarding the Beowulf v. Shakespeare debate, Is there not something to be said for Beowulf as an Old English poem, while Shakespeare's works were written in Early Modern English? Obviously, the Norman Conquest has a pretty major impact on the forms of identity as crafted and construed by the English language. Beyond that, if we accept that articulations of identity are tied to language, and that articulations can effect material changes (and not in some Chomskyan "instinctive generatively" kind of way), can we also mark a dialogue between the past forms of identity (contained in Beowulf) and those of Shakespeare's plays, re-experiencing and re-expressing of the former within the latter along the lines Peter suggests, but within a historical context as far as the evolution of the language itself is concerned?
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I just read Eileen Joy's comment on the interview with Karl Steel, where she says that biopolitics fails to account to techno-science, cyborg structure, and the economics dismemberment. I'm not sure that I entirely agree with her, but she raises an interesting point about how braking down the divide between the in/human may not go far enough toward redressing the foundational violence of an increasingly cyborged society.
I would assume that monsters, and narratives of the monstrous, have adapted to these developments as well - this accounts, in part, for the changes made to the Beowulf CGI adaptation, I think. But has the whole concept of 'the inhuman' or 'the monstrous' shifted, become more fluid? Clearly, the answer is yes - just look at movies like the Matrix or Terminator, which depict latter-day monsters are technological masters. What I find most interesting, however, is that these latter-day monsters are typically coupled with narratives of utter destruction, total annihilation, end-of-humanity scenarios.
So, it would seem that the techno-science of which Eileen Joy speaks pushes a re-reification of the divide between in/human at the same time both are being reconceived, and that's something I think Foucaultian accounts of biopower, in its emphasis on technologies used to control bodies, can speak to. At the same time, the space that monsters inhabit seems now to be less aboriginal and more future-oriented, reflecting newfound fears of technological uncertainty, singularity, etc. In fact, that's one of the prime questions I think must be asked of today's monsters - if they represent a break from the social order and regulatory device, what is it that we are discomforted by, now, that begs regulation?
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To Ryan's comment above, I would just add here that I'm not sure Foucault's accounts of biopower will help us 100% with navigating the thorny ethical thickets of bodies/body parts in the era of, not just techno-science, but also of transnational "liquid," speculative, and hyper-networked [and sometimes also black market/underground] economies over which no centralized form of power had total, and in some cases, even partial authority. So, while Foucault can certainly help us think about the *regulation* of bodies and body-technologies under certain regimes of authority, I think the situation we face now also calls for re-thinking what "authority" actually is anymore within a hyper-networked & hyper-speculativized global economy. I'm thinking in terms of politics, I guess--how does one formulate a politics that takes account of this state of affairs and maybe also attempts to carve out "safe" spaces for free identity formations and lifeworld choices within this world dis/order? Haraway has called for acts of hybrid contamination and radical non-purity under the aegis of a "renewed kinship" system radicalized by "concretely affectionate ties to non-human others." I buy the first half, but not the second, which is too romantic.
As to Ryan's question about what today's monsters might be telling us about what we are discomforted by now, "that begs regulation," I'm not sure that it's 100% different from what Jeffrey has outlined above in the interview and that, historically, has always troubled us: the loss of discrete, bounded identities.
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@Peter, does one have to choose? I think Beowulf and the corpus of Shakespeare's plays are both massive and loose enough to enable all kinds of reading strategies. Both have in common irreducible heterogeneity; they are both collections of narratives, not seamless stories.
@Michelle, I believe strongly in the power and promise of amateurism. Carolyn Dinshaw has been working on this issue for quite some time, and medieval studies would not be what it is without ardent amateurs. And in many ways I am deeply amateur at much of what I do. BUT medievalists also have a training in philology, codicology, historicism and comparative studies that is kind of rare, and this training counts for something. Not that it gives a right to silence others or to superiority, but it does have some impact upon ability to place recent stories within vast time frames. I like very much the idea of perpetual in-betweeness.
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@Richard: and thus Beowulf is inaccessible to most readers without a translation ... and is therefore an amazing classroom text for teaching how words have enduring power and inbuilt failures. I always teach it in with multiple translations brought in to emphasize this process. And Shakespeare is also taught in a kind of translation, via the necessary glosses and marginal notes.
@Ryan and Eileen: I would only add, troubled AND enthralled. There are pleasures to the identity loss that the monster offers; we desire this thing we fear.
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I just want to add something to this thread that I mentioned in a more recent one. When we look at what's happening to Muslims today in comparison to Ryan's techno-monsters, I think we see a vindication of Jeffrey's point about the pleasure/fear simultaneity. As Kris describes in another post, Muslims are seen as antimodern, resistant to modernity. As such, they're made into the "monsters" constantly threatening modernity; as long as neoliberal modernity persists, so will its monsters. At the same time, the "progress" so often associated with modernity, mostly notably technological advancement, is also caricatured horrifically in the ways Ryan mentioned. So, both antimodernism and hypermodernism, from the viewpoint of neoliberal modernity) are made "monstrous." Seems like a paradox until you consider Jeffrey's statement, in which case it makes sense. Anything can become monstrous given the right combination of abjection and desire, where abjection becomes desirable. Therefore, both of the abuse of modernity and resistance to modernity are made to inhabit a shared space, if not a shared temporality.
What I think needs to be kept in mind is that the monsters of hypermodernity are proleptic, while the monsters of antimodernity are real people. Here, I wonder if we can employ Lacan to say that with regard to hypermodernity, monsters reflect a fear of/desire for a corrupted 'Imaginary', the idealized self-image that becomes the space of relation between the ego and its images, whereas antimodern monsters reflect a fear of/desire for the 'Real', or that which is pre-imaginary, resists representation, the residue of articulation.
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@Jeffrey: Thanks for the response! I don't mean 'amateurism' in the sense of independent scholarship. I mean 'amateurism' in the sense of constantly problematizing and 'in-betweenness', which you acknowledged And I concede that medievalists have a number of special skills most people don't. The most basic to me are knowledge of historic languages and manuscript studies. You're right that those skills count for something, but I think that even within those contexts one should be repeatedly questioning one's own assumptions, never seeing oneself as a 'master' of knowledge in any given area. Once you see yourself as having mastered knowledge, you reify that knowledge into a cohesive, unmediable whole - in other words, an ideology. I think that's where anti-intellectualism seeps in. In a sense, the anti-intellectual furor shaking our country isn't a fear of fixed knowledge, for isn't an organization like FOX News extremely ideological and rigid in its assumptions? Instead, it's a fear of allowing knowledge to be posited as something fluid, always open to questioning and revision, eliding control. Just my opinion!
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Michelle, I am with you! What you so well articulate is in fact foundational to my teaching (and writing) credo, which I entitle "against secure knowledge":
http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2011/02/we-fuse-like-family.html
Thanks for continuing the conversation. How much better this world would be with more flexible thinkers, with a little more humility, with less declaiming and more mutual investigation.
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@Eilieen - I suppose my question is: When have identities ever been discrete and bounded? I would argue that they never have been, that identities are always fluid, unstable, particularly in medieval tales. For example, in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" Gawain's keeping of Lady Bertilak's girdle and breaking of his promise to give whatever he gains reveals conflicting ideals of knighthood, i.e. honor and virtue. When Gawain learns that the Green Knight is Lord Bertilak, he is ashamed, but the inability to reconcile virtue and honor demonstrates the complexity of knighthood as an identity, showing that any assumed identity construct emanates from myriad situations and cannot be made into a concrete whole. In other words, identity is always in flux, even over the course of a few days, or a single day.
Therefore, I don't think we can be satisfied with the speculation that identity loss is the hallmark of monster madness, as concrete identities are always a fallacy. I concede that the illusion of a stable identity is a powerful one - just look what's been done in the name of protecting a common "American" or "Christian" heritage. For me, though, I think it's more apt to say that monsters evolve from challenges to our ability to CONTROL the process of identity formation, steer it in a direction that matches our own desires and intentions. That said, control of such a process is also mediated by Others, and that's where I think you idea of a philosophy beyond biopolitics can help.
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@Ryan Onaga: I pretty much agree with everything you say here; I never meant to imply that we ever had, in the past, bounded and or discrete identities: and as in the past, so too, today, BUT: I still think the desire to believe that such might be the case still fuels some of the fear of, and also the enjoyment, of monsters [Grendel, for example, not only kills his victims, but also eats them, and part of the palpable anxiety that circulates around the figure of Grendel in the poem is partly an effect of other characters' inability to consign him to a discrete species/identity category: he slips and slides between human, demon, giant, animal, "civilized," "savage," etc. categories. Of course concrete identities are always a fallacy; nevertheless, we still have the political problem of working out certain security and human rights issues in which we have to utilize, or grant, if even provisional, some kind of "status" to certain "identities": human, animal, male, female, queer, trans-, cyborg, etc. in order to actually protect "persons" or "actants" or "beings" or other types of entities [which could even be a forest or silicon] from harm and injury. And we have to do this at a time when everything, in a sense, is up for grabs as regarding what "counts" as "life," etc. Another way of putting this might be: we live in difficult times.
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