I answer the invitation to consider “medieval studies in the twenty-first century” by considering one of its mysteries in the twentieth. Thirty years ago, the work of D. W. Robertson, Jr. (who retired from Princeton in 1980 and died in 1992), polarized the field: it was the stuff of midnight debates and broken friendships; it gave his department a fearsome notoriety; it made and unmade careers. In a celebrated 1987 stocktaking, Robertson was the problem the field could not shake (Patterson 3–9, 26–39). But from this prominence, he did not dwindle; he vanished. Just as medieval literary studies steered hard into the cultural turn, he disappeared from its stage except for straw-man cameos; by 1999, The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature could spare no breath to mention him. So who stole Robertson?

Huntington's disease. Perowne, the neurosurgeon in Ian McEwan's novel Saturday (2005), readily diagnoses the genetic abnormality that afflicts a petty criminal who is assaulting him. It is like a tic with Perowne. He cannot stop himself from analyzing the biological causes of the poor emotional control, the violent temper, of the man who is mugging him. Perowne regards himself as a “professional reductionist,” a man of science who “can't help thinking it's down to invisible folds and kinks of character, written in code, at the level of molecules” (281). A lifetime of medical experience has led him to conclude that much of our behavior is dictated by biology. But Huntington's disease represents an extreme case. For someone with this condition, the “future is fixed and easily foretold” (94).

Violence as a public and private practice is a constant. Furthermore, it belongs in the political axis since political institutions measure, plan, and distribute it, inscribing and administering it according to their productive and programmatic interests.

Violence is adaptable and acquires different forms and formats, which range from the most concrete corporeal reality to the infliction of punishment on the symbolic and emotional registers of the subject. It is mobile but enduring, adjusting to the emergence of new social subjects. The enduring struggle against violence resituates and changes it, bringing about the penalization of practices considered abusive, such as long workdays, certain school regulations, or the beating of women.

Critical art ensemble staged the theory of electronic civil disobedience (ECD) as a gamble against a form of the all-too-present future of “dead capital,” otherwise known as late capital. In our 1994 book The Electronic Disturbance, Critical Art Ensemble argued that dead capital was being constituted as an electronic commodity form in constant flow (11). Capital had been, was, and would continue to be reensembling itself, as the contemporary elite moved from centralized urban areas to decentralized and deterritorialized cyberspace (13). For Critical Art Ensemble, it was clear that cyberspace, as it was called then, was the next stage of struggle. The activist reply to this change was to teleport the system of trespass and blockage that was historically anchored to civil disobedience to this new phase of economic flows in the age of networks: “As in civil disobedience, primary tactics in electronic civil disobedience are trespass and blockage. Exits, entrances, conduits, and other key spaces must be occupied by the contestational force in order to bring pressure on legitimized institutions engaged in unethical or criminal actions” (Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Disobedience 18). As we imagined it in the early 1990s, electronic disturbance was the core gesture that could initiate a new “performative matrix” (Electronic Disturbance 57).

For Jorge Luis Borges, local color was overrated. In “the argentine writer and tradition” (1951), borges responded to the charges of critics who valued indigenous traditions and themes above all else; for Borges, just as Shakespeare could draw on Scandinavian history and Racine from the memories of the ancient world, so the Argentine writer should be permitted to mine the veins of the Western European tradition for the rich ore of literary art (Frisch 43). When the national writer does wish to produce a “truly native” text, he suggests, this should be accomplished with great subtlety, even to the extent of obscuring altogether the indigenous hues of local color in favor of an unspoken affiliation with the authorial homeland. A prime example of this technique, he avows, can be found in the Koran:

A few days ago, I discovered a curious confirmation of the way in which what is truly native can and often does dispense with local color; I found this confirmation in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon observes that in the Arab book par excellence, the Koran, there are no camels; I believe that if there ever were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this lack of camels would suffice to prove that it is Arab. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were particularly Arab; they were, for him, a part of reality, and he had no reason to single them out, while the first thing a forger, a tourist, or an Arab nationalist would do is bring on the camels, whole caravans of camels on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned; he knew he could be Arab without camels. I believe that we Argentines can be like Mohammed; we can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color. (181)

In advocating a biocultural approach to literature, one is claiming an ineluctable relation between science and culture. Biology, for example, is as intrinsic to the embodied state of readers and writers as history and culture are intrinsic to the professional bodies of knowledge known as science and biology. To think of science without including a historical and cultural analysis would be like thinking of the literary text without the surrounding weave of active or dormant discursive knowledges. It is similarly limited to think of literature—or to debate its properties or existence—without considering the network of meanings we might learn from a scientific perspective. Combined, these propositions link with a more synthetic argument: that the biological without the cultural, or the cultural without the biological, is doomed to be reductionist at best and inaccurate at worst.

“Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,” William Wordsworth famously wrote in the Preface to the 1802 version of Lyrical Ballads. “[I]t is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science. Emphatically it may be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare hath said of man, ‘that he looks before and after.‘ He is the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying every where with him relationship and love” (xxxvii).

Observers of the recent political polarizations of western and Islamic culture might be forgiven for concluding that we are living in a new Middle Ages (Holsinger; Eco). Such narratives as “the clash of civilizations” (Huntington) and “the rise of the modern West” (McNeill; which beguiles with the dangerous fantasy of the fall of the atavistic East) have attained the status of cultural mythologies. Conversely, modern Arab cultures have never forgotten the shock of their first encounters with medieval Europeans in the Levant and al-Andalus: the legacies of crusade, countercrusade, occupation, and re-conquest. Extremists have politicized the orientalist divide described by Edward Said to create their own postcolonial mythologies. We are now in danger of projecting current impasses historically backward until Islam and the West seem always to have been enemies, inimical by nature and throughout history. Doing so would reify East and West and render them monolithic. Most troubling, such mythologies obscure the uneasy, strategic, and often stunningly productive interchanges that enrich what might better be considered as a complex intercultural evolution. The deep roots of the encounter between Islam and Christendom—the influence of Arabic science, literature, and philosophy and of Islamic forms of thought, historiography, economics, and cultural practice—deserve a richer, less politicized examination. It would be useful to try to see medieval Islamic cultures write back, from a time before European hegemony, decentering and defamiliarizing their Western neighbors. What would a medieval world look like if it constructed itself not as a tedious intermission between classical and Renaissance enlightenments, but rather as a heterogeneous fretwork of contact zones, aversions, and transmissions between sophisticated and acquisitive cultures? This medieval world could better serve our own twenty-first-century global culture, whose multiplex networks exceed simple polarization. To this outcome, the study of Arabic writing in the premodern and early modern world is key.

In October 1992, the united nations security council requested the secretary-general to appoint an impartial commission to examine and record the atrocities committed in the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Two years later, this commission produced its final report. Some of the goriest pages in this catalogue of infamy are dedicated to the explosion on the Markale open-air market in central Sarajevo that took place around noon on Saturday, 5 February 1994. The report describes it as “the worst attack on civilians during the siege” of Sarajevo, citing that it killed at least 66 persons and wounded 197 (781). This explosion can be said to represent the turning point in the Bosnian war, which by that point had lasted some twenty-two months without any reasonable resolution in sight. David Binder, a New York Times reporter and the author of the most detailed account of this atrocity to date, writes that it

Stockhausen aside, how can anyone call the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers a work of art? Of what value is such a designation? What does calling the destruction of the Twin Towers a work of art assert about (performance) art, the authenticity of “what really happened,” and social morality during and after the first decade of the twenty-first century? To even begin to address these questions, I need to refer to the history of the avant-garde—because it has been avant-garde artists who for more than a century have called for the violent destruction of existing aesthetic, social, and political systems.

The history of the book is everywhere. Intersecting with the thoroughgoing historicism that has dominated scholarly conversation in the last several decades, the study of material texts has flourished in all fields of literary study. An already vast bibliography is growing exponentially as graduate courses in the history of the book proliferate, universities establish centers for those who study material texts, presses publish series dedicated to book history, and more and more scholars recognize the fascination of studying anything “… and the book.” This field of inquiry has been newly codified, not only within numerous institutional structures but also in the most etymological sense, for codify ultimately derives, through code, from codex. Scholars of book history are eager to excavate the codes that are embedded within the codex—that is, more generally, the systems of thought that are both revealed and created by the physical structures through which ideas are expressed. Their true subject is neither the disembodied poem floating free of its material support nor the nuts and bolts of quiring and print runs but “the sociology of texts,” in D. F. McKenzie's memorable phrase (Bibliography). The history of the book thus offers scholars their own kind of system, for it draws methodologies together with theories in a particularly compelling way.

We have never been biological. Across disciplines, human beings are hybrids, to use Bruno Latour's formulation, inhabiting the realm of what Donna Haraway calls “natureculture.” Literature and biology, art history and physics, chemical engineering and philosophy approach the question of “human being” differently, but the tacit acceptance of a hybrid (natureculture) world is common to all these fields. So why does the question of the biological seem to be looming larger in the humanities in recent years?