McKenzie Wark on Tue, 1 Oct 96 02:05 MET |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
Re: nettime: the art of debating |
Confessions of a Conference Junky... Perhaps its a cultural thing. As someone from an English speaking culture, the format of the public conference seems the most natural thing in the world. But i was interested in Geert's irritation with the form. The spectacle of the conference itself is, as we all know, not usually where its at. Its a pretext for a PR event that generates TV and radio interviews -- in Europe a surprising amount of these. Its also a public airing of a few riffs by a few people that a whole bunch of other people sit through in silence, to create the pretext for subsequent conversations. Now, this is where it really gets interesting. A good conference has spaces and times where the speakers can get together, but also where the 'public' can get in on the act, too. As an inveterate conference junky, i can only report that for me that's usually the fun part. Its in the chaos of randomly bumping into interesting folks doing all sorts of different things, around the edges of the public spectacle. The net won't ever replace that. Its true that conferences are also about the production and circulation of intagible kinds of value -- 'prestige'. They are almost by definition inequitable events. Somebody gets to speak and somebody doesn't. But i think the way to view that is in terms of opportunity. Is there a fair distribution of the chance to occupy time on the floor? Or is it always the same people? Lots of subdivisions of the public world clog up and grind to a halt when they become reproducers, over and over, of the exaggerated prestige of a few people -- usually a few cynical operators who have figured out how to collude to this effect. But even that doesn't last forever -- its a perfect opportunity for somebody to mount an 'interruption', to insert some static, some noise into the party. I guess the thing that really worries me is that nobody gets much training thesedays in how to do that sort of stuff. I was probably one of the last people to learn this stuff from now totally defunct labour movement organisations. I don't know that subsequent social movements put much store by training people not only how to speak but when, and according to what kind of rhetorical tactics. Certainly in Australia those kinds of training grounds are in decline. Can't speak for elsewhere. Its a basic ability for a media artist / activist / critic -- speech. __________________________________________ "We no longer have roots, we have aerials." http://www.mcs.mq.edu.au/~mwark -- McKenzie Wark -- * distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission * <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, * collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets * more info: majordomo@is.in-berlin.de and "info nettime" in the msg body * URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@is.in-berlin.de