Tuesday 17 July 2007

A tale of two conferences



As an aspiring academic of sorts, concern for the health of my CV drives me to attend conferences both in Britain and abroad - even when this begins (as it occasionally does in the wake of such occasions) to raise concern for my sanity. "Conference-land" is a peculiar place indeed - as you can discover at second-hand, without the pain and with extra entertainment, from the academic satires of David Lodge ("Changing Places" and "Small World"). I would recommend them to anyone either as a preparation or (better) a replacement for full exposure to an international confederation of those strange beings, bluntly yet so justly referred to by the Germans as Fachidioten (Fach meaning specialism or pigeonhole - you can work out the rest!).

But I'm not going to use this post simply as an outlet for railings against academia, even if I were to include myself among the satirical targets (as would only be fair, since I don't just go to these conferences to listen with an amused smile playing about my lips, but sometimes have to open them too). What provides the opportunity for writing this is my having recently attended two very different "conferences" or academic events, one under and one very much outside the auspices of the university system, which has prompted me to think about what these events can actually achieve.

The most recent was an international congress held in Zurich, the first of its kind I had been to. The programme lasted from Tuesday to Sunday, with up to twenty parallel sessions of talks to choose between on a typical morning. This necessitated a conference guide that was less of a "booklet" than a dauntingly thick book. If the to-be-published proceedings actually included everything, one would quickly have an encyclopedia. (The sheer horror of the notion makes me positively glad that my paper is very unlikely to be published.) A small army of Swiss students were on hand to press buttons, fill glasses, give directions and so forth. In the main hall of the conference building the confident meeting-and-greeting and the chink of espresso cups never ceased.

Here and in the seminar rooms around the edge of the central hall, alliances are constantly being negotiated - every word of encouragement or gesture of impatience a tacit reference to a position one shares or does not share with others, and behind that position ever-circulating anxieties about status, money, patronage and the ultimate worth of what one is engaged in. Teamwork is a key element of strategy, and the Americans know particularly well how to exploit it. The chair of a talk can use their introduction to put a speaker in a certain light, boost their morale and lay the tactical groundwork for what they are going to say; a questioner can bounce their question off an ally in the audience ("I know that X would like to ask a question on/speak to this issue"), or ask a speaker to expand on some mutually gratifying opinion, like an "assist" play in basketball; and few techniques are more cultivated than a skilful defence, protecting the speaker like a well-shielded quarterback from aggressive lines of questioning. Above all, however, one employs references, which means: names authorities, drops buzzwords, cites opinions, tells entertaining anecdotes (that may be self-deprecating on the surface, but invariably involve a glimpse into some high circle of academia one wishes to suggest one is privy to).

Where does the "pursuit of knowledge" come into all this, then? Well, partly by the same route general financial welfare is promoted by the capitalist regime of competition. If knowledge is the currency here, it may get a little torn and grubby through being passed around or fought over, but at least its ultimate increase thereby will work for the common good. The more professional risks and incentives are involved, the greater the need to master the material (sources, languages, facts, theories); and this mastery becomes like capital. One does not just give it away, or hide it under the floorboards, but invests it carefully in publications that are calculated to bring the dividends of professional advancement for their author, even as their knowledge is being put at the disposition of other scholars.

In this world, then, I felt a bit like a pauper, tramping past the loaded shop-windows of a swanky city mall, without any platinum cards to flash, my purseful of change already spent and no rich friends or bright ideas to help me out. Rather than just being a metaphor, that actually does describe how I felt sitting on the terrace at the after-conference party. I nursed a glass of wine, looking out over the roofs of the city in the late afternoon sun (the squeal of tramwheels rising faintly from the Limmatquai far below, the Ferris wheel on the fairground by the lake turning slowly), having heard the band exhaust their repertoire, and flirted desultorily with a Korean girl, the one person I could find who felt more out of place than I did.

The second "conference" was quite differently organised (so much so that I advisedly place it between inverted commas). It took place in a hamlet in Lower Saxony, north Germany, and was occasioned and preceded by a most unusual modern dance performance. This took place in a barn before an audience of (at most) forty, the majority curious villagers from the surrounding area, the rest specially-invited friends of the organiser (shown below - in the blue shirt - acting as usher/compere):




After an unexpected and mysterious prelude in which someone (we could not yet see who) moved around slowly, spider-fashion, directly over the heads of the audience on a translucent sheet of perspex, we scaled ladders and hay-bales to reach the main performance space, a stage constructed as it were on the second "floor" of the barn. At the back was the musical half of the duo - the drummer Fritz Hauser - and tiptoeing and circling backward and forward over the stage was the dancer Anna Huber, now more fully visible. (The photo below is from her publicity.)

Both artists are Swiss, internationally recognised and highly professional, and doubtless more used to performing to well-heeled audiences of modern dance aficionados in Zurich, but having let themselves in for this peculiar one-off event, they had to accept that the atmosphere was going to be rather different (not least in the literal sense of being quite dusty).

And it was different - not only during the performance, which the numerous children present, as well as most of the adults, obviously found entirely new (it was for me as well), and by turns athletic, hypnotically rhythmic and playfully abrupt. But in the theoretical discussion devoted to it the day afterward, too, some of the spirit of encounter and exploration persisted. In beginning our "conference" with the themes of the body and performance one could scarcely say that we were breaking with present academic fashion; but in the way we were able to approach them - with a real, physical example still fresh in our memories, as well as having the performers there to give their own perspective and contrast with those coming from philosophy, literature, music, pedagogy, and even neuroscience - there were undoubtedly some unique advantages. And there was an atmosphere infinitely more congenial than that of the conference-hall in sitting around an old wooden table in a country-house conservatory with glasses of wine, a chaise-longue in the corner to recline on, a beautiful panelled library next door, and only the occasional tractor puttering down the lane outside to disturb the peace.

What is achieved through such events, though, when, through their informality and eccentricity, they fall below a certain level of professionalism? That would be the obvious critical response here. But in fact I would propose that the danger is still of being too "professional" - in one's attitudes and anxieties, not in the level of argument. Even in such an independent setting as this, one finds oneself casting around for impressive-sounding references, seeking to prove favourite points, harbouring half-conscious ambitions or resentments in the back of one's mind.

The moral one is tempted to draw is - you can take the man out of the university, but it's not so easy to take the university out of the man. And that is what limits the scope of any such forum, whether in the university or out, independent of the more superficial issues of who its participants are, how its results are publicised, or how specialised or difficult its themes are imagined to be. One needs always to be mindful of this if one is searching for genuine independence and universality - qualities which are after all attainable within the present university system too (just as capitalism does not abolish charity!), and are above all tested, I think, through teaching.

Here one has to proceed as one does in everyday life, and as one really ought to at a conference or any other event. That means - through sharing and patient narration of knowledge, and through appeal, not to privileged texts or arcane "discourses", but simply to reason and common experience. Such enforced modesty is what makes teaching - and I don't mean to Master's or PhD students who are already climbing the career ladder, but to undergraduates - so important. It shouldn't be seen as an arduous duty tied to economic needs; rather it is just the point where the academic economy of knowledge cedes to a more utopian possibility - knowledge as a gift.

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