Notes from a Conference

I just came back from a two-day conference here in the Valley on violence. It was one of my fellowship duties to attend the conference and to provide a formal response to one of the papers presented, which I happily did. Unlike most other academic conferences I've attended, this was a small affair - about 15 people attended - and instead of standing at a podium reading papers to an audience, the presenters were asked to circulate their papers several weeks in advance and then to give short, informal overviews of their papers while sitting around a large conference table. To my way of thinking, this format is far preferable to the usual way of doing things, insofar as it not only provides everyone with a common textual foundation from which to start a discussion, but it also allows for a more intimate and unstructured exchange of ideas. I enjoyed all this very much, and the narrow thematic focus - we were all people who study violence in one form or another, albeit from different disciplinary perspectives - made it all the more engaging.

That said, there's one thing that perplexed me about the conference - the same thing, in fact, that has perplexed me about the many other conferences I've attended. This is the question of why I bother taking notes at these things. By this point in my career I've amassed a sizable pile of scribblings on all sorts of media - legal pads, post-its, napkins, the backs of printouts - created during conferences, seminars, and the like. Sometimes these represent ideas or themes that occur to me while listening to a speaker and that I may use during the ensuing discussion as prompts for a question I'd like to raise or an observation I'd like to make. More often, though, they're a collection of phrases or ideas that seemed worth jotting down at the time but whose coherence, even five minutes after the conference has ended, has completely vanished. I don't know why I keep these notes - it's not as though I'm ever going to look at them - but, more to the point, I don't know why I take them in the first place.

I suspect it has something to do with the note-taking training we receive in college - not only the notion that we're supposed to take notes when we're undertaking some sort of serious intellectual endeavor, but, perhaps more powerfully, the notion that we should be seen to be taking notes in order to look fully engaged or knowledgeable. Every college student will be familiar with the experience of sitting in class, daydreaming away, when suddenly the room erupts in a flurry of notetaking prompted by something the professor has said, something that the collective wisdom of the room has determined to be important or, at the very least, likely to appear on the exam. What do you do in such a situation? Of course you begin taking notes as well, even if you don't really know what's been said, so as not to look like you don't know what's going on. Notetaking becomes more about performance than about obtaining or retaining knowledge. It becomes a social activity rather than an intellectual one.

The tangible results of this activity are, as I say, completely worthless from an intellectual perspective, but I nevertheless believe that these strange, incomprehensible jottings do have some value. That value is, I believe, aesthetic. These notes are quite poetic, in their way, and they evoke all sorts of associations and images that often have nothing to do with whatever matter was actually being discussed at the time of their creation, but that seem to exist in their own dreamlike world. By way of illustrating this idea, I herewith present to you, gentle reader, a transcript of the notes I took during six hours of presentations and discussions:

- perlocutionary speech produces an effect - persuasive speech
- elocutionary - speech that's an effect in itself - apologizing, etc.
- focus of paper - this is the violent speech act
- simultaneity of physical & linguistic activity explodes agency
- anonymous speech - attempt to deny your own agency

- Frame the everyday w/i the global

- how does violence become normal?
- innocents & guilty
- complicity in acceptance of wall as normal
- Bergeson

- radical right is central component of "mainstream" conservatism
- Alice in Wonderland

- how to read the body? How to tell who's a Muslim by visible signs
- Absence of standing languages
- aesthetic vs. political representation -
aesthetic assumes tacit consent by Muslims
- in colonial period, punishment for traitors is to deny religious rites on death
- doesn't want to stablize given Muslim subject
- consent & assimilation
- Brian Masumi on fear - post 9/11 - thru color coded system gvt invades bodies
- loss of words
- tendency to conflate perpetrators of violence w/ causes of violence
- in writing about violence, how much do we say? We know bad things happen, don't have to say everything
- Violence = essentially unstable object
- don't know how to connect external expression & inner life
- everything they're saying about violence could also be said about love*

- Abu Ghraib photos reinforce hierarchy

- Read Norman Mailer's Executioner's Song


Now I'm going to take these notes and put them in a folder somewhere, so that I'll always have them when I need them.

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*This is my favorite note of the series. At a certain point I began imagining that every time someone said "violence" they were really saying "love", and it all fit perfectly - love is fundamentally unstable, unrepresentable, ultimately unknowable, we can't define it but we know it when we see it, etc. I thought about bringing this up, but decided against it.