Saturday, January 27, 2007
(10:55 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Conferences
This weekend, I am apparently going to write some ridiculous thing on John Wesley and Jean-Luc Nancy. The reason I am doing it this weekend in specific is that the papers for the Wesleyan Theological Society are apparently due February 1, so that they can be posted on the website and people can -- apparently -- read them beforehand.I am skeptical of this whole concept. While my charming and witty delivery style is well worth the trip to the conference, I think it's a safe bet to say that this will not be the case for all presenters. Certainly there's the off chance that (1) people will actually read the papers ahead of time and (2) this will lead to better use of the paltry five minutes of Q&A at the actual event -- but we can all think of a variety of more likely outcomes.
This does raise the obvious question of whether one could run a completely virtual "conference," perhaps via a blog on which only registered participants could comment. We all know that every paper at every conference is totally worthless and stupid and no one in their right mind would ever want to hear them, so this would save everyone a lot of misery -- we could get the line on our CVs without having to go through the bother of interacting with each other in person. The next step, of course, would be to eliminate the papers themselves, since no one reads more than the abstracts anyway, eventually leading to a point where an online conference would be a simple list of names and institutional affiliations, perhaps with some residual paper and session titles, which would attain to ever more baroque levels of decadence. "Sodomy as Ereignis: Dasein's Ownmost Possibility of Fisting." "Meatwad Sacer: An Agambenian Reading of Aqua Teen Hunger Force." "'That Dangerous Supplement...': Thoughts on Explaining Away Semen Stains on Student Papers."
This would inaugurate an academia that would go beyond its own exhaustion, suspending its own suspension of meaning in a desoeuvrement that fulfills academia by holding it in reserve as pure potentiality -- a messianic academia that would be purely gestural, communicating nothing but communication itself.
