Some thoughts in closing

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Fol­low­ing the ap­pear­ance of my be­lated re­port on “con­fer­ence com­mun­ism” a couple days ago, I re­ceived a num­ber of ap­pre­ci­at­ive com­ments, e-mails, and replies. It would seem I wasn’t alone in my rather low opin­ion of these con­fer­ences. A few of the people who sent me notes to this ef­fect caught me genu­inely off guard; it al­ways feels vin­dic­at­ing to know that oth­ers agree with you.

Pre­dict­ably, however, the re­sponses that came in from the speak­ers who ac­tu­ally par­ti­cip­ated in the event, es­pe­cially those who had been singled out for cri­ti­cism, were less than ap­pre­ci­at­ive. Some seemed to take it all quite per­son­ally — and one of them, George Cic­car­i­ello-Ma­h­er, went so far as to de­friend me on Face­book. Was a bit sur­prised by it, to be hon­est; I’d al­ways thought he had pretty thick skin, oth­er­wise. For the most part, I think, I’d re­frained from the ad hom­inem at­tacks and man­aged to keep my re­marks strictly ad rem. Maybe he felt that by at­tack­ing his cre­den­tials to speak on a giv­en sub­ject, I was thereby in­dir­ectly at­tack­ing his char­ac­ter. This was not my in­ten­tion.

Either way, it’s not like it mat­ters. I’d an­ti­cip­ated it any­way. Just goes to show you can’t please every­one.

Nor­mally, I’d let sleep­ing dogs lie. But since Cic­car­i­ello-Ma­h­er sub­sequently ac­cused me of mis­rep­res­ent­ing the event (call­ing my re­port “lit­er­ally fant­ast­ic”), and my own re­ac­tion to it at the time, I think it might be good to set the re­cord straight. He wrote in the com­ment thread at­tached to the link I pos­ted:

Oh wait, you for­got the part where you were mock­ing Jord­ana [Rosen­berg] on Face­book be­fore her talk even star­ted. Whoop­sie.

In­deed, dur­ing the con­fer­ence I had made a single snide re­mark based on the title of her pa­per — “The Mo­lecu­lar­iz­a­tion of Sexu­al­ity: Cap­it­al­ist Ac­cu­mu­la­tion and the On­to­lo­gic­al Turn” — which I felt was hor­ribly con­vo­luted and jar­gon­ist­ic. Yet, as I went on to in­dic­ate in my re­port, her pa­per ended up be­ing one of the two presen­ted that I felt were really worth­while.

This was why I wrote:

Un­ex­pec­tedly, the pa­per I ex­pec­ted to hate the most turned out to be much bet­ter than I’d an­ti­cip­ated Jord­ana Rosen­berg…had a couple things the oth­er pan­el­ists lacked: stage pres­ence, and an un­canny sense of tim­ing…Plus, it be­came clear in the course of her ex­pos­i­tion that many of the terms in­cluded in the title of her talk were pre­cisely those that she meant to cri­ti­cize.

Out of curi­os­ity, I checked back on what I’d said at the time. Asked how “the pa­per on sexu­al­ity” went, I re­spon­ded:

The pa­per on sexu­al­ity was ac­tu­ally bet­ter than I an­ti­cip­ated, though I (un­der­stand­ably) entered the talk with very low ex­pect­a­tions. The speak­er had more cha­risma than the oth­ers, whose per­son­al­it­ies are more the equi­val­ent of a dead moth.

[My re­capit­u­la­tion of Rosen­berg’s ar­gu­ment:] It was an im­man­ent cri­tique of vari­ous spec­u­lat­ive/meta­phys­ic­al and on­to­lo­gic­al ver­sions of queer the­ory from the per­spect­ive of a more Marx­ist-in­flec­ted queer the­ory. Some of the jar­gon was un­avoid­able, prob­ably be­cause the lan­guage of the au­thors she was cri­ti­ciz­ing was so opaque.

Cic­car­i­ello-Ma­h­er was un­im­pressed by this ex­plan­a­tion, and thus sar­castic­ally re­marked:

Ah, makes total sense then. Nev­er­mind. It makes per­fect sense to mock the title of a pa­per be­fore the au­thor even opens her mouth. It also makes per­fect sense to write a blog post about a same-day face­book post that you mis­un­der­stood and were cor­rec­ted about. It all makes sense.

Re­gard­ing the titles of vari­ous aca­dem­ic pa­pers, maybe oth­ers are less pre­ju­diced than I am. For my part, I con­fess that whenev­er I see titles like “Con­ver­sa­tions with En­rique Dus­sel on Anti-Cartesian De­co­lo­ni­al­ity & Pluriver­sal Trans­mod­ern­ity” (just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?), my eyes glaze over. Should I with­hold judg­ment? Prob­ably. But it’s hard not to fear the worst in such in­stances. I’ve read far too much bull­shit not be wary.

Any­way, to per­haps grant this whole med­it­a­tion some sense of clos­ure, I’ll just add a couple thoughts. If I’m a bit un­fair to the “con­fer­ence com­mun­ists” to rib them for their aca­demi­cism, it’s likely be­cause at­tend­ing these events can be like hold­ing up a really un­flat­ter­ing mir­ror on one’s own in­tel­lec­tu­al in­terests and pur­suits. Noth­ing’s worse than that gnaw­ing sus­pi­cion: “What if this is how I sound whenev­er I talk about x, y, or z? Hope some­body shoots me if I do.”

Be­sides, once you at­tend enough of these con­fer­ences and sym­po­sia you be­gin to re­cog­nize all the ir­rit­at­ing buzzwords and tired habits of thought. At such events, you’re lucky if there’s even one per­son who’s say­ing something ori­gin­al or in­ter­est­ing. Yeah, they’ll all re­as­sure each oth­er after each talk about how “im­port­ant” or “ground­break­ing” they think each oth­er’s re­search is. It’s a thor­oughly ex­haust­ing af­fair. The old say­ing is true: Fa­mili­ar­ity breeds con­tempt.

And it’s not like it’s the con­fer­ence com­mun­ists’ fault that their at­tempts to the­or­ize (and some­how thereby re­vive) com­mun­ism for the 21st cen­tury prove in­ad­equate or fall short. There’s no “real move­ment” ab­ol­ish­ing the ex­ist­ing state of things today. Or if there is, none that I can see. In­cid­ent­ally, that’s why I en­joyed Jason Smith’s pa­per; at least he was look­ing for a pulse out there in nas­cent forms of struggle. Jord­ana Rosen­berg’s es­say I thought provided a very smart cri­tique of the­or­et­ic­al tend­en­cies that ex­tend well bey­ond the realm of sexu­al polit­ics and queer the­ory, as these are areas in which I’m hardly an ex­pert. See­ing it in writ­ten form would be help­ful also, as it all went rather fast.

I should add, also, that I think the con­fer­ence might have gone much bet­ter if Gav­in Walk­er had been able to at­tend and de­liv­er his pa­per. Bruno Bos­teels’ sub­sti­tu­tion was a last minute de­cision, from what I un­der­stand, and he came through pretty well. Even if I pre­ferred the Par­is Com­mune as an ob­ject of thought.

Alain Ba­di­ou et al. might even be in­ad­vert­ently right that com­mun­ism is noth­ing more than an “idea” today. Lately, I’ve be­gun to feel like it’s more like a beau­ti­ful dream that someone once had, one which seemed at the time an im­man­ently and im­min­ently ap­proach­ing real­ity. Since that time, however, the dream has all but dis­sip­ated. That’s where we stand. We can do no oth­er.