#IPF09 debrief

Posted on | December 23, 2009 | 8 Comments

Now one cannot demonstrate scientifically what the duty of an academic teacher is. One can only demand of the teacher that he have the intellectual integrity to see that it is one thing to state facts, to determine mathematical or logical relations or the internal structure of cultural values, while it is another thing to answer questions of the value of culture and its individual contents and the question of how one should act in the cultural community and in political associations. These are quite heterogeneous problems. If he asks further why he should not deal with both types of problems in the lecture-room, the answer is: because the prophet and the demagogue do not belong on the academic platform. – Max Weber, ‘Science as Vocation’

The irony of the Internet as Playground and Factory conference was that it involved so much more labour than usual: physical (getting to NYC), mental (writing the paper), administrative (scheduling video shoots, uploading slides), promotional (coercive tweeting, list-serve participation, appearing in videos), emotional (patience with long-winded theory boys…). So I want to avoid writing a report of what I saw. The summary gesture of the conference blogpost is something I’m feeling less inclined to write over time, since so much effort goes in to making big events like these happen. Trebor’s drive and ambition are evident forces to behold :-)

A lot comes down to serendipity and the chemistry of participants. There was, and continues to be, amusing frisson between key stakeholders brought together by this event (epitomised in one complaint from the audience, after the very first panel, that the papers were too boring). I suppose my lingering questions are to do with whether the territory being claimed by the iDC project is for politics or scholarship, and whether this matters.

There are now at least four extensive takes on what happened. It’s a comprehensive overview, especially given that most presentations were archived in some digital form. This is the unequivocal advance IPF made: new media devices and crowd-sourcing can broaden the audience for conferences for those who are a) interested b) literate in digital platforms and c) able to access the massive broadband infrastructure that makes these technologies work. Of course, in combination, these three factors exclude significant numbers, even within the host nation of the event, so it is a specific kind of achievement to celebrate.

For me, the conference was less interesting for the amount of new research presented than for the overall climate of Theory that was taken to be the legitimate register of scholarly performance (and here I’m purposefully separating academic work from the contributions of artists and activists). Given the critical landscape I usually inhabit, this was a confronting, almost nostalgic experience, and one that seemed extremely revealing of the hierarchies within the present international division of academic labour.

At this conference I heard things said by professors from prestigious US and European knowledge institutions which I might applaud but correct in a promising undergraduate essay. In some cases this was a genuine and objective problem of disciplinary impasse and ignorance; in others it was an outrageous display of ex-nominated discursive privilege being traded like currency. It had nothing to do with the best political intentions of speakers, and the enthusiasm for new ideas shared by everyone I met. But passionate, overarching proclamations were unremarkable, even encouraged, via the metrics of Tweetability, and the rhetorical position adopted in pre-conference publicity.

In the lead-up to the conference, relevant disciplinary histories and alternative theoretical legacies were routinely discounted on the iDC list in preference for excruciatingly detailed debate about Marx’s writings. Anyone with the time to read these macho arguments – for pedagogical intent rather than sheer bewildered entertainment value – learned plenty about the consequences of theory fetishism, as well as the relative amounts of time different writers have at their disposal at the end of a working day.

In the absence of disciplinary focus then, the lack of self-reflexivity on the part of some participants was professionally unthinkable to those attending from interdisciplinary fields like cultural studies and gender studies (which precede the conference’s closest disciplinary neighbour, internet studies, and which trouble the possibility of any unified project for that field too). Once scholarly formations are abdicated, it’s almost inevitable that speakers become open to the charge of practicing politics from the security of a scholarly location. So while few academics today would agree with Weber’s distinction between science and politics quoted above, it is one instance of how this problem has been shown to occur throughout history. I don’t subscribe to easy distinctions between politics and scholarship either, as my next paragraph will show. But I want a more convincing rationale for why these lines are necessarily more blurred when it comes to studying the internet.

Much has been said about gender at the conference, whether publicly, privately, or in ‘counter-public’ online back-channels. The fact that organisers and delegates alike worried openly about ‘the problem’ during and after the event is certainly one way of appreciating the dynamics of the iDC list leading in. But perhaps what hasn’t been said is that in an academic context an awareness of gender politics is not advanced by quoting the number of women on the program and claiming superiority over conferences that are worse. It is certainly not illustrated in the actions of a prominent speaker who used part of his presentation to express relief that a female colleague was on his panel (to keep the boys in line?) and who was later feted for being the most ‘participatory’ of presenters.

We all share responsibility for creating the conditions for inclusiveness. But an awareness of gender politics in an academic context involves respecting epistemological difference. It means recognising there are stakes involved in the very act of defining what counts as intellectually valuable. In a scholarly setting, feminism is not a political insight that can be enacted simply through the incorporation of certain kinds of bodies. It is an actually existing intellectual field that speaks directly to the very tensions around labour value that this conference regularly claimed as novel.*

When disciplinary differences arise (eg. when the writings of a major postcolonial feminist scholar are openly dismissed on the iDC list by someone who has written perhaps three times the amount of posts of any other member) the performance of territorialisation reaches dizzying heights. A lack of distinction between scholarship and politics provides an avenue of ambiguity leading away from complex discussions. Such encounters between different intellectual lineages cannot be avoided if we are actually interested in improving our theoretical concepts. They are also necessary if we seek to promote a time-frame for critical thinking that can resist the manufactured urgency of new media studies generally (an urgency that clearly also relates to capitalist processes).

Given that my job is to write and teach about contemporary culture, some of the problems I’m most haunted by after the conference are those raised by the students in the final plenary (something that Trebor’s report also mentions). Their enthusiasm for the event and their anxiety about entering the conversation without credentials were matched only by their curiosity at the modes of intellectual performance inherited and perpetuated by delegates. I got the sense that the forms of interaction these students are familiar with online already offer a more accommodating environment for their passions and interests than the odd rituals of academic knowledge production. This may explain why they aren’t so bothered about whether Google or Facebook provides them this platform.

The challenge I took from the conference – and it is a significant one, in an international market for higher education – is to demonstrate and translate the value of scholarly work to present and future generations of digitally literate students. For they surely deserve to believe in a world that is more complex than the space between the monoliths of commerce and politics.

*I tried to sketch some of that history in my (short!) presentation.

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IPF09 delegates rearrange chairs to form a circle for the closing plenary and facilitate the Web 2.0 mantra: participation

Category: Academia, Politics, Travel
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8 Responses to “#IPF09 debrief”

  1. Tweets that mention #IPF09 debrief : home cooked theory -- Topsy.com
    December 23rd, 2009 @ 3:59 pm

    [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jason Wilson, Col. Col said: RT @jason_a_w: RT @melgregg ok comrades, since yr all on holidays here is my debrief from IPF09 http://bit.ly/8T65QB [...]

  2. Terry
    December 23rd, 2009 @ 4:05 pm

    Mel, you present Max Weber’s argument at the beginning as somewhat naive and transcended by contemporary humanities scholarship, but it comes across to me as considerably less naive and more ethically defensible than the sight at the bottom of your post of IDC delegates rearranging the conference chairs into a circle in order to efface power relations at the conference.

    I’ve long found Ian Hunter’s critique of this sort of “ethical athleticism” very persuasive, taking his point that it says more about establishing the moral persona of the critic than actual political engagement, which is invariably more mundane and prosaic. I’m also aware that this line of argument has little purchase in the U.S., where Fredric Jameson dismissed such arguments as “laughable” back in the mid 90s.

  3. MC
    December 23rd, 2009 @ 4:15 pm

    Thanks Terry, I will have to return to Ian’s work yet again. I should admit I started with Weber because I do believe in the distinction he’s making, but sometimes feel very unfashionable for doing so. I even quoted from the same essay in the epigraph for my book about cultural studies :-)

  4. Terry
    December 23rd, 2009 @ 4:21 pm

    It appeared in my PhD as well, and I agree with it even though its unfashionable. But it really grates against a view of “cultural politics” that sees its primary sites as being the classroom and the conference centre.

    That is a fantastic picture, BTW. That and Ken Wark’s hand-sketched diagram have been my two principal take aways from the conference thus far.

  5. Jane G.
    December 24th, 2009 @ 11:44 am

    I’m ongoingly grateful only to have experienced this event through exposure to peripheral talk (on and offline), though I would like to have heard some of the papers. Anyway I thought this was terrific.

    My one comment concerns the way that you place your ironic feminist observations under the heading of the scholarly & disciplinary concerns as opposed to political ones.
    I, too, am attracted to Weber’s formulation and think it’s a relevant, interesting ideal to bring to the discussion of internet studies (and other interdisciplinary fields, like scholarly feminism). But it’s not like any of the irritating gestures you report would be any less irritating, inadequate, misleading, etc in a political context or viewed as political.

    Surely the complaint is both scholarly *and* political. Maybe they are not so much indistinguishable as interdependent – feminism fail is both bad scholarship and bad politics, for non identical reasons. And it’s hard to imagine making progress on either front without respect for both.

  6. MC
    December 25th, 2009 @ 1:52 pm

    Oh, this is so true. Thanks Jane.

  7. ana australiana
    December 26th, 2009 @ 1:37 pm

    Thanks so much for this reflection Mel. Looking at those photos I can see there are is not nearly enough fashion hair as it seems there ought to have been. Disappointing! PS. You don’t mean to say that there are _other_ feminist theorists, past and present, apart from Silvia Federici? PPS. Max Weber is my No. 1 favourite founding father of sociology.

  8. ana australiana
    December 26th, 2009 @ 1:45 pm

    Ooh, comment grammar fail! I meant “Looking at those photos I can see there was not nearly enough fashion hair as it seems there ought to have been.” As you were.

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