separation anxiety
Music: Active Child: You Are All I See (2011)
Five days in a city that loves, that doesn't loathe as a matter of habit, thriving on an industry that turns on a suspension of surveillance and ample chers and darlins and babys like gravy, can make you wonder what you've traded in for health and regulated rhythms and a steady job. At least for a few days. New Orleans can get in your blood, and not like Las Vegas or Orlando like some forced, Oliver Stone virus of paranoid hedonism or policed happiness respectively (fantasies of blind enjoyment, foreplayed disordered order), but a dis-ease of tolerance. A temporary disease-cum-ease, at least: "I can't believe it took us an hour for coffee," I found myself saying to friend after a sojourn in search of coffee. "I can't believe I just complained about that," I said to myself quietly, angry at my complaint. "This is Louisiana." I should know better; I should listen to the rhythms I once felt living in the state (-of mind). I came around, eventually. And just when I let it in and was ready to stay forever, it was time to go.
It's easy to find solace in cynicism, and I've got barnacles of the stuff encrusted on any number of cognitions and nerves, some sad ganglia in the groin too. But I do love New Orleans; I love that there is soul somewhere in that tourism, something deeper than slot machines or a desert or . . . blue-dyed water. . I love Chicago and Denver and New Orleans. And parts of Maine. I love the creek bed behind mind grandmother's house that is now squatted by a strip-malled grocery store. I will let myself love some cities and places and not be clever about the beloved. It's permissible to love a place crammed with people, even. And there is something in a people or their vibrancy released of the usual or mundane orders that is genuine, even when a dollar is crammed in a shoe resigned or habituated to dancing.
New Orleans was a comfortable lap (at least for me) for seating a conference, the strangest of things that professions and politics have created and attended, this weird, mondo-klatch designed for the visual spectacle of a particular economy (of knowledge, of power, of money, of unrealized sex).
As I do this gig more and more, I find myself enjoying, increasingly, those who dress well---and I mean that in many senses. If ideas are attractive, why not align the senses "all the way down?" It's a military fashion show, you know? (a very crypted musical nod, I know.) And this in a city that rewards stylistic risk coupled with a relaxing of the defenses. The cultural context made it easier for me, this time, to detach a bit and observe and enjoy the conference for what it seems to be for me at this moment of my career, which is now fully woven into my life, and that's a life that cannot be fulfilled by a career but which is enriched by it nonetheless: a conference is a huge, ever pulsating brain that rules from the centre of the ultraworld.
That much, that last bit, is also musical joke that has an idiosyncratic relation in my mind to Hegel's understanding of the "world spirit." (I really don't know what Paterson means by "the ultraworld," though I'm pretty sure LSD was at one point involved in the coin.) The association is neither here nor there for you nor important except for the weird realization for many of us that conferences are not only economies of exchange but organisms that reckon with change---with mortality. When I started attending them as a graduate student, I viewed the academic conference as a smorgasboard of "free" (though ot really free) food and booze and a kind of star system that circulated celestial bodies. The annual National Communication Association meeting is certainly that---in so many ways---but from the vantage of middle age no longer in the same way I had supposed. Some years ago I started to recognize the heart of the pulsation shifted to something memorial, a kind of life-tracking device functioning centrally for some and peripherally for others, but functioning just the same: multiple cohorts are growing old together and using the conference as a way to re-member and re-center over the auspice of the idea.
The promise of the auspice is often (if not routinely, as a matter of mutation) perverted. This is the function and dynamic of governance, to argue over the character of the mutation; for example, the administration inevitably emerges at variance with the membership. As with the rave or circuit party, so with the professional convention The Burkean barnyard bubbles up, often over the spectacle of policy, this year in the name of "civility" or less publically, crass careerism and stupidity, then (re-membering) last year prestige, next year I predict entitled nihilism or apocalypticism (the jargon of the meta-meta, matta matta . . . or as I overheard a senior scholar intone this morning, the excluded third or "turd"). But this ironically consequential prattle really runs cover for the maturing attendee, for the central conversational labor: we are growing older, wending toward a dying, and we want to matter, at least to each other. Growing old together. Children produced and reared/books seemed to dominate our conversations.
My friends and I talked repeatedly about petered partying. About not going out to drink. About staying in, getting rest. About tiring over the reindeer games.
Conferences are machines of recognition. The observation seems trite, I know, but in the setting of New Orleans this demand really was starker and more interesting to me, even fascinating because of the mood that this particular city inspires, a mood of cutting through the crap, almost like a high school reunion in a decade or two after the graduation year: how complex have ways become to ask for love and to say to others "you are loved?" Conferences are combines---projection zones and screens, and its off-sites and friend-only dinners and no-hosts spaces of relational identification (against).
"But, I phoned ahead and they said there was space for 200."
"Yeah, but you didn't expect 400 to show up," he responded. Overhead.
Underestimated. There is a "soul" to this, after all.
There are many stories to tell, and three, overly-disclosive paragraphs that I have just deleted.
Still, what a strange and beautiful thing this last conference was. I will be thinking-through its experiences for some time to come. I suppose my point here is that I think many of us who went to the conference assume, going to a professional meeting, that these are professional endurances. That is, well, that is the rhetoric we produce about them (as I said, "Ugh. And so the circus begins.") But deep down you and I know---the you who know me through school---we know that these things are major life events, extremely significant, sometimes potentially traumatic and increasingly operatic. As an academic, we have to reckon with the fact that we invest so much in our professional lives that it becomes central to our lives---and this is why location, mood, and the rhythms of the host city are so important.
Perhaps this is why so many of us were talking about, feeling about, how much this particular conference in New Orleans was good and moving and loving and important. The fantasies of the city were implicated---I don't think superficially---in our conference experience, in the traumatic and deeply consequential event of Katrina and the disastrous Nation State's response to it and our feelings about ourselves and this city and its mood and our orientation to recognition. And why so many of us want to avoid the conference next year in Orlando. It's as if our personal lives and self-conceptions are at stake. It's like Disney makes plain the necessary economy of professional fantasy and all the work it actually does to allow us to do the labor of loving we all really want. We don't want to see those we love and respect in a strip mall.
I didn't get to spend time with those whom I admire and love and respect enough in these past days. I left wanting and I felt guilty for not seeing or doing this or that thing with loved ones. But that is a good wanting, I think, and it says something about the import of a city and its soul and its dispositional seat. It says something about my not wanting to go to a conference in Orlando, Florida, as if my time with the admired and loved would be cheapened by the con- and pretext. That the auspice of the idea would be somehow cheapened by completely retreating the necessity of the spectacle and the dollar (a observation I would make similarly about Las Vegas).
Still, these unordered musings begin, for me, the thinking of bodies in place. It's not something I've really dwelled on in the past, since my focus as been on the moorings of professional stability, which do not so much depend (at least initially) on place. I've chosen a line of work for which the choice of rest is not mine. Even so, seated in a city I love (Austin, indeed!), I recognize that place (geographical culture) now has a purchase on me it hasn't had before---at least consciously. Travel has a new meaning. And I'm starting to reckon with that in ways I've never really done before. This is, I think, a dimension of the subjectivity of settling, of emplacement. Of disposition.
I'm realizing, I guess, that where I meet my far-flung friends has an impact on relational contact, on professional stead, and the situation of stranger encounter.