[matilda] [Fwd: ] <trans-sib> Conference review: Capturing the Moving Mind

[Simon Geller]

I read this and thought of you guys; (I take guys to be a non-sexist term)

Simon

>From EPHEMERA at JISCMAIL.AC.UK


The following review of the 'Capturing the Moving Minds' conference was
published in the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto on 2 October 2005. The
Italian version is available at:

http://www.ilmanifesto.it/Quotidiano-archivio/02-Ottobre-2005/art83.html

I append an English version below.


A window on the world

>From Helsinki to Beijing on board the trans-siberian train. A mobile
conference of activists, artists, researchers and mobile communications
experts, gathered to investigate the new logic of the economy and generate
forms and practices of resistance to global control. 'Capturing the Moving
Mind,' an itinerant event organised by the journals Ephemera and Conflitti
Globali.

Brett Neilson

To move without cause, to organise without ends, to flee the war against
intellect: these were the imperatives that animated the conference held on
the trans-siberian train: 'Capturing the Moving Mind: Management and
Movement in the Era of Permanently Temporary War' (September 11-20, 2005).
Organised by a group surrounding the online journal Ephemera: Theory and
Politics in Organization (http://www.ephemeraweb.org/index.htm) and
affiliated with Framework: The Finnish Art Review and the new Italian
journal Conflitti globali, the conference brought together activists,
artists, mobile communication experts, filmmakers, musicians, and
researchers of all stamps. In reality, this moving event was something
more than a conference. The rhythm of the train, the changing landscapes,
the interactions with strangers, the border controls and currency
exchanges: all imposed contingencies that demanded constant interrogation
and shifts of perspective. At the same time, the train functioned as a
kind of protective shell, like the set of a reality TV show, removing the
participants (their discussions and creations) from the world that flitted
by outside. Yet, in this isolated space, there was time for rumination,
intimacy, withdrawal, and debate - an ongoing group dynamic, fight or
flight, contained by neither the many nor the one.

It is not difficult to criticise an undertaking like this: a pack of
intellectuals, activists, and artists, predominantly white and
English-speaking, speeding past impoverished towns, disputing the finer
points of immaterial labour while aestheticizing the crumbled factories on
the way. To be sure, the paradoxes of this situation were sharpened as the
train continued on its arrogant line, like Benjamin's angel, but with its
face unturned, oblivious to the storm behind. The outside world, as it
were, reacted back on the group, sparking internal dissension, stunts of
devil's advocacy, and, in one case of one participant whose passport was
stolen, delicate negotiations at the German consulate in Novosibirsk. It
is tempting, following the formulation of another participant, to
characterise the event in temporal-historical terms: a bunch of people
from the twentieth century, hurtling past nineteenth century villages on
their way (like the business leaders of our times) to find the
twenty-first century in Beijing. But a mere stroll around Beijing, let
alone Moscow, reveals the limits of this elegant summation.

In these former second world cities, the first world implodes upon the
third. All the global divisions can be found in a single locale. The
petrodollars that swell the pockets of the Russian oligarchy do not
trickle down. The houtons of Beijing, rapidly being cleared for the 2008
Olympic Games, border on corporate skyscrapers and department stores. As
the local participants in both Moscow (Michael Chernyl) and Beijing
(Zhiyuan Cui and Wang Hui) insisted, the concept of capitalism is too wide
to explain what is happening in these urban laboratories. If, as Deng
Xiaoping once said, 'we do not know what socialism is,' perhaps today we
need to add, 'we also do not know what capitalism is.' For it is the very
precariousness of capital, its constitutive exposure to venture and risk
that makes it impossible to isolate as an empirical object. As that most
abstract of abstractions, capital produces an -ism to which nothing (but
almost anything) can attach. Doubtless, this is why it propagates so
incessantly. And perhaps this is also why the power that it breeds is so
mad, indeterminate and arbitrary, no more so than at a time of seemingly
permanent war.

It was the emergence of the new forms of global control (which find their
principal mode of being in war) that occupied the conference's critical
core. Beyond the state of exception, beyond the borders and fences, beyond
the humanitarian tragedies and suicide bombings, there operates a new and
seemingly pure power that functions without institutional legitimation and
seems to change day by day. The control of the mind, of collaboration
between minds, of feelings, affects and the generic human capacity to
relate is the borne of this power. Under its sway, politics melds with
productivity and the primary struggle becomes a fight for the free use of
human minds. It is no longer a matter of this or that issue, this or that
injustice. When power becomes detached from any single logic or rationale,
all that remains is to stay on the move, to meet its madness with a
delirious rigour that shifts, twists and compulsively derails. With such
movement, there emerges a variety of experience that motivates itself and,
in so doing, acquires the quality of an experiment - a kind of pure
theoretical practice that attempts to create something new. This, in
essence, was the gambit of the conference, locking away forty brains and
bodies in a train and leaving them to sense as well as cogitate. Can
there, could there emerge from such an experiment a new form of politics,
another way of being, within and despite the frenzy of global control?

The trans-Siberian journey was kind of learning without pedagogy, an
exercise in improvisation as much as organisation, a passionate encounter
where relations by hand, touch, and intuition (although not necessarily
physical) outweighed those that occurred on the cusp of understanding.
Beyond the lands of the Roman alphabet, with only one Russian and one
Mandarin speaker, the signs become illegible and the entire symbolic realm
of language begins to fall away - imposing itself as a kind of barrier,
sure, but also opening new vistas of intimacy that are neither
communicative nor symbiotic. To buy food on the platform, one was left
only with the hands - pointing, counting the fingers, expressing gratitude
by joining the palms. Some used digital cameras to display the items they
wanted to purchase. But this gestural economy, importantly motivated by
commodity exchange, could not go unnoticed by the group. Obsessed with the
movement of the economy from the limited sphere of rationality to the
in-born and adaptive human faculties, the discussion constantly veered
back to these chance encounters. Perhaps because this accidental
ethnography - more than the internal group dynamic - registered how the
purity of experience is always contaminated by contingency and context.

The memory traces of this event were already under construction before it
began. Part of the process involved the use of newly invented
'mobicasting' software to feed images and sounds via mobile phone from the
train to a website (http://www.kiasma.fi/transsiberia) and display in the
Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki. An exercise in the
assemblage of an open archive as much as an act of intellectual tourism,
the conference sought to build common resources for creative political
expression. Nor has this generativity ceased with the dispersal of the
participants, each of whom came and left with his own baggage. As the
object of journal issues and art exhibitions, one of which will be held at
the Villa Croce museo d'arte contemporanea in Genova next summer, the
process goes on. Disposable cameras distributed to non-conference
travellers on the train will be sent to a studio in London, film rushes
shot on the journey will be stitched together with others, digital video
of an action carried out at the Russian-Mongolian border will provide
source material for media art, a manifesto about a network of networks
will be penned. But these material products should not be considered ends
in themselves. The point of the conference was to institute, through the
sheer experience of movement, a mode of being that reveals itself
phenomenologically - a way of living without opportunism or fear,
paralysis or submission. Such a strike against boredom, or activism for
the sake of activism, can have no outcome. It exists only in the present,
somewhere between departure and arrival, in the thick of the night, when
the movement seems to slow and the rhythm of the train at once wakes you
and lulls you back to sleep. In this time and space, there is neither
dream nor calculation, transport nor retreat, but only the incessant clang
of metal on metal.