psi14thinks@wiki

I was recently discussing a project we call 'unsustainable conversations' with Lee Weng Choy and Sharaad Kuttan in Kuala Lumpur. The unsustainable conversation we have planned for this year is a gathering in Vietnam in October, and Weng Choy was arguing for a reflexive conversation about the act of organising gatherings. That is, to look at the way a conference or symposium is structured. For example, you might have an NGO trying to reach consensus on a plan of action for distributing food following a flood. Typically the group might break down into smaller pods, and then reconvene to bring back possible strategies to the whole group. Or there might be an attempt to glean a consensus from a round-table discussion. The conventional tendency is for the group to value one expressed point of view above the others, and then for the group to agree to act upon it.

For Weng Choy the issue was how to go beyond such tendencies, by focusing on the possible 'emergence' of an 'abstraction' that does not represent any one view expressed in the group, but represents a previously unimagined median point between all the expressed views. Such an emergent phenomenon might be short-lived, lasting only as long as the gathering, but once emerged, could begin to have a life of its own.

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Rescheduling of the roundtable discussion on Sunday morning and removal of single identity attached to session.

While it feels somewhat perverse to say this, the kinds of things you are struggling with below (having to argue for a session that 'competes' with 'only' 6 rather than 12 parallel sessions, having a roundtable figured a single identity, etc.) are perhaps symptomatic of the organisational issues which a project such as this might wish to address!

Suggest that the Roundtable be placed Sunday morning. Will send a statement for the session to appear with Panel Abstracts & Digest. Oddity of single identity associated with panel noted.

Scheduled a roundtable discussion under the title "How PSi Thinks" on Friday Aug 22. Welcome setting up of a wiki blog linked on Interregnum site

Forward noted from Simon Bayly, contacted following on Paul Rae's suggestion. I have added them both to this thread I like Simon's idea about a Wiki blog or site, and wonder if a portion of the PSi site could be colonised for this purpose? He makes a number of other interesting points, such as expanding the focus beyond the PSi special case, and keeping an arms length to the board. Thoughts?

I'm very interested in your ideas and proposal for PSi. Actually, I wasn't planning on going to any more large scale conventional academic conferences ever again, largely due to issues with the unexamined (but often commented on) aspects of their 'performance'! My interests at the moment are circulating around conceptions and practices of gathering, meeting, conversing, etc in various different contexts and I've spent the last few year exploring psychoanalytic approaches to organizations and groups, which has been very stimulating if problematic on a number of levels. The 'more structured' approach Paul mentions relates to some discussion and dialogue formats that I've been experimenting with in conference and pedagogical 'scenes'.

PSi Copenhagen is right in the middle of the UK summer school holidays and so I'm very unlikely to be able to make it this year due to family commitments. But I'd very much like to participate in this group in terms of online discussions before and after Copenhagen with a view to future face-to-face encounters. I am looking to put together a collaborative, multi-centre and multi-national research project in this area: not just a self-reflexive investigation into PSI but into what kinds of 'live' practices of gathering/meeting are used to symbolize and reproduce different organizational cultures and communities. What are you proposing sounds like an excellent place for me to meet potential co-workers - which is, I guess, what conferences are all about!

I think a wiki might be a useful way to go in terms of structuring an initial online conversation, in terms of mapping out initial lines of convergence and divergence, a shared literature/link resource, what are the issues that people find most important. Once we'd established a sense of roughly who the working group consists of, we could run a series of time-limited online conversations on specific questions and topics over the coming weeks, which could create an archive of material that could be taken and 'addressed' somehow in Copenhagen?

Let me know if any of the above strikes you as interesting or relevant?

In terms of how what mentioned in this thread about engaging - or not - with the PSi board, I'd support an 'arms' length' approach at this stage. If former or current board members wanted to participate, all well and good, but it would seem counterproductive to me to focus solely on PSi as a special case (and either implicitly or explicitly as something to be critiqued or defended) when perhaps what has led to the formation of our shared interest in this area is PSi's participation in a much larger set of cultural assumptions, expectations and values around what such an organization should look and feel like, what it should do and how, etc. As I think someone says in this email thread, the PSi board may or may not want to make use of whatever this grouping produces, but it might be a good idea to avoid even the impression that it's engaged in some sort of organizational consultancy mission by some self-selected members. From my perspective then, an enquiry like this is more to do with my/our desires and fantasies about our relationships and attitudes to 'organization' and collective endeavour than it is about some separated thing called 'PSi' and its variously experienced and contingent realities. Some tortured part of me is 'PSi' ...BUT in trying to think about 'how institutions think' I'd obstinately suggest that thinking is property of minds, not institutions - so institutions, as such, can't think - though the thought that perhaps that institutions or groups appear to have minds and thoughts of their own is one well worth pursuing. Anyway, whatever you're doing in relation to this topic, count me in!

Obviously I think a reflexive and theoretical 'reading' of PSi is an essential component for all annual conferences. If I am interpreting his thoughts accurately, Ed was saying that he thought it would fit better with the Zagreb meeting. But now that you have expressed interest, maybe it can happen in Copenhagen too, and then get followed up with the "Return of Roundtable" at Zagreb and successive PSi annual conferences.

Paul Rae sent me a note suggesting the inclusion of Simon Bayly at Roehampton, who apparently has "a particular interest in organizational psychoanalysis, and could be v interesting to have him bring his more structured approach to this". I m guessing that Paul also would be interested as it is in line with our panel on criticality, and I would guess many others.

I think it would be good to bring the board and previous and future conference organisers into it, but it certainly reaches beyond this hallowed group I think into the membership. It particularly may interest those i concerned with institutional performance. Perhaps one way it can be framed is along the line of Mary Douglas' : "How Institutions Think" -- ie, "How PSi Thinks", (leading to the irresistible Cartesian assertion.....!). So, as a membership initiative that invites Board participation. and those who want to attend can.

And it can be organised though a mailing to a small group who set the scene of the roundtable by deciding on theme, architectonics (what kind of space, panel or circular formation etc), whether there are introductory comments or what we called 'provocations' at PSi#10, to set the ball in motion, etc. For example, the way I set up the final Plenary at #10 was to begin the discussion with the panelists a couple of months before by email, which was then carried into the actual plenary. So, the plenary was an outgrowth of a dialogue already in mid-stride. The method seems to be effective.

So Ed, what are your current thoughts on this? Shall we give it a whirl and see what transpires? Once we agree it will take place, we can begin to theorise its form and raison d'etre, and then gradually expand that theoretical discussion up to our arrival at the space of the conference.

There was a mail from Ed on March 3rd as reply to your proposals, I don't know if you saw this. So lets keep in touch, also with Ed and others, about how to proceed with your ideas of a more theoretical approach to what PSi is about.

I think a discussion session would be very fruitful, and as one of
the organisers of the Copenhagen event I will be happy to find a
space in the programme as well as in the physical reality to host
such a roundtable discussion. We can perhaps continue this dialogue
to find a format for the discussions and a way of keeping an eye to
the theoretical part, as you mention, and not ending up in just
discussing points for making PSi conference more effecient in the
future.

Being a relative newcomer til PSi myself, and after the very first
conference in Singapore being invited into the honourable club of
conference convenors, I do have some reflections on what makes it
so attractive to make a PSi conference, and in which ways I am
being honoured or disappointed in my expectations now that I am
actually in the middle of things. I will be happy to share some of
these thoughts and perhaps in this way contribute to some
perspectives of a panel discussion that you suggest.

I was thinking of this session as part of the conference, and by
invitation to conveners of the past and the board, open to audience,
structured in the normal was like any other panel , except it
would be in the form of a discussion, rather than papers. And, because
of the numbers involved, I think it should take place in a large room.
My preference would be to organise it in a circular format, to
increase the sense of an egalitarian discussion. But I would structure it to
begin with the presentation of positions by conference conveners and
board, perhaps with critical respondents , and then open to the
'floor'.

But most importantly, I don't see this as a gripe session but a theory
session, and this would have to be firmly stated repeatedly.
I feel the unique opportunity before us is to undertake the analysis
of the performance of an organisation of people who are themselves
devoted to the analysis of performance. Perhaps never before in the
history of our species has such an opportunity presented itself. This kind
ofgroup looking at itself with the intellectual tools we have been
developing together for the past 20 years or so.

The difficulties in doing this are obvious. Our lack of
reflexivity may reflect the fact that our field altogether is the size of "Our
Town". Everybody knows each other and depends on each other for positions.
Why would we want to raise any sticky issues at a mere conference in the
midst of such real-economics? But, on the other hand, if we cannot
look self-critically at the performance patterns we have created,
what right do we have to analyse the performances of others. If we cannot
apply our tools to our own performances, doesn't it raise the spectre
that our study of the performances of others is, in the Sartrean
sense, "in bad faith"?

I am not talking about how to make PSi function more efficiently.
I am asking for a theory session which looks at PSi as a performance, as a
system of behaviors that should be analysed reflexively. If one of the
by-products of the discussion is that it helps make the organisation
more efficient or stronger, that is good , but it should not be an
explicit goal of the meeting.

In our meeting in Penang before PSi #10, we specifically invited
people who are not "believers" in PSi. In fact, I don't think any of
us at that meeting, including myself and the other co-conveners,
were members of the PSi association at that time. (In fact, I had been
contacted by Peggy and Charles Garoian in their effort to 'out-source'
a conference to Asia. I knew nothing of PSi at the time.) Nor were we
co-conveners in agreement that PSi should be chosen as an umbrella for
our activities in Asia. We invited people like Rustom Bharucha,
Krishen Jit and Marion Pastor Roces who we knew would be critical of PSi and
of the field of Performance Studies as currently constituted. This
was the point of that think-tank: to raise the problematics of an
association of regional performance studies with a Euro-American
dominated association such as PSi, and the problems of creating a
locally relevant performance studies conference in Asia.
So a pro-PSi agreement system was not at all taken for granted, as
would be inevitable at a retreat for PSi board members.

But I have problems with this plan in another sense. Doesn't such a
retreat of an 'inner-circle' make the functions of the board less
transparent rather than more transparent. And, for me, the whole
notion of a Board that does not include all the previous conveners is
fatally flawed, based more on academic vanities than on pro-active
functionality. But we conference conveners are also true believers in
the above sense, so I would like to see PSi 'tarrying with the
negative' in a much more radical manner by inviting theorists who are
not part of the PSi organisation to such a pre-meeting and to be
respondents, presenting the mephistophelean view as it were.

I will end by reiterating my main point: what I feel is needed in PSi
is not just more efficiency but a reflexive theorisation of the
organisation. It is in my view an organisation that up til now has
for the most part functioned without a commitment to self- criticality?
perhaps a particularly American & English trait at this historical
juncture. While some conferences have been critically engaged, the
organisation as an organism has not. I have some hope now that it has
moved away from the New York nexus to other, hopefully more critical
cultural zones. But I wonder, how many of us see this as a
problem at all? This is why I would like to see these issues brought forward,
during the PSi Conferences in Copenhagen and again in Zagreb. And, I
feel that such a session should be sponsored by the board on an
on-going basis as part of its normal function.

it was good to see you too and hear yr interventions into the bubble
of apolitical dance at PSi.... thanks for yr thoughts and I am very
much interested in this stuff... its what I want to get the board to
do a bit of at the retreat before the conference... I'm thinking of
how best to do this... and my thoughts are a bt scattered at the
moment so pls bear with me:

time is always tight at the conference so these longer term and
deeper things always slip away ... some q's: how did you intend doing
this exactly? as a session within the conference itself? how many of
the annual conference conveners did you intend to bring together?

all I can say about the nuts and bolts at this point is that it would
be good to allow the board some time to do its thing first in the
pre-meet but have this discussion before the agm so a motion can be put
to the meeting from the members (which the board will be required to
act on or be cognisant of ... ) depending on what emerges from the
discussion

I am also aware that its going to be tough to schedule things as
usual so although I think we shld commit to it... we might want to
make this a meeting before Zagreb in 2009... ie a version of the
thing you guys did in KL before Singapore? what do you think?

Nice to see you in NYC.
I have been batting this proposal around for a while. Paul suggested
i send to you as it requires bringing the other annual conference
conveners together with the board for this roundtable. I have worded
it in my usual polemics, but it could be toned down and opened up
more for the potential participants. Basically I think it is time for
some navel gazing in this ...organisation or convention, or flock,or
herd? : PSi.

So, the question is whether you are interested in supporting this?
(see below proposal)

Nice to meet you in New York.
As a former Co-convenor of the Singapore PSi, "Perform: State:
Interrogate:" I propose to bring together in a roundtable setting
the previous, current and site-organisers of PSi conferences, members
of the board, and anyone else, to engage in a theoretical and
critical discussion of the past and future of PSi the
'organisation', and the annual gatherings of PSi. i hope we can
stimulate a metadscourse around the on-going performative
construction of PSi itself, and the manner that PSi each year
instantiates itself as a 'space' in a particular 'site'...while
usually not effectively engaging the specific characteristics of the
' site'. 'Place' is, then, re-placed by an abstract conference
'space' where self-criticism either cannot happen as it has no
history or analogical accumulations, or evaporates into functional
irrelevancy in the face of the panic and instrumentality of
organising the annual conference.

I think it is time for PSi itself to come under the knife as it
were, and look at its teflon utopianism as siteless organisation
without organs.... a surface or shell to which nothing 'sticks',
while criticism does attach itself to the specific sites where the
conference takes place. To put this in the frame of the utopian, we
appear to have engineered a repetitively situated virtual or
allegorical 'compound' where an imagined community of 'citizens'
manifest annually 'within the compound'. The illusion and problematics
of utopian developmentalism are at stake in our meetings .

This concept of a session, which would replace the delivery of
papers with an intelligent and informed (prepared for) roundtable
discussion, will be developed further over the next few weeks. It
will present an opportunity for a prolonged meta-discursive gaze at
PSi as conference, as performance, as agreement system.