From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Sat Jan 20 2007 - 19:12:54 EST
Well I didn't go to the HM conference, but reading the abstracts and papers I often found myself asking, "if this is the answer, what the h... is the question?", i.e. why is this important and why should I be concerned with it here. It often seems more like some "old dogs" testifying to an aspect of a faith to each other in a more or less erudite, or at any rate carefully crafted, way, and frankly a lot of it is rather boring insofar as you can predict fairly accurately what will be stated and how it will go. I'm left musing that you can be so far engrossed in your own theory, than you cannot see beyond it anymore. Here and there some interesting new lines of thought appear, or interesting old forgotten trains of thought are dug up, but a lot of it seems masticating over old chestnuts anyway. Maybe that's not quite fair, and as I said I didn't go to the conference, but that's my impression and if I did go, it would be more likely I would do it more for the informal conversation outside of the formal presentations, to get the benefit from dialoguing - as and where possible - with people with a lot of experience in their area of expertise that I have a lot of respect for, and who can put you on the correct track. And collectively the participants do have an enormous amount of experience and expertise that is important and valuable, and which makes going to such a conference worthwhile. The intergenerational aspect is quite interesting - in some respects, the theory of the previous generation of scholars (1970s, 1980s) was far superior, much more creative, profound and with greater depth, yet the way in which problems and issues are framed these days is often quite different. It creates certain problems of intellectual renewal, replacing old rhetorics with new substance, and it may be that the language of the past used to address these problems and issues is no longer so adequate, at least not from the point of view of actually *persuading* somebody. People persist in this language as an alternative to the ruling ideology but it might not communicate in the same way anymore. When I think of the experience of the classical bolsheviks, what strikes me is how good they were at dialoguing with people at all levels, often under extremely difficult circumstances, and how hard they worked at perfecting their communication so that the message was transmitted, understood and accepted by all kinds of people. These days of course we can communicate worldwide with ease at the touch of a button... but by golly what a lot of confused communication also occurs, you can almost be drowned in "noise". The older I get, the more problematic I think the notion of a "research tradition" or "political tradition" is. A tradition could be a source of inspiration, revolutionary inspiration even, sure, but it could just as easily strangle off or sideline important new thinking. A tradition can be projected which never actually existed, and so on. Sifting through the past to find cues to understand the present day turns out to be a very problem-fraught activity, requiring a lot of skill and experience to do it well. Jurriaan
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 31 2007 - 00:00:05 EST