Thursday, October 04, 2007

 

some notes on HistoriCITY from Yeung Yang (part4)

The following three questions regard points of order, of how the Roundtable was organized with respect to its being a “live” event:

What is the task of the moderator in a Roundtable? What has been done, and what could have been done, in order that the “live” nature of the Roundtable was respected? I am thinking about time-keeping, the time for speakers to respond to each other and for the audience to participate. What could be done to avoid letting a “live” Roundtable event become an accumulation of monologues?
Why was there the need for so many speakers, if not the imagination of, or the failure to suppress the desire for, some kind of “completeness”? What kind of “completeness”, however tentative, was constructed in terms of the choice of speakers, the way they spoke (or briefed by the organizers to)? The Roundtable had not exposed itself adequately to the risk of improvisation, costing it the kind of energy that could have conjured up in the live event.
Why didn’t speakers’ synopses accompany the e-invitation to the Roundtable, or even just one sentence describing the content of the speakers’ presentation? Instead, there was only the circulation of names and institutional or social affiliations, which reproduced existing power structures around these institutions, and reinforced a star system frequently used in consumerist practices to deliberately empty out the meanings of the names to give them the highest exchange value.
If simultaneous translation was important, could organizers give it more thought to make it professional and available, and simultaneous translation for Cantonese as well? Effective translation could have encouraged much more discussion.

A different reading of the Roundtable could have been simply this: the text you weave must prove to me that it desires me.

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