There is way in which all genuinely creative social actions are oblique or perpendicular to normative social “reality.” The way in which the Occupy movements have simply gathered—this is the point, not some kind of “message” or “demand” that the media want them to be “sending.”
Remember Plato had inscribed over the entrance to the Academy: “Don't even think of coming in here unless you know geometry.” Geometry being earth-measuring, not algebra. Plato became cross with students of his who solved the Delian problem of doubling a cube with algebra rather than using ruler and compass and so on. Assembly. Don't think of coming in here unless you know how to make things like triangles and cubes.
So the choice to house the conference in an ad hoc, funky space, inviting non-academics, and several nonhumans including a rusting cement mixer and a very noisy heater, into the philosophical space, was inspired.
Conferences often end with a hand-wringing hour of guilt, where we sit around on our comfy chairs in our comfy conference suite and wonder what, finally this amounts to, what we're going to do. Intellectuals love to beat up on themselves for being intellectual. And atrophied humanists who only know how to do one thing—defend the nonutilitarian in an absolutist dogmatic way—really get off on that.
This conference, on the other hand, had already done something—it had assembled this new space. It's a very object-oriented approach, immediately.
In the two and a half hours back to the airport, Nick and I mused wonderingly at all this.
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