Inflight: Exchange Value

Hi Ian, no this is not a good time (panic stations: flying to LA tomorrow and thence to New York, Toronto, Rome, London and Singapore, and not home till Christmas … blah, blah, blah) and yet it is. Means I have to be quick, and maybe rough but to the point, re ongoing obsessions.

1. Collective writing: between the potluck and the feast
Here I think there’s space for another alternative – the degustation. I wouldn’t assume that the potluck is always indigestible or lacks a cumulative resonance – it’s just that you need to graze discriminately. Of course you’ll do this anyway, according to disciplinary background, politics, what seems ‘new’, quirky; what opens up new ways of looking at things. Nevertheless, a degustation assumes something more structured: a careful balancing of ‘tastes’ while retaining a sense of fragments – competing voices. David Bell’s article on food in the city (reference, Ian?) takes this approach, and the whole ends up being more than the sum of its parts.

2. Collective writing: nostalgia
As a product of the so-called Birmingham School (long note: the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ line was never coherent enough for it to constitute a ‘School’ … it tended to be seen as either a raggle-taggle of lefties, feminists, gays, black people or a bold cultural experiment in university education – take your pick), I am well steeped in the values of working and writing together. Much of our writing at Birmingham was written in blood. Intellectual (and otherwise) friendships were forged, occasionally enemies made. (See Richard Johnson's chapter 'Teaching without Guarantees' in ??, Epstein and Johnson for a gentle history of CCCS.) While the blog is a milder version of the intensity of this ‘experience’, it seems to me that it is using technology in ways that reference the rich potential of exchange sans frontiers (?Ian: dictionary here), well at least in the literal geographical sense.

3. Collective writing: romance
I don’t want to be utopian about the ‘blog’ form as necessarily guaranteeing a form of collective esprit and community. You can read Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Community if you want that warm glow. But I do think exchange itself – that ‘unsettling’ I talked about earlier is a very fine thing, and that is what we need to keep going – that sense of questioning and debate in a reasonably ‘safe’ but rigorous context.

4. Aftermath: flightplan
Personally, I like the metaphor of exchange here too – exchange as a methodology but also as a core moment (am I claiming too much? Probably. However, this certainly fits in with my own research). Exchange appears to thread through much of the discussion we’ve generated here, whether we’re re-thinking relations with animals, reclaiming the value of ethnography, re-emphasising food security and just distribution or zooming in on the intricacies of people's everyday exchanges, particularly in contexts of difference.

I’m not sure I’ve changed my own position fundamentally due to the blog. Nevertheless, both the process and the actual contributions have certainly opened up new routes and occasionally ‘troubled’ (Butler) the tried and tested (even if I kid myself that my version of this is still ‘radical’). The value of risk when travelling, I guess.