psi12 :: Performing rights library

Questions might be useful; i'm guessing that there must be general ones that are cropping up, but perhaps there are particular ones arising out of the discussion in KL. It would be interesting to see (from this position anyway) what kinds of things present themselves in KL as general areas of interest (or should that be global/international?), and which are more particularly local? Is that immediately obvious to the participants in the discussion? How might the London conference address issues of particularity and applicability in relation to crisis, reaction etc?

hope you're all having fun.

M

One of the issues that has cropped up in different ways over the course of the discussions here in KL is the importance of creating and sustaining a real space for the constitution of a public, or publics. When we meet in London we will be doing so securely within a set of interlocking institutional structures, including the structure of the university. While we may feel that the university as an institution applies certain pressures, it is also, of course, a public institution in which the idea and the fact of people gathering together to think and to talk is more or less taken for granted. It is a chamber in a public sphere in which it remains possible to voice dissent and to challenge prevailing ideologies. As we moved, today, from the private space of the roundtable, conducted in an art gallery, to a public forum, this question seemed increasingly pressing. The notion of the public needs constantly to be affirmed and contested. In some political situations the mere fact of gathering in public cannot be taken for granted. Furthermore - and this applies, I think, in differing degrees in all polities - those who exercise or represent various forms of authority (state, corporate) tend to present themselves and their speech as the voice of 'the public'. 'The public' in such presentations, easily claims for itself the authority of the majority, ordinary people, common sense, and so forth, and thereby disallows as marginal, exceptional or even seditious, other voices that might seek to be heard. The development of 'counter-publics' is therefore very important. On a related note, an important theme of several discussions has been the way in which restrictions in this sphere - including the censorship of performance, films and writing – are neither always nor only the action of the state as such. Instead they arise out of social and political contestation, in which, for example, Islamist groups or even self-appointed individual 'defenders of public morality' or advocates of particular national or religious 'values' succeed in empowering themselves as agents of censorship, thus mutliplying the agents of the state. Several of the events to which the organisers of Panic Buttons refer in their introductory commentary - such as the closure of a performance art festival in KL, the attacks on Utan Kayor in Indonesia, the banning of Amir Mohammed's film 'The Lucky Communist' - were events in which it was the claim by objectors to the events to speak on behalf of 'the public' were instrumental in the censorship that ensued. From a UK perspective it doesn't take long to recall last year's controversy over Behzti at Birmingham Rep in this connection. So, to close this line of thought for now, as I prepare to return for the London conference, the fact of the conference itself, as unexceptional as it may seem, is itself an instance of the kind of action that contributes to the preservation (in the UK case) of a certain part of the public sphere, which only came into being as a result of historical struggles, struggles which, in other places, remain fiercely contemporary.

Some description will follow.