Conference Rhetorics
Tags: Anger, Conference, Banality, Food, Travel

I’m eating tacos and drinking a beer in a place across the street from my conference hotel. I’m sitting at the counter with a few other people I do not know. It’s eleven a.m. I have to give a talk in an hour and a half. It’s St. Patrick’s Day. The hotel elevator is already sticky with spilt beer. People are walking around the hotel lobby and streets with plastic cups filled with Guinness. A little girl cheerleading event is taking place as well in the hotel. Seven year old girls doused in their mother’s makeup are running around in glitter-soaked outfits. I’m in Pittsburgh at the main conference of my discipline. When I arrived at the airport, my cab driver told me to pay attention to the tunnel we had to drive through to get downtown. “When we come out of there,” he said, “you’ll see the city.” Pittsburgh rises up out of the tunnel, represented as a series of bridges and buildings nested into brown and green hills. I woke up at 5:30 in the morning to leave Lexington for Pittsburgh. When I leave Pittsburgh, I’ll wake up at 2:30 in the morning. I meant to wake up at 3:30.

A conference demands hallway, book exhibit, bumping into, over drinks, and standing outside of conference rooms questions. People you haven’t seen in a year want to ask questions. These questions pretend to mean something. Are we that curious about one another? Isn’t curiosity phatic? We have Facebook, after all. I am asked about my wife. I’m asked about being department chair. I’m asked if my department is hiring. Nobody asks me about the weather in Kentucky. I try 50 new beers over three and a half days in Pittsburgh. I eat at a vegan Polish restaurant. I eat an arepa one morning. I eat a veggie burger off of a food truck at one brewery and then eat a meat burger two hours later off of another food truck at a different brewery. These are details. Details frame experience away from home. Collected receipts. Itineraries. Calling a Lyft. Notes on my phone regarding where to eat and drink. Details construct a narrative. Staccato sentences outlining the banality of visiting another city, giving a talk, sleeping in a different bed, drinking beer, texting my daughter back home, walking downtown streets, casual conversation among old friends, wondering where I will eat next.

I walk around a book exhibit and notice that the publisher who has published three of my books has none of them on display. Someone stops me and asks me about how I am managing as department chair and if I’ll return for another term. Our panel is the very last session of the conference. If one opens the program, we are the very last listing. Twice former colleagues have chaired the conference, and those two times my panel was the last one. One day in Pittsburgh it is almost 70 degrees. Two days later, it snows. I skip the keynote. I have not attended a keynote in many years. When I am away from my kids and waking up at six to make their lunches and go to the gym before work, I think I will sleep in. The keynote is always early. I don’t sleep in, but I still don’t go. Thumbing through the program, I am bothered by panel titles, claims of moral superiority, land acknowledgements, assumptions about identity, identity politics, yelling at everyone else who seems to represent what is wrong with the world, mundane ideas. Roland Barthes noted his boredom at conferences. I don’t blame him.

Someone I once worked with is telling friends I kept him from being hired at my university. Because of this, he hates me. He’s wrong. It was his mentor who turned on him. She, as she often vocalized it, hated him. But how do you explain or care about misinformation? My Facebook feed is full of misinformation, all from friends. We misinform each other daily: over politics, identity, policy, economics, ideology. Our discipline is mostly based on being wrong. Assumptions about other countries, about race, about majority discourse, about identity, about economics. We should know better. We have Facebook, after all. What do we mean by fake news when we are among colleagues at a conference? Is the keynote fake news? The monotony of session titles? The artificiality of a conference theme? The questions about our personal lives we ask of one another? Social justice claims? Happiness? Answers to global problems? Trump. Politics. Which misinformation should I attempt to clarify? None. Morality is phatic.

I’m a respondent on another panel. My response begins with an anecdote of taking my son to a brewery after picking him up from school. It’s hardly a response. It’s a small piece of writing among other writings read out loud in different rooms by different bodies. The panel is the third to the last session of the conference. Twice, people ask me afterward if I am a creative writer. I barely read fiction. I hate poetry. I would never go to a play. “No,” I say. “I just write.”

Is there meaning in movement? Do bodies have a rhetoric? At a conference, bodies move among one another, checking over name tags, looking over books in the exhibit, drinking Starbucks from the hotel, eating bad food in the conference area (chicken sandwich, fish sandwich, veggie sandwich. . .our lives counted out in bad sandwiches). Urinating next to one another every hour or so in a crowded men’s bathroom. Shaking hands. Hugging. We expect to engage with bodies. “Get some gossip,” my wife tells me when I leave for Pittsburgh. I am a bad influence on junior scholars as I spend most of my time at the conference eating and drinking. They should be networking. They should be at the conference asking phatic questions. Pretending to be moral. My gray scraggly beard. My short height. My blue jeans with the cuffs torn around my ankles. My balding head. I’m taking notes on my phone of the beers I have in front of me. I am eating a pastrami sandwich piled high with coleslaw and French fries and drinking a cheap, local lager. I am waking up too early when I could have slept in. What is my professorial rhetoric at a conference? What is this body I carry around, walking through the book exhibit, walking down a long hallway in the convention center, attending the final panel of someone I deeply respect, drinking from the water fountain, looking at someone else’s name tag, using the restroom. What is my banal professionalism compared to others’ need to put their professionalism on display. “Are you still department chair?” “Yes, I am.” “Boy, I bet you can’t wait to step down.” “Uh…I really don’t care.”

“The real conference is in the hallways, between sessions,” my dissertation advisor would tell us in graduate school. The hallways are quiet, however, with banality. “How are you?” “Are you still chair?” “Are you hiring?” In the sessions, our discipline is mostly angry. People are too white. People are privileged. People are neoliberal. Trump. The university is racist! Life is unfair! The rhetoric and composition mixtape is a fairly predictable mix of morality and outrage. Young PhDs sure of their moral purpose and Maoist devotion to a body of generic agreement around an even more generic term called “social justice” huddle among their assumptions, declaring anyone who disagrees or questions heretical. Bodies gathered together in agreement over nothing. Non-representation. Because in their obsessive distaste for faulty representation, they are not referring to any actual body, simply their own anger. Instead of circulating information or ideas, they circulate anger. To be in the Humanities today is to be angry. Angry at oppression. Angry at the university. Angry at the generic, American populace. Angry at popular culture. Angry at work. Angry at writing. Angry at global affairs. Angry at the president. Angry at everyone but ourselves.

We gathered in the doorway of the Cinderlands brewpub. We were a couple miles out from the conference hotel. The streets were now quiet. No one from the conference was present. But the brewpub was packed with bodies. We could no longer ask or answer questions about being professional. The next available table was a two hour wait. Huddled near one another, bumped by entering customers who, too, could not get a table, watching others eat sandwiches and French fries at the bar, we stood drinking hazy IPAs and talking. What did we talk about? Morality? Whiteness? Presentations? Banality? I don’t remember. I jotted notes on my phone about the beers I was drinking. Notes. Details. Banal references to a glass of beer in my hand: hazy, hoppy, nice, good.

Sometimes on Twitter, I tell the story of my dog trying to kill me. He’s a two year old coonhound who barks at trash cans and signs. He rolls over on his back for belly rubs. He plays with a football that squeaks, and he rips apart stuffed animals. He sleeps on a bed. My tweets acts as if he is vicious, cunning, suddenly alert of his wolf origins and ready to take revenge on the humans who have reduced him to a pet in a suburban house in Lexington, Kentucky. Is he angry? Does he resent eating out of a bowl on the floor or waiting to have a rope attached to his neck so that he can crap and piss outside? On Twitter, I represent him without representation. He exists as a series of short jokes circulated among a thousand or so followers, some of whom are bots, some of whom I don’t know. Fake news. It’s all fake news. He couldn’t kill one of the rabbits we encounter on a nightly walk in the neighborhood. He couldn’t kill a trash can that scares him. But why do I perform this on Twitter and not, where information spreads among my academic friends more so, on Facebook?

Conference rhetorics. They are banal and every day, but dressed as professionalism. Where to eat? What to ask? What time is your flight? Is this your Spring Break? Are your kids on Spring Break too? Do you have grading to do when you return? Where are you travelling this summer? I got in so late last night.

Are you angry?