Editorial – Luís Trindade

Correspondence

We organise a lot of scientific events. Some would even say that we do it too much, that we spend so much time organising them that we have no time to go to other people’s events, to spend hours and days listening, discussing and sharing. And of course we give a lot of names to the events we organise, often without really thinking about why we call what we’re doing a conference or a seminar, a symposium or a lecture. But the time we don’t have for colloquia and debates is also lacking in the events themselves, in the hurried speeches with ten minutes for final ‘questions’. The result is that we learn little at these events, which are rushed by the deadline and the timetable to be met, leaving time only for what is close at hand – disciplines, colleagues, institutions – and confirming what we already knew. Tim Ingold (who was unable to come to CEIS20 to give a talk or workshop due to the pandemic) recently suggested that we should write each other letters again, as in the old days when we wrote long letters and had to wait for an answer. Perhaps this would allow us to regain some of the care and spontaneity that has been lost in modern communication. Writing letters takes time, requires “attention and reflection” and “the patience of waiting” when reading. What would an event be if it took the form of correspondence? What kind of knowledge would we gain from messages sent slowly, with no scheduled time or deadline for receiving a reply? Perhaps it would be something similar to what Ingold himself proposed for overcoming disciplinary domains, in addition to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary (which still seem like territorial negotiations to him): a liberation of the imagination from its ‘confinement within disciplinary concepts and languages’. The time of the imagination is the time of waiting for correspondence, when we mentally dialogue with the imagined response of our interlocutor. Academic work as a letter in circulation, loose conversations (and therefore open to contingency and otherness), always ready to be resumed, without a farewell or closing session.

Luís Trindade
Vice-Coordinator of CEIS20 (2020 - 2023)