The following review of the 'Capturing the Moving Minds' conference was
published in the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto on 2 October 2005. The
Italian version is available at:
 
http://www.ilmanifesto.it/Quotidiano-archivio/02-Ottobre-2005/art83.html
 
I append an English version below.
 

A window on the world
 
>From Helsinki to Beijing on board the trans-siberian train. A mobile
conference of activists, artists, researchers and mobile communications
experts, gathered to investigate the new logic of the economy and generate
forms and practices of resistance to global control. 'Capturing the Moving
Mind,' an itinerant event organised by the journals Ephemera and Conflitti
Globali.
 
Brett Neilson
 
To move without cause, to organise without ends, to flee the war against
intellect: these were the imperatives that animated the conference held on
the trans-siberian train: 'Capturing the Moving Mind: Management and
Movement in the Era of Permanently Temporary War' (September 11-20, 2005).
Organised by a group surrounding the online journal Ephemera: Theory and
Politics in Organization (http://www.ephemeraweb.org/index.htm) and
affiliated with Framework: The Finnish Art Review and the new Italian
journal Conflitti globali, the conference brought together activists,
artists, mobile communication experts, filmmakers, musicians, and
researchers of all stamps. In reality, this moving event was something more
than a conference. The rhythm of the train, the changing landscapes, the
interactions with strangers, the border controls and currency exchanges: all
imposed contingencies that demanded constant interrogation and shifts of
perspective. At the same time, the train functioned as a kind of protective
shell, like the set of a reality TV show, removing the participants (their
discussions and creations) from the world that flitted by outside. Yet, in
this isolated space, there was time for rumination, intimacy, withdrawal,
and debate - an ongoing group dynamic, fight or flight, contained by neither
the many nor the one.
 
It is not difficult to criticise an undertaking like this: a pack of
intellectuals, activists, and artists, predominantly white and
English-speaking, speeding past impoverished towns, disputing the finer
points of immaterial labour while aestheticizing the crumbled factories on
the way. To be sure, the paradoxes of this situation were sharpened as the
train continued on its arrogant line, like Benjamin's angel, but with its
face unturned, oblivious to the storm behind. The outside world, as it were,
reacted back on the group, sparking internal dissension, stunts of devil's
advocacy, and, in one case of one participant whose passport was stolen,
delicate negotiations at the German consulate in Novosibirsk. It is
tempting, following the formulation of another participant, to characterise
the event in temporal-historical terms: a bunch of people from the twentieth
century, hurtling past nineteenth century villages on their way (like the
business leaders of our times) to find the twenty-first century in Beijing.
But a mere stroll around Beijing, let alone Moscow, reveals the limits of
this elegant summation.
 
In these former second world cities, the first world implodes upon the
third. All the global divisions can be found in a single locale. The
petrodollars that swell the pockets of the Russian oligarchy do not trickle
down. The houtons of Beijing, rapidly being cleared for the 2008 Olympic
Games, border on corporate skyscrapers and department stores. As the local
participants in both Moscow (Michael Chernyl) and Beijing (Zhiyuan Cui and
Wang Hui) insisted, the concept of capitalism is too wide to explain what is
happening in these urban laboratories. If, as Deng Xiaoping once said, 'we
do not know what socialism is,' perhaps today we need to add, 'we also do
not know what capitalism is.' For it is the very precariousness of capital,
its constitutive exposure to venture and risk that makes it impossible to
isolate as an empirical object. As that most abstract of abstractions,
capital produces an -ism to which nothing (but almost anything) can attach.
Doubtless, this is why it propagates so incessantly. And perhaps this is
also why the power that it breeds is so mad, indeterminate and arbitrary, no
more so than at a time of seemingly permanent war.
 
It was the emergence of the new forms of global control (which find their
principal mode of being in war) that occupied the conference's critical
core. Beyond the state of exception, beyond the borders and fences, beyond
the humanitarian tragedies and suicide bombings, there operates a new and
seemingly pure power that functions without institutional legitimation and
seems to change day by day. The control of the mind, of collaboration
between minds, of feelings, affects and the generic human capacity to relate
is the borne of this power. Under its sway, politics melds with productivity
and the primary struggle becomes a fight for the free use of human minds. It
is no longer a matter of this or that issue, this or that injustice. When
power becomes detached from any single logic or rationale, all that remains
is to stay on the move, to meet its madness with a delirious rigour that
shifts, twists and compulsively derails. With such movement, there emerges a
variety of experience that motivates itself and, in so doing, acquires the
quality of an experiment - a kind of pure theoretical practice that attempts
to create something new. This, in essence, was the gambit of the conference,
locking away forty brains and bodies in a train and leaving them to sense as
well as cogitate. Can there, could there emerge from such an experiment a
new form of politics, another way of being, within and despite the frenzy of
global control?
 
The trans-Siberian journey was kind of learning without pedagogy, an
exercise in improvisation as much as organisation, a passionate encounter
where relations by hand, touch, and intuition (although not necessarily
physical) outweighed those that occurred on the cusp of understanding.
Beyond the lands of the Roman alphabet, with only one Russian and one
Mandarin speaker, the signs become illegible and the entire symbolic realm
of language begins to fall away - imposing itself as a kind of barrier,
sure, but also opening new vistas of intimacy that are neither communicative
nor symbiotic. To buy food on the platform, one was left only with the hands
- pointing, counting the fingers, expressing gratitude by joining the palms.
Some used digital cameras to display the items they wanted to purchase. But
this gestural economy, importantly motivated by commodity exchange, could
not go unnoticed by the group. Obsessed with the movement of the economy
from the limited sphere of rationality to the in-born and adaptive human
faculties, the discussion constantly veered back to these chance encounters.
Perhaps because this accidental ethnography - more than the internal group
dynamic - registered how the purity of experience is always contaminated by
contingency and context.
 
The memory traces of this event were already under construction before it
began. Part of the process involved the use of newly invented 'mobicasting'
software to feed images and sounds via mobile phone from the train to a
website (http://www.kiasma.fi/transsiberia) and display in the Kiasma Museum
of Contemporary Art in Helsinki. An exercise in the assemblage of an open
archive as much as an act of intellectual tourism, the conference sought to
build common resources for creative political expression. Nor has this
generativity ceased with the dispersal of the participants, each of whom
came and left with his own baggage. As the object of journal issues and art
exhibitions, one of which will be held at the Villa Croce museo d'arte
contemporanea in Genova next summer, the process goes on. Disposable cameras
distributed to non-conference travellers on the train will be sent to a
studio in London, film rushes shot on the journey will be stitched together
with others, digital video of an action carried out at the Russian-Mongolian
border will provide source material for media art, a manifesto about a
network of networks will be penned. But these material products should not
be considered ends in themselves. The point of the conference was to
institute, through the sheer experience of movement, a mode of being that
reveals itself phenomenologically - a way of living without opportunism or
fear, paralysis or submission. Such a strike against boredom, or activism
for the sake of activism, can have no outcome. It exists only in the
present, somewhere between departure and arrival, in the thick of the night,
when the movement seems to slow and the rhythm of the train at once wakes
you and lulls you back to sleep. In this time and space, there is neither
dream nor calculation, transport nor retreat, but only the incessant clang
of metal on metal.