Free Dissociations

This article arises from the research project Acts of Assembly, conducted by Simon Bayly with Johanna Linsley, which examines the pervasive phenomenon of the face-to-face meeting in contemporary public life. The beleaguered meeting is a social formation that is simultaneously acknowledged as perpetually \broken\ (everyone hates meetings), and also held out as an idealized path to democratic forms of communitarian solidarity. It is our interim conclusion that face-to-face meetings are iterative performances of contact that produce powerful feelings of relation and non-relation in equal measure. What follows are some notes towards a report on contact, whose form takes part in its own performance of relation and non-relation. The notes are straining against their status as singletons, aiming to relate \ or maybe we are interrupting their nourishing solitude with our demands that they add up.