IAPL2012-CB-0531-052.. - The International Association for ...

critics, theorists, writers, artists, architects, historians, and social thinkers. Since
IAPL 2002 in Rotterdam, the IAPL has been a truly inter-national society not only
bringing together participants from all corners of the world, typically from more than
30 different countries, but also holding its conferences in many different and often
less well-travelled folds of the world. IAPL has “travelled” from Rotterdam to Leeds,
to Syracuse (New York), to Helsinki, to Freiburg-Basel-Strasburg, and on to Cyprus,
Melbourne, Uxbridge (UK), Regina (Saskatchewan, Canada), Tainan (Taiwan), and
now back to Europe. Estonia is one of the newer members of the European Union,
certainly the newest member of the Euro Zone (that is so much challenged these days
by Estonia’s antipode to the south). The IAPL does not seek to situate its places of
“event” in the typical centers of global tourism and travel, but rather to regions with
rich, complex, and challenging intellectual and cultural histories.
So here we are in Tallinn, in Estonia, in the Baltic region that achieved its independence
from the Soviet Union only two decades ago. Seeking a place for the future, looking
back at a troubled and conflicted past, often caught historically between German /
Hanseatic traditions, on the one hand, and Russian, Czarist or Soviet occupations,
traded back and forth between these two powerful colonial entities to the South and
to the East, but also sharing and separating itself from a linguistic affinity with the
successful Finnish nation to the North. Estonia is now seeking to find its place in a
27-member European Union of multinational complexities, global, international, futural
politics extending far beyond the limits set by its nearby neighbors. Into this context
comes the IAPL to celebrate the successes of Estonia, to provide space—intellectual
space, cultural space, theoretical space, political space—for those very inquiries that
have made IAPL famous! These are the places of intersection where theorizing can
take place without the constraints of typical disciplinary conferences and associations.
These are places where exchange, cross-breeding, challenging ideas, and unusual
intersections can happen, animate and vitalize the work that is done at conference
participants’ respective institutions of research and teaching. IAPL members come
together not just to present papers–as is common at many professional societies–
but even more to constitute the “research laboratories” of thinking, sharing, marking
differences that are encouraged at IAPL. In these contexts, the very spaces of IAPL
conferences, alternative and cross-sectional ways of theorizing, inquiring, strategizing,
and conceptualizing are fuelled, instilled, animated in ways that quite simply could not
happen at one’s “home” institution. The differends, the intellectual confrontations, the
theoretical propositions, the literary imaginings, and the artistic conceptualizations
happen in the eventing (as in Ereignisse) of these conferences. They are the life blood
of the IAPL, and the IAPL is the context where these intersections can take place.
Following the Monday afternoon Official Conference Welcomes and Opening Round
Table, the screening of the German film director Chris Kraus’s The Poll Diaries sets
the scene for thinking Estonia in relation to its troubled past whereby Estonians are
constituted as the outsiders in their own home, as revolutionaries, even anarchists
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