Unexpectedly, quite a few people came today, especially since someone surnamed Li happened to be passing by on the way, which made me very pleased…
I’m thinking about the form of the forum next semester. In addition to keeping its current openness and spontaneity, I also want to add some more proactively organized activities, such as reading groups and regular presentations. For some reasons, I feel that perhaps the regular-presentation format is more suitable. Of course, a reading group might also be organized at the same time, but the latter requires some fixed members with particular strengths in order to function well, whereas the former is comparatively more flexible and open.
What I mean by regular presentations is actually activities similar to the KeKe Forum, the philosophy-of-science-and-technology salon, and the like: that is, a small-scale but recurring lecture, with a different person invited each time to speak on some topic, followed by commentary or open discussion. The forum I want to organize, compared with the KeKe Forum and the like, would certainly be much smaller in scale: only three or five people at a time, at most no more than seven or eight. The topics would also be more casual. The people I invite would be ordinary classmates, and the content of the presentations would already be ready at hand—for when everyone takes university courses, especially certain small-seminar courses, they are often required to give presentations, sometimes longer talks, sometimes reading reports. These materials are already there.
So there’s no need to prepare deliberately. Before you have to give a presentation in a course, you can come to my salon first and rehearse it; or you can bring over those presentations that worked well in class and share them. In addition, some papers can also be brought in for discussion.
By now I’ve taken quite a few courses in which students had to take turns giving presentations, but I’ve always seen very few satisfactory ones: either they are perfunctory, or they make no sense at all. Truly reliable presentations are rather rare, let alone outstanding ones. Of course, this is not only a student problem. For example, at places like the KeKe Forum, many presentations are really dull, or else all style and no substance.
There are mainly two reasons for this. First is the presenter’s attitude problem: many classmates just want to get through it perfunctorily, while some who do take it seriously often still treat it as a task, a piece of homework, something to hand in to the teacher. But the key is that a presentation should not merely be something to account to the teacher for; it should also be something to account to oneself and to the audience for. It ought to let the speaker gain something, and let the audience feel that it is interesting. I believe that only when one goes beyond the requirement of merely getting by or completing a task, and engages in something freely, can it be made interesting—not necessarily more successful, but certainly more interesting and more powerful. That is why my salon will provide precisely such an opportunity: here you do not need to complete a task, nor do you need to placate a teacher. Through this kind of free presentation, you can awaken the desire for expression within yourself, and also receive the most direct and sincere responses from your listeners.
Today can be said to have been a rehearsal of this idea. First, dr gave a presentation of the Marxist philosophy assignment she had brought along, with four people in the audience. Even without audience feedback, I myself discovered many errors and omissions in the course of speaking; in any case, it certainly was not spoken in vain. Looking at one’s own writing with one’s eyes and speaking the writing aloud to others are completely different experiences. In the process of speaking, some errors and abrupt spots in the text will be more easily exposed, and the logic of the writing will be re-sorted once again. Even without feedback from the listeners, such a presentation is a beneficial experience; and let alone that, in the listeners’ feedback one will also gain more things—the greatest gain lies not in receiving some explicit suggestions for improvement from the audience, but in certain inexpressible gains obtained from the listeners’ simple and utterly unselfconscious immediate responses (mm. ah? oh! um…).
After chatting casually for a while, I then gave another course presentation, namely by taking out and presenting again the reading report on Winner that I had just finished recently. This of course was by no means my most satisfying presentation, nor was it the most interesting, but I wanted to use it as a demonstration first—to show that a presentation like this is about right; it need not involve especially deep analysis or argumentation, nor does it require any special talent for speaking. In any case, as long as it can roughly provide something somewhat interesting and somewhat inspiring, that’s good enough.
For next semester, it might probably be done like this: on average, a scheduled presentation every two or three weeks—that is, publish the topic in advance, arrange the main speaker and commentator, and recruit listeners on a small scale. The rest of the time, spontaneous presentations are welcome at any time; with just two or three listeners, it can go ahead. As for the time and place, there’s no need to continue with this semester’s fixed all-day Saturday arrangement; that can also be adjusted. We can discuss all of that after the summer vacation.
Seen in this place today: byz/xsl/sjc/dr
Possible topic for the next session: if there are people, we can put together another small presentation
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Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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