ABSTRACT
Take the situation where you arrive at a party with a friend or partner. After a few minutes, having grabbed a drink, you announce to the person that you came with that you are now going to circulate. And so you proceed to go around the space of the party talking to people already situated in different combinations of conversation that are likely to rapidly change. You move from one set of conversations to another amongst groups of shifting composition. You never really stay very long in any one place and don’t dwell intensely on what anyone is saying, since prolonged conversations limit your ability to exit and move on to the next one. In such a situation, people and their stories and situations seem to rapidly bounce off each other. Although many convergences are possible-i.e. reports about mutual friends, movies everyone has seen-this is not a context in which people’s situations really intersect. This is not a context for reflection or deliberation, or of experimentation or provocation in anything other than a perfunctory or easily playful way.
