There’s no doubt about it, academics hate practitioners, I said to H. last night. Aestheticians hate artists, music theorists hate musicians, English department theorists hate authors, on it goes. Above all, I said to H., philosophy academics hate philosophers. There’s nothing they dislike more than philosophers, I said to H., to the extent that they try and banish all notion of the idea of philosophers by calling themselves philosophers. As if any real philosopher would call herself a philosopher! It wouldn’t be necessary, I said, it would be obvious to all! Even the ones who call themselves philosophers can sense a real philosopher, I said. That’s why they call themelves philosophers, I said. It’s to avoid thinking about philosophy.
I don’t deny that I am worst of all, I said to H. I have to go through the typescript of my second book one more time before it goes out for copy editing, my editor told me. It was terrible, I told H. What happened? What catastrophe has made it so that a book like mine could find its way into print? Was there ever a time when books flowed from publishers like a cascading stream? Was it ever that book after book spouted forth, each as pristine as the other? It seems so, I said to H., given the open sewer of bad books that is now polluting that stream, mine included, I said. Mine especially!
There is no question that the new book is weak, I said. Weak for all that it tries not to be weak, to experiment with its prose style, to launch itself in a new, non-academic direction. Not, for example, to reference all quotations, I told H. – that used to be permitted in the 1950s, I said, and I always liked it. When Blanchot quotes he will often do so from memory, he says. As if he didn’t have the books to hand. Well, who knows, perhaps he didn’t. But I’ve always liked that: to quote from memory and then to garble the quote. To garble the quotation and not to worry about it. To allow what is quoted to be reborn into the tissue of your text. To change what is quoted as you quote it. This would be marvellous, I said.
It’s as if everyone has forgotten the third of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, I said. The essay against scholarship. They should all read it every day, I said. It should be close to their hearts. They should repeat it to themselves every day. I know I do, I said. But then that’s half my trouble, because I can’t carry off non-scholarship. In the new book, I cut and paste bits of the first book. I like the fact that Zizek is cavalier just as I like him very much for putting so much on the internet, I said to H. Everything should be on the net, I said, and it should be free. Authors are paid so little anyway, so why don’t they simply leak their books onto the net (here is an excellent example, which comes, no doubt, via Questia (it’s an excellent book, a real book)).
But still, there’s never a thought in my head, I said to H. That’s part of the trouble. Of course, those who are called philosophers hate philosophy, I said. The philosopher in the academy is the enemy of philosophy, I said. And don’t object that the UK is unfriendly to philosophy. There’s the internet, I said, and plenty of room on the net for philosophy. It’s easy to find readers, I said. I don’t think I hate philosophy, I said to H., it’s just that I know it’s out of my reach.
That’s already a step forward, I said, but I have to distinguish myself from Socrates. He knew he knew nothing and I don’t know what I know. What happens, rather, is that I read this or that strong book and I am carried on the wind of that book, my sails full. Yes it is as though I wrote it myself and earnt the right to think myself when in fact what I write is always derivative, I said, and dreadfully so. What’s worse is that it’s dressed up as though it were not derivative, I said. It looks as though a real wind filled my real sails and bore me along. As if the good ship Spurious bobbed along on the open seas, journeying from this place to that. As though it were buffetted by the great winds that come from science and the arts.
But I read no science, I said to H., and my taste in the arts remains conservative. You see, I came to the high arts late, I said, when it was a way out of the warehouse. I came to it too late and venerated what intellectual content I could find there, even though I would learn that that was no way to read. I read and sucked dry what I read, going through the book and underlining every abstract passage, I said, but that’s what prevented me from reading. All the same, it felt as though Joyce and Tarkovsky and Mann had rescued me from the warehouse. The doors were opened, I said. The whole sky was open before me and the vacant lots where new office buildings were yet to appear. I could walk to the station, I said, and sit against its wooden walls, reading A Portrait of the Artist or The Magic Mountain.
True, I said, I had always sworn I would never pass over into what was called literature and what was called classical music, I said. But I did pass across. How could I not? You have to understand Winnersh Triangle was a void, I said, and I had to get my stimulus from somewhere. It was a void, there was no internet then, no one said a word, I said. Once I decorated my office cubicle with photocopies of Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love, where he is depicted as a Hindu god. Anand, the only brown skinned man in a warehouse of white skinned men told me it would bring me luck. I thought to myself: what is more distant from this warehouse than the gods, and the Hindu gods in particular.
Once it snowed in June. That it snowed was a great fact. It broke the law of Winnersh Triangle. It was snowing and Winnersh Triangle’s law was incomplete. Winnersh Triangle could not determine the behaviour of the heavens. The weather was out of the control of my boss and his boss and all the bosses, all the way up to the Managing Director. The M. D., a slim man, went jogging every lunchtime. That day, he didn’t jog. It was snowing and the snow and ice made the pavements slippery. He’d had a heart attack, the M. D., that was why he was jogging, but today he couldn’t jog. Because it was snowing in June. In June!
You will never understand what it was to read The Magic Mountain in the warehouse, I said. Those for whom low art is their playground will never understand what it was to happen by chance upon Tarkovsky’s Stalker. I’m still stunned by those discoveries, I said. I was the ape of Kafka’s story who saw through his cage the activities of real people. He taught himself to speak and walk like them, but he was still an ape. Thereafter he would only have a dim memory of the jungle from which he came. So too have I forgotten. The grimness of the warehouse exists for me only in counterpoint to the glory of Mann, of Tarkovsky and the others. The light of the latter illuminates the former so it can emerge from the darkness of forgetting. But it was forgotten. It was my jungle, I said, and forgotten.
Why do I write such bad books? I wondered to H. What is missing in my education? What course did I miss, which school year? Because there is something missing. When I read myself, the typos always horrify me. But when they do not (and the new book is better than the first one in this respect) it is the prose itself, I said. It unfurls across a void, I said, as though it were a very thin film, a bit of grease to be rubbed away. There’s no depth to it, I said, it’s all surface learning. There’s an element of scholarship, I said, but it barely believes in itself. The book resents itself. An ape writes knowing he’s an ape, I said. Then when I try to be non-scholarly, I am simply a bad scholar trying to be what he is not, trying to justify not learning this or that language with some vague pathos of rebellion. But there’s a difference between rebellion and bad writing, I said, just as there’s a difference between philosophy and sham philosophy.
It’s true, I said, most academic philosophers dress up sham philosophy as philosophy, I said. But this is the case for almost any subject. Young scholars who appear who’ve written three monographs in five years. Three of them! For an obscure university press which runs at a loss! Which keeps these hardbacked books in print for a year! As if the printing of 50 hardbacked books constitutes a publication! As if that’s what it would mean to be published! Books and more books, I said to H. and nothing in them, not one idea! And I’m the worst of all, I said, a product of the new meritocracy that allowed people from bad universities to compete with those from good ones!
In truth, I said, I am the spawn of the R.A.E. which I affect to despise. The Research Assessment Exercise produces overpublished monsters like me. Benign monsters, it is true, monsters who wave aside their books saying ‘none of it means anything’. Monsters who when asked what they’re working on, say ‘nothing in particular’. What are you working on?, I said, that’s always the question. And what does it mean? The Marxist intellectual, famous for many books, barely sees his supervisees, I said. He’ll do anything to avoid them. He draws a huge salary and helps no one, the Marxist intellectual, I said. Then there’s the philosopher of religion who is also a property investor, I said. He is a man of God, he teaches students about Jesus and he owns a string of houses, I said.
There’s no shame, I said to H., but I least I feel shame. I write very bad books, I said to H., and no doubt I’ll finish three books in five years. I have no trouble writing, I said, but who does? The young academics with their three books in five years hate the older academics, who publish little. They hate them, their savage little teeth gnashing. They tear about like piranhas, I said. I’m editing a collection, they say. I’m putting together a colloquim, they say. I’m running a book series. It’s a sickness. I, as an ape, understand this better than anyone. I remember what it was to read Mann and watch Tarkovsky. I wasn’t brought up with all that stuff, I said. It wasn’t my legacy, I said. I didn’t discuss Mann and Tarkovsky at dinner parties, I said.
Yes, I am an ape, and this allows me at least to know my disgrace.
Lars Iyer's Blog 