Humanities academics take their real business to be doing what is called research, I said. What they want is all the other stuff to be taken care of so they can get down to some work, I said. The academics are dreaming of Introductions and Critical Readers, I said. They are dreaming of new books whose name begins with Understanding … or ends in … in 90 Minutes. They dream of edited collections and special issues of journals.
Ah, creativity, I said – the capture of creativity, it’s marvellous. There is a whole technology to capure creativity, to seize it as it seems to give itself as soon as it appears. To seize creativity from the second it appears. It is easy to laugh at academics, I said, but they deserve to be laughed at. It’s happening all around us, I said, the world is changing as it has changed only a few times before, and it’s passing us by, I said.
The only way we think this change, I said, is under the sign of apocalypse. And I am the best example of this, I said. Or the worst example. I write over and again that the world is about to end, I said. That it’s all coming to an end. But there has been one version or another of this apocalypticism for the last century, I said, and probably before that, I said. A feeble milleniarism is the driver of all sorts of books, I said, best sellers or not. To write in this way is only another kind of self-loathing, I said. It is another kind of imaginary revenge on a world that is indifferent to you, I said. A world that is leaving you behind, I said, and in truth had always left you behind.
There’s no role for us now, I said to H. For a time the R.A.E. has funded research in the humanities, I said. This gave thousands of academics a chance to flood the world with books, I said. Thousands upon thousands of books, good and bad, I said. Where would I be without the R.A.E.?, I asked. After all, I come from a bad university, I said. I was a mediocre student, I said, and now I’m a mediocre writer. B0ok follows book and I leave a slug’s trail of mediocrity across the world, I said. Follow me by the signs I leave, I said. Mediocre signs. I used to be able to get away with commentary, I said. But even a slug knows when it’s done enough commentary, I said. Even a slug feels a distant, gnawing shame.
So now it’s necessary to take my revenge on the world, I said. The world which blame for my own mediocrity, I said. I got a job by chance, I said. And then acted like I’d deserved that chance, I said. As if it were natural and right, I said, and my due. But it wasn’t my due, I said, and it wasn’t my right. If I published a great deal, this was because of sickness, I said. There’s no an idea in any of the publications, I said, nothing of worth. I published and published, I said, and there’s nothing in this. For have there ever been more places to publish? I asked.
Once, it is true, I struggled to get published. I had more rejection letters than anyone. But that is when I aimed high, I said. Then I learnt to aim low, I said. I learnt that quantity was the rule. And then, when I found myself in a good university, the publishers came to my office and asked me if I had anything to publish. They came to my office, I said, one by one. There they were, aimiable and pleasant and in my office, I said. What had I done to merit that! For years I had been carrying round a mediocre manuscript which no one would touch, I said. Not because it was bad, but because it wouldn’t sell, I said.
I sent it off to that idiot in a cowboy hat in the states, I said, that velvet cowboy hat on which I spilt my Guinness, I said, and he never wrote back. That happened any number of times, I said. No one was interested, and rightly so. And now the publishers came to my office I said, and they asked me if I had a manuscript they could look at. Of course, what they were really looking for, I said, was a textbook, but they gave me a contact to whom I could send a monograph, I said.
There was no problem getting a book out, I said, once I was in a good university. It was like sneezing, I said. There it was. Barely copy edited, barely edited, with errors the Malaysian proof reader added herself, I said (they had subcontracted everything to the Far East, the publishers), but there it was, a book. And now I was free to act like the author of a book, I said. Like a player. Now I could refer people to my book. ‘Just read the book’, I could say. Meanwhile, I knew the book was mediocre, I said, and not even that. Barely mediocre, I said, and full of typos, I said. A book written in gibberese, I said.
Even with my poor standards I knew something was wrong, I said. The second book’s coming out without any publisher’s referees seeing the whole manuscript, I said. It costs too much to employ referees nowadays, I said. They pay you in books. They give you two or three copies of your own book if you referee someone else’s book, I said. But that usually means only looking at a proposal and perhaps a sample chapter, I said. No more than that.
Even mediocrities know something is wrong, I said. Even mediocrities feel an obscure sense of shame. It’s getting worse with me, I said, I feel more shame than ever, I said. You might think this would mean the beginning of thinking, I said. The first two books would have been ‘prentice works and now the real work begins, I said. But no. What is left to me now is only a vague apocalypticism, I said. One which is basically resentment at the system which gave me job, I said.
I am enacting an imaginary revenge on the whole system, I said, but it’s only imaginary. God forbid I ever accomplish a deed, I said. God forbid I ever do something. A resentful, hate filled little soul has hollowed itself out in me, I said. A little place has been scooped out in me where I dream of revenge, I said. A little place of shame and hatred I said, which cannot bear itself, I said, and seeks to blame everything on something else.
This could be my saving grace, I said. It could be this which leads me to accomplish something, I said. Because casting about for someone to blame led me to strong thinkers and strong books, I said. I blame Capital, I said, and, happy chance, I was right to blame Capital, I said. Somehow or another Capital led me to discover its truth, I said. The truth it laid like flies’ eggs in my own soul, I said. In my soul which is the soul of Capital I said, as it is has seized and destroyed academia, I said. In my soul which is full of writhing maggots, good maggots and bad ones, I said, much like academia itself.
Write from shame, I said. And write from loathing. For there is something to be ashamed of and there is something to loathe. The blog is a threshold, I said to H. It is that place where Capital becomes aware of itself, I said. Where the maggot realises he is a maggot among maggots, I said. Everywhere the flies’ eggs are hatching, I said. Culture is only the dung heap in which maggots crawl, I said, and I am one of those maggots. How is it then I know I’m a maggot? How is it that my maggotry revealed itself in me? I said.
Winston Smith in 1984 wrote a diary he kept secret from Big Brother. He wrote and discovered his soul. But it is the other way round, I said. The soul was born because of Big Brother and only because of Big Brother. The strong have no need for souls, I said. The soul is not a womb, nothing is born there. The soul is a place for flies’ eggs, I said, that hollows itself out from sheer resentment, I said. Then the flies eggs hatch and maggots crawl around, eating out our insides, I said. Then the maggots turn into flies and the flies buzz around, I said, and buzz out of our mouths at symposia and colloquia and buzz through the pages of our books.
The ancients thought flies were spontaneously generated from base matter, I said, and they were right. Only the base matter is the walls of our own souls, I said. Those souls resentment and shame have hollowed out. Happily, unhappily, that resentment and shame are entirely legitimate I said, when directed at Capital, I said. All they need to do is to understand their genealogy, I said, and the shifting planes of force which produced them, I said.
Dream of a kind of writing, I said, where the soul uncovers itself as a hatching ground, I said. As a hollowed-out place for maggots and maggot breeding, I said. Dream of scorpions which sting themselves to death, I said. Dream of open wounds that are cauterised by the sun. It is not the recovery of the soul that should be sought, I said, but it’s extirpation. Send Ripley into its caverns with a flamethrower, I said, and then let the whole thing close up, I said. Then you will find yourself outside, I said, in empty space. Outside, and what you were was only a pleat of Capital. Outside, and you see, as in a vision, that there are only the folds and pleats of Capital.
But then, the greater vision: Capital itself is only one way of organising those folds and pleats, I said. It has seized life and seized everything, but it is only a transcendental illusion, I said. Capital is the usurper, I said, that has usurped all of life, I said.
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