Thrashing on the Line

The Voice

Come close to someone and they may speak to you in the voice in which they speak to themselves. That voice, never heard out loud, by which they goad and orient themselves – allowing them to press forward or sink back, to strive for something or to give up. Come close to another, and you’ll hear it, that secret voice in which they speak to themselves.

This is the way to learn what another is like. Live close to them, live alongside them, and even if you dislike them, that voice will let speak the integrity of their lives, the way it binds itself together. But also that which that life seeks to bind itself against – you’ll learn what threatens them, and how they have made their way through the world.

Perhaps this is why Kafka and his father were set against one another: the father let the son hear the voice which allowed him to lift himself from peasantry. And what a voice! So savage and so raw! Kafka’s voice was different; perhaps you could say it had been claimed, that it was literature’s – only it was Kafka who claimed himself for literature. It was he who set aside, with a determination that was the echo of his father’s, a few hours each night, to write.

Each night, every night, he would experience the claim of what claimed him, reaffirming it in turn. He heard a voice, but it was one which said nothing. A voice as privation, to which he joined his own voice that we hear sometimes in his letters. He said to himself – but also to literature, for what was he, as he asked Felice, apart from literature? -: I will set the hours aside for writing. I will wait for writing and write as I wait.

But what voice was it that told him to put aside The Trial and then The Castle? Perhaps it was literature’s voice again, this time saying: do not trust false idols, not even those I, literature, allow you to make. So the peculiar demand to cease work. So the manuscripts disappeared into the drawer and he sought to follow other stories across the days and nights.

Monologers

It is true, much to R.M.’s consternation, that I like very much to hear the voices of others. Nothing better than the pub in which others speak in great gales and floods. Marvellous to hear long anecdotes and long thoughts-out-loud. Then does something emerge that is new, because it does not come from me.

I hear it then, another’s voice, the one that would direct their life. I hear it: not fate, exactly, nor necessity, but a sign of that freedom which runs up against fate. The voice which says: I will make myself; I will make something of myself. Which lets speak that self-relation by which each of us lifts ourselves above the given.

Wonderful to be close to the voice as it knits life together. To be there as what is spoken turns round that self-relation which makes of life a coming back to oneself, a movement of return. Yes, that is what is common to my friends: the capacity to speak, the capacity for certainty. And I, who am uncertain, am caught in the great movement of their return to themselves, the sweep of their voice.

But what of those who cannot speak thus? What of the ones whose voice never raises itself against the hand they were dealt?

The Ones We Left Behind

As a child, to come across a new housing estate on our bikes was infinitely exciting. Another world, another labyrinth of roads and paths: where had we found ourselves? Perhaps there would be other children like us. Other children on other bikes in houses much like our own. Joy that our lives were doubled thus! Joy at the vastness of the world!

When we were older, those same housing estates trapped us. One after another, from here to eternity – who wouldn’t feel trapped? It was time to move away. Our friends who stayed drifted into drugs. Work, then drugs in the evening. Work all week, and drugs at the weekend. They were either doped or speeding, one or the other. That’s how they accommodated themselves to those estates and to the vastness of suburbia.

What, after all, were they to do? In the end, there was no rebellion, only accommodation. They adjusted themselves to life; they were reconciled to it. The voice that spoke to them was capital’s voice; it supplanted their own. With what voice did they speak, the ones who’d hollowed out their adolescence? The same as the one I heard in the alcoholics I would come to know – one that lacked itself, that had withered from itself. And in the end, like the alcoholics, it was as though they were possessed, those friends. Only now it was capital that spoke in them, not the bottle. It was capital that spoke and stared through their eyes.

Oily Fish

What happened to those friends of ours? Nothing happened; years passed, they are still there. And what has happened to us, who were able to lift ourselves from that place and go elsewhere? I admit I feel guilty about the voice in which I speak to myself, and that sometimes I hear when talking to those close to me. Yes, there is guilt, which is why I like to hear others speak, and not myself. For who am I to speak?

You were a dominant child, says R.M. looking at an old photograph album at my parents’ house. Dominance – it’s true I wanted to achieve something, to make something, but what? I never saw anything through until I came to academia. But then what have I seen through? There is that voice which breaks against necessity. How is it I find myself here? By a formless desire to do and to make. A desire that found form.

Up early, never late. Up early, at work before anyone else and then the whole day ordered. Up early, plenty of oily fish, carefully regulated caffeine intake – isn’t it capital, still, that orients my days, which have no room for error? I tell myself it is the fear of capital that orients me thus: the fear that I will find myself back on the dole, having fallen from that high place in which I find myself.

A fear of capital – fear born of the deregulation of labour which forced me from of the suburbs. Then unemployment, from this perspective, was my good fortune. Deregulation was my good fortune – and so was capital. I was afraid of unemployment, afraid of recession. I chose a different direction. But how, in turn, not to resent that choice? How not to thrash like a fish on the line?

Unemployed Negativity

I said to R.M. once she was full of ‘unemployed negativity’ (Bataille). Was I speaking of her or myself?

Most often, Bataille says, it will direct you towards religion, or towards art. Those are the temptations. But what happens when religion and art offer you no purchase? Then you thrash like a fish on the line: you’ve been caught, and you can do nothing. You’ve been caught, you allowed yourself to be caught, but what can you do? Resentment: because you escaped, you ended up far from home in a world you cannot really understand.

You escaped, but the world in which you find yourself is not your own. You’ve escaped, but you can’t go back, either. You’ve escaped, you struggled to gain the high place where you are, but you don’t belong there, or you do so negatively, not positively. You are there by default, by a kind of default.

But where are you, and what are you doing there? Look around you in the canteen. Am I like them? Am I really like them? For them, this world is theirs by default; they belong here. For them, this world is continuous with Oxbridge and then a fee-paying school. It is one and the same; they deserve to be there; it is their milieu. In the end, they are on the inside, and you are on the outside.

This a travesty, of course. It is fantasy. For a time, you try to turn away from the place where you work, surrounded by a circle of charred books, written by those who escaped the university. But what does it mean to teach those charred books in a university? In the end, you tell yourself, it’s laughable: you are a domesticator just as you have been domesticated.

But even this is naive, for the old patriarchy is collapsing. It is pure naivety, for no one minds that you teach Bataille. No one is bothered that you teach Bataille. You can publish what you want. You write whatever you like, and teach what you like. True, you have to bring in income, but as long as you do that, the university is indifferent. There is no rebellion and no domestication, either, since the old patriarchy is disappearing.

Perhaps the university where unemployed negativity finds itself accommodated. It is where it finds itself corralled not because of restraints but because everything is permitted. You cannot turn away from the university; it is everywhere. Wherever you turn, it is there. The world is training; everyone is training. The university is only part of a world that is perpetually in training. The content of what is learnt does not matter. Only skills matter, and skills that are transferable.

And you, who work in academia, for what do you work? To write another article? another book? So does unemployed negativity puts itself to work. So is it eminently obedient. Unemployed negativity, if it becomes anything, becomes academic. This is what Bataille missed in his ‘Letter to X’.

Thrashing on the Line

What became of our friends in the suburbs? The same as became of us, who escaped the suburbs. We have been captured and drugged in a different way. We’ve been caught, we thrash on the line, but in the end we’ll go still and that will have been our lives, that thrashing.