Category: W.

Manchester's completely changed, I tell W. as we wander through Piccadilly. I hardly recognise the place. When did it happen? How did it happen?

A new world appeared while we were napping. A new world … And what was the old world like?, W. says. I'm to tell him about old Manchester …

I tell W. of watching a flock of birds wheel above Piccadilly Gardens and then vanishing into a tree and making it sing. Of Sunday walks among the warehouses near the station, half of them derelict, bushes growing from their roofs, the other half low-rent clothes wholesalers for the Asian market, and of wandering under the viaducts and along the old canal arms of unregenerated Castlefield.

I tell him of the accidental entrepreneurs of the city – of fanzine writers and t-shirt makers, of band managers and party promoters. I tell him of leftfield record shops and rehersal studios with leaky roofs, of anarchist co-ops and worker's drop-in centres, and of Frontline books where you could read about the Rosa Luxembourg and the Angry Brigade …

I tell him of a city with a council full of militants, of the toleration of structural unemployment and of high tax for the rich and none at all for the poor. I tell him of the tacit acceptance that parts of the city were marooned, left behind, and that there was no longer any point in charging anyone to live there. Manchester was being left to fall apart like Mir space station in the sky.

I tell him of the dub music that would boom out from the Crescents of Hulme Free State, of old unregenerated Hulme, system built in the 60s, and now half-deserted and condemned, with piles of rusting white goods and shattered TVs thrown off the walkways by squatting crusties. Old Hulme, the concrete of which was once white, a futural white, but had long since faded to a stained grey under grey northern skies – Old Hulme, occupied once by council tenants in large maisonette flats, but deserted when the heating became too costly and damp crept everywhere; Old Hulme that was the crack in the city to which hippies and ravers and bikers came, and travellers with pit-bulls and rastas in their colours.

I tell W. about the music of Manchester, about the sound systems, about shebeens and drinking clubs, about the nightclub they made by drilling through the wall that divided two council flats. I tell him about dub, and the weightlessness of dub. I tell him about dub's anti-gravity, about liquified beats and aquatic rhythms.

Dub opened up the sky, I tell him. Dub opened up space. But at the same time, dub belongs to the earth. It lets the earth reverberate through our bodies. We are not made of nothing, that's what the low end said. We are made of the earth, that's what you heard when the sound system DJ slid the faders and let the vocals and melodies drop out. It's the rhythm you returned to, when he amplifed snare rolls like detonations, or let the hi-hat echo and fizz out into white noise, or when he slowed down the beat, making it thicker, stickier, liquifying it like molasses. And behind the rhythm, with it, above it, the ambience of dub, its space, its reverberations, a kind of humming squall above the music, as humid and dark as Jamaica stormtime …

I tell him about the demise of Old Hulme (of Old Manchester), its last days, as battles fought between gangs of Hell's Angels over drug deals, and of gunshots resounding in Woodcock Square. I tell him of stabbings in the queue for patties at Sam Sams, and of blood in splotches all along the floor of the laundrette. I tell him of the muggers who waited in the dark corners of the walkways with their stanley knives and screwdrivers, and of packs of dogs running wild, tongues lolling …

I tell him of hardhatted officers from the new council looking up at the low-rises, and then of the chainlinked fences they put around the Crescents, which were slated for demolition. And I tell him of breaking into Old Hulme the last night before the regenerators came, of lying out on the greens smoking dope watching the bellies of the police helicopters with their searchlights and talking about the Paris Communes and the Soviets and '68 all over again, passing round the dope clockwise because it was a time of war …

And I tell him how we they were hunting us down, the long term unemployed, the long term sick, how one by one we were caught and brought in … I tell him how we were told we had to be straightened out and reksilled; how each of us was given an advistor, a Case Worker, and made to sign an Agreement. And I tell him how we were each to present ourselves at the office to be retrained, about flipcharts and groupwork …

And I tell him that as I cracked open the spine of Either/Or in my rented room by the curry house extractor fans, I thought returning to full-time study wasn't a bad idea after all.

Manchester is a city of warehouses, we read in our guidebook on the train north. And what warehouses! The ones closest to the centre were built in the style of palazzi of Renaissance Italy, the new merchant princes of Manchester seeing themselves as descendants of the Italian princes of the city-states.

The Florence of the nineteenth century: that's what they called Manchester back then, W. reads in our history of the city. The money that was once here! The confidence! Cottonpolis: that's what they called Victorian Manchester. The city of cotton, the city of banking, the city of the vast Royal Exchange, in which 10,000 traders could buy and sell stocks and shares on the foreign market. The city of the department stores, of the new retail chains …

'From this filthy sewer, pure gold flows' (de Tocqueville). And it was filthy. It was squalid, along the old Medlock where the casual workers lived: the car men and porters, the builders and decorators, the messengers and warehousemen. The old Medlock, Little Ireland: that's where Engels saw 'a horde of ragged women and children swarm about as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles', W. reads in our history book. He saw the cellars in which the Irish immigrants slept ten to a dark, damp room on beds of straw, scarcely above the level of the water flowing in the river …

And Engels brought Marx north to show him for himself, the city where the revolution might begin. For wasn't it the reality of capitalism that revealed itself in the grime and squalor of Little Ireland, even as it was concealed itself as ideology in the men of Manchester, the self-made merchant princes with their faith the free exchange of goods and labour?

For a time, Manchester was a Chartist town, a town of mass protests, W. reads. The people demanded universal suffrage, annual elections … All Governments, not immediately derived from and strictly accountable to the People, are usurpations and ought to be resisted and destroyed: it was in the name of that Declaration, sent to the Prince Regent, that 100,000 reformers gathered at St Peter's Field. And it was there so many were injured and killed by the military forces arraigned to prevent another French Revolution … 

Ye are many – they are few (Shelley). But soon, they were many, too. The army was brought in to put down the revolt. And so in Manchester, garrison city, they broke the first sustained working-class movement in the Europe of the industrial era …

Ah, what do we know of political movements?, W. says. What of the politics of mass protest? As soon as the worker's movement comes to an end, we have the end of politics: that's Tronti. And he thought it ended just after '68, after the revolt of '68.

W. goes back to his reading. In the end, they didn't need the garrison, W. says. The Manchester men, the merchant-entrepreneurs, borrowed new models of internal organisation from the military. They brought in bureaucracy, and the chain of command. Each worker was assigned a place, and hence a function in the institutional whole.

In the end, it was all about time, W. says, summarising. The worker was encouraged to take the long term view – to understand his life in terms of his service to a firm. Time was predictable, certain. The worker learned to defer gratification, to develop long-term goals and self-discipline, in view of future rewards … And in return, they were granted a free weekend from midday Saturday. They were given time to shop in the new department stores, and to take to the streets, making a night of it …

And so when mass unemployment came, after the mid-century boom, there was no disorder. When famine came, no mass protest. The working classes joined the anti-immigrant, anti-Irish, anti-Catholic Tory party, and railed against the 'Yids' and the 'sheeneymen' driven from Eastern Europe by the pogroms …

Divide and conquer, W. says. They set one faction of the working class to fight against the other like rats. And above them all, Manchester man, buying and selling shares in Cottonpolis …

When did the labour movement come to an end? When did the new order begin? Das Manchestertum: that was the word the Germans coined for this new kind of economic individualism, which saw off the rebellion of the workers. But it depended nonetheless on the predictability of time. It belonged to those firms whose names you can still read on the side of the warehouses. They thought they'd be here forever …

Once it was a city of material labour, of the import and working of cotton, of the oil trade, of engineering … It was the home of old Labour, the home of municipal socialism, with workers with their eye on their betterment. And then what happened? Deindustrialisation, of course. Which meant deunionisation. Which meant the destruction of the labour movement. Which meant the demolition of every leftist hope and dream …

They sold off the housing stock quickly, to make sure it was irreversible. They broke the miners, the steel workers, the shipbuilders. They destroyed the car industry. They opened the markets to foreign competition and foreign investment. And production was allowed to became transnational, spreading across the world, plugging into and plugging out of this or that territory, even as the financial sector was almost completely deregulated …

'Economics are the method', said Thatcher, 'but the object is to change the soul'. They changed the soul in the '80s, W. says. They changed our souls, and what did the worker become? Flexible workers, one man or woman entrepreneurs selling their labour to Capital, which now encompasses the whole of their lives. And consumer-entrepreneurs, for whom commodities have been diversified and differentiated. Entrepreneur-consumers looking to sell their soul to Capital and then to buy it right back …

Ah, there's no long-term, for the worker, not now. Deferred gratification need bring no reward. For the new elite, it's all about contacts, about their network, not about the firm. Self-discipline without dependency: that's what they show, the editors of the new media, the advertising creatives, living in converted warehouses. Free-wheeling initiative: that's what they exhibit, the floor traders in brokerage firms, the internet entrepreneurs who buy apartments redeveloped by Urban Splash.

And for the rest of them, the non-elite, around whom their firms are constantly changing? For those for whom work means constant insecurity, the constant re-engineering and restructuring of their workplaces, constant delayering and outsourcing, constant downsizing and networkisation? Casualise your labour pool: that's what the consultants recommend. It's what the market wants, they tell their clients: labour flexibility impresses the investors.

And '68 is nothing in the midst of all this, we conclude. '68 is finished just as politics is finished. Because there's no more time. Because time has been broken up into short-term contracts. Time is for consumption, and commercialised leisure. There's no long term, not for the worker, nor the consumer. Nothing connects. Experience no longer accumulates. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships dissolve into the air …

The conference dinner. There's Alain Badiou, sitting all alone. We should go and talk to him, says W. You talk to him and I'll listen, I tell W. I want to hear W.'s French again, he knows that. He knows I think he becomes a better person when he reads French – kinder, gentler.

But why should Alain Badiou want to speak to us? He's a man of rigour and mathematical precision, of course. He's a man of politics, of real political commitment! And what are we?

Badiou has lived through things, experienced things, but we've experienced nothing. He is a man of exceptional rigour, of dispassionate mathematical thought, whereas we are men of exceptional vagueness, of pathos-filled would-be religious thought, which, in fact has nothing to do with religion, which has its own rigour, its own precision.

What would Alain Badiou make of us? What would he conclude? Enemies, he would think. No, not even enemies, he would think. Pas enemies. Les tosseurs. But perhaps he wouldn't think anything at all. He'd just look through us, he couldn't help but look through us, a man of mathematical rigour wouldn't find anything in us with which to engage. It would be as if, like evil for Plato, we didn't really exist.

For the mathematical philosopher, vagueness doesn't exist, not really; it's only a deficiency of precision. And pathos doesn't exist either, unless it is the glint of starlight, impersonal and remote, on the eyeglasses of the militant, brick in hand, charging the police.

God, what a terrible campus! The towers are like the towers of Mordor, W. says. Like the crags of doom. In the tiny bathroom on our floor, the light flashes on and off. A fluorescent tube, humming and flashing on and off. I bring W. to show him. It's like something from David Lynch, we agree. It feels like a symbol, but of what? There'll be a murder here, later, we agree. Or a suicide. One or other of us will throw ourselves from the tower, from one of the crags of doom. Or perhaps we'll both hurl ourselves down to the concrete …

We need to get out of here! We need to get away! W. suggests we head to Wivenhoe, the fishing village where he used to live as a student. We could find a pub, settle down for evening, and then walk out along the sea, taking in the ozone. But I insist we board the conference bus, and head out for the dinner. We've paid for it, after all.

Why does he listen to me?, W. wails. The bus hurtles through the counryside, branches crashing against the windows. Oh God, oh God, he wails. I show him my cock to distract him. It's a bit like slapping an hysteric around the face. W.'s suddenly sober. He feels very, very sorry for me, he says.

'The true and only virtue is to hate ourselves'. Pascal wrote that, W. says. To hate ourselves: what a task! He'll begin with me, W. says. With hating me. Then he'll move on to hating what I've made him become. What I've been responsible for. Then – the last step – he will have to hate himself without reference to me at all.

This stage, for him, is the most difficult. He can hardly remember what he was like without me. He has no idea what he might have been, what he might have achieved? I arrived too early in his life. The blow was fatal.

It's a relief, of course, W. says. He can blame me for everything. It's all my fault, his failure, his inability to think! In fact, that's probably why he hangs out with me, W. says: to have a living excuse for his failure.

W. and I never make a point of finding someone to discourage. They must find us, deliberately seeking us out, since we who are the last people to whom anyone would want to speak. But we're friendly, if nothing else, and it amuses us when people throw themselves upon our mercy. – 'You must be really desperate. We're the last people you should talk to. It'll get you nowhere'.

What advice do we give? What do we tell them? You have to know you're a failure, we tell them. That's absolutely essential. Give up now! There's no hope for you, you have to know that. Then we buy them a drink, or get them to buy us one. We must have the air of people in the know, I say to W. – 'We have the air of idiots', says W.

It's the same with our doleful companion at the table in the bar. We gave him our usual advice. We warned him! But he seemed to sink further into melancholy. We should think about cheerful things, W. says. But we can't think of any. – 'It could be worse', W. says. 'You could have Lars's life'.

Our guest staggers off into the night. – 'See what we do to people?', W. says.

Interrogative nine year old school girls on a Colchester bus. – 'Where are you going?'; 'Why do you dress like that?' Yes, where are we going? Why do we dress like this? – 'Didn't anyone tell you not to talk to strangers?'

Straight to the Student Union. We'll be in the bar, we've told everyone we know. – 'That's where you can find us'. Constancy is always admired, we agree. People need to know where to find you.

We order beers, then whiskey, then beers, then whiskey, then chips, then beer, then whiskey, then another beer and another whiskey, then chips. A balanced diet, W. says. All the major food groups.

'Godard made a film on this campus, did you know that?', W. says. British Sounds, from '68. It's really boring. W. describes the last scene, with a bloodied hand rising from the mud. – 'Godard cut his own hand for that. He wouldn't use fake blood'. 

We should cut our own hands, W. says. Our own throats … Then people might believe us. Then they might believe we have something to say.

I don't feel I belong at Somerset House, W. says. He can see that. It's a class thing. He's working class too, W. says. But I'm more working class than him, there's truth in that. In these times, we should be cultivating an aristocratic detachment, he says. We should retire from the fray like Roman Stoics, holing up on their country estates while the empire crumbled …

Should we order another bottle?, I wonder. – 'Of course!' W. learnt it from Debord, from Bacon: the art of luxurious dining at the end of times. He's read of Debord towards the end of his life, in his luxurious apartment on the rue du Bac, spending whole days planning elaborate meals and choosing fine wines. He was a warrior at rest, he said of himself. He'd lain down his arms, he'd had enough.

This century does not like truth, generosity, grandeur, Debord wrote. And Bacon, who, giving up painting in 1935, gave himself over to champagne, promiscuity and gambling, to a furious frivolity, to the grand style of existence …

Ah, but what have we given up? What arms have we lain down? Let's order some sandwiches, too, I suggest, and W. agrees.

Somerset House. Why are we heading for Somerset House?, I ask W. We don't belong in Somerset House! But W. won't be deterred from going to Somerset House. He wants to see the fountain, he says. He wants to see the jets of water rising and falling. And he wants to see me caper among those jets like an idiot child.

The bottle of wine I ordered arrives, with two glasses. – 'To us!', says W. 'To idiocy!' How do I think our lecture tour is going?, he asks me. Well? Badly? Have we come through with our reputations intact? Our dignity? Have we increased in stature in the eyes of our contemporaries? Ah, there's no need to answer.

This is our last tour, W. says. He feels that strongly. Something's going to happen. Something's about to happen … Why does he feel such a sense of dread?

In his dream, we're on the beach, and the sea's out, sucked out, as it is before a great wave comes. And only W. knows the tsunami's coming. Only he knows, but no one will listen to him. And there I am, inflatable around my midriff, running down the beach …

W. reads to me from his notebook:

The present generation is like the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It has not only a new world to conquer, it must go under in order to make room for men who are able to cope with a new world.

That's Marx writing in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848, W. says. Have we gone under?, W. wonders. Are we going under right now?

Only the young arrived in Canaan, we reflect. Moses himself died without entering it. And he bade the Hebrews to wander for 40 years in the desert, lest they bring Egypt, the memory of their captivity, with them to corrupt the promised land.

We dream of the young of Middlesex, with a daggers in their heart and ice on their lips. We dream of those who will come after our going under. What fools they'll think we were!

We're not young enough. Not ardent enough, we agree. Aren't we a symbol of what needs to be overcome? The escape from Egypt didn't happen once and for all. To be sure, Pharoah's horses and chariots were drowned in the Red Sea, but there is a Pharoah of the mind, too, and horses and chariots of the mind. We are all in bondage – especially us. We're all in bondage, and especially those whose communist dreams are so lacking in definition. 

Our communism is mystagogic, fanciful. At once pure obfuscation and childish whimsy. What do we understand of the militant demand? What of the risks that must be taken? 

To go under … We need to be purged! Put up against the wall as counterrevolutionaries! Only then, without us, might liberation begin. Only then might the world overcome its bondage.

We are altogether too pathetic for our Middlesex audience, we agree. Our vague communism. Our communist pathos.

We await our Marx, we agree. Perhaps he's somewhere on Middlesex campus, diagnosing the crisis of our time. Perhaps we'll meet him today, for whom we will only be the rubbish to be cleared away.

'Our task must be unsparing criticism, directed even more against our self-styled friends than against our declared enemies', Marx wrote. Our self-styled friends: the phrase makes us tremble with passion. It's us! He's referring to us!

Idiocy!, that's what our Marx will scrawl in his notebook as he listens to us. Stupidity! underlined. Foolishness!, practically ground into the page …

You should never learn from your mistakes, W. and I agree. It's our basic principle. If we lived them over again, would our lives be any different? Not one bit! The same, they'd be exactly the same, and that's our strength, W. says. We are reliable in our idiocy.

Is that why thinkers – real thinkers – are attracted to us? They want to be amused, no doubt, and we are amusing, for a while at least. We have a kind of charm. We make them laugh, our thinkers, who are often lost in melancholy. We lighten their souls.

But we always go too far in our inanity. We alienate them, our thinker-friends, sending them into a new kind of melancholy. They walk away, shaking their heads.

Is that what's going to happen at Middlesex? Undoubtedly. We'll only send our Middlesex friends further into despair.

Middlesex is the crappiest of campuses, we agree. It looks like a primary school from the 70s. But from the crappiest campus, the greatest thought …

What are we doing here? Why did they want us? You'd have thought they'd have wanted us to keep away. That we would have been banned rather than invite us, although invite us they did.

There are people who can think here, for God's sake. And now we're here, who are in no way capable of thought. We'll have to depend on our charm (on W.'s charm). We'll have to use our natural wit (W.'s natural wit). I should do my monkey dance for them, W. says. That should buy us some time before they lynch us.

The slow train to London. Twickenham. Putney. And Clapham Junction, where the track braids together with myriad others, and trains like ours run a parallel course.

My life in Manchester, in contrast to the suburbs. What was I reading in my box room by the curry house extractor fans?, W. wonders. What, as cold air seem to run from the crack in the wall? Kafka, in my own way, which is to say, spuriously.

W. read Kafka as he travelled through Europe, as he surveyed the European scene from his train window. He read about the Austro-Hungarian empire and its collapse, as the train passed through Freiburg, and about the generation of German Jews in its final hour as he arrived in Strasbourg.

He read about Benjamin and Scholem who, referring to Kafka, discussed the fine line between religion and nihilism in their letters in a cafe in Berne, and about their attempt to develop, each in their own way, a kind of anarcho-messianism, an apocalyptic antipolitics even as they argued about the exile of the Jews from the meaning of Law as his train crossed the Alps. 

And me – what was I reading, to contextualise my Kafka studies? What, as I wandered through the university library? But I had no idea of Kafka's milieu. To me, he was only meteor who had arrived from nowhere. I read The Castle in the same astonishment with which I'd greeted it first, back in the warehouse when I borrowed it from my long-eyelashed fellow worker who wrote my name as L'arse. A meteor flashing through the sky of my stupidity … A meteor through the squalor, and the squalor of my mind, with my secondary modern education.

Sometimes W. wonders whether for all that my relation to Kafka is more pure, more intense; that the star of Kafka burns yet brighter in my sky. – 'You had nothing else to steer by', whereas W. had a cosmos, a milky way. And steer I tried to, paddling my coracle into the unknown. But where was I paddling but in circles? Where but in the spotlight of my single star?

And meanwhile, all around me, the city was regenerating. Meanwhile, they were promising to rebuild Manchester … The suburbs were coming: is that what I sensed? That the suburbs were looking for me, even here? I knew, as my studies came to an end, that I'd have to bury myself more deeply in squalor. I knew I had to disappear into the crack in the city.

'We're in the suburbs of a suburb', W. says. 'In the suburbs of a suburb of a suburb …' Through the suburbs on the slow train, travelling back to London. – 'Did you really grow up here?' I really did. - 'You're lucky to have escaped'. I know that. He's amazed I got out. What would have happened otherwise?

Winnersh, Winnersh Triangle … 'Nothing ever happens here', W. says. 'Nothing will ever happen'. And suburbs like these are spreading to every corner of the world … And everyone will live everybody else's life, and nothing will have happened.

'You'd have to be very strong to survive in such a place', W. says. 'You'd have to go into some kind of internal exile … And even then you'd go mad. Even then you'd lose your mind'. Didn't I nearly lose my mind, living in the suburbs?

He pictures me as a teenager, cycling out to every green patch I could find on the map. He pictures me making my way through fir plantations to the patch of scrappy woodland fenced off by the MoD where solders came to train for future wars. I listened out for artillery, but heard nothing but the wind in the trees and birds singing.

What was I looking for? What did I discover? There were the suburbs and the suburbs were everywhere. That my non-town was growing on the verge of every town; what does it matter where you are? And even the firing range was sold off, the last of the old woodland, to build a new housing estate. Didn't I see myself as Stalker's cousin, ready to lead others through the last patches of wilderness?

What was I looking for in the wide patches of grass between the plots on the hi-tech industrial estate where I first went to work? What, in the rain that was allowed to lie in long puddles in the grass and mud?

The gypsies came with their caravans and churned up the grass. We were warned about them on the tannoy. – 'Make sure you lock your cars'. They left quickly enough, and the companies organised for diggers to cut trenches along the perimeter of each plot. But beyond the trenches, beyond the new chain-link fences …

Once it snowed in April, and the last remaining lot, the biggest, the wildest, was one pristine snow bank, full of space, I thought. Full of time … And I saw my future there in some sense, that's what I told him, W. says. I saw a future.

'You should go to college while it's still free', said a fellow worker, who read Sartre on his lunch break. He lent me his book, I told W., and I underlined a passage. I'm bored, that's all. From time to time I yawn so widely that tears roll down my cheek. And did tears run down my cheek?, W. says. No tears, I tell him.

'So you went north'. I went north. – 'Of course you did, where else were you to go?' For his part, as a northerner, or a semi-northerner, a man of the Midlands, W. went south, lured by the promise of a course on which he could study Kafka in translation (he could only read Kafka in translation, then). But they'd lied, of course. He never studied Kafka, but he studied other things instead. He learnt things – great things. He studied overseas. He visited the great archives. He criss-crossed Europe on the great train routes of Europe.

'And you, what did you do?', W. says. I became Stalker's cousin all over again, looking for space, looking for time under viaducts and on the tow-paths of canals, climbing over rusting pipes and broken girders. I arrived in Manchester while it was still a rust-zone. I arrived just before its regeneration, and the city was still falling apart like Mir space station.

Fog descends as we head back to the campus. It's as thick as the cloud on Mount Sinai, when Moses went up to meet God. He descended with the Tablets of Law, but what will bring back with us?

We're lost, hopelessly lost. Our kidnapped speaker's worried. What about the conference meal? He's supposed to be sitting at the high table. – 'Never mind the high table', W. says. Of course, the speaker's too full of sausage and mash to be able to eat anything else. – 'You have a real appetite!', W. said to him, impressed.

Where are we going? It's a very verdant campus, we agree. Very lush. The Thames Valley's known for its humidity, I tell them. It's very bad for asthmatics. I developed asthma when my family moved out here. And eczema. And lice, says W. And anal crabs, he says.

In the thick darkness: that's where God was waiting for Moses, W. says. That's how God appears to the mystic, Gregory of Nyssa said. The mystic receives a dark vision of God. But what do we see? Not God, at any rate. Barely even each other! It's a real pea-souper, we agree, speaking like the commoners in Brief Encounter. Gor blimey, guv'nor.

I tell them about my schooling in the suburbs near Reading. It was the worst of schooling. I tell them about my early days at work, in the warehouse. It was the worst of jobs.

W. loves these stories. I tell them about my first office job, by the dry ski slope in Bracknell. W. loves these stories, too. And I tell them about my escape to college, my escape to Manchester, despite knowing nothing of Manchester. – 'You had an instinct', W. says. 'It's admirable'.

We still haven't met God, though. We still haven't received the Tablets of Law. 'Go on, say something profound', W. says to our kidnapped speaker.

With our kidnapped speaker in the pub, waiting for our plates of Cumberland sausage and mash. – 'You know they hate you', W. says. 'They hate us, God knows, and they hate you, too'. – 'I don't think they hate me', the speaker says. – 'They do!, they really hate you', W. says. 'And they hate us. Especially him', pointing at me. 'But who wouldn't?' And then, 'Seriously, though, why do you bother? Why do you come here?' And then, 'Why do we bother? Why do we come here?' We ought to run our conferences, W. says, just for our friends. Why don't we do that?

Our sausages and mash arrive on oval plates. It looks disgusting, we agree. Then a second set of sausages and mash arrive. We have two vast plates each of sausages and mash.

'I didn't order sausage and mash', the speaker says. It must be a mix-up, we agree. – 'Go on, order some more sausage and mash', W. says, when the speaker disappears to the loo. I place an order at the bar. Soon, there's no space at our table but for plates of sausage and mash. They'll have to pile them on top of each another, W. says. He finds this very funny.

Reading University campus. Yew trees. The lake. We're in enemy territory. How did we end up here? Who parachuted us behind enemy lines? What's our mission? A suicide mission, it can only be that. And why did we volunteer?

This can only end badly, W. says, shaking his head. He's full of dread, he says. Saturated by it. We're in the wrong place, he says. At the wrong time. – 'Surely other people feel it. It can't just be us'.

Then we spot him in the foyer: the plenary speaker who W. feels is an ally. How did they get him here?, I wonder. – 'Just as they got us. Through flattery', W. says. But he actually has ideas. It's true: he doesn't belong here, we agree, hearing him speak. He needs to be rescued! So we resolve to smuggle him off campus to the pub. We need to kidnap him, for his own good!

And in the meantime? Be careful! There are enemies everywhere!

Reading University campus, and W. is full of dread. He has the feeling it's about to go terribly wrong. What, our presentation? No, no – more than that, W. says. Something catastrophic is about to happen.

Of course, Reading would appal him, I knew that. Not the whole area. The Thames Valley, west of London, the endless suburbs, driveways packed with Land Rovers … He shakes his head. How did I manage to survive here? How did I to grow to adulthood?

It's suicide country, W. says. He's full of thoughts of suicide, not least because some visiting academic is bound to pun on the name of the town. The university of reading … oh God, oh God.

This has to be last time, W. says. This has to be the last one, the last dog and pony show. It's true, we came here against our better judgement. We were invited, personally invited, and how could we refuse? Our trouble is, we're too polite, W. says. We want to please people, despite everything.

How will we survive? We need a rallying point, for one thing. – 'Look for a bar!' We need a place of safety, W. says. We need a panic room. And we need a general strategy. – 'Keep your head down, talk to no one'.

Origen has his cock cut off in order to think without distraction, W. says. Perhaps that's what I should do, if I could find it. You'd need a microscope, he says. A nanoscope. Ah, but it wouldn't make much difference in the end, he says. I've always had a low sex-drive. A low thought-drive!

Sometimes W. thinks we'll survive everything, that we'll last longer than anyone else. Perhaps it will be just us at the end, at the very end, like cockroaches, like vermin, running across the cindered planet. But sometimes, W. thinks we'll be the first to go, that we're being held out in front of the rest like coalmine canaries.

'How are things at work now?', W. asks me on the phone. 'Is it so mad that it's no longer bleak?' No, it's still bleak, I tell him.

I tell him about our endless management meetings. W. imagines me in them, a version of Shostakovich before the Politburo, of a political prisoner, moving between stupid defiance and complete compliance.

How abject I must be! How pitiful! How many fingers am I holding up?, my interrogator will ask me. – 'Fuck off!', I'll shout. And then, pitifully, 'How many do you want me to say there are?' Yes, he can see me in his mind's eye: a gorilla in a suit, pleading for his life.

Tomorrow it was May: but it's hard to believe it, we agree at we sit hungover at Stoke station. We're heading our separate ways: W. to the south, and I to the north. In separate directions! Ah, how will we ever form our political collective? How our new Party, always in search of members? There is no workers' movement, Tronti says, W. tells me. There is no workers' party, and therefore no politics. No politics! Then what is to be done?

Only thought, not practice is possible now, W. reads out from his notebook. Tronti says we can no longer think politics, but only the crisis of politics. Theoretical despair, that's what Tronti calls it. Political despair. Philosophical despair.

We are men of defeat, we agree, sitting on the bench on the platform. Should we hang ourselves now? Should we go out in search of strong rope and two stools? Ah, it seemed so simple last night in the pub! We felt so hopeful! And today, beneath the overcast sky?

What remains to us is only to chart our despair, to fathom it. What remains is only to understand our confinement. That's why Tronti commends us to read Kierkegaard, W. says. That's why he sends us to the philosopher of despair.

In Stoke, at the university, we speak, on the occasion of its anniversary, about the Events of May 1968, the general strike, of the battles between students and the police in the Latin Quarter, of the wrenching of paving stones and metal grilles from the streets, and the throwing up of barricades. We speak about the groupuscules, about the action committees that replaced the bureaucratic institutions of the state, about non-Leninist forms of organisation, of molecular revolution (Guattari) and the creation of moments (Lefebvre), of situations (Debord). 

We speak about a breaking with causality, a bifurcation, a lawless deviation (Deleuze and Guattari); we speak of the void of the zero point between hope and despair (Duras). We speak about the continuity of modern mathematics, of Dada and the Cubists, of Heisenberg's theories and the critique of representation extended by workers and students to society itself (Lyotard).

We speak about the Dziga Vertov Group, of the dissolution of individuality into the forces of the revolution (Gorin), of new forms of collectivity, of community. We show excerpts from the collective's British Sounds; we speak about sit-ins and teach-ins, about the collective production of handbills and posters, about graffiti and the refusal to disperse.

Towards lunch, our stomachs rumbling, we talk about the occupation of Nanterre, the Sorbonne and the Theatre de l'Odeon; we talk of the occupation of the six main plants at Renault, and of the closure of the ports of Le Havre and Marseilles. We speak of the men and women of the streets, about 'an inaugural moment of speech' – about the welcome that each could bid the other with no other justification than that of being another person (Blanchot). We speak of De Gaulle's fumbling address on French television, and of panic in government circles, and of the carnivalesque redoubling of the power of authority in the disarray of the marchers (Blanchot again).

After lunch, in a temporary food coma, we speak of the banning of far left groups in France, and of the retaking of the Sorbonne and the infiltration of the police into schools and universities. We speak of the workers returning to work, and the triumph of the Gaullists, returned to government with a good majority at the General Election in June. We speak of the Czechoslovak Spring, crushed by the tanks of the Warsaw Pact. We speak about the collapse of the Cultural Revolution into terror, and the suppression of Guevara-inspired guerillas in Latin America.

The room seems to grow dark. We feel depressed, terribly depressed. But we invoke, as the afternoon wears on, the title of one of the collectively written tracts of the Students and Writers Action Committee, whose participants included Butor and Roubaud, Sarraute and Duras: Tomorrow it was May. How moving! How beautiful!

Tomorrow it was May: and so we speak, too, about the Hot Autumn in Italy in 1969, and the British miner's strikes of 1973-4, about Italian workerism and Autonomia. We invoke the ghosts of Fourier, Blanqui, Luxemberg; we speak of Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and Cabral, and then we drink with our fellow attendees through the night.

Up and down piss-smelling stairwells, heading to our rendez-vous. You can't walk in a straight line in this city, W. says. It wasn't made for the pedestrian.

We breathe more easily as we are driven out through the suburbs. One day there will be no more cars, W. dreams. The flyovers will crumble. Grass will grow on the motorway. And the concrete collars of the inner, middle and outer ring roads will fall off one by one.

The tower blocks will gambol like rams and the shopping centres like sheep, W. says. And above it all, the same sky as he glimpsed that day at his college, with the students sitting out with their barbecues.

I'll have to pay for the beer, W. says at the pub. He no longer carries money, he says. He's like the queen.

W. ponders why I always make my lips – my great fat lips – into a funnel before I take a sip. No doubt it's all the better to pour it down, pint after pint: a funnel for the two pints I always neck at the bar before I sit down, and for the dregs of pints other people leave …

Anyway, he has his story, W. tells me. He has a story so good that to tell it is to betray it. He pauses for effect. 'I got my job back', he says. He got it back! I gasp. How is that possible? How, when the college had taken such measures to sack him? A legal technicality, W. says. That's what saved him, which is ironic, because it was through a legal technicality that they tried to get rid of him.

But hadn't the college managment had him marched off campus? Didn't the college police enter his classroom and lead him away? He'd been seditious, they'd told him. He'd been stirring up the students with all that Marx. It wasn't on the syllabus. He was in breach of contract. But he'd said nothing directly about staff cuts and course cuts, W. told them. He'd said nothing at all about managerial incompetence.

But they suspected him regardless of leading the students on their protests. The students led themselves he told them. They festooned a banner across the humanities building and sat out on the lawn in peaceful protest, drinking wine and cooking lunch on disposable barbecues with no help from him.

Still, W. was becoming a folk hero, management worried. Hadn't he spoken up to management in the redundancy meetings? Hadn't others followed his example? Colleagues shook his hand in office corridors. They thanked him for his courage, which had in turn stoked their courage. And meanwhile, outside, the sky open above them, the students drank wine on the lawn.

It was a glorious time, W. says. Management had been quiet for a few days, holding meetings off campus. Rumours were the College president was close to resignation. But then the order came, and W. was led away from his classroom and banned from the campus. Life went back to normal. It was as if nothing happened. Students went to their lectures. Sacked staff stuffed their books and pot plants into their cars and drove away.

And then? He was permitted to appeal, W. says. He came along to the appeals meeting with the mightiest of documents. His defence was Talmudic, he thought. He'd gone through the college laws like holy writ. He'd gone through its financies. And then he'd made graphs, he says. He'd made charts and diagrams to expose the real reason for staff redundancies. But none of that impressed them.

The Union, meanwhile, had seized upon some technicality in their attempt to dismiss him, W. says. They explained their case to management, who then disappeared into a huddle. And then? Full reinstatement, W. says. It was to be as if nothing happened. And that's how it was, as if nothing happened.

It's a marvellous story, I agree. Marvellous and terrible, W. says. Still, W. wonders whether he wouldn't have been better off sacked. Whether he shouldn't have been forced to leave it all behind, the whole system.

We need to leave, W. says. We need to depart. What's that line Appelfeld has his characters say? 'After all, I'm not an insect'. We're not insects, W. says.

W.'s train was full of obese children, he says. – 'When did everyone get so fat?' The children ran up and down the carriages, unhindered by their girth. But W. got down to some reading despite their bellowing. He underlined passages and wrote in his notebook. The children on my train were wiry and lean, I tell him. They sat still with their pitbulls, full of spent hatred. – 'And what did you read?', W. asks. And when I tell him, he nods and murmurs. – 'Flusser again, oh yes … Mazzarri, oh you'll never understand him …'

W.'s been reading so much Tronti he's not sure which of his thoughts are his own, and which the Italian philosopher's. The development of capitalism is the truth of capitalism, he quoted in an email to me. The more that capital develops, the more it reveals the secret of capitalism.

And then, in another email: As soon a capitalism has conquered everything externally, the force of domination must become internal – capitalism has to be internalised, capitalism is now a matter of subjectivity. Brilliant!, I wrote back.

It is only by seeing ourselves as part of capital, immanent to capital, that we can possibly struggle against it, W. wrote. Exactly!, I wrote back.

He's reading Tronti's Twilight of Politics now, W. says. It's very despairing. Basically, there is no political subjectivity so there's no more politics. The workers' struggle is over … The credits are rolling … Tronti says we need to read Kierkegaard now, not Marx, if we want to understand the effects of capitalism.

He has things to tell me, W. says when I meet him at Birmingham New Street. Great things! But first he needs a pint. He needs to regroup.

There's no city more revolting than Birmingham, W. says. But there's no city he understands as well as Birmingham, he says. Wasn't it to Birmingham that his family fell to earth after their years in Canada? Wasn't it Birmingham that saw his first intellectual adventures in the library of his grammar school? Wasn't it there he was dazzled by the bright orange dustcovers of the Schocken editions of Kafka?

Perhaps we need something to think against, W. says. Would he ever have needed to think, if they'd stayed in Canada among the pine trees and the lakes? Of course not. His body and soul would have been one. He'd have known fellowship, harmony. But as it was, falling to earth in Birmingham, he had to think against the city. To think against it, which meant to think against England, this ridiculous country, he says. To think against England from the city at the geographical heart of England.

And isn't that why we've travelled here from opposite ends of the country, from our cities on the periphery, from W.'s Plymouth and my Newcastle? Isn't that why we agreed to speak here of all places?

Schelling, Malebranche … no one's safe when I begin to think. Maimon, Nicholas of Cusa … Is there anyone who might be saved?

A rumbling through the heaven: Lars is writing one of his commentaries! Angels' cries: he's defiling Rosenzweig! And Weil! And Kierkegaard!

W. shudders. No one reads a line he writes, he says. It's of no significance at all. But when I write – when I publish my reflections, if he can call it publishing, if he can call them reflections – he wants to clasp the entire oeuvres of Rosenzweig, Weil and Kierkegaard to his breast. Wants to build a big wall around the library and all libraries, posting sentries to shoot me on sight.

Don't let him get near!, he's tell them. But he knows, like the Red Death of Poe's story, that I'm in there already, that my reading has eaten away at those oeuvres like cancer.