Lars Iyer's Blog

Day 1000 of our non-careers, coffee in the autumn sun up by the station. We speculate, as ever, about jobs. There’s a job coming up at X. There may be something at Y., but not for a couple of years. And isn’t there a research post at Z.? And the ongoing decline of our kind of philosophy. ‘Basically, we’re fucked’. And those who work around us in our department become like gods. What do they expect from us? What do they want? What are they thinking? And we’re getting older. ‘I’m 35 for fuck’s sake’.

Caffeine in the bloodstream, new hope. But you’ve got that article coming out, haven’t you? Why don’t you try and get something in sociology? I’m publishing in religious studies. I’ve got something coming out in cultural theory. We should got to a sociology conference. Who’s paying for coffee? I am. No, I am. Who of us can afford anything, let alone coffee? Small rebellion against the state of things: I’ll pay. Small potlatch.

Who of us in a position to understand whether we’ll be hired or not this coming year. If A. gets a sabbatical, then … If B. gets research leave, then … Autumn sun. The year is turning towards the new term. Who of us will get hired, and if so, for what? The sun falls equally on each of us. But who does the department favour? They might give the teaching to D., she’s just finished her Ph.D. No, they’ll probably give it to E., it’s his turn to get teaching experience. Yes, but F.’s very close to the head of department.

Then there are the wild cards, roving bands of part-timers who pass locust-like from university to university. They are pared down, hungry, hyper-efficient, the shock-troops of the new contractualism. They see a chink in the department and they are there, enlivening the research forums, attending the colloquia, joshing with the head of department in the corridor. Damn it, F.’s from Oxford, as well.

New term comes. F. hoovers up the hours. I’m given one hour a week’s teaching. One hour. F. is given several hours. The Head of Department, ‘He’s more experienced than you’. ‘He’s got more publications than you’. I’m going to write a letter to the Head of Department I tell my friend in the sun. Will I write it? The sun falls equally on each, but we are not all equally favoured. If I write a letter, what then? Will the department look upon me less favourably?

In truth, by this time next year, the Head of Department will have forgotten everything. It will begin again, all over again. For this year, F. is teaching in our place. F. who buys his own white board markers, his own chalk. F. who makes his own handouts. As part-timers, we are given neither white board markers nor printing privileges. The secretaries and administrators know we are scum. We know we are scum. In we drift and out we drift, like scum on the tide. But F. has bought a packet of new white board markers in several colours. F. has a packet of coloured chalk and a packet of white chalk. Damn it, F. even has transparencies.

Where did he get them from? I ask my friend in the autumn sunlight. Then we hear he is bringing in videos and arranging screenings. He wants to start up a philosophy and film society. He wants to get the students involved. How does he do it? He teaches – what – 8 hours a term. 8 hours for 20 weeks a year. How does he live on it? Independent means. They all have independent means. He’s come down from Oxford with his independent means. And then he has the Oxford manner. A bit of tweed.

He really does wear tweed. He wears tweed and what do we wear? We look like scum, we dress like scum. Dress for the job you want. What job do we want? We are scum on the tide, drifting in and out. The trouble is, we know we’re scum. How is it F. doesn’t know? He has the right attitude. He’s dressed for the job he wants. Here he comes with his briefcase. Don’t talk to him. He comes up to us, all friendly. Shall we kill him? God, he’s pleased with himself. In he goes with his briefcase full of transparencies, videos, coloured markers and coloured chalks. He’s got it all, the bastard.

Of course he gets a job elsewhere a few weeks into term. Of course he’s lined up a job somewhere else, he’s off. In a year a volume of The New X. has appeared, which he’s co-edited. In another year, he’s edited a special edition of a journal. Meanwhile, the department has rung us. Do you want to split F.’s hours between you. F.’s hours! Of course! We divide them between us. Coffee in the autumn sun, a few weeks into term, you have five hours teaching and so do I. It’s all turned out pretty well.

I have a column of sorts over at the new look Ready Steady Book. The latest piece is on Josipovici’s In a Hotel Garden.

Desperate Need

October 2000, and I am on the dole for the thousandth day, the hundred thousandth day, for the millionth-and-first day, on the dole, working, but still on the dole, working a few hours for the university, but still on the dole, still claiming council tax exemption and housing benefit. Working, it is true, but not enough, there are never enough hours, so you’re on the dole. Working a few hours here and there, picking up what hours you can, but on the dole, on benefits, visiting the job centre, signing on every couple of weeks, standing in line and signing on every fortnight.

Working, yes, but you know you won’t get paid until February, that this is the deal, you begin working in September, you teach in good faith, you prepare your teaching, you get the bus to work, you attend the lectures on the courses you are supposed to be teaching and then supply the seminars. Working, but on the dole, because there is always the timelag, always that the university cannot manage to pay you for many months, always the six month lag, always that length of time when it cannot, for some reason, may a payment to you.

So roll on February, you say to yourself, February can’t come too soon, you say to yourself, because although you sign on, you are not entitled to full benefits, you work after all, though you are not paid for work, not until February, but you work nonetheless, which means you are not jobseeking, not entirely, so there’s always the suspicion, always non-comprehension, you have to make your case again each week, over and again, and they search each week on their database for lectureships in philosophy, no, nothing’s come up, they say, have you thought of anything else, they say, and you think to yourself, I’ve thought of everything else and that’s the trouble.

October 2000, housing benefit isn’t being paid, the City Council are months behind, and helping only those who are in desperate need. Those in desperate need are told to come to the Council to make their case. On the bus, up to town, across the squate, into the City Council, along the long corridors, through rooms which are only corridors, and there it is, the waiting room, but it is really a corridor, and the chairs lined up, take a ticket and take a seat, you will be seen, just be patient, so I take my place alongside the others, we sit, minutes pass, then hours pass, and we are asked to fill in forms about our desperate need, then to wait a little longer, and so we fill in forms about our desperate need and wait a little longer, and then we are told to submit our forms about our desperate need and come back another day, so out we go into the sunshine, another morning gone, another half-day wasted, we queued, but we were not seen for all our desperate need, this is the way of things, we are unemployed or half-employed after all, and the City Council is doing its best to sort out the mess, after all, and there is a great deal of good will in the civil servants we meet, everyone wants the best for us, everyone sympathises with us about our desperate need, no doubt they’ve been on courses on sympathising and empathising, no doubt they’ve also gone on courses for negotating and managing, no doubt they know how to deal with us and our about our desperate need, the long term unemployed, no doubt they are prepared to be tough, if necessary, and that they do not and cannot tolerate violence or verbal abuse. Out we go into the sunshine with about our desperate need. Another day, back on the bus, back home, moneyless, rentless, back home with no money and no chance of money, on the bus and wandering about those whose need is so desperate they never made it to the bus and to the City Council.

In desperate need, skint, cashless, rentless, hopeless, I phone the university, but nobody’s there, no one will take my calls, they’ve heard my whining before, they’ve heard my carping, they know what I’ll say, I always say it, the same lament, the same wailing. I go to the library to write a melodramatic e-mail, I’m in desperate need, I write, but am I in desperate need, not really, if I was in such need, I couldn’t write, I’m in desperate need, I couldn’t have made it to the library, couldn’t have logged into to my e-mail account, couldn’t have typed a line, nevertheless, I’m in desperate need, that’s what I write to my employers in the department of accountancy, I’m in desperate need, I write, and I need an advance payment, but it’s university policy not to make payments before February, that’s that. I know that, they know that, my silent correspondents. The issue’s been raised before. I raised it, they’ve heard me raise it. They’ve explained, they’re helpless, it’s structural, what can they do, they wish they could help, but they can’t help.

Should I go on strike? Should I withhold my services? Should I just not turn up to teach my Libyan students English? Should I just not get on the bus and not go to work to teach the students whose company in Tripoli is paying £16,000 to the university in fees but who are taught accountancy, yes accountancy, which is to say the English vocabulary used by accountants in England, by me, who knows nothing of accountancy, not a thing, who is the least qualified person to teach accountancy at the university, but I have to make a living,

I’ll teach anything, and so I teach in the business school, I take on those students who pay enormous fees to be taught by me, an hourly paid lecturer who receives £23 an hour, a fair amount, it is true, but then that includes preparation and marking and everything else, it includes the ride on the bus and the trips to the library, in I come, away I go, without an office, without a room, but in I come, away I go, promptly and efficiently, not overstaying my welcome, another of the ghosts of the academic world, another of the living dead of the academic world, the desperate ones who haunt the university, the ones no one wants to see, the untouchables and unpalatables and we might as well be unthinkable, we who barely exist, who exist only enough to deliver a course, who can be trusted only when all the other teachers have disappeared, only when they’ve vanished and can’t be contacted, then as a last resort, as the last of last resorts, always in a panic and at the last minute, I am contacted, they reach me by phone, after all what else was I doing, what else could I do, but wait by the phone, day after day, hardly existing, in which was never really desperate need, but what was need nevertheless, one day after another lived in need, a half life half-lived in need.

So the day passes, so another day is wasted, so another day am I too cross and frustrated to work, another day in obscurity, another day in vague if not desperate need, another day on the other side of the glass, another day dreaming of February, another day dreaming of payday, when will it come?, and of housing benefit, when will it come?, another day unemployed, but the unemployed have days to waste and time is on their side, all time is on their side, they have all of time, they can do what they please, their time can be wasted because they have time to waste, because all their time is wasted time, because they waste time and soil time, because time is wasted and soiled by them, because they destroy time, and especially work time, the time the civil servants spend at work, the time they spend working to process claims by those of us who do not work, yes we have all day everyday and all the hours of each day, and time stretches before us without markers, each day the same, pretty much, and each week the same, only the fortnightly signing on to mark time, only that fortnightly visit to the job centre, only that vague need that is never yet desperate need, only a vague need that fills the sky and fills the streets we see from the bus, only a need for the world not to be the world but to be something else, only that need which barely knows what it wants, but only that it refuses everything, loathes everything and wants done with everything.

It’s Good for Your CV

And meanwhile, for me, a few hours teaching here and there, a few hours teaching accountancy and economics, a few hours teaching business and politics, a few hours filling in for absent lecturers in philosophy, a few hours, sometimes unpaid – ‘don’t tell anyone about this’ – teaching in philosophy – ‘we can’t pay you, but it’s good for your CV’ – a few hours, sometimes unpaid, sometimes they don’t pay you, because it’s for your own good, it’s good for you – ‘we can’t pay you, we simply don’t have the resources’ – a few hours, they can’t pay me, they are victims just like me, we don’t have enough money, but still, it will look good on your CV.

And what do I teach my students? What do I teach my students in accountancy? I teach them about the fees they pay and where the money goes. I tell them where the £16,000 a year their companies pay in fees goes. I tell them I earn £23 an hour, quite a lot of money, but that includes preparation and marking, and of the conditions of my labour. I tell them this, they sympathise, and we go to the canteen because they like to feel life all around them, I tell them all about it, we talk about life in Libya, and we buy each other sandwiches and sit in the canteen and waste time, the time their companies have bought and paid for, the time for which the university pays me, I tell them about the secret lectures I give for which I am not paid, which are supposed to be good for me, for work experience, and how I am offered these hours as though they were a favour – ‘we can’t pay you, but it’s good experience’ – and that I spend several hours in preparation, several hours writing these lectures to impress, to make a good impression, I am not paid, it is true, but perhaps I can impress the students who will tell the lecturer for whom I’m covering that I was a good lecturer.

Yes, it’s important to impress, I tell them, to be seen to be one of the gang, to attend everything I can, to come to research forums and colloquia, to comment on papers and to drink with the others in the pub. Because there might be a job coming up, that’s the rumour. Yes, there might be a job, in the new year, that’s what we’ve heard. Not a full time job, it is true, but what they call a Teaching Fellowship, half-time, but quite dignified, a monthly wage, no having to wait until February, a monthly wage, not a bad one, considering, £9,000 will get you a long way, by comparison to what you earn now, yes, a Teaching Fellowship might be coming up, it’s a new rank, a new kind of post, ideal for the new academic, ideal for those looking to build a career, £9,000, you can live on that, it’s not a lot, but it’s a wage, and perhaps you can use the time to build up your CV, give a few papers, write a few papers, get a few publications, and then you can go on to another job. Yes, it’s probably unfair, but you’ll be in a better position than you are now, we wish we could offer a full time post, but you’d be unlikely to get it or even to be shortlisted, what you need is to build up your CV, to publish a few papers.

But the new academic year is a long way away. It is October, and I haven’t been paid. October and I haven’t been paid and I won’t be paid for a long time. We go out for a departmental dinner. The head of department: ‘we should do this more often’. The bill comes to £40 a head. I get £50 a week from the dole. It’s October, I won’t get paid by the university until February.

One fine September day after another; summer comes each year belatedly, after it is summer, arriving only in that autumn which is never quite autumn, transforming all of this month into a threshold. And of course there is the start of a new term, which, as it comes, surprises me, because I never think I will keep my job, or, before, that I would find one.

I remember how I used to have to wait to the last minute – a week or so before term began – before I knew I would have work that academic year. How merciless they were, Marxists or non-Marxists, heads of departments, heads of teaching who would make me work thus! How dependent I was on their impressions of me! With what petty gratitude did I welcome a hour of part time teaching!

The lesson is clear: there is absolutely no relation between the philosophy espoused by these same heads of department, heads of teaching and the way they treated the proletariat, the part time staff! An obvious lesson, but difficult each time – the completely inconsistency of thought and life! The mismatch between what was said and what was practised! Head of department, I thought to myself, you have a million-pound house and a cottage in Wales, you’ve had everything, every chance!

Head of department, you found your job when there was no need to publish, no need for a Ph.D., it was the late 1960s, jobs were everwhere, jobs came to you, and you rose through the ranks. You rose, and no one ever asked you to raise income before you were promoted! You never had to raise three times your own income in research income before your promotion! Head of department, lecturer for whom I took seminars, lecturer who spoke on this or that philosopher upon whom I had published a clutch of papers! I was told: you don’t have enough expertise in this area. You just haven’t got a background in ethics. I said, but I’ve published these papers, here, here and here – papers on the topics you teach!, and thought to myself: and what have you published, nothing, not one line, not one line in your whole career!

What have you published, to have this swarm of Ph.Ds wanting teaching around you? What have you published that you would have power over us, that you can seize one of us as from a cloud of protons and make us real! What have you done that would have given you this power, property-millionnaire, you who have done nothing, who have lived in the golden years of our country, when work was plentiful and wages were high, you who brought that great house with five bedrooms and married and had children! You’ve done nothing of course, blinking man, kind man, amiable half-friend who would have us round, we paupers to your great house every year!

Every year, and you would bring up wine from your wine cellar, and speak of the wine you bought, the wine you collected, you who opened wine for our starters, a different wine for our main course and yet a different one for dessert, you who served us aperatifs before dinner and brandy after dinner! What marvellous taste you developed, what a marvellous cellar you keep, how wondrous that you give us a taste of what distilled itself from your life, not just the wine, but your great house, your cultivation, the books stacked up in your library, the views over open fields!

Ah, we part-timers are less real than you, we are like the flies who circle in empty rooms, one of us has died, one of us disappeared, what does it matter, for there are always more flies, there will always be flies, well qualified flies, each year with more publications, each year with more credentials, each year with more respect won from academic peers! Yes, we are flies and our job is to circle in the big rooms in your big house, you will have us round, every year, this is your concession to us, this is what we are given, it is a sign of your kindness, but your kindness is impersonal, we know that, it is bestowed equally on each, we know that, next year one of our company will not be here, but what does that matter, next year another will join us, but that still does not matter because you have been in this business a long time, racking up your pension, dreaming of your retirement, dreaming of selling up and moving to France, to the sun, speaking to us of your holidays and asking us about ours.

Holidays?, we think to ourselves – what are they? Holidays – who has time for a holiday, we have to write, we have to read, to graft, to apply for this job and then that one, to fill out this form and then that one, to contact this university and then that for a half-time research post, we’re busy, too busy to have holidays, for what would happen if we missed hearing about a job with a short deadline for application? what would happen if we were contacted for interview and they failed to find us, and another took our place at the interview for the job that could have been hours?

Holidays! Don’t you understand we are flies, circling and circling, faster and faster, flies without hope, but without time to think about hope, flies who move too quickly for hope, who will not allow themselves that luxury, flies who circle with neither hope or non-hope, flies without jobs who only want jobs, flies who dream only of jobs, who circle in search of work, who want only to survive year by year. Another year of work, that’s all we want. Another year, and we’ll take anything.

But when asked about holidays, what can we say? When we are asked about holidays, what should we say? We should speak of our holidays whether or not we had holidays. We should speak of our foreign trips regardless of whether we have been abroad. Why? Because academia is still upper middle class and the head of department is upper middle class. Because the upper middle class know only how to deal with the upper middle class. Because the upper middle class want reassurance from those they’ve taken into their houses that they too are upper middle class. Because the condition of visiting the upper middle class is to pretend you are upper middle class. Because the condition of their hospitality is the marvellous theatre of the upper middle class.

And so we vie, we flies, to speak of our holidays. To particularise ourselves, to make ourselves more real to him, our employer. To hypostatise ourselves in front of him, to give ourselves substance, to make ourselves less than flies or more than flies, to make him care about us, to pick us out from the other flies, to tell that we are not just a fly, but a fly who takes holidays, who has a life outside all this, who lives not for work, though we all live for work, but the holidays we take, the dreamy holdays, three or four weeks of holidays, that open to us every summer. Ah the holidays, our holidays to Provence or to Tyrol! The week we spent in Florence! Holidays!

Have you ever taken a holiday, have you ever had time to take a holiday, to think of holidays, do holidays ever cross your mind? But we must speak of holidays, we each of us speak of holidays and what we ate on our holidays and what we saw on our holidays, if only to make our host feel comfortable, if only to let him know that we are like him, that we have something in common, and this dreadful academic business is not all we have in common. For after all, he sympathises with us, he grants that times are harder, that he might not have got a job as easily as he did, that academia is madness, yes he agrees with us, he is sympathetic, he has some idea of what it’s like, but we shouldn’t speak of it we know that. It’s the last thing we should speak about.

We are flies, circling in his rooms, in the rooms of his house, but we must not talk about our circling, must not speak of what we have sloughed off in that circling, of the life we have given up, of the standard of living we have relinquished, of those great gaps of unemployment between term ending and term beginning, of the humilations of the dole and housing benefit, of the visits from dole officers, of our forced participation on training schemes, of the temporary work we take, a few days here and a few days there, no, we will not speak of this, we must not. It’s the last thing we should say, we who are gathered here in this vast house, we who have taken our place in a house in whose many bedrooms his children once lived – children who, now, have gone to university.

Children he and his wife brought up in the golden 70s and the golden 80s, children to whom nothing was denied, who were taken abroad, children who were shown something of the world, children who were sent to good schools, who have learnt a good deal, children whom they are helping out at university, who, no doubt, have had a flat bought for them, for whom a flat and a car were supplied. We are not like them, his children, he knows that. We have not been blessed thus. But what can we do?, he says, our host. Terrible times, he says. I’m glad my retirement is coming up, he says.

Ah, graciousness! His wonderful graciousness! And now the wine is going round again, he is the most attentive host, our glasses are being filled again, the food is going round again, and soon we will have to leave. Soon, yes, it will time to leave, time for the summer to open before us again, time for the dole and for training courses, time to work and apply for jobs and write, time to wander through this city that does not want us and through the university that is indifferent to us.

Time to wander without shadow, to circle around and around, time to swarm but without solidarity, time to swarm, each of us separate, each of us circling, time to disappear across this city, time to go home to our bedsits and shared housing, time to flee back to the rubbish from which we were spontaneously generated, time to return to the skips of thrown out library books, time to join the concrete and rubble of destroyed buildings, time to be threaded in paper threading machines.

For where do they think we go over summer, these heads of department? To where do they think we disappear? Ah, they know we are born from rubbish, born anew from rubbish each September, resurrected from the dead each September when they ring around at the last minute, knowing we are all waiting by the phone, knowing we are all dependent, waiting for the phonecall that will allow us to circle around once again, one more time.

Yes, we are born from rubbish, for them, spontaneously generated from the dross of the university, spreading like some vile cancer from mutated dross, spreading disease-like from university decay. Born from the residue of universities, from its foul excresence, we hatch and we circle, we are born, our sticky wings glisten in the sun, our compound eyes survey the world, our probiscii seek fresh nourishment, we come to ourselves in September and fly into the air, and fly around again, one more time.

Yes, one more time, around again, swarming flies, who can only ask one another about job applications and publications, flies who can speak to one another of interviews failed and papers rejected, flies who speak of what is real, flies who alone know what is real, proletariat-flies in touch with the real conditions of the university, fly-proletarians who know what the upper middle class do not know. Scum-proletarians who the upper middle class do not want to see, the beggars outside the gate, the mendicants in the alley, the prostitutes on the pavement, vile proletarians who are the living refutation of the upper middle class world of academia, flies who are born from dross and return to dross, flies adapted to the mad circulation of the world, flies whose movement is as one with the real movement of capital, flies hatched from capital and returning to it, flies who live capital, who know only capital, flies in whom capitalism dreams of itself, of its return to itself.

Flies stripped down to themselves, who know of nothing but circling, flies without rest, pared down, prepared, perfect vessels of Capital, fles ready for the new condition of labour, for the great casualisation, flies ready for the subcontracting of education to Microsoft, flies honed down for the great sell-off, flies who will teach this and that and that without expertise or preparation, flies who will move from this end of the country to another, flies who will take any job and every job, flies who will overload themselves with what needs to be done, because next year there may be nothing to be done, flies who arise when they are needed and disappear when they are not needed, flies like the nanobots who will one day repair our bodies, nanobot flies who ensure the smooth running of capital.

For we know, we flies, that the future is ours. The upper middle class know it, too. They want to keep their hands clean, but our hands are dirty. They want to keep their good conscience, but we are bad conscience through and through. They can see it: we’ll do anything.They can see what the system from which they lived produced. They can see the new breed, the disgusting breed, the everywhere-and-nowhere breed. Ah, they don’t like us, but that is okay. Ah, they have some little power over us, but that, too, is okay. Because our day is coming. We can feel it in our antennae. Our day is coming, we know that. When they retire, when they disappear to France, when they buy up cheap houses all over Europe, it will be our turn.

And we will rise and we will swarm. In us, scholarship is dead. In us, expertise is unnecessary. We will serve. We fly round and round and we will serve. Everything, all knowledge, will be online and we will facilitate and serve. Everything, all knowledge, will be owned by Microsoft, and we will work for Microsoft, after the great privatisation. Oh you upper middle class, reading Plotinus in Provence, what have you done! Oh you heads of department, to what have you closed your eyes! For we are coming, the know-nothings and the scorners of scholarship. We are coming, without knowledge and without culture, pared down and ready.

Honoured Members of the University!

You have done me the honour of inviting me to give an account of the life I have led as an ape of the University.

It is now over ten years since I entered the doors of the university, a short space of time perhaps, according to the calendar, but an infinitely long time to gallop through at top speed, as I have done, more or less accompanied by excellent mentors and good advice. Above all, I have been served by my own capacity for mimickry, my apishness, if you like. This was the trait has served me most well in the academy, and one which led me to attain my comparatively elevated position.

I still remember how I was captured. I was happy on the savannah with the other apes, sitting back on my haunches and looking over the expanse. Food was plentiful and life harmonious. I was not the alpha male, but nor was I the omega one; as long as I did not threaten my fellow apes, baring my teeth as apes will, I would not be threatened. But something was missing. But something marked me out as different from the apes around me. Was I more intelligent than them? Or was it simply because I sought a from of stimulation I was unable to find on the savannah? Now, having studied a few theories of intelligence and evolution, I am inclined to put it down to a kind of aberration. My soul had been hollowed out a little too deeply. For this reason, I willingly let myself be captured by the University.

Once I was a free ape, free to stand and look all around me on the savannah. But now, in the University, I have broadened the circle of my freedom. True, I became a prisoner of an office, bent over a keyboard, my sore eyes fixed on the monitor, but I was a happy prisoner! I steered my apish body through the halls of the academy. I knew if I was to survive in my new world, I would have to imitate those around me. I learnt to walk upright and wear shoes; I learnt not to holler and whoop. I still dreamt of great bunches of bananas and clear pools in the middle of the jungle. Sometimes I remembered my ape comrades who would pick the lice from my thick fur. But I was resolved to make a success of myself in my new surroundings.

Most difficult was writing. It was hard enough to hold a pen or to type on a keyboard (our fingers are stubbier than yours) let alone compose a string of words observing the rules of grammar. We apes employ much simpler means of communication. Often, a simple whoop will do. Our sensitive nostrils tell us a great deal about one another. We have no need to read and no need to write. Besides, apes are not too inquisitive; we are not given to abstraction. For the most part, we are happy to get on with our lives, happy to be free from immediate danger. Writing, therefore, was always a tremendous labour for me.

On what should I write? It was clear to me that only foreign thinkers were worthy of accolade, and only difficult ones at that. What mattered was to hitch your little wagon to one of these great lumbering beasts, and to follow the trail of the books which dropped from them like dung. One book a year was not enough, for example, for X., nor for Y. Two, three, even four books a year sprung forth from their mighty pens. How much they had to say, I wondered! How much there was to write! And how much for me, a humble ape, to read!

Happily, there were books to guide me through the wilderness. How many of them there are! The message was simple: the French thought and the British paraphrased. They were very good at that, the British. I learnt that everything can be expressed in a calm and measured prose. The wildest thinker can be tamed. All thought can be measured; philosopher can be placed alongside philosopher. Reading one series of commentary after another, I felt ought to commend the editor of each series for the uniformity of their pages. Truly I was in contact with the great minds of the age, and with little effort required from me! I was up to date with what was most radical and new in European ideas! Now I only had one problem: to which thinker should I hitch my wagon?

I found a thinker around whom the wall of commentaries still let in a chink of light and wrote a book to block out that light. Then I wrote another to make sure it really was blocked out. Nor a chink of light should escape! Truly, these thinkers burn too brightly for our poor British readers! So I commented; and I was proud of my contribution. I thought: I have done as others have done; my book has disappeared into the library, and if I have had no thoughts of my own, this is appropriate, for we are not thinkers here in Great Britain. Others think and we paraphrase. That is the correct division of labour.

A colleague often jokes he can still tell I’m an ape. It’s the way I hold a pen, he tells me. Your hand curls in towards your chest, he says. Once that hand was a paw, I tell him. Apes are not made for typing or for holding a pen, I tell him. And there’s that look you get, my colleague says, when you have to do anything. As if you’re going to tear open your shirt and whoop, he said. This too is common to all apes, I tell him. We are not made for seminars and colloquia, I tell him, but for the savannah where we whoop to express our joy and our strength.

Alas, I know my apish spontaneity has long gone. Sometimes I wonder, busy with my labours, whether I am any better off than my miserable comrades in the zoo. There is so much to do, after all! My poor eyes burn from the monitor and my clumsy fingers miss the keys I want to type. I have translations to finish and essays to write; if I am to keep my job, I must make sure a steady stream of books flows from my printer. But even now, my boss tells me it’s not enough. You will have to raise money, he says, covering your pay three times over. It’s a lot to ask! But already I’m looking around, watching what others do and imitating them, aping the way my more diligent colleagues have as they say put in for funding.

Sometimes I ask myself – but how is this possible? – what would it mean to do what I do for real; to write because I have something to write, to think only with the aim of discovering what it might mean to think? I laugh in my apish way as I think of all I have written – all my books and articles. What foolishness! I copy others who copy others. But what am I? An ape, an ape among humans, not yet a human and no longer just an ape. Sometimes I wonder whether others around me were not once secret apes who came out of the savannah as I did. Sometimes I wonder whether our British academia is full of secret apes!

Once or twice, I have I felt the shock of encountering a genuine thinker from within our ranks. A thinker – imagine! How is it possible?, I ask myself. Is it true? Do I dare say it? Yes, there she is. A thinker. At that moment before her I am ashamed of my apishness, ashamed of everything I have said and done and written. I am ashamed too for all those whose activity conceals indolence and pretension. I am worst of all, no doubt of that, but then I am an ape. Perhaps, honoured members of the university, it not only takes an ape to recognise an ape but also to recognise non-apes! Perhaps we all know, secret and not-so-secret apes who the real thinkers are!

Too tired to revise my papers over again, I resign myself to a day without work. Just go to the office, I tell myself, and wait; after all, you can read this and then that, light reading, half-absorbed reading, where the surface of the page is merely grazed. And so I read, idly, indifferently, pages turn, and I think to myself – or is it just my tiredness speaking – what of pathos in all this? What of the sense of an experience gained and won, what about joy, what about the intensities of affect that attest to that gaining?

I am reading very good secondary commentaries, very clever and faithful, opening up the thought of X by discussing his relationship to predecessors Y and Z; it’s impressive, I’m carried on a journey the landmarks of which are familiar to me, but it’s pleasant to be reminded, pleasant because it’s easy enough, nothing has to be fought for and I can reward myself for a few years’ work that allows me to pick up this or that reference or to furrow my brow and think, I’m not quite convinced. The book reaches me as an expert; the book awakens an expert in me. Called forward is another inhabitant of the community of scholars, measured and calm, clear-voiced and versed well in a particular canon.

Because I’m tired, because tiredness leads to that kind of indifference Freud commended to his analysts, one resting on everything and nothing, I see what I might have been distracted from another time: if there is a kind of pathos of the primary text, a sense of a thought struggled for and gained, the joy of a thought granted, the grace of a thought that comes on light feet, whatever pathos, however warlike, however peaceable, it is one lacking in the secondary one. I am not bored by what I am reading; it engages, but it does so only with the expert who only half-lives in the world.

The old saying, before you study Zen, mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers, while you study Zen, mountains are no longer mountains, rivers are no longer rivers, and after you study it mountains are again mountains, rivers are again rivers: a world has been regained, reborn. The secondary commentary is the text for whom nothing has been regained yet, it lives as an abstract storm, a kind of fog; it is another of Job’s temptations, a challenge to his faith.

And to you, who would be faithful? Do not read me, says the modest commentary, read the original. Always that modesty. But a kind of reading has already happened of those same originals. Their secrets have been given up, you have a basis from which to read, a sound one, a scholarly-endorsed one, you can make an honest beginning, you were prepared, you know what’s to come, there’ll be surprises, to be sure, but nothing too surprising; the text has already been measured in advance, its length and its breadth are known, its weight calculable, its significance estimated.

What, then, am I advocating? The abolition of these useful stepladders? How else are we going to read what is around us? How else will we sort and catalogue? How else can an oeuvre be measured and a contribution assessed? How else might comparable worth be gauged? There’s a marketplace for ideas, said Johannes de Silentio in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, and you can get everything for a knock down price. But at the price of pathos, too – that’s what you given up to enter that same marketplace. £8.99 will buy you Kierkegaard in 60 minutes or £10.99 the Routledge Guide to Fear and Trembling. This is valuble.

What have you lost? I could put it this way, once again like Kierkegaard: the discord between system and pathos, but this is too abstract. What have I lost?

And when you realise you’re no good at philosophy and nor will you ever be any good? When you realise you lack the brilliance? In truth, I could say I realised this a long time ago, straightaway in fact, that there was never any pretension and no matter how hard I work, night and day, week after week, nothing will happen in my thinking.

It’s hard to explain this to others working in different disciplines. Perhaps because they use what they call theory rather than try to grasp philosophy as such. On the other hand, because they use it and test it against some other area – music, say – their work is often more interesting than what, in the end, collapses in philosophy into interminable commentary. Of course the way I have described this model of ‘using’ thought is naive and objectionable – it is a matter, rather, of a double implication, the wasp and the orchid, where what is called theory changes as it meets the ‘object’ to which it is supposed to be applied. A double becoming.

But philosophy as philosophy – that’s difficult. Read Husserl, read Derrida on Husserl, reread Derrida on Husserl after reading Lawlor and Marrati. Read Deleuze, read Spinoza, Leibniz and Bergson to get some grasp of his thought – read Simondon and Ruyer and Tarde … Or again, read Foucault, read Agamben as a reader of Foucault, or still further, read Heidegger, read Nancy as a reader of Heidegger, chart the differences between Nancy’s and Derrida’s takes on deconstruction. Read Badiou, understand the differences between him and Deleuze and criticise his accounts of them, read some set theory, assess his readings of the philosophers who precede him …

Each of these tasks will take five years. Five years that will take you through your Ph.D. if you’re lucky enough to have a background in this kind of philosophy rather than playing catchup. Five years and it is likely your understanding of philosophy will be so strongly informed by the master thinker (I am thinking of Adam’s recent posts at The Weblog) you’ve picked that you will have no real, independent take on philosophy itself. Then the next five years begins, if you have time for it, if you have a job which will allow it, if you have a family life which allows it and perhaps you’ll have some independence with respect to the thinker you studied in detail. Perhaps you’ll have suspended that conditioned reflex through which you respond to philosophy and the problems which confront philosophy in a Badiouian, Deleuzean, Derridean etc. way.

Ten years at best before you can philosophise in your own name. How old will you be? 37, perhaps – the magic age of Hegel and Heidegger and others. But it’s likely you’ll be older. 45, say. And if you never had the staying power, the fortune or the powers of concentration to sustain you through years of thinking? If you never had the time?

Philosophy allows you to be young until those ten years or their equivalent have passed. Sometimes, this is enough to sustain a lifetime of thought. Sometimes that lifetime is sustained in a awareness that nothing that you say has any philosophical worth, that it remains commentary, or a kind of pathos that lifts itself too easily from commentary, that flaps about weakly.

But what of those who are able to think? What insights have pressed themselves upon them? What force of insight? I have been in the presence of thinkers, real thinkers. They are different beasts, marvellous ones, serious and calm. They have the strength of thought behind them. They rest in that strength. They speak seriously, calmly. And I, too, rest in their strength as it resists careerism and academic politics. As it is so obvious, everyone can tell, even if it scares them, that they are in the presence of brilliance. The careerists are scared, it’s beautiful. Because they know they’ll never be brilliant and that what they take as to be their youth is already old and crabbed. That they are the dullards, the mediocrities who’ve always stood in the way of thought.

I’ve reread the two papers on which I’ve been working on all summer (well, all of August, which is as much summer as I get). Laughter: this is supposed to be thought? One, written in the DOGMA style, is pure pathos, lacking in ideas. Pathos without direction, enthusiasm without rigour, borrowing from all and making a mish-mash of all. Postmodernism in the worst sense. A paper that asks to be put out of its misery like a sick animal that must be shot. And the other? This is where real laughter begins. An ‘ambitious’ paper, passing through this thinker and then that as if I should think myself capable of anything other than bad commentry. Ambition! How funny! By what right have I thought myself able to write such a thing? In the end, there is only laughter: how did I think myself able to write on the topic I chose? What imposture! What stupidity!

An imposture, it is true, that was always mine. Why is that hope that I could one day write something estimable not dead in me? Why is it I begin again with fresh hope and momentum? Why is it I can begin again in innocence and hope? I wonder whether the best thing to write would be a journal of failure, an unpublishable book on the way I failed thought and thought failed me. Still hope – every summer, still the hope that, if I do not speak it, I think bears me in my writing. Still that hope which bears, that youth, that dream of youth and being young, that attempt to reach the point where it might have been that I was brilliant. ‘His majesty the baby’ (Freud), that’s who I am, in hope. It is that ‘his majesty’ who hopes in me and in my place, the child-narcissist.

Every summer I am young and grow old in writing. And in the autumn? The alibi of teaching and administration. As I dream all academic year of being young again. As I say to myself, if only I wasn’t so busy with teaching and administration. Laughter: why won’t hope be crushed? Why doesn’t hope crush itself inside me? Comedy of that hope for hope, for a youth upstream of youth!

Everyone talks about everything, I said to H., everything is up for grabs. There’s everything to be said and nothing that cannot be talked about. They put questions to me, I said to H. They ask me things and I am meant to reply like an expert. I am meant to have an opinion on what divides madness from badness, or on animal rights – I am meant to speak first of all, and to speak on everything. To speak in the calm voice of the expert – assured, speaking for reason, speaking for all, and making arguments for anyone to follow and understand. Sure, I can make a show of my own doubts and hesitations, I said to H., I can proclaim my modesty and my lack of expertise on this or that, but I should be able to speak, I said, and that first of all. To discourse on this topic and then that, on the immortality of the soul and the origins of mathematics – to speak of all and for all, to give voice to what would divide this from that, the reasonable from the unreasonable. I am made to speak, I said to H., but I cannot speak – I will not. I have hardly anything to say, it is true, I was never any good at debating – I lack the skills, the speed, the memory; I am not quick.

They listen, I said to H., and I am meant to speak – I protest, they take my protests for false modesty and I know required of me is to join what I say to the speech of experts, to take my place in the virtual community of wise men and wise women and the community of those united in taste, for whom music means Schubert and literature Dickens, for whom there is only decline, and the twentieth century is a long sorry episode. How assured they are! How tranquil! We are in decline and they love decline. We are in twilight and they love the twilight. But really, they say of wild moods and turbulence, isn’t it all a bit much – a bit – French? We don’t have to be like them, do we? And I am supposed to smile and say, why of course not! Thinking to myself: what is meant by them, by us?

And when these men finally discover film when they finally admit televisions into their houses, it is the golden age of Hollywood they love – they protest about the decline of script and story and stars and speak of Now, Voyager and Bringing Up Baby. But I still keep my place among them, I said to H., there’s still in me that conditioned reflex which allows me to join them in speaking of decline and going-under, the twilight and the coming end. No doubt it is because they represent to me the opposite of the world from I wrenched myself, I said. No doubt there is still too much reverence in me, and thankfulness for the teachers and educators who picked me up and gave me home among their books. Yes, I benefitted from their generosity; they gave me a great deal; I was their charge. There’s no doubt of this, and I am thankful. And what they expected from me was to speak  with them of decline, of a horrible sensationalism and the decline of verse. I was supposed to speak of the novel’s end and music’s end and the horror of pop and the esotericism of Boulez and the unlistenability of Messiaen, I said.

So we spoke, my benefactors and I, over the nights, over the weeks, over the years, one armchair facing another, one man speak to another, one older, one younger – one assured, resting in all the weight of culture, cradled by it, content in his taste and his discernment, certain and fluent, the other without a word of his own in his mouth. So we spoke together in their flat-mausoleums to faded culture – or rather, they spoke, I listened – they discoursed, I studied, he held forth and I was the echo chamber of their words. They spoke on the immortality of the soul and the clash of civilisations, on the ethical challenges of stem-cell research and on Dryden’s neglected dramas. They spoke of the inability of anyone to read – ‘they haven’t the skill’ – or to pick up this or that Biblical reference or Homeric reference.

Always the decline, I said to H., always the great going under. So I listened, and the embers burnt on the imitation fire and they educator nodded and approved when I nodded and approved. ‘Quite’, you learnt to say; ‘quite so’ – just like Socrates’s interlocutors ‘yes, Socrates’. The evening passes in a million ‘quites’. And in the corner of the room, volume turned down, the television showed some TV show.  As a kind of temptation. So they could rest in the contentment that I could only watch it, like them, with disgust – that I now had good taste enough to be inoculated from Friday night television.

But they were generous, I said to H., understand that. There was a time when the house of books was paradise. The books piled to the ceiling, the piano, the records – the antique clock: all this was paradise when I worked in the world. I would examine each book on the bookshelf – the complete hardback edition of Trollope, two complete editions of Dickens, every reissued Everyman edition – it was marvellous, life itself. And in those hours we would speak and drink Aqua Vitae and I would be played symphonies by composers whose name I had never heard and send me home with gifts of books and music. My pronounciations of French, German and Italian titles would be corrected; librettis would be summarised and this or that pianist would be spoken about in great and generous gusts. How marvellously they could speak, this benefactor, that benefactor! What great gusts of speech! What knowledge! It was splendid to listen, to sit back and listen, to be present at a performance, to be struck dumb with wonder, to have left work and the misery of work and to come to this – this still unvanished world, this island of culture, this demi-paradise of music and books, this cave of a house set back from the wide, vile world.

I’m tired of old men, I said to H. Tired of the end, the endless end – the whole story of a world coming to an end and culture on its last legs and the great collapse and the great barbarism. The other day on the phone to a benefactor I heard myself say: but you don’t understand the conditions under which we work – you don’t see the question is not, why are books so bad?, but what are the conditions of production that determine their badness? I heard myself say: – I’m not defending the modern culture-industry, the modern university; I’m justifying nothing, but you have to see what’s on the end of your fork, how it was made, the conditions of its manufacture. And my benefactor said, surprised at my animation, – I shall think of you as a gladiator in the arena. And I said – yes, that’s how it is, even as I thought to myself, he thinks I’m being touchy, he thinks I believe he’s getting at me. I said, there are no scholarly ladies and gentlemen anymore – oh, perhaps at Oxford, but nowhere else. You can’t compare yourself with us, I said. And thought to myself: he thinks he’s wounded my pride, he who noted my desire to write in what he called brown style and who noted my inability to sustain a written tone – he to whom I sent my book when it came out and who I rang to say: I’m sorry – it’s terrible, I know -.

On the phone, I said, – you really have no idea; you’re not in a position to see. I had to raise my voice to be heard. Had to raise it against the marvellous streaming of a voice that belonged to a world and a culture that was never mine. To raise my barbarous voice against what had taken me in as a barbarian and sent me out, like Kafka’s ape, as something like an educated man – yes, his voice, their voices, the benefactors, the culture-experts, the decline-lamenters, their voice, all speaking as one, their conjoined voice with its plenitude and its mellifluousness, their voice and its confidence. Their one voice and what bore it – the richness of culture in its depth and its breadth, that great marvellous river in which everything was alive, which flowed intact from the Bible and from Homer through all the literature of all Europe and all its music. Their voice fluent in the tounges of Europe, ancient and modern that spoke as though from the other side of the window.

I thought: his old culture has died inside me. What have I to do with that world – what can that world mean to me? I do not inhabit it; it is not my element – what I have learnt I have done so by imitation – my voice is a borrowed voice, my writing style that of the ape who types with too-big fingers. I thought as I spoke: you have Europe, the unity of Europe, it speaks in you, it flows through you, but I am on the other side, in the world and up against the world. You have Europe, jolly, joshing Europe with your laughing knowing mockery of the French and the Germans whose great literatures you know and runs through you! I thought: Europe is all yours, old, old Europe in which you can pass as a traveller would have passed in the late nineteenth century!

I thought, the car parks and the town centre mall are the thick rind that has laid itself on top of the old world. I thought, the company cars pass over the crust that has formed across the face of the old world. I thought, the hi-tech industrial estate is built on ashes. I thought: some writers have seen it. Some writers understand. I said so. – But they were very cultured, says my old friend, my benefactor. ‘They were very cultured’ – yes, yes, but what they endured saw culture turned inside out, saw Europe become ashes and old Europe burnt away, saw death omnipresent and war omnipresent. And they sought to hollow out culture itself, to despise literary depth and literary richness, to loathe the triple-decker novel and the four movement symphony, to paint the wounds and the howling, to film the end of the end. How could I not love what despised what I despised! How could I not love what hated what I hated! – You won’t understand this, I said. You won’t see it, you’re not in the right position. – But you’re not exactly suffering, he said. And I said, – it’s not a question of suffering, but of hatred. And I thought: this is what Britain becomes in me. How contortedly, miserably British I am! How laughably 80s-schooled and 90s-broken British! How marvellously and happily broken! How thirsty for the books and music already baked in the fire to come! I thought, perhaps I understand nothing at all of art, of film, or books. I thought, perhaps they are just for me the opaque screen that is like the concrete rind that has formed across the surface of the earth. I thought, perhaps they are just the door of the world, the one which will not open, but on which are scratched dreams of the fire-to-come, the great revenge, the end of the end.

For the apocalypse is coming, I thought. They’re building robot warriors – think of that! Building robot tanks and drone fighting machines! Old Europe and its poets (‘Europe is unthinkable without its poets’ – Kundera) has gone under. The world is going under. There is the flat plane of the battlefield, and the battlefield will be everywhere. But what apocalypticism is this? Perhaps only the reflex of one who can only resent what he thinks he does not have and does not deserve. Who supposes he will be the cockroach that will survive the new wars. Who thinks, it is nice to be so reduced, so concentrated, and to scuttle under the feet of those who do not see the world has already destroyed itself. Who thinks, the apocalypse is already here, why do they not see it? Who thinks, the books are on fire and the concert halls are on fire, and only that art survives that is already baked to nothing. Who thinks, soon the fire will consume nothing but itself – not a sun, but an anti-sun, and these cockroaches will crawl hard-shelled over its surface, happy in its flames, happy that the world is burning and that they were right all along.

How stupid I am!, I said to H., how foolish! I haven’t understood anything at all, I said. It’s passed me by, all of it, all art, all philosophy. I’m an apocalypticist, I said to H., a resenter. I can only speak in generalisations, only read what is already in my breast, only speak in great dark gusts, mirror image of the men in culture who suppose they live in the twilight of art. I want to think it’s like Alcibiades’ betrayal of Athens, I said, that it’s like Phaedrus’s desecration of the Eleusian mysteries! It is the great betrayal, I said, the great devlishness, fallen angels fighting real angels, the battle around the throne! But in the end, it’s nothing, I said to H., another great gust, another garrulousness. The world is the world is the world, I said to H., think on that. It’s all the same as it was yesterday, the same Morrisons, the same roundabout, the same Kentucky Fried Chicken. We all run up against the same world, I said. The rind is getting too thick, I said, there’s concrete everywhere and nothing hatching. There’s no apocalypse, I said, no great unveiling, and that’s the trouble. The same thing bothers me as my benefactors, I said. In the end we are the same, and the world is the same, and that’s what appals us. Great gusts of conversation and nothing said, I said to H. All I say to you is as nothing, I said. The world is the world is the world, I said. There will be no end just as there was no beginning. It’s Bracknell all over again, I said. The Roman Empire never ended I said.

It’s been a long time since we’ve spoken, I said to H., not that I haven’t thought of you often. A long time, it’s true, but I’ve often thought of our talks, and what you allowed me to say. It’s nearly the end of the summer, I said. It’s time to look back and see what has been achieved. And what has been achieved? What have I done? What thoughts have I had, what books have I read, of what advances was I capable? Yes, it’s time to look back, I said to H., at the quiet days in my flat and in the office. Oh there was some teaching, I said, but not too much. A few students to see here and there, I said, but nothing too arduous. Above all, there was time, I said. Time to do more or less what I pleased. Great stretches of hours, swathes of time, time in great wounds and tracts.

Yes, I had time, time was given to me. And what did I do with it? What was I able to begin? What of my great labours was I able to carry forward? What was it given to me to achieve? Just think of all the others, I said, working their holidays away. Just think of those who never found employment, I said, working as others work in the world. I think of them all, I said, and then I think of myself. Here I am, with no excuses. Here I am, with nothing to stop me and plenty of time.

Oh I moan to my friends, I said. I complain to W. about my admin. I’ve so much admin, I moan to W. He says the same to me. But I’m glad I have admin, I said. Secretly I’m glad for all the bureaucracy, I said. Secretly, I’m happy there are so many forms to fill in, I said. Secretly, I know I need an alibi, even to myself. I know I have to be able to make an excuse. For in truth, I said to H., in truth I’ve done very little this summer.

In truth, very little has happened. I bought Spinoza’s Ethics, I said, but it was too hard. I read the introduction to Spinoza’s Ethics, I said, and it was too dry. I bought the Routledge Critical Thinkers Guide to Spinoza’s Ethics, I said, and it was too vague. I piled up commentaries on Spinoza, I said, Negri’s and Deleuze’s and others, they were all there before me, I said to H., but nothing, I could barely begin.

I phoned W., I said, and asked him how he was getting on. The same, he said. He was writing on Rosenswig, I said to H., and when he was done with Rosensweig, which he was reading in German, he was to begin on Spinoza. In Latin, I asked W., no not in Latin. How are you getting on?, I asked W. He’s getting on, I said to H., sometimes he feels he’s banging his head against the way, but W. is getting on doggedly, I said. W. is dogged, I’ll give him that, I said to H. He’s up in the morning, I said, turning open The Star of Redemption, I said, and reading it in German, I said, page by page. When I visited him last, I admired his edition of The Star of Redemption, I said, and all his other Rosensweigs, I said.

‘We’ve no hope’, W. said to me then, but he has his doggedness, I said to H., and his determination, and there may be hope for him for that reason, I said to H. He’s determined to read, I said to H., nothing stops him. He gets up in the morning and works all day, I said, reading in German, taking notes. He tries to understand every line, every page, no matter how difficult it is, taking notes all the while, I said to H., his own notes. W. doesn’t read the Introduction to The Star of Redemption, I said to H. He doesn’t read the Routledge Critical Thinkers Guide to Rosensweig on Redemption, if there is such a thing, I said to H. No, he reads it for himself, he begins at the beginning and works his way to the end, all the while taking notes, I said to H., careful, careful notes.

Occasionally he’ll send me sections of his notes, I said to H. Sometimes on what he is reading currently, but sometimes older notes, from what he was reading ten or even fifteen years ago, I said. They’re very impressive, those notes, I said to H. Very careful and meticulous. His notes on Being and Time go on for hundreds of pages, I said to H. Very patient and thorough and meticulous, I said to H. He scrutinises every line, I said to H., reading them backwards and forwards in German. It’s not that he had German and then read, I said to H., he’s like the rest of us, he knew no German, but he read nonetheless. He read and learned German as he read, page by page, I said to H., and sentence by sentence.

Of course in those days, I said to H., as he hells me, W. worked not just in the morning and the afternoon, but in the evening and the night, I said. There was no limit to his labours. Morning, afternoon and night, I said, without trips to the pub, without time with his partner, I said to H., because he had no friends and no partner. Morning, afternoon and night, and there was only work, I said to H., and not even the kind of work which led to writing papers and books, I said to H. It’s true that I too have worked for mornings, afternoons and nights for long stretches of my life. It’s true that it was only when he met me W. began to write papers and books, I said to H. He’s always said that was my gift to him, I said, but I’m not sure it was a gift.

It is well known that I’ve written a great deal, I said to H. A great deal and it’s all worthless! A great deal and all for nothing! I’ve said it a hundred times, I said it while I was writing and even before I started writing. I always knew I’d write a great deal, but that it would all be for nothing, I said to H. Yes, I have that facility, I said to H. but is it a facility? – isn’t it rather a kind of sickness? – isn’t it rather a kind of disease, an obsessive-compulsion, a manic prolixity, a writing without joy, a joyless trudge like soldiers across a marsh, I said to H. Oh I write, I said to H., it is given to me to write, but I do so without thinking, without thought. I do not think then write, I said to H., it is rather that I just write. And can I, while writing, be said to think? If only that were the case, I said to H. If only I had a single thought, I said to H., if only I had the capacity to think for myself. I write a great deal, it is true, I said to H., and where before a paper would take me six months work, it takes me only a month, and where my first book took me few years and my second book only a few months, this is no gain, I said, for it means I write more and more, I said to H.

It’s all very well W. saying I spurred him to write, but there is the question of what it is I was working on all these years, morning, afternoons and nights. There is the question where it led me, if it led me anywhere, I said to H. What was it all for?, I said to H. What does it mean, these thousands and thousands of words? It’s just meaningless prolixity, I said to H., a great streaming of words. Did I really think I would be able to read Spinoza this summer?, I said to H. Spinoza and then Leibniz? Spinoza and then Leibniz and then Bergson? And so I bought the Ethics, I said to H., and my Routledge Critical Thinkers Guide to Spinoza’s Ethics. I bought my Routledge Critical Thinkers Guide to Leibniz, I said to H., and I piled up the books in front of me. I bought Matter and Memory and the Oxford Thinkers introduction to Bergson and piled them with the other books in front of me. So many books, all mine, I said to H. So many books, and there they were all summer. Every day, I would come into the office and they would be there. Every evening, I would leave the office, and they would still be there. I took them on holiday to London with me, and I brought them home, I said to H. And still they went unread. Still not a page was turned. Still nothing happened, no pages were turned and I learnt nothing.

Oh once upon a time I read, I said to H. What little reading I did once upon a time, lying across my bed in 1996 has served me well, I said. I’ve got – let’s see – nine years out of those three or four difficult books I read in 1996, I said. They served me well, I said, those three or four difficult books which I know backwards and forwards. Meanwhile, W.’s read dozens of books and has all his notes on those books. It is not as if I have notes, I said to H. Oh I may have taken notes at one time or another, but they’ve since been lost, as everything was lost in one computer crash or another. Just this week I lost a whole sheaf of notes, I said to H., if a collect of electronic files can be called a sheaf. Just this week, the computer was hacked and it had to be rebuilt and all the notes on the C drive have disappeared, I said to H. What does it matter, I said to H., I’ll keep writing nonetheless. There’s always writing, I said, always the illusion of work. Always the illusion of moving forward. Always the sense that if sentence is placed after sentence, something has begun, something begins, thought is possible, hope is possible and I will have squeezed one more drop from my great period of reading in 1996, lying across my bed in the middle of that affair, I said.

Sometimes I think something has stopped with me, I said to H., that something great has come to an end with me. That I am a symptom of the end, I said to H., not of a decadence, I said to H, which suggests indulgence and luxury, but a miserable paring down, I said. Not of the indulgences of decadence, but a feeble dismantling, I said to H., where living has dismantled itself, where life is reduced to a bare frame. I’ve said it before, I said to H, I am the spawn of the R.A.E., I make no bones about it, I am the kind of thing that is produced when the R.A.E. spreads everywhere. I am the medocrity that gives itself the excuse of writing a great deal for the sake of the R.A.E. So what if what I write is bad, I tell my friends, it’s over anyway. So what if it’s no good, it’s for the R.A.E. And creatures like me, I said to H., have the whole publishing industry at our disposal, a whole industry of petty journals and periodicals and monograph pushers. A thousand ways of pressing ourselves into flesh, of producing a clutch of articles a year, a pair of books, a miserable trilogy, a deathly tetralogy, a stream of books, one after another, an oeuvre in a hundred thousand word batches, books placed end to end like Prufrock’s spoons.

I am an industry, I said to H., I am a little publishing factory, my few hundred thousand words part of the great streaming babble, the great streaming madness of publication, book after book after book. And I tell myself, just like everyone else, that this is the way to survive, that I have to publish to survive, whether it is true or not, I give myself that alibi, that great excuse, I tell myself as I tell others that I cannot be blamed for my books, that the interesting question does not bear upon whether they are good or bad, but on the conditions of their production, I said to H. I take as my excuse the madness of the world, I said to H., the madness of academia, which spins us younger academics like tops. Around and around we go, I said to H. and book after book spins out of us. Once you needed to show promise to get a job, I said to H., promise and one or two articles. Then it was four articles that was wanted, one after another, ready for the R.A.E. Then it was that one of those four submissions had to be a monograph – then two of them – and soon you will have to have four books, one after another, four books to get a job, four books to get on the lowest rung, four books to even begin to begin to begin. We’re spinning like tops, I said to H., and we even congratulate ourselves on our productivity and our symposia and dayschools.

Each of us an industry, I said, to H., a manufacturer of dross. Each of us is a paper mill, from each us streams several hundred thousand words, each of us writes this and then that, each of us introduces this thinker and then that, each of us chews the thought of this or that thinker into meaningless pabulum, each of us writes as dog food is squeezed into tins, each of us produces exactly the same book, each of us writes X and the political and Y and the ethical, each of us edits a book on the new Z, each of us writes for the latest series that seeks to explain the demigods of theory or the archangels of poststructuralism. How is it that every great and singular figure is surrounded by a dozen explanatory books? How is it that the innovator does not cry out for other innovators, the great writer for other great writers? How is it that brilliance makes a career for banality? How is it that the books of a great generation are seeds from which rise only mediocrity and careerism?

And I am worst of all, I said to H., I am first to admit it. I am the worst of all, the greatest sinner, the truest mediocrity, I said to H. Philosophy has crawled in me to die, I said to H. Philosophy finds in me a place to die and rot and fester. The death of philosophy has gone rotten in me, I said to H. Oh philosophy is alive, alive and well, but anywhere but here, anywhere but in our academia – anywhere except in the great mediocrity, I said to H. Philosophy is elsewhere, I said to H., but we are in academia.

In May 1968, Judith Miller passed out course credits on the bus, ‘the university is a piece of capitalist society’, she said in justification, and she would do her utmost to make it function ‘worse and worse’. Perhaps that is our hope, I said to H., our hope and our fever. Perhaps that’s what justifies this great plague of books, I said to H. But even as I say that, I said, I know the game will soon be up, and books will be unimportant. Capitalism is subtle, I said, and changes shape very quickly. Soon, I said, books will be as nothing, and it will be the income you bring into the university that counts. Books will be expected and writing them even indulged, but what will count is money. Forget research funding for books and articles, I said to H. If it is that books have become no more than tokens, the rapidity of their circulation volatilising what little content they might have, if books have become no more than abstract counters of exchange, then their worth as career markers will depreciate.

That is the smiling revenge of the university on those who have made their career by writing books from which the world would gain if they disappeared. That is the laughter of capitalism as it strips from people like me what passed as a measure of their self-worth. But I’ve written all these books, we will whine when the university expels us for not bringing in enough money. I’ve written an introduction to A and Understanding B; I’ve written a book that introduced C to first and second year undergraduates; I’ve made D accessible to bright sixth formers and laypeople; I’ve published an illustrated guide to E and an idiots guide to F: does this not count for anything? And the university, at once indulgent and cruel, at once smiling and vicious, will let our contracts run out and send us back out into the world. Yes, that will be our fate, I said to H. And we will deserve it, we who took the toreadors’s cape for our target. Who of us looked up at the grinning face of the one who made us run around the arena? Who of us will have seen that it is capitalism that laughs and that the house that wins every game?

You know the lie we tell ourselves, I said to H. You know how we want to survive like parasites, that we cling onto to the great beast sucking a little blood for ourselves. We moan, we complain about administration and bureaucracy, I said to H, but in the end it keeps us happy and active. We think we are alive, we write and think writing is living, we write and congratulate ourselves for keeping ahead, for having been able to squeeze another one out before being caught out. We think we’ve done well to have survived this far in such a hostile environment. But in truth, we have been indulged, we have played the game we were supposed to play. In truth, our writing is an alibi, and what we write is written across the void. Nothing has happened; nothing is happening; the world plunges into misery as into the night. Today and tomorrow are the same, I said to H., capitalism turns around itself as the tiger ran around the boy. And just as that tiger melted into butter as he ran, everything we take to be the world, the university, is melting into money.