Lars Iyer's Blog

Folie a deux, the madness of lovers separate from the world. Levinas will condemn it as a solipsism; Blanchot will discover in this madness the link to the communities outside constituted politics – the protestors who remembered those killed at the Charonne metro station in 1962, for example, as they demonstrated against French colonialism, or those who rose up in the streets of May 1968 in Paris: those streets which, beneath a sky no longer cosmic – no longer linked to a particular world (kosmos), to a given people or nationality, where there arose a horde of no one in particulars, each the anyone whatever sharing what affirmed for each in what he calls, after a book of Char’s poems, common presence.

So too the presence of the lovers, one to another in Duras’s The Malady of Death: each is wagered according to the attempt to love. An attempt formalised in his accession to the contract she offers to him. How did it work (I’ve forgotten): seven nights, was it, together in a room by the sea? In the end, he finds it impossible to love – do not assume he was homosexual – and she departs. To where does she go? To find others whom she might love and from whom she might receive love.

Common presence: this names the ‘people of Paris’, as they were called (though Blanchot is quick to say these were not a Volk): marchers who marched without leader in memory of those killed. Who marched and then dispersed, without being given the order to gather or disperse. In silence and in memory, though great strength was there. The same, perhaps, as the one of which Blanchot writes in relation to the demonstration against De Gaulle’s return to power, helped by mercenaries, in 1958. Refusal: that is Blanchot’s model. A word to which he will return, just as Duras will take it up in her turn, in her books.

Common presence: I think at once of those little groups who were gathered in political hope in the wake of 1956, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and the triumphs of Guevara. And in the face of the French Communist Party which expelled Duras, Antelme and others. I think of the group who gathered at the Rue Saint-Benoit, who were they? Mascolo, Schuster, Duras, Antelme (and later, his wife, who still lives), and of course Blanchot whom, as a correspondent once wrote to me, came like Gandalf from the South, full of magic and mystery. They assembled in the evenings to eat. Feasts were prepared. They would edit the collective paper 14th July, to aid the movement of refusal of de Gaulle’s return but also that of French colonialism in Algeria.

Marvellous to read of those days and the efforts which succeeded them – the failed International Review which drew Barthes to the rue-Saint Benoit (Lacan, too, was a visitor – and what of Bataille?) and saw Blanchot write to Gunter Grass and Iris Murdoch, to Enzenburger and Vittorini (another friend of the group, whose Red Carnation was admired by Bataille (I still haven’t read it)) with the aim of establish a review adequate to the overcoming of colonisation, to the achievement of a world citizenry and, perhaps, to the common presence of all, the great sharing of the world. Then came May 1968, and the dispersal of those at rue Saint-Benoit: Blanchot became too ill and retired from the world (he no longer saw even his closest friends whom, strange irony, he would outlive, all except for Derrida, who outlived Blanchot only by a year), Duras turned to film-making, the others continued to work …

Common presence. But what if this model of politics, of a democracy that would answer those who refused and were capable of refusal – strange capacity, as it involved a receptivity to receptivity, a responsibility which begins in a response not to the Other as for Levinas but to world as it was what Deleuze might call virtual, to the possibility of a countereffectuation of what is, that same responsibility which Gillian Rose, for one, will find wholly objectionable and a symptom of a postmodern lability to endless melancholy – itself fell short of what was announced in Char’s poems: to the common presence of all – of the reserve of being, to the refusal implicit to matter?

Char is not a bucolic poet; beware the attempt to celebrate nature for it is still cosmic – still belongs to that order which would find stars in the sky to steer by. What if the stars have fallen? What if it is not to the cosmos we belong (celestial order, the appeal to nature) but to the disaster (des-astres, without stars)? How pretentious! Blanchot sought with the International Review the creation of an anonymous fragmentary writing which, he thought, was so lacking in those who tried in their writings to alert their readers to the fate of the world (Jaspers, for one). This is admirable. He sketched many topics for his contributors to write about. He asked for translators to make the journal available for those of many languages. In the end, the project failed. Barthes, for one, was angry; Blanchot dissuaded him from commemorating the project, aware of the fate of those groups whose brilliance was eclipsed by the brilliance of their disputes (Surrealism).

But what was my point? Oh yes: common presence would draw also on those forces outside the human – on reserves of fresh water, on supplies of energy, and the revolution cannot be one of refusal, of marches in which the plight of the world (the plight of the fixity of the world, its determination) is witnessed, but of those relations to impersonal forces. No longer is the subject the centre of political science. No longer is it the mulitude which must awaken. Now it is impersonal, transpersonal forces which much be engaged. Unless this is what the multitude and refusal already mean; unless it is a question of that counter-effectuation which return to each of us that commonwealth of fresh water, fresh air and fresh food …

Not the molar revolution, perhaps, bodies on the street – or rather, not just that. The scientist who struggles to unleash new energies and those energies themselves is also part of the revolution, as are those who make sure our monocultural agriculture is not vulnerable, because of the paucity of seed varieties (am I right to think our crops are grown now from a handful of seed-types which could be wiped out quickly?) to obliteration. As are those who work to control the flow of finance capital, not just to steer or to administrate it (our new model of government), but to regulate its devastation of peoples and of the environment.

All this without the suspicious return to the pathos of the ‘natural’ (itself part of the cosmic order), of nature. To the cosmic, Blanchot will also link a molar image of writing. He dreams of a new collectivity, each responsive to what can only be received in a kind of passivity: that opening to each of what being is not, of the becoming of being, of being’s virtuality (however it might be put) and hence for the chance of counter-effectuation, of counter-memory, of forgetting (however that might be put). Why do I entertain the idea that this writing is present in Will Oldham’s songs?

Watch the G8 concerts and you will see what were called in Rock school ‘rock positions’: a system of codes which would express the rock performance, codes which have long voided their content and now repeat themselves not even as farce (the spectacle of, say, Whitesnake in the early 80s) but as the worst kind of postmodern cynicism – every style is up for grabs; even U2 can play punk. Listen to Will Oldham, watch him speak or perform and at every stage there is a refusal of position. Not by chance will he write over and again of an unspecified ‘it’ – peculiar object, peculiar, impersonal agent which acts upon those of whom he sings. No consolation for him of the great cynicism. Reborn is a new a commitment – not for what was called rock and not even for punk (though punk is a different word to rock, is its refusal). Songs of part-objects and fragmentary things (always the word things in Will Oldham’s songs). Songs of couples in rooms. And passing through the words, flowing with them, sometimes, but also against them, forcing the singer’s voice to rise and break, there is a music which allows there to be sung something like the heart of being, the lining of the world.

These are beginning songs, but what begins are receptivities and new alliances, new relations. There are no stars above Will Oldham. Old verities have disappeared. Begin again; you can rely on nothing. The old forms have been hollowed out and the new a form of form must open. Not by chance does Will Oldham speak of the importance of Big Black and the Minutemen to him, and of the new collectivities which gathered around these groups. Punk repeated itself in them, as it did, later, in Slint and then in Will Oldham (his first album sees him accompanied by several members of Slint), which is only possible if the punk is repeated as a revolution, and not as a repetition of empty forms. When Will Oldham writes of God, this is not the God of monotheism. Not is a postmodern and cynical God, meaning everything and nothing. God now names a kind of relation: the one who asks for a wager. Will Oldham’s music is then exemplified by Abraham’s journey to the mountain in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. The knife is held over Isaac, which is to say, over himself as singer, over what he has taken himself to be (and what is taken as being). But God intervenes and a new Will Oldham is born.

Who is Will Oldham? Not the actor who hides himself under pseudonyms, but the one who knows that there are no names but false names, and each of us is the monster who cannot be named. A monster? Rather a horde of monsters, a whirling multitude. Who is Will Oldham? Interviewee who responds differently to the questions he is asked each time he is asked them again. Singer who begins anew with each album, working with new people, working differently each time. Who is he? One who watches over punk as it names the being of becoming.

You know their type, I said. Brooding, resentful, middle aged, their too-large bodies shifting in their chairs, their fat necks in collars and neckties. You know the old style bullies, great, lumbering, stupid beasts who have had years of sabbaticals and research leave, who were promoted on the back of a mediocre book or a clutch of average articles. You know them, I said, gas-filled and stupid, with stupid blank eyes that search the horizon for new objects of resentment.

You know them, you suffered from them, you were directly oppressed by them when they employed you to cover their teaching for free (‘it’s great experience’) or organised large conferences without credit (‘don’t you take a summer holiday this year’). Yes, you know them, shambling from one international conference or another, professing from lecterns from Sydney to Seattle, surrounded by a little cloud of academics who want favours. You know the ones I mean, I said, writing on Marxism while they employ you on a part-time contract to do their teaching, their administration and their conference organisation. You know them, I said, filling the committees and the Q.A.A. panels.

You remember what they confessed to you that day in their office, when puffed-up with power, chest pushed outwards they boasted they could destroy a department if they wanted to and that no one could escape their grasp. You remember being told your career would be destroyed, I said, that they would destroy your career, that wherever you went you’d be in danger, I said. You remember them telling you to run upstairs and fetch their printing, I said. You remember being led round the canteen like a shire horse, like a tamed dumb beast.

You remember having to kow-tow to idiots, I said, to speak the language of idiots, I said, to speak idiot-speak when they asked you questions after your paper, I said. You remember being told how important it was to impress them, I said, these idiots I said and how you went cap in hand to their great offices to ask for a little more teaching I said. You remember, I said, as a part-timer having to attend the lectures for which you were to provide seminars, having to attend team meetings and quality meetings and, to impress the department, to attend and be an active member of the Research Seminar, I said.

You remember them whispering in corners I said, scheming and plotting in pubs, I said. You remember them as transmitters of gossip and rumour, I said. You remember when they favoured you with a conversation, I said, and they led you like the lumbering beast they had brought under control from this corridor to that, I said. You remember calming them down after their tantrums, I said, and all but wiping their brows. You remember how they told you teaching 4 hours a week was difficult, I said. You remembering being advised to attend their postgraduate courses even though you had your doctorate, I said, to get into their good books, I said.

You remember their idiocies and lies, I said, and smiling at their idiocy and laughing at their idiotic remarks, I said, and feigning to admire their power, I said. You remember indulging their fantasies, I said, of letting them wallow in their sense of their importance, I said. You remember telling them how much you enjoyed their book, I said, and how much you looked forward to their reckoning with Bonhoffer, I said. You remember them telling you about the good old days, and how it didn’t used to be so hard, I said.

You remember them, I said. The memory is burnt into you, I said. Because you have been everybody’s monkey, I said, everybody’s jester, I said, the bells of your cap jangling as you passed down the corridors, I said. Because you were everybody’s carthorse, everybody’s houseboy, the slave who danced in his chains, I said, the dancing bear and the grinning court dwarf. You were the department idiot I said, the department ape and buffoon. Of what did you dream, I said, but of becoming the confidante of the manager, her favourite. Of supplanting all the other rivals in her affection, I said. Of being the most docile seminar-wallah, the best listener-wallah and the most loquacious flattery-wallah, I said.

How you loathed it, I said. How keen you were to escape, I said. ‘No one would believe what goes on here’, you said to the other monkeys. You longed to stand upright, I said. You longed to have the blinkers removed, and your iron collar unlocked, I said. And you longed for the bit to be removed from your mouth. To speak, to stand, to see at last.

There he is in his velvet cowboy hat, I said, the puffed-up mediocrity, I said, the editor of several publishing series and a prestigious series of edited collections, I said. Cultivator of admirers and dependants, I said. Like the lord of a little feudal town, I said, throwing gold coins to the peasants just to see them dashing about and then tipping their caps. ‘Bless you guv’nor, god bless you’. 

The Vice-Chancellor is in her suite and the lecturers in their offices. The desperate ones are wandering the corridors, officeless and baseless, writing on films they cannot afford to pay to see and on books they cannot afford to pay to read. The desperate ones, I said, wandering the corridors for years, pitied by all and despised by all (‘why don’t they just give up?’) because they see in you the truth of their own condition, its disgusting price.

Do you think it’s possible to die of hatred? I asked H. Do you think a creature could have been who was so stupid they died of sheer stupidity? I said. Not as a consequence of that stupidity, I said, but from stupidity. And shame, I said, – do you think you could die of shame, I mean literally die? And what about boredom, I said, do you think you could die of that? Because I’m burning up with hatred and stupidity and shame and boredom, I said. I’m burning up and I think I will explode from hatred and stupidity and shame and boredom, I said.

I feel like one of the scientists on the space station orbiting Solaris, I said. Orbiting round and round and round the planet of my stupidity, I said. Round and round I go until I’m bored. But I cannot help but be fascinated, I said. It’s like my first book, I said. It mesmerises me, I said. Sometimes I pull it down from the shelf and open its pages, I said. I already know what I’ll find there, I said, but I want to find it again. I want the fact of my own stupidity to be confirmed, I said. And I want to enter my stupidity, to fall into it, to be embraced by it even as it bores me, I said.

Boredom is the modality of my fascination, I said. It’s still boredom, I said, but it’s boredom fascinated, I said. And in this case with what I sought to make with my life, I said. This is it, I say to myself, I said to H., this is what I worked for? A book published by a company which barely checks what it publishes, barely deigns to proofread it, barely deigns to publish it, I said, letting it creep out in the tiniest of editions, I said, effectively printing on demand from the first, I said. Printing on demand, I said, in short runs – it is little different to the way Zara operates, I said, constantly updating its stock, changing direction once a fortnight, moving rapidly, very rapidly I said. So too with the publisher in our late capitalism, I said.

This is the great lie of academia, I said, the great capture of creativity. That the book you wrote – the second rate commentary on this or that French thinker – is a badge of your creativity, a form of struggle against Capital, a little negentropic island in the midst of general decay. Phew, I finished it,  that’s what you say to yourself, despite everything, I finished it despite everything – which is to say, despite Capital and the new demand it places on you. And what is that demand? Production, I said. To produce spreadsheets and funding applications and material for the audit – all that, I said. To produce virtual learning environments and reports on teaching, all that, I said.

The great lie: against the dumb production of administrative nonsense, you managed to write a book. You took your evenings and weekends back to write a book. You crept into the office in the evenings and at the weekend to work not on administration, I said, but on your book. So it is I orbit the planet of my stupidity, I said. Around and around the book that is supposed to be the concrete manifestation of my freedom I said. Bad commentary, I said, that’s my great cry of rebellion! Badly written and badly argued I said, and that was all the revolt I could manage!

Worst of all, I want always to excuse myself, I said. To say: but I wrote it in nine months in my spare time, in evenings and weekends, I said. And that is the great joke, I said, because this excuse is also a kind of pride. It says: oh, what I could have produced if I’d have had more time! It says: I will have to begin again, to write another book if only to erase the memory of the first book I said. And so it goes on, I said. Book after book after book, I said. Like a great sickness, I said.

Academics are like skeleton crew left on the space station in Tarkovsky‘s film, I said. We’re half-mad, I said, and living from the phantom products of our creativity, I said. Academia seems to grant our desires, I said. It seems to give flesh to our desires, I said. Capital repeats what was lost, bringing it to life again, I said, just as the protagonist Kelvin, meets his lover, Hari, who killed herself a long time ago. He meets her again, beautiful, loving, but also empty. And when, disturbed by this emptiness, he tries to leave her behind, to move into another part of the space station, she walks through sheet glass and metal doors to be with him, I said, wrecking herself. And when he blasts her off into space, she returns to him, I said, as if from returning from the dead. Only she remembers nothing, I said. Each time it is as though she is born again from Kelvin’s dreams and from his youth.

Isn’t there something of this in romance under the current conditions?, I said. As though the romantic scripts themselves had failed and romance itself had worn out, I said. Everyone’s working, I said, night and day. Working and moving around the country, from this place to that, I said. And everyone is contactable, I said, night and day. It’s hot desking in the office and working from home, I said, until worktime is all time and the home, too, is an office.

Romance – what of romance in the midst of all this? A kind of repetition – youthful ardour repeated, the sense that there is something to live for apart from Capital, I said. As though what returned in romance was the ability of laugh at Capital, I said. Laughter at Capital as it demands you move from here to there and then away from your lover, I said.

What is age when compared to this youth? Conservatism and foolishness, I said, adjustment to the fact of Capital and the sense of its inevitability. Strategy and careerism. But it is that your body has been wrecked, walking through sheet glass and metal doors to follow your career, I said. You’ve torn yourself up and torn up your youth I said. So it is with the academic monograph, the great incarnation of freedom, I said. Disinterested research, I said. Pure intellection, I said, how marvellous! And you’ll do anything to complete it, I said, working alone, as other academics are also alone on the space station I said. Each of you alone and working on your monograph I said. Alone and hoping you’ll get away with it, that you can snatch a few hours for yourself each day and complete it, I said.

But all along we are orbiting the planet of our stupidity, I said. The planet of Capital, I said, from which are born the ghostly correlates of what we take to be the work of our creativity. What I produce does not matter, I said. It is not anti-production, it is not the gift that breaks with the economy of production, it is simply a bad book in the great streaming of bad books, I said. That’s what we’ll be known for, I said: bad books.

The dream is ending, I said. Soon, books will count for nothing. Only income generation will count, I said. Monographs will cease to be of any importance, I said. What will matter is research funding, I said, the flood of money the government releases for academics to bid for, I said. Even in philosophy, I said. Especially in philosophy, I said. Philosophy will be a way the State returns to itself and confirms itself, I said. There will be only State Philosophy, I said, building elaborate new space stations to orbit the great planet of stupidity, I said.

When you ask me, ‘what are you working on?’, I said to H., I’ll say, ‘deepening my own stupidity’. ‘What are you working on?’ – ‘The perfection of State Philosophy’. ‘What are you working on?’ – ‘Allowing the State to perfect itself into the administrator of Capital, the limbs of Capital, it’s little mandibles, its pseudopodia’. ‘What are you working on?’ – ‘I’m trying to quicken the movement of Capital, to allow to return more efficiently to itself’. ‘What are you working on?’ – ‘I want to perfect myself as an instrument of Capital, a conduit which offers no resistance. I want to feel Capital steaming through me’.

Meanwhile there is the lie that the torn and shattered book, like Kelvin’s Hari, answers my youthful dreams of creativity. This lie confirms itself even as I whine that it is not the book I wanted to write. The book lies, I said, on every one of its pages. It is my alibi, that I can show people to justify poor pay and poor working conditions. ‘I wrote this – it is not the book I wanted to write, but …’ It is my pathetic act of rebellion, I said, the prize awarded me for giving my youth to Capital.

It’s marvellous, I said, universities now employ administrators expert at translating poorly written funding proposals into sleek and efficient funding proposals. They get paid more than us, I said, and rightly so. They’re doing the real work, I said, and can only approximate the officialese at which they are so adept at writing, I said. It’s only right they get paid more, much more than us, I said. They are the translators of academic funding proposals into the terms Capital can understand, I said, which is to say they translate everything into nonsense, I said, but officialese nonsense, written in that non-language that laughs at us, the poor academics who have yet to upload ourselves into the movement of Capital, I said.

Academics are the dross of the university, I said, but never mind. Microsoft will roll out the great teaching Encarta soon, I said. They’ve spent billions on it, I said. Billions, and they feel it is pure philanthrophy. And after Encarta, what need will there be for lecturers or seminar leaders?, I said. Research will survive, I said, but only the universities far sighted enough to employ administrators who can efficiently translate the poorly written funding proposals that come to them from academics, I said.

In the end, a new breed will appear, as I said, as it is already appearing: the administrator-academic, the all-purpose university robot, I said, adept in the languages of funding proposals and quality management. Fluent in all the tounges of Capital, I said. Ready for all weathers and all terrain, I said. With little caterpillar tracks instead of feet, I said, rolling around from here to there, I said, efficient and ever ready I said. We’ll keep them in empty lecture rooms, I said, switching them off at night and on in the mornings. And they’ll roll about, I said, ready for every challenge, I said.

I have happy memories, I said to H., of that Away Day with the Quality team which we took in a room of the Houses of Parliament, I said. We rented that room at a discount, I said, and it was our room for the day. What a bonus for us academics, I said, to be treated to lunch at the Houses of Parliament, I said. And what joy it was to be joined by the imperatrice of Quality, that marvellous individual who instructed us about branding and how we should be proud of our university! Every module outline should have the university brand on it, she said. You should be proud of working for the university, she said. But then she said, ‘as the university should be proud to have you’.

It was the run up to our QAA. As a Lecturer on a one year 0.5 post, earning a full £9,000 in the Home Counties, it was clearly important that I attend such meetings. I was to be trained in matter of quality, and I gladly received that training. I listened to the imperatrice of Quality with great concentration. Yes, I should think about university branding, I thought, and I should think about personal branding, too. How was I to brand myself? How to develop my own personal brand? What did I stand for, after all?

That year, I told H., I was given an office in the former stables of the house in which an American senator lived during the war. I had my office, but no keys to the office, so I could never get into it. It was designed thus, I found out. There was no need, after all, for me to have an office. On the other hand, somewhere on paper, I should be seen to have an office.

Even if I had got into the office, there was nothing there. A few rotten mattresses were all I could make out through the windows. And some mould on the wall. Effectively, I had no office. Instead, I rented a room from the university, a little room in which I could stay in the evening so long as I cleared it out every morning. I would take my personal effects to the porter to look after, I said, and then wander around the Senator’s former mansion, up the stairs and down the stairs, and then around the courtyard and past the old greenhouses. The campus was mine, I said, because it was no one’s.

I had no office and no computer, I said. The little campus was mine, however. I wandered about the campus in the evening, I said, where there were no bars and nothing to do. There was the library, I said, so I went there. I went to the library and photocopied books. I abused my privileges; I still have piled-up photocopied books in my filing cabinet I said.

They let me teach Husserl, I said. Husserl, but not anything after Husserl. ‘My supervisor warned my about Merleau-Ponty’, said the Head of Department, ‘and he said he was dangerous. I’ve never read him’. Often, I would wander into the Philosophy corridor and gaze in admiration at the clippings from the newspapers stuck to the walls. They included the piece in the Guardian published just after Deleuze’s death, where he is impugned for his intellectual impostures. Then there were carefully photocopied paragraphs from other lofty newspapers on Derrida and others. ‘Pure bunk’; ‘arrant nonsense’. Finally, there was a glass case containing the lofty publications of the philosophy department themelves. How busy they had been! How ambitious they were! Photocopied front pages of their articles at jaunty angles were arranged beneath glass panels on the wall. I marvelled at their industry.

Truly I was among giants! I was a fool, a dwarf among giants! They were taller and better than I! I was a skulking thing, half-dead, wandering in obscurity around the campus! I was a skulking disgusting thing who could never think of anything to say in the long Research Forums where visiting academics, some from Oxford and Cambridge, would give not one but two papers, with dinner at a local restaurant in between. Not one but two papers. Two papers on the Philosophy of Mind. Two papers on why it was wrong to stick pins in babies. What joy it was in that dawn to be alive! What joy I experienced among the men and woman of Oxford and Cambridge who came to visit us!

The academics drove round in their cars and I walked on my poor feet. The academics lived in the surrounding towns and I lived in a rented room on campus. They passed me and I waved. Had they seen me? In the evenings I wrote a flood of poor papers and by day I received a flood of rejection letters. I received a Bad Writing award and the academics drove around in their cars. I was a Bad Writer, but their careers were like their cars, large and established. On they sped. It was good and it was right. I was base matter and they were the gods.

What will happen to them now, these lofty academics? What resistance will they put up against Microsoft and its minions? Because I know they are the old breed, the dying breed and that for all their strength and magnificence, they will fail, I said. Better than me, stronger than me, but rather like the boastful tree in the children’s story, the tree which said: I am stronger than you, grass, but was felled in a storm. But I am not grass, I said, I am something which will survive the death of grass.

Crawling through the grass are the survivors, I said, those degraded creatures who will survive all disasters. They are waiting for the disaster, and out they will swarm, I said. I am not one of these creatures, I said, but the scum that grows on their chitin, I said. I am a little patch of sickness that grows on their hard black casing, I said. I am not a survivor, I said, but the scum that grows on the backs of survivors. For there is something knowing about me, I said. I have learnt bitter lessons and live from bitter lessons. I am adjusted and ready for the disaster, and I am even looking forward to it, I said. I dream feebly of the great takeover when Microsoft rolls out its educational software and people like me will move from university to university, slaves to the great servo-mechanisms of Capital.

The grass will be dead and the earth singed and the great beasts with whom I used to work will have starved to death. Their cars rust by the roadside; pages from their articles blow in the wind. Meanwhile, I will be one of the technicians of learning appearing in a 2 inch by 2 inch window on your console, having been brought in by Microsoft to deliver what will pass for teaching.

Humanities academics take their real business to be doing what is called research, I said. What they want is all the other stuff to be taken care of so they can get down to some work, I said. The academics are dreaming of Introductions and Critical Readers, I said. They are dreaming of new books whose name begins with Understanding … or ends in … in 90 Minutes. They dream of edited collections and special issues of journals.

Ah, creativity, I said – the capture of creativity, it’s marvellous. There is a whole technology to capure creativity, to seize it as it seems to give itself as soon as it appears. To seize creativity from the second it appears. It is easy to laugh at academics, I said, but they deserve to be laughed at. It’s happening all around us, I said, the world is changing as it has changed only a few times before, and it’s passing us by, I said.

The only way we think this change, I said, is under the sign of apocalypse. And I am the best example of this, I said. Or the worst example. I write over and again that the world is about to end, I said. That it’s all coming to an end. But there has been one version or another of this apocalypticism for the last century, I said, and probably before that, I said. A feeble milleniarism is the driver of all sorts of books, I said, best sellers or not. To write in this way is only another kind of self-loathing, I said. It is another kind of imaginary revenge on a world that is indifferent to you, I said. A world that is leaving you behind, I said, and in truth had always left you behind.

There’s no role for us now, I said to H. For a time the R.A.E. has funded research in the humanities, I said. This gave thousands of academics a chance to flood the world with books, I said. Thousands upon thousands of books, good and bad, I said. Where would I be without the R.A.E.?, I asked. After all, I come from a bad university, I said. I was a mediocre student, I said, and now I’m a mediocre writer. B0ok follows book and I leave a slug’s trail of mediocrity across the world, I said. Follow me by the signs I leave, I said. Mediocre signs. I used to be able to get away with commentary, I said. But even a slug knows when it’s done enough commentary, I said. Even a slug feels a distant, gnawing shame.

So now it’s necessary to take my revenge on the world, I said. The world which blame for my own mediocrity, I said. I got a job by chance, I said. And then acted like I’d deserved that chance, I said. As if it were natural and right, I said, and my due. But it wasn’t my due, I said, and it wasn’t my right. If I published a great deal, this was because of sickness, I said. There’s no an idea in any of the publications, I said, nothing of worth. I published and published, I said, and there’s nothing in this. For have there ever been more places to publish? I asked.

Once, it is true, I struggled to get published. I had more rejection letters than anyone. But that is when I aimed high, I said. Then I learnt to aim low, I said. I learnt that quantity was the rule. And then, when I found myself in a good university, the publishers came to my office and asked me if I had anything to publish. They came to my office, I said, one by one. There they were, aimiable and pleasant and in my office, I said. What had I done to merit that! For years I had been carrying round a mediocre manuscript which no one would touch, I said. Not because it was bad, but because it wouldn’t sell, I said.

I sent it off to that idiot in a cowboy hat in the states, I said, that velvet cowboy hat on which I spilt my Guinness, I said, and he never wrote back. That happened any number of times, I said. No one was interested, and rightly so. And now the publishers came to my office I said, and they asked me if I had a manuscript they could look at. Of course, what they were really looking for, I said, was a textbook, but they gave me a contact to whom I could send a monograph, I said.

There was no problem getting a book out, I said, once I was in a good university. It was like sneezing, I said. There it was. Barely copy edited, barely edited, with errors the Malaysian proof reader added herself, I said (they had subcontracted everything to the Far East, the publishers), but there it was, a book. And now I was free to act like the author of a book, I said. Like a player. Now I could refer people to my book. ‘Just read the book’, I could say. Meanwhile, I knew the book was mediocre, I said, and not even that. Barely mediocre, I said, and full of typos, I said. A book written in gibberese, I said.

Even with my poor standards I knew something was wrong, I said. The second book’s coming out without any publisher’s referees seeing the whole manuscript, I said. It costs too much to employ referees nowadays, I said. They pay you in books. They give you two or three copies of your own book if you referee someone else’s book, I said. But that usually means only looking at a proposal and perhaps a sample chapter, I said. No more than that.

Even mediocrities know something is wrong, I said. Even mediocrities feel an obscure sense of shame. It’s getting worse with me, I said, I feel more shame than ever, I said. You might think this would mean the beginning of thinking, I said. The first two books would have been ‘prentice works and now the real work begins, I said. But no. What is left to me now is only a vague apocalypticism, I said. One which is basically resentment at the system which gave me job, I said.

I am enacting an imaginary revenge on the whole system, I said, but it’s only imaginary. God forbid I ever accomplish a deed, I said. God forbid I ever do something. A resentful, hate filled little soul has hollowed itself out in me, I said. A little place has been scooped out in me where I dream of revenge, I said. A little place of shame and hatred I said, which cannot bear itself, I said, and seeks to blame everything on something else.

This could be my saving grace, I said. It could be this which leads me to accomplish something, I said. Because casting about for someone to blame led me to strong thinkers and strong books, I said. I blame Capital, I said, and, happy chance, I was right to blame Capital, I said. Somehow or another Capital led me to discover its truth, I said. The truth it laid like flies’ eggs in my own soul, I said. In my soul which is the soul of Capital I said, as it is has seized and destroyed academia, I said. In my soul which is full of writhing maggots, good maggots and bad ones, I said, much like academia itself.

Write from shame, I said. And write from loathing. For there is something to be ashamed of and there is something to loathe. The blog is a threshold, I said to H. It is that place where Capital becomes aware of itself, I said. Where the maggot realises he is a maggot among maggots, I said. Everywhere the flies’ eggs are hatching, I said. Culture is only the dung heap in which maggots crawl, I said, and I am one of those maggots. How is it then I know I’m a maggot? How is it that my maggotry revealed itself in me? I said.

Winston Smith in 1984 wrote a diary he kept secret from Big Brother. He wrote and discovered his soul. But it is the other way round, I said. The soul was born because of Big Brother and only because of Big Brother. The strong have no need for souls, I said. The soul is not a womb, nothing is born there. The soul is a place for flies’ eggs, I said, that hollows itself out from sheer resentment, I said. Then the flies eggs hatch and maggots crawl around, eating out our insides, I said. Then the maggots turn into flies and the flies buzz around, I said, and buzz out of our mouths at symposia and colloquia and buzz through the pages of our books.

The ancients thought flies were spontaneously generated from base matter, I said, and they were right. Only the base matter is the walls of our own souls, I said. Those souls resentment and shame have hollowed out. Happily, unhappily, that resentment and shame are entirely legitimate I said, when directed at Capital, I said. All they need to do is to understand their genealogy, I said, and the shifting planes of force which produced them, I said.

Dream of a kind of writing, I said, where the soul uncovers itself as a hatching ground, I said. As a hollowed-out place for maggots and maggot breeding, I said. Dream of scorpions which sting themselves to death, I said. Dream of open wounds that are cauterised by the sun. It is not the recovery of the soul that should be sought, I said, but it’s extirpation. Send Ripley into its caverns with a flamethrower, I said, and then let the whole thing close up, I said. Then you will find yourself outside, I said, in empty space. Outside, and what you were was only a pleat of Capital. Outside, and you see, as in a vision, that there are only the folds and pleats of Capital.

But then, the greater vision: Capital itself is only one way of organising those folds and pleats, I said. It has seized life and seized everything, but it is only a transcendental illusion, I said. Capital is the usurper, I said, that has usurped all of life, I said.

The academics to come will be stronger than us and better than us, I said to H. They’ll be taller, for one thing, and have magnificent haircuts. They’ll have enough money for great haircuts and great shoes, I said. And they’ll exercise more regularly than us, I said. They will achieve an exemplary work-life balance, I said.

They’ll look at our 3 or 4 books and laugh; they will have produced 3 or 4 books while they were studying. It’s no struggle for them. Their books will write themselves and no one will read them, I said. You think few people read our books today, well in the future, no one will read anything, I said. Books will pour from the academics to come and no one will even notice them, I said. It will be pure career capital, I said. Proof of an ability to teach and to profess, I said.

The real business will be raising income, I said. They’ll learn from interactive programs how to put research proposals together, I said. They’ll be taught that from the first. And every university will have a Centre for this or that, an Institute for this and that. Two lecturers and a postgrad will make for a Centre, I said, and three lecturers and two postgrads will make for an Institute, I said. There will no departments as such, I said, only self-funding Research Institutes, linked together in order to maintain the interactive programs which will teach future students, I said. They will allow the virtual learning environment to sustain itself, I said, and concentrate on the real business of the university, which is raising money, I said.

They’ll all be 6 foot tall or more, the new breed, I said to H. They’ll be taller than us and better than us. They will find us amusing. How they thought they suffered, they’ll say to one another, that lazy generation before us! How they whined about the simplest task! But of course they will not be hampered by archaic management structures. Privatisation in 2010 will do away with them. Now the university will become a network, a superefficient rhizome, I said, spreading out all over the world.

University will link to college which will link to school, I said. And the whole education system will be wrapped around the idea of life-long interactive learning, I said. The worker will be responsible for herself from now on, I said. She will have to find suitable courses for herself. Her skill-set is everything; she will carry a portfolio of such skills from one temporary job to another, I said. It’s a brave new world, I said. So much initiative! I said. Forget the Foucauldian idea of a disciplinary society, I said. This will be a society of control, I said. Worktime is all time, I said, and the network is all.

Wages will rise, I said, as older, less productive and adaptable academics are laid off. There will be efficiency savings as layers of management are cut away. The network will make sure of that I said. It will spread its tentacles into everything I said. The network will be used to justify everything, I said. No more human agency, just the network, I said. The network and its priests, I said. The philosopher-priests who sing about the network and its marvellous power of autopoesis, I said.

But what they love is capital, I said, and what capital has made of the world. They love the idea that capital is a self-organising system. They have simple boyish wonder at the inventiveness of capital, I said. They love capital and they are the agents of capital. Nihilism completes itself, I said, when capital believes and desires in our beliefs and desires. When the takeover is complete, I said. When there is nothing but the network and the circulation of information, I said.

The men and women of the new world will be taller than us and better than us. Now and then they will break down, but they will be repaired again. A few days out, a month’s sabbatical, the new regime will be infinitely flexible, I said. Now the worker is responsible for herself, she can take career breaks and sabbaticals, I said. And those periods between jobs she’ll annex for personal development. Time to work with the interactive programs from Microsoft to update her skills. And there will be a great deal of updating, I said. The world will be moving, and she’ll have to move with it, I said.

The tall ones, the better ones, the machines who never break down will soar above us. Oh they’ll take care of us, I said, they’ll appear at charity functions, I said. Money will flow from them to us, I said. But they’ll jaunt from country to country, I said, they’ll flow as fast as capital. Capital will sing and celebrate itself in them, I said. Capital will shine in the brightness of their eyes and the whiteness of their teeth. LASIK and veneers, I said, they’ll have had that from the first, I said.

How white their teeth and how bright their eyes! The teeth and eyes of capital!, I said. LASIK and veneers, I said, and plenty of exercise. For their bodies are sleek, too, I said. Their bodies are bodies of panthers and tigers. They slink from place to place, I said, and couple in dark corners. Capital loves itself in their slim arms and tanned backs, I said. There’s no excess fat in the network, I said. You’ll have to move and move fast. You’ll have to be on the ball, a self-motivator. There will no room for the word ‘we’. Local affliations, yes, little teams, sometimes – teams who will barely meet face to face. But no ‘we’.

But what they don’t understand is that this new appeal to nature, the new rhetoric of evolutionary theory is an extension of the same vile network which laughs in their laughter. That laughing in their laughter in their bright eyes and bright teeth is the laughter of capitalism. The fittest survive, they laugh, those with the broadest skill-set, those who are tallest and slimmest and have had LASIK and veneers. It’s evolutionary theory, they laugh. Darwin said it all, they laugh. It’s the selfish gene, they laugh. They’ll never say any of these things, they hardly know they think them, but it laughs in their laughter and flashes from their white teeth and their bright eyes. It believes in itself in their slim bodies. It prays to itself in their gym-trained muscles.

Capital is stripping itself down to a bare frame, I said. It is emerging as such and is unashamed. Sheer and unadulterated Capital is coming out into the open, I said. That’s what the 80s and the 90s prepared us for, I said. Capital is here and it is obvious. Capital is natural and eternal and falls everywhere like light. No transcendence need be posited. There is no mysterious abyss, no night of the world. Nothing is hidden, everything is here and it is quantifiable and measurable.

There are those who can work and those who cannot work. There are those who are able and those who are unable. And to those who can work will come the fruits of work. And to those who are able will accrue the skills that are needed for work. The others will be divided into the deserving and the undeserving poor. For the former, skills training and a subsistence income. For the latter, alcoholism, madness and drug abuse and all of them beneath the indifferent light which falls on everything. Alcoholism, madness and drug abuse beneath the sky which has driven them to alcohol, madness and drug abuse.

No one can see the light of capital like the alcoholic. No one faces the face of capital like the mad. No one can know it like the one unemployed and undeserving, the one who is exiled from work. It is unbearable and it is streaming down. And it will find you. The madness of that light will find you. It is indifferent to you but it will find you. You weave between the three-wheeled pushchairs but it knows you and it follows you. It is only in that light that you will know your shame.

H. and I ask the police for directions. Where’s Morden Tower? we ask. They don’t know, but they’re helpful. We’re polite and they’re helpful. ‘We should hate them’, I said to H. a little later. It would help us if they were brutal, I said. But they’re considerate and pleasant, I said.

When the auditors came, it was the same, I said. They were pleasant and helpful people. They wanted to do a good job, to see justice was done. One of them was a fan of Will Oldham, he told me. He liked Will Oldham and Nine Inch Nails and he was an auditor. This wasn’t a contradiction, I said to H. He might have been anguished, but auditors can be anguished. They’re just like you and me, I said to H. No doubt one of us will have to audit a department soon enough, I said.

When they had the two minute’s silence for 9/11, I was in an induction meeting at the university where I worked, I said. I had worked there for years, I said, but they’d finally thrown me a bone: I had a half time post for a full year. I earned £9,000 and was ecstatic, I said. Well, the Vice Chancellor came to meet all us new staff, I said. When the silence began, we stood heads bowed. One woman couldn’t bear it and she went into the corridor to cry. The Vice Chancellor hugged her. She held her and hugged her. It was a beautiful scene, I said. How kind the Vice Chancellor was! I would have liked to have been hugged by the Vice Chancellor. To feel a Vice Chancellor’s arms around me, I said. How protected I would have felt! How soothed! How warm! But I would not have been close to the source of her power. Power would not have pressed me against its bosom.

They’re all very nice, I said to H., and that’s the trouble. If you went to see them with a legitmate complaint, they’d be sympathetic, I said. They’d sit you down and have their secretary bring you tea, I said. And they’d say: well, there’s little I can do. It’s the system, you see. It’s the way things are done.

In the end, they can imagine themselves in your place just as you can imagine themselves in theirs. They say: I would never have made it to this position in the current climate. You say: I would certainly have made it to their position if I was allowed to write then as much as I write now. Why, she only has 1 book to her name and I have 3, and while she has only 4 published articles, I have 12! On it goes. The point is that I would have never written 3 books except in the current climate. And she would have done the same as me in the current climate. It is the system that works; we are only its nodes.

Is it possible, then, to speak like the Greeks about fate? Is it fate that measures out what is to happen to us in this great system? Not even that, I said. For the network is curiously random. One day, you’re without a job, things look bleak, the next you have one. One day, your mediocre colleague finds a way to get a promotion. The next you find your contract ending and having to move to the other end of the country. Fate is not the word, I said. It is too grand, and besides it would still be linked to the genre of tragedy where human beings are still revealed in their glory as they batter themselves against their destiny.

No such glory for us, I said. There is no destiny, not for us. If you lose your job, you disappear, I said. No one notices. You are forgotten all at once. The only consistency you can maintain, the only stability, would be that of your life at home. The Vice Chancellor comes home to her grandchildren, the auditor to listen to Will Oldham in a dark room. Home is a place for recuperation. You can complain to your partner about the injustices of the day and prepare yourself to go back to work tomorrow. What if you have no partner? There are your parents, your relatives and your friends, I said. And then there are counselling services – a whole network of support, I said.

You can claim the worst victimisation, I said, and someone will believe you. Claim you’ve been abducted by UFOs and you’ll find a support group. There are support groups everywhere, I said. There is every kind of therapy. There is no grandeur or glory in your life, I said, but there are support groups. Everywhere there are victims of capital, but no one understands they are victims of capital. If you survive, you will have to return to work. If you go mad for a year or two, if you undergo treatment for cancer, soon you’ll have to be back at work. The daylight is everywhere and there’s no escape. Above your mad head or your bald head it’s the same.

The white, bland light is the same above the housing estate as above the industrial estate and there’s no escape. You disappeared for a year or two, but you will be back in the workplace. You were unemployed, you became a job seeker, you were on the sick, but you’ll be helped back to work, don’t worry, I said. What matters is that money be extracted from you. What matters is that you contribute, I said. The world is heading for collapse but you’ll be made to contribute right up to the last minute I said.

You can take maternity leave for a while, I said, but you’ll soon be back at work. You can give your child over to schools, which will open ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day. The new kids will be the new drones, I said. They’ll be capitalised from birth. Capital will stream through them. Capital will pour through their limbs and sinews. Every lesson they learn will be subordinated to capital. Every class they go to will be justified in terms of the broadening and deepening of their skill set. Every learning outcome will map onto the learning outcome of the university and the learning outcome of capitalism, I said. Every aim and objective will map onto the aims and objectives of the university and onto the aims and objectives of capitalism, I said.

But there are no learning outcomes in capitalism, I said, and there are no aims and objectives. Capitalism means nothing, I said, it aims only at its own increase, its not rational, there is no rationality of the market there is only the madness of the market as it permeates every part of our lives. There is a great roaring I said, as what you’d hear at the centre of the sun. A great senseless roaring and that is capital I said. There is a great roaring senselessness and nothing else.

It’s like my endless babbling at the weblog, I said. My endless babbling is simply the converse of the endless babbling of capitalism, I said. My inane babbling, senseless and relentless is the inanity of capitalism which desires only its own increase, I said. The inanity of what I write mirrors the inanity of capitalism, I said. Everything I write is stupid, I said, but so is capital. I am as stupid as capital, as prolix as capital, as senseless as capital, I said.

This is no time for sobriety I said. Capitalism is drunk with itself and why shouldn’t we be. That’s why everyone drinks so much I said. Academics drink and students drink. The Vice Chancellor drinks and the auditors drink. We’re all drinking all the time. Because this is an infinite audit culture, I said. Because I audit you and you audit me, I said. Because we all audit each other and we audit ourselves. Because we are made up of little homunculi who audit one another, I said. Because the Quality Assurance Agency are auditing our hearts, I said. Because we have a little Q.A.A. inside our hearts, I said. Because my heart is the heart of the Q.A.A. I said. Because I’m auditing myself and auditing everyone I said.

Of course what I say to you, I said to H., and what I record here at the blog has nothing to do with philosophy. That’s very important, I said because philosophy’s important. Thinking’s a serious business, I said, of which I fall far short, I said. At best, what I write here with its lyrical laziness and would-be poetic flourishes is only the converse of sterile academicism.

There’s no thought here, I told H. You’ll look in vain here for any sign of thought. It’s a waste of time, I said, I’ve no doubt of that. And there’s no time to waste, I said. We need to find weapons, I said, and no amount of pathos about expenditure and excess will justify writing this nonsense in the teeth of the disaster. It is a matter of paying attention to what matters most, I said, of training and disciplining the attention.

Sitting in my office listening to Arab Strap and writing blog posts helps no one, I said. For a start, there are plenty of others who should be sitting in my office in place of me, I said. I feel them all the time. I am ashamed before them. How is it that I ended up here and they did not, I said. Look at me with my sagging flesh and my indolence, I said. I am already old, I said, too old.

Writing my books, I said, book after book and all of them bad, I said. And writing this here, trying to excuse myself for writing those bad books, but in fact just producing more overcooked prose, I said. I haven’t the sense to stop, I said. It’s a kind of illness, a mad prolifigacy, I said.

Truly it is as though I was born from the R. A. E., I said, truly it is only in our insant system that something like me would have found a job, I said. To think, I am partly paid to write I said. And I write this baloney, I said. Think of all the people who could write sensible things in my place, I said. Think of what they could do with this office, I said. Instead of whining on about their former life and the badness of their books they could actually do something, I said.

They wouldn’t start a blog like this, I said. Above all, that’s not what they’d do, I said. They’d use the internet for sensible things, I said. They’d write in the teeth of the disaster and write about the disaster. No preliminaries, I said, no messing about. No bad parody of Bernhard or Beckett. You’re running on empty, that’s what W. always says to me, only the last time he said not that but: your tank is dry, that’s what he said: your tank is dry, not an idea left, he meant, nothing left of all the reading I did so long ago, and even that reading, I told W., was casual and random and underdeveloped, it was dry from the first, I said.

My tank is dry, no question of that, I said, it was always dry, I said. It’s a sickness, I said, someone should put me out of my misery I said, I am like the chimpanzee who is teletransported in The Fly and becomes a singed mass of bones, flesh and fur. The destroyed chimpanzee who still emits a little gasping noise, or one the strange creatures of Bacon’s Three Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion, trussed up, turned upon himself making what I imagine is a subdued whining. His wings have been severed and all he can do is whine. Or I think of the creature of Zarathustra who is all ear, one big ear and then, attached by a stalk, a little envious face. Only I am all hand, a monstrous typing hand and my face is flushed with shame.

I am ashamed, I tell H., it’s terrible. And now I’m awaiting the proofs from the publisher. They’ll be here soon, I said. In the teeth of the disaster, I said. And the proofs of my book mocking the disaster, laughing at it, squandering time. Writing as though it were still 1950, I said. As though Kafka and Surrealism were the newest thing, I said. As though all that mattered was Giacometti and psychoanalysis, I said. Taking refuge in the 1950s, I said, without even confronting what was worst about the 1950s, I said. Think of the uprisings crushed by the Soviets, I said. Think of Guevara, I said. Those writers you admire were thinking of Hungary and Guevara, I said. They wrote their essays in the morning and came together in the evening to print clandestine newspapers, I said.

W. tells me my tank is dry, I said, but he’s not quite right because it was never full, I said. I never had a full tank, I said, not once. It was always empty, I’ve never had a thought, I said. I’ve never had a single idea, I said, I was the echo chamber of the ideas of others, I said. For a time, their ideas would bounce around inside me, I said, and then they would disappear, I said. My entire intellectual history was a series of such bouncings, I said. I was an empty space, I said, a hollow, a pocket in which every idea would lose itself and become banal, I said. It had been repeated a million times elsewhere and in me it was repeated for the millionth and first time. It had lost all context, all meaning and importance, I said. The idea was abstracted from the struggles of which it was a part, I said. They were busy printing banned newspapers, demonstrating and being arrested, I said, and you sit in your office listening to Arab Strap, I said.

And now I’m writing here, I said. Writing, hardly writing. Whining, and not even whining. A writing so contorted, so bent upon itself, all it can imagine is a half-mute mewing. The most pathetic noise. But not mewing, that can still be elicit some kind of pity. I am beyond pity, I said. Think of a kind of scraping, I said, and a kind of gnashing. Think of the noise a stuffed dog’s teeth would make as they bit through its skin, I said. Think of the creatures in the taxidermist, I said.

When did it become acceptable to write like this? I asked H. At what point would one have had the temerity to moan in this way? Once, I imagine, those with troubles kept quiet. They kept them quiet from themselves and from others. What use was it to bother others with your troubles? What sense was it to return to them yourself? While Kafka suffered, I said, he also wrote literature. In the diaries, I said, there are passages of fiction intermixed with passages which bewail his inability to write. But he wanted to burn his diaries, I said. Grete Bloch had begun to feed them into the fire along with his notebooks. What we have are the remnants, I said, and it is not as if Kafka intended to leave them for us.

Then there was Artaud, I said. He wrote about his sufferings to Riviere, the editor of the journal to whom he sent some poems. Their correspondence began when those poems were rejected. True, Riviere would soon suggest publishing the correspondence in which Artaud writes so eloquently about his suffering, but the poems were the thing; the rejection of the poems was the occasion of the writing, great as it was.

Then there was Beckett, I said, who is badly read if it is in terms of defeat and failure, I said. Beckett writes in the teeth of despair, I said, and so does Kafka. They despair, but they write anyway, and far from being writing of despair, I said, theirs is a writing of magnificent humour, I said. But there is nothing funny about a teleported chimpanzee, I said. But it wasn’t as though there was an intact and healthy chimpanzee to begin with I said.

It’s clear to me, I said. I am a nightmare the R.A.E. has about itself, I said. The R.A.E. wants to die and to die through me I said. I am the place where the R.A.E. cannot bring itself to death, I said. I am that site where it rots, I said, where it festers and all thought festers with it, I said. Thought has become stagnant here, I said. Thought festers and hatches strange kinds of maggots, I said. Blind wriggling maggots unashamed of what they are, I said. They are the new breed, I said. Soon they’ll sprout wings and fly about I said. They’ll fill the air with their buzzing I said, and that buzzing will be what is said at colloquia and on funding applications, I said. That buzzing will be heard in a million strategy meetings, I said.

You should have battered me to death while you still could, I said. You should have shovelled me into a bag and thrown me into the bushes, I said. But you didn’t and it’s too late. The blind wriggling maggots are wearing tweed jackets with elbow patches, I said. They’re driving the big cars their mothers bought them, I said. They’re driving to and fro from meeting to meeting I said. Their little teeth are grinding with excitement, I said. They drive from here to there to here. They drive round and round the M25 talking about surds, I said.

They’re not even dead, I said, because they were never alive. They do not rot or decompose, I said. And they are without shame, I said. There’s no shame in them, I said.

Once, I told H., I was relatively content in my warehouse. I was neither alpha male or omega male, but somewhere in between. Days passed contentedly; each weekday I would arrive early, resting my heading on a desk and napping for an hour. Each Saturday, I would come in for training, learning to navigate fork-lift trucks and order pickers through the racks of boxed products. I was one among others, I told H., and could use the word ‘we’.

How wonderful that was, I told H., the word ‘we’. It belongs to another age, I told him. The warehouses are disappearing from Winnersh Triangle, I told him. No doubt they are being reborn on the other side of the world, and a new group of workers are using the word ‘we’. But it is likely they labour in much more unpleasant circumstances that our own, I said to H., and would have only rare occasion to look up from their labours and say the word ‘we’.

But there was definitely a sense of solidarity, I told H. There we were, men and women together in the warehouse, men and women of the warehouse and therefore infinitely different from the men and women of the offices, I said. They would hardly dare to visit us in the warehouse, I said. They would search for us by telephone I said, but we were always hard to find. We’d hide behind the boxes, I said, and in the racks. No one could find us, I said. Of course we were not busy at all, I said. We larked about. We climbed up the racks like monkeys.

My job was to find UTLs, I told H. – unable-to-locates. But it was less bother, I said, to destroy what I found rather than filling in the paperwork. I never found a thing, I said, and no one minded. I worked with a small team – Cowboy Pete, in cowboy boots and a cowboy shirt who would always tell me about his debts, and a scrawny guy who was always pulling sickies. Our little team never found a thing, I told H.

Once a month, there would be a motivational meeting. We were encouraged to look ever more carefully for UTLs. We were told to hunt high and low. But in reality, the insurance would take care of missing products; our boss knew as we knew that we were there only for show. When my boss could report we couldn’t find a UTL, it was written off. When we did find one, it bothered everyone, so we were encouraged to hide what we found or to destroy it, I said. Later, our team was abandoned and I became the standards man, in charge of regulating the flow of goods through the warehouse to conform to British Standards. I oversaw the processes of the warehouse, from goods in to goods out. I was to make sure that everything passed through the warehouse with speed and efficiency.

No one bothered me, I said, and I bothered no one. I found a staircase that was supposed to lead to another story of offices but that led only to the roof. I would take The Mammoth Book of Fantasy to those stairs to read. All day I would read in that quiet space, leaving only to visit coffee machines.

I bring the same rigour and hard work to my academic work, I tell H. I am just as thorough and diligent. Yes, I work with the same focused concentration as I did in the warehouse, lightly skimming this or that book and then going for tea. And don’t we all? We’ve read everything, I tell H., but we’ve read nothing. We leave that to others. In truth, we prefer introductions, I said. We like our thought predigested. We like it prechewed and uniform. We want to read books in a standard format, we told H., all exactly the same.

We want them to conform to British Standards, I said – to appear in a series from Routledge or Continuum with uniform covers and uniform contents. We want the prose on the page to be broken up by useful summarising boxes, I said, and conclusions to follow at the end of each chapter, setting out the main points. On no account, I told H., do we want to encounter thinkers in the raw. We would withdraw like a vampire from daylight from the real pages of a real book. What is more horrifying than catching sight of a page of real philosophy?

British Standards, I said, require that all continental thought be reduced to certain standard measurements. You know the attitude, I said: If they cannot write clearly themselves, we must write clearly for them. That’s the attitude, I said. The French think and the British paraphrase, I said. It is a marvellous industry, I said, like a great sausage factory. In one end come books of all shapes and sizes, books of ideas. Out of the other end comes a standard product, I said, books of exactly the same size and with the same cover. Publishers won’t touch anything resembling real thought, I said.

We British are underlabourers, I said, and we are happy being so. The Germans used to think, the French think and the British translate and comment. Of course we have no choice, I said. How else can you have a career?, I said. At least it’s meritocratic. Research is measured by volume, not by quality. We can all agree: it is the weight of the research that matters, its bulk. You have to produce as much as you can, I told H. and all this because real thought is hated.

This is what Britain has become, I said. The annihilator of thought and ideas, I said. It appears we are most hospitable of all, that thought pours into Britain from all directions, I said. But in truth we are reducers of thought. We reduce it to nothing. I am worst of all, I said to H., I’ve always maintained that. I am still the man of British Standards, I said. I’m happy to contribute to the great stupidity, I said.

It’s not that I can go back to Winnersh Triangle now, I said. The warehouses have all gone and solidarity has disappeared. It was disappearing then, I said, but it was boom time, and if you were sacked by one temping agency you could find employment by another. But those times have passed, I said. Companies have contracts with only a single agency nowadays, I said, and the contracts are longer and more exacting. The worker is expected to manage herself, I said. She is expected to develop her skills, I said. And the same is happening in academia, I said. Now you will have to cover your salary three times over. You’ll have to bring in money to the university, I said. It’s not enough to teach – teaching is already nothing – nor even to write. No, money is the measure of all things, I said.

That’s what British Standards mean, I said. There are no warehouses and no UTLs. There are no objects anymore, I said. Nothing manufactured, not in the UK. There is a pure flow of services, I said, which is really the pure flow of capital. That’s all anyone deals with now, I said. Goods come in from overseas and we provide services. And what are services? I said. Money chases money. Money creates more money. We are a trading floor, nothing more than that, I said. When I close my eyes and think about Britain all I see is a great streaming. And the same for academia, I said. The age of monographs and scholarship has passed, I said, and the age of the introduction and the commentary is passing. Soon we will be dealing only in money.

Only the income generators will be left, I said to H. Interactive software from Microsoft will teach for us. Lectures will disappear even as seminars as disappearing. Assessment will be by means of online multiple choice. Learning will be self-directed, I said, which means directed by Microsoft. Men and women of British Standards will oversee the process. It be a benign takeover, a kind of liberation. Now learning meets the individual midway, they will say. There’s no need for lecture rooms and staff offices. What matters is the virtual learning environment. What matters are electronic resources. The real business of a university is the flow of information, they will say. Now everything can flow more smoothly, they’ll say, now you’ll have time to make out our funding applications. What matters are capital and information, one and the same.

I went to a meeting of Nobel Prize winners for science lately, I said, and I’ve met several fellows of the Royal Academy. The uploading of consciousness, I said, that’s what they talk about. Consciousness will become pure information, I said. Our physical bodies can be liquidated and there will only be consciousness swarming around. It’s like Buddhism, I said, it’s exactly the same thing. The environmental disaster is upon us, I said, and all the scientists talk about is uploading consciousness. They’ve given up, I said, it’s like Bush and the belief in the Rapture.

What will become of the world?, I asked H. It hardly matters, I said. You’ll find everything you want to learn in the virtual learning environment. Never mind the real enviroment, I said. Never mind the desecration of the planet, I said. Never mind real suffering and real poverty, I said. In the future there will be no pain, that’s what the Nobel Winner told me. In the future, we will live forever, he said. We’ll be barely individuated, said a Fellow of the Royal Academy. We won’t love or fear or hate any longer. We won’t need to work, he said. We’ll just enter the great flow of capital and information. We’ll be at one with the cosmos, I said, which is to say with capital.

No one cares about Joyce and Tarkovsky and Mann, I said to H. And no one cares about the more difficult equations in maths or counterpoint in music. It’s information that counts, I said. Information into which everything can be translated. It begins with the Routledge Critical thinkers I said, but then it spreads everywhere. Can you feel it passing through you? I asked H. Can you hear it whispering? What’s frightening, I said, is that it’s unintelligible. It does not speak words, but babbles. It is not rhythmical. It has no shape. The Greeks called it the aperion, I said. It has no limits and no contours, I said. And we will not be able to draw aesthetic satisfaction from it in the manner of the sublime, I said, no more than those killed by the whirlwind admire the beauty of the whirlwind. We’re caught up in it, I said, and it is indifferent to us.

Can you hear it traversing you?, I said. It is not glorious as Van Gogh’s starry night is glorious. It does not appear for itself but nor does it hide. It is indifferent to us, I said, and it streams indifferently. The Nobel Winners know it, I said, and that’s why they want to upload our consciousness to other media. Eventually, I said, they would like to do away with media altogther and just disperse the human race, I said. They want to dissolve us into the flow of information, they say, which is to say, pure capital.

In the end, there is no human history, I said. There can be no memory and no biography. It’s all a thin film covering the movement of capital, I said. Our dreams are dreams of capital, our philosophies are philosophies of capital. It’s closer to us than we are, I said. It’s no good becoming Buddhist, I said. There’s no need to meditate to experience the Nothing. It’s here, I said, and its everywhere.

Can you see it in the eyes of the Vice Chancellor, I said, or in the career academic? Can you see it the eyes of Deans recruited from industry and the marketers and advertisers brought in to rebrand the university? They are reptilian, I said. Or they are insects. I am frightened by what I see in them, I said. It is a new kind of nihilism and one which will do away with everything, I said. They hardly know it, I said, they don’t know what they embody. The Vice Chancellor goes home to play with her grandchildren, the Dean does charity work for Guide Dogs for the Blind. But they are filled with reptiles and insects, I said, just as we are all filled with reptiles and insects, and not even them, I said, but just an insect buzzing and a reptile hissing.

The apocalypse is upon us, I said, and what we will see will be nothing because we’ll have no eyes with which to see and no bodies. Our descendants will upload themselves directly into capital. We will give birth to capital, to the streaming of capital. It’s no good talking about the new earth, I said, or dreaming of wild new territorialisations. There need be no places, no terrains, no topoi except the utopia of capital. The darkness of space will be filled with capital, I said. And capital will draw all light and energy into itself, I said. That’s how the universe will end, I said.

There’s no doubt about it, academics hate practitioners, I said to H. last night. Aestheticians hate artists, music theorists hate musicians, English department theorists hate authors, on it goes. Above all, I said to H., philosophy academics hate philosophers. There’s nothing they dislike more than philosophers, I said to H., to the extent that they try and banish all notion of the idea of philosophers by calling themselves philosophers. As if any real philosopher would call herself a philosopher! It wouldn’t be necessary, I said, it would be obvious to all! Even the ones who call themselves philosophers can sense a real philosopher, I said. That’s why they call themelves philosophers, I said. It’s to avoid thinking about philosophy.

I don’t deny that I am worst of all, I said to H. I have to go through the typescript of my second book one more time before it goes out for copy editing, my editor told me. It was terrible, I told H. What happened? What catastrophe has made it so that a book like mine could find its way into print? Was there ever a time when books flowed from publishers like a cascading stream? Was it ever that book after book spouted forth, each as pristine as the other? It seems so, I said to H., given the open sewer of bad books that is now polluting that stream, mine included, I said. Mine especially!

There is no question that the new book is weak, I said. Weak for all that it tries not to be weak, to experiment with its prose style, to launch itself in a new, non-academic direction. Not, for example, to reference all quotations, I told H. – that used to be permitted in the 1950s, I said, and I always liked it. When Blanchot quotes he will often do so from memory, he says. As if he didn’t have the books to hand. Well, who knows, perhaps he didn’t. But I’ve always liked that: to quote from memory and then to garble the quote. To garble the quotation and not to worry about it. To allow what is quoted to be reborn into the tissue of your text. To change what is quoted as you quote it. This would be marvellous, I said.

It’s as if everyone has forgotten the third of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, I said. The essay against scholarship. They should all read it every day, I said. It should be close to their hearts. They should repeat it to themselves every day. I know I do, I said. But then that’s half my trouble, because I can’t carry off non-scholarship. In the new book, I cut and paste bits of the first book. I like the fact that Zizek is cavalier just as I like him very much for putting so much on the internet, I said to H. Everything should be on the net, I said, and it should be free. Authors are paid so little anyway, so why don’t they simply leak their books onto the net (here is an excellent example, which comes, no doubt, via Questia (it’s an excellent book, a real book)).

But still, there’s never a thought in my head, I said to H. That’s part of the trouble. Of course, those who are called philosophers hate philosophy, I said. The philosopher in the academy is the enemy of philosophy, I said. And don’t object that the UK is unfriendly to philosophy. There’s the internet, I said, and plenty of room on the net for philosophy. It’s easy to find readers, I said. I don’t think I hate philosophy, I said to H., it’s just that I know it’s out of my reach.

That’s already a step forward, I said, but I have to distinguish myself from Socrates. He knew he knew nothing and I don’t know what I know. What happens, rather, is that I read this or that strong book and I am carried on the wind of that book, my sails full. Yes it is as though I wrote it myself and earnt the right to think myself when in fact what I write is always derivative, I said, and dreadfully so. What’s worse is that it’s dressed up as though it were not derivative, I said. It looks as though a real wind filled my real sails and bore me along. As if the good ship Spurious bobbed along on the open seas, journeying from this place to that. As though it were buffetted by the great winds that come from science and the arts.

But I read no science, I said to H., and my taste in the arts remains conservative. You see, I came to the high arts late, I said, when it was a way out of the warehouse. I came to it too late and venerated what intellectual content I could find there, even though I would learn that that was no way to read. I read and sucked dry what I read, going through the book and underlining every abstract passage, I said, but that’s what prevented me from reading. All the same, it felt as though Joyce and Tarkovsky and Mann had rescued me from the warehouse. The doors were opened, I said. The whole sky was open before me and the vacant lots where new office buildings were yet to appear. I could walk to the station, I said, and sit against its wooden walls, reading A Portrait of the Artist or The Magic Mountain.

True, I said, I had always sworn I would never pass over into what was called literature and what was called classical music, I said. But I did pass across. How could I not? You have to understand Winnersh Triangle was a void, I said, and I had to get my stimulus from somewhere. It was a void, there was no internet then, no one said a word, I said. Once I decorated my office cubicle with photocopies of Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love, where he is depicted as a Hindu god. Anand, the only brown skinned man in a warehouse of white skinned men told me it would bring me luck. I thought to myself: what is more distant from this warehouse than the gods, and the Hindu gods in particular.

Once it snowed in June. That it snowed was a great fact. It broke the law of Winnersh Triangle. It was snowing and Winnersh Triangle’s law was incomplete. Winnersh Triangle could not determine the behaviour of the heavens. The weather was out of the control of my boss and his boss and all the bosses, all the way up to the Managing Director. The M. D., a slim man, went jogging every lunchtime. That day, he didn’t jog. It was snowing and the snow and ice made the pavements slippery. He’d had a heart attack, the M. D., that was why he was jogging, but today he couldn’t jog. Because it was snowing in June. In June!

You will never understand what it was to read The Magic Mountain in the warehouse, I said. Those for whom low art is their playground will never understand what it was to happen by chance upon Tarkovsky’s Stalker. I’m still stunned by those discoveries, I said. I was the ape of Kafka’s story who saw through his cage the activities of real people. He taught himself to speak and walk like them, but he was still an ape. Thereafter he would only have a dim memory of the jungle from which he came. So too have I forgotten. The grimness of the warehouse exists for me only in counterpoint to the glory of Mann, of Tarkovsky and the others. The light of the latter illuminates the former so it can emerge from the darkness of forgetting. But it was forgotten. It was my jungle, I said, and forgotten.

Why do I write such bad books? I wondered to H. What is missing in my education? What course did I miss, which school year? Because there is something missing. When I read myself, the typos always horrify me. But when they do not (and the new book is better than the first one in this respect) it is the prose itself, I said. It unfurls across a void, I said, as though it were a very thin film, a bit of grease to be rubbed away. There’s no depth to it, I said, it’s all surface learning. There’s an element of scholarship, I said, but it barely believes in itself. The book resents itself. An ape writes knowing he’s an ape, I said. Then when I try to be non-scholarly, I am simply a bad scholar trying to be what he is not, trying to justify not learning this or that language with some vague pathos of rebellion. But there’s a difference between rebellion and bad writing, I said, just as there’s a difference between philosophy and sham philosophy.

It’s true, I said, most academic philosophers dress up sham philosophy as philosophy, I said. But this is the case for almost any subject. Young scholars who appear who’ve written three monographs in five years. Three of them! For an obscure university press which runs at a loss! Which keeps these hardbacked books in print for a year! As if the printing of 50 hardbacked books constitutes a publication! As if that’s what it would mean to be published! Books and more books, I said to H. and nothing in them, not one idea! And I’m the worst of all, I said, a product of the new meritocracy that allowed people from bad universities to compete with those from good ones!

In truth, I said, I am the spawn of the R.A.E. which I affect to despise. The Research Assessment Exercise produces overpublished monsters like me. Benign monsters, it is true, monsters who wave aside their books saying ‘none of it means anything’. Monsters who when asked what they’re working on, say ‘nothing in particular’. What are you working on?, I said, that’s always the question. And what does it mean? The Marxist intellectual, famous for many books, barely sees his supervisees, I said. He’ll do anything to avoid them. He draws a huge salary and helps no one, the Marxist intellectual, I said. Then there’s the philosopher of religion who is also a property investor, I said. He is a man of God, he teaches students about Jesus and he owns a string of houses, I said.

There’s no shame, I said to H., but I least I feel shame. I write very bad books, I said to H., and no doubt I’ll finish three books in five years. I have no trouble writing, I said, but who does? The young academics with their three books in five years hate the older academics, who publish little. They hate them, their savage little teeth gnashing. They tear about like piranhas, I said. I’m editing a collection, they say. I’m putting together a colloquim, they say. I’m running a book series. It’s a sickness. I, as an ape, understand this better than anyone. I remember what it was to read Mann and watch Tarkovsky. I wasn’t brought up with all that stuff, I said. It wasn’t my legacy, I said. I didn’t discuss Mann and Tarkovsky at dinner parties, I said.

Yes, I am an ape, and this allows me at least to know my disgrace.

I’ve been given a lift; we’re off to London. I’m in a car with a philosopher of mathematics. Only gradually do I realise why he gave me a lift. He gave me a lift because he wanted to tell me at length how much he hates Deleuze. We are driving to London and he is telling me why Deleuze got it all wrong. I am in a car with a man who genuinely wants to understand Deleuze, he says, but who can’t, for the life of me, understand him. He is a man of good faith, the philosopher of mathematics. of good sense and of common sense and he wants to understand, he says. I just wish he would write clearly, he says.

Why bother with him at all then? I ask him. Because it’s humbug, he said. And I think to myself: how marvellous it is to hear this word, humbug. Humbug, I think to myself, who would use such a word? Humbug, I say. Yes, he says, he gets it all back to front. He’s been talking to mathematicians, he says, that much is clear. But I don’t think Deleuze understands what he’s writing about.

We’re on the M25, circling London, looking for an exit. The philosopher of mathematics is explaining surds to me. That’s what Plato’s all about, he says, surds. We’re circling round London and listening to Hank Williams. ‘I like Hank Williams’, I tell him. The philosopher of mathematics tells me about his band. ‘We’ve just done a song about exchange students’, he says. I am happy, because he’s not talking about surds or about Deleuze.