Lars Iyer's Blog

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.