Europe! So far away! France! Germany! So inconceivable! So unreal!
We’ve never even been. We’ve never even dared to go. We can’t imagine what it would like to visit Paris. Imagine it: Paris. Let alone Berlin!
Hasn’t Paris got gates to keep our kind out? Hasn’t it got detectors? Wouldn’t the Parisian air itself rebel if we tried to breathe it in? Wouldn’t the Parisian cobbles heave upwards in protest, if we tried to walk on them?
Better to deny it altogether: there’s no such thing as Paris. There is no Paris, there cannot be. Paris is a step too far. They made Paris up. We’re stuck in our Truman Show, which has only has a painted Paris.
No Paris, and no University of Paris 7 and no École normale supérieure. And no Sorbonne. And no seminars. Derrida never existed. Lacan. No, no. Let alone Deleuze. Especially Deleuze. There never was a Paris. Paris is impossible. Paris cannot be. There’s only the Organisational Management campus.
The Anglophone enthusiast kind. The don’t-really-speak-the-language kind. The desperate provincials. Who’ve turned, for some reason, to what they do not understand and cannot understand. To what they’re not equipped to understand. To what must lie forever beyond them …
Of course, Cicero was a European, and even an Eastern European. English was her third language. But here were Europeans en masse. What the plural noun for a bunch of Europeans? A Culture. A High Brow. A Loftiness. A in-crowd. An Intelligentsia.
Real Europeans are kinda scary. Do you mean you really came from France. From Germany? All that way. All that distance.
We’re desperately provincial! Pathetically so! We shouldn’t be let out of the provinces. We confine ourselves to the provinces. Voluntarily.
The likes of us shouldn’t be allowed to travel about the world. From here to there. We should stay in our adopted region. Locked in our houses. Our rooms. Should defile the rest of the world. Should spread across the rest of the world, like a plague.
We have no thoughts! We have no ideas! Nothing of our own! The cupboard is bare! The tank is empty! There was never anything there! We think with other people’s ideas. Which we barely understand.
We push around the ideas of others. Badly! Incompetently! There’s nothing new or original about us.
To have been raised to these heights … is grotesque. To have given us lectureships. No, no. It’s not in the order of things. It makes us question the entire order of things.
There are such things as ranks. As hierarchies. No – lectureships should have fallen to us. Not to us. Not to our kind.
Say what you will about us, but we know our place. And Cicero lifted us above our places. We’ve been Elevated – illegitimately. We’ve been Lifted – into the wrong place. We’re on the wrong shelf. These aren’t our offices, not really. This isn’t our department.
It’s like David Byrne sings: this isn’t our quadrangle. This isn’t our lecture theatre. These aren't our private-school-educated students.
Work in Progress 