Sure, we’d try to brown-nose the great and the good at conferences. Would vie to sit next to them at conference meals. When we could barely afford the conferences! When we couldn’t feed ourselves at conferences!
Paying for a ticket to the conference meal just so we could place ourselves next to some influential person or another. Someone in charge of some Philosophy department or another. So that we’d be a face to them, at least. So they’d know our names at least.
Ready to ingratiate ourselves. To impress.
But we’d never really know how to make conversation. To show polite interest. To ask things of others. To respond to questions in turn.
We had no general conversation. We could never think of anything to say. We stumbled over words. When addressed with friendly curiosity, when asked about ourselves, we could never find any words. We could never sum up what we’ve been doing, or what our interests were.
Giving nothing back to polite inquiry. Even from the great and the good! Even those who might give us jobs! The nihilism would overwhelm us. Hopelessness would crush us.
Sure, drunk, we could perhaps manage a few words. We could offer the beginnings of a drunken monologue; could extemporise on hopelessness or failure or despair. Or on our apocalyptic desires. Our world-revolution desires. A few feverish words! But that wasn’t what was wanted, was it? And we weren’t drunk – or never drunk enough. Not sitting at a conference meal.
Tongue-tied. Stumblers.
All those years of learning, and for what? All that expensive education, and what for? With what result?
All our desperation for a full time job, and where was it leading us?
A conference was a networking opportunity – and what were we doing?
What creatures we were! What specimens! From the outer outer darkness. From outside the university. Wanting nothing other than to enter the university. Wanting only to find their way inside the university. Believing that they had no tolerable life outside the university.
And yet, when given the chance, unable to take sell ourselves. Unable to network. Unable to press the flesh and impress …
Our supposed desperation. Our supposed cravenness. The supposed fact that we’d do anything – anything for a job. That we’d be fucked by anyone, would fuck anyone. Sign away our souls.
And yet, when it came to it … We couldn’t do it. Couldn’t ingratiate ourselves. Couldn’t make polite conversation. Could network with the great and the good. Couldn’t sell ourselves, American style. Couldn’t get our faces known.
What was it – some sort of pride? Some last inner stand against humiliation? Against compromise? Something uncorrupt inside us? Something not completely abased?/
Some kind of retrospective resentment that we’d all but prostituted ourselves? That we’d all but lay ourselves out to be fucked? That we’d all but worn a sign around our necks saying, Will fuck for teaching hours?
Some late-in-the-day rebellion against the fact that we’d essentially volunteered for everything? The fact that we’d always our hands straight up in the air? That we’d done all kind of exploitative stuff just to show we were available for anything? That we’d do whatever it was just for the experience – just to put it on our CVs.
Some self-sabotaging attempt not to drown in the bottomless swamp of our indignity?
Why was it any good to make our stand now, sitting among the great and the good at a conference meal? Why did it stick in our throats only now, as we’d wormed our way next to some big name or another at the dinner table? Hadn’t cravenness already brought us to the conference, to the meal, to our strategic seating? What was wrong with a little more ingratiation, when it had already got us this far?
It was like a moment in a Nuri Bilge Ceylan film. Like something a Dostoevsky character would do – a particularly pathetic one … half-alcoholic … with shaking hands. After all, I’m not an insect?: is that what we said to ourselves, like the underground man?
So weak! So compromised! So ludicrous! So capering! And yet, in the final hour, there was some wild pride after all. Some disgust at ourselves, after all. At who’d we’d become, as part-timers, as hourly paid lecturers.
No more convulsions! No more thrashings! No more stinging ourselves, like scorpions! Something in us wanted to get up onto its feet. Something wanted to no longer be disgusting! Or pathetic! Something said it would not be part of the whole part-time academic dance of death!
Work in Progress 