Division of Labour

Other-people’s-ideas manipulators. Other-people’s-ideas appliers. Distorters! Betrayers!

Ideas we barely understand! That we barely even grasp!

Ideas that we have to dumb down. Simplify. That we distort. Rip out of their context. Ideas that we have to translate into our language of stupidity.

Ideas that we explain and thereby explain away. Ideas that we have to simplify and hence dissolve. In the acid bath of our witlessness!

 

Idea shunters. Idea pushers. Idea opportunists. Idea seizers. Idea introducers, which is to say, simplifiers.

Fishers of ideas in the European pond. Servers up of ideas for the Anglophone world.

 

Panners for idea-gold in European waters. Career makers! Ready to be introduced. To be contextualised. Ready to be explained in simple Anglophone sentences.  A new idea for the marketplace of ideas.

 

We’re ideas-ventors. Travelling ideas-merchants. European ideas, of course! Not our ideas!

We’re idea-reframers. Recontextualisers. Presenting our wares in journal articles and conference presentations.

 

Idea stealers. Put them to work.

Plucking out European thoughts to add to the theory pick ‘n’ mix. Ready for the Anglo academy to put them to work. To inject new life in the Angloworld academy.

Career making ideas. Career-makers, some of these ideas. Bright new things. Baubles. Ready for the discerning educationalist or art historian of musical theorists to put to Anglophone work.

The latest thing! The newest idea! Ready to adorn some new introductory volume.

 

We know the division of labour: the Europeans think, and we introduce.

The Europeans produce ideas and we contextualise them. We present them to our Anglophone peers.

Europe is the element of ideas, and the Anglophone world the element of introductions to ideas.

Europe is where ideas swim in the wild, and the Angloworld is the place where ideas are caught – snared. Domesticated.

We’re farmers of European ideas, essentially. We make them grow in Anglophone soil. We make them useable for the humanities! Ready to be put to work, by all the other disciplines! Ready for art historians, for architects, for musician, for fine artists, for geographers! Ethnographers! God knows, even business studies! That’s the role of European philosophy.

That’s our role. That’s what we’re for. Like worker ants. Drones. Taking an idea from here and placing it over there. Reframing it. Rephrasing it. Contributing to the great Anglophone academic labour.

 

We’ve no ideas of our own, not really. Nothing to say. But the ideas of others!

Writing introductory books: that’s our aim in the academic factory. Explaining difficult things: that’s what puts our philosophical skills (such as they are) to work. That’s what gives us a meaningful role in the division of humanities’ labour.

Packaging ideas. In the right way! In an attractive way! In introductory books that are readable by anyone. In gaudy paperbacks. In collect-‘em-all series. That you can just line up on the shelf. As a veritable encyclopaedia of contemporary European thought. Of what’s happening now in Europe. The latest stuff! The new frontier!

Making sure that the Which means the Anglophone world never falls behind. That it never has to play catch up for too long. Feeding European ideas through the Anglophone philosophy mill. In digestible form. In palateable form. Standardised. Ready for consumption. Ready to be applied.

There can be no letting ideas stay n obscure European treatises, hundreds of pages long. Under off-putting titles. In hardback. Ideas need to be brought out into the open. Ready to be harvested as Theory. Ready to be thrown together with other ideas in Theory bricolage. In the great Theory pick ‘n’ mix.

 

We’re gathering pollen from the finest European flowers. Producing Anglophone honey.

 

There are the translators. Who first make ideas available. Then the introducers – our role. Then the appliers.

So long as there’s new French thought – it’s most French thought. So long as there’s something exciting from Paris – it’s usually Paris. So long as there’s something to keep the humanities’ wheels turning.

And it doesn’t always have to be contemporary. It doesn’t have to be absolutely new. Only to new to us, in the Anglophone world.

There are crumbs from the French philosophical feast that we’ve missed, in the passed. There’s stuff that fell from the table. Thinkers Deleuze refers to. Or Serres – whoever. We’re here to complete the picture. To make sure nothing’s overlooked.

We’re in the deciphering department. We’re in the explanations game. Rendering explicit: that’s our job. The clarity of representation, as opposed to the fire from heaven. We’re about clarity. Short sentences.

Making sure that there are no obscure corners left. Nothing overlooked. Nothing left behind, from the European feast!

 

The Parisian experimentium. The Parisian ideas incubator.

We never go there. We’ve barely even been there. We don’t speak French, let alone Parisian. Paris would be quite impossible for us. We’d explode if we ever went to Paris.

 

Everything in its place. Everyone doing what they’re good at. The English are explainers. Makers-clear. Renderers-explicit. Cutters and dryers: that’s what we are. Servers up of difficult things.

We know our place in the marketplace of ideas. We know our role in the international circulation of ideas.

 

Whole careers can be made from a few Parisian crumbs. There are books to be written. For prestigious presses! You can make your name as an [insert name here]-ian. As an A-ian or a B-ian. As a specialist in the thought of C, or D. Which can work very well when the stock in A or B or C is rising! When D’s work is receiving a lot of attention.

Plan well! You could be ahead of the curve. Ready with a raft of articles on E or F. Ready to introduce a volume on the thought of G. On the politics of H.

Explaining where this thinker came from. What that thinker is about. To link them to the already familiar big names. Making a case for their place among the Big Beasts of European philosophy.

 

Of course the Parisians know nothing of us. Of our Anglophone underlabouring.

They have no idea what we’re doing to their thoughts. Where we’re taking them.

They have no idea what they mean over here. Who they’ve become over here. What keen young Anglophoners make of them.

How their thought’s been put to work in every kind of discipline. By the busy little Anglophoners! In all the busy Anglo university factories. Where everyone has to continuously churn out articles! Where everyone has to incessantly bid for research money!

They can’t grasp the Anglophone ecosystem. The books that spring up around them. Around their oeuvres. Around their names.

And what’s being done in their names! The thought-crimes being committed, in their names! The thought-barbarisms being perpetrated in their name!

We invite them over to keynote our conferences. They stand there blinking. Who are all these idiots? they wonder.

 

Anglophone European philosophy is basically not very good history of philosophy. The history of ideas, really. Philosophising as summarising the thoughts of others.

We’re the epigones of the real European philosophers. Their imitators. Doing the Levinasian thing. Or the Deleuzian thing. Like new dance crazes. New dance moves. Doing it this way. Doing it that way Doing the Deleuze. Doing the Simondon. And doing something else when that gets tiresome.