Telling ghost stories in the dark. Stories of the old departments, the vanishing departments. In the days of wine and roses. Before shit got serious.
Stories of who we once were. Of where we did our PhDs. Stories of our supervisions. Of our dissertations. The conferences where we delivered our first papers. Our maiden voyages.
Our kind. Our gang. Hanging out on the conference lawns. Doing cartwheels. Dressed down. In shorts. In band teeshirts. Knowing no better. Alongside others of our kind. Other pranksters, other rogues and rascals; other bad boys and girls who’d somehow blagged their way in. Who’d somehow found themselves among the serious academics.
The academic world had opened, for a while. Academia opened its doors. All sorts were there. What a company! What a crew! People like us. Delinquents and miscreants. Chancers, pretenders. Who weren’t exactly the tallest flowers. Who weren’t the choicest cuts. Who were no one’s first pick for any philosophical team.
But we were there nonetheless, we PhD students. There at the annual conferences. On Oxford lawns. In Oxford colleges. Wandering Oxford rivers. Taking Oxford walks. Drinking in Oxford pubs – us! How was that possible?
Our kind, the doomed kind, the clueless kind, fruit of mass Higher Education. Fruit of the crappiest universities (the only ones where European philosophy could be taught.) Fruit of the working class!
Our salad days! Halcyon days! When we were funded to attend conferences. When there were such things as conference bursaries. As subsidised accommodation. When we were out among them, the serious academics.
Did we remind them of their own youths back then, in those conference summers? Ah, but they were more diligent than us. They worked harder than we did. They were from higher social classes. With a better class of education. With conscientiousness! More ability to defer gratification!
Did they envy it our levity, our casualness, the way we lacked all need to impress? Ah, but they couldn’t understand it. And really, they never ventured amongst us, except when it was late, and they were drunk and looking for someone to fuck (and it’s true: some of us were fuckable.)
The joy of our academic lives. The sheer improbability of our academic lives. Of moving through the ranks of UK European philosophers. It was a culture – a world. Where were the anthropologists to remember its codes? Where are the memoirists? When will it appear in literature, in film? Will it really be forgotten? Buried in the memory?
Remembering the real European philosophers came amongst us. Hans-Georg Gadamer in his nineties, going from postgraduate table to table at conferences, telling Heidegger stories. With such modesty!
Paul Ricoeur, billed in the local papers as the cleverest man in the world, addressing a small group of us at Staffordshire university. Chantal Mouffe, at Bolton Institute. Frederick Worms, on his return visits to Dundee University. Dominique Janicaud, at Manchester All Saints.
We saw them! We heard them. True, we barely understood a word, but there they were: a dose of the continent …
The conferences of yore! At Greenwich, the old Naval campus, in the Italianate squares. At Dundee, which always extended the most magnificent of welcomes.
Conference days, conference nights. There were philosophy-offs. Philosophy duels! Subtle Machiavellian manoeuverings! General jockeying for power (for what little power!) Betrayals! Backstabbing. Rats-in-a-sack politicking.
But we were oblivious to all that, in our PhD days. Larking about! Late night drinking. All-the-way-to-morning drinking. In someone’s room. Chasing the party. Going to where the fun was.
We made up the numbers. We were part of the crowd. Conference extras, not understanding a word. By turns baffled, puzzled, bored. Wandering what everyone else was getting out of it. Doodling on our pads, or just staring into the air.
That was before our part-time years. before we finished our PhDs. Ran out of scholarships. Before we were cast out into the outer darkness.
It was before we knew we had to make an impression. Stick up our hands. Ask clever questions. Network. Sit next to the right people at conference dinners. Before we signally failed at all those things! Before we knew the futility of all those things for our kind, for the idiot kind …
Work in Progress 