Hasn’t W. tried to set up an alternative intellectual network for people like ourselves? Hasn’t he run his famous Plymouth conferences, inviting but a handful of speakers to his college, and allowing them to select their ideal interlocutors? Hasn’t he wheedled money from all kinds of sources to pay for it all?
Ah, it was marvellous, until I ruined it, W. says. Why did he think of inviting me? he says, shaking his head as we sip our pints. He still remembers it, the whole afternoon devoted to my work, to my so-called work. The thing is, the audience — my invited audience — were on my side to begin with, W. says. — ‘They wanted you to do well’. But what happened? He shakes his head.
Why did he invite me? W. wonders. There’d be sense in bringing people to his college to inspire him, but not to destroy him. Unless it’s his death-drive, W. says. Unless I’m his death-drive, for how else could he account for it?
I ruined his conference, there’s no question of that, W. says. I ruined his whole series of conferences. And what choice did he have but to return to Oxford, to our Oxford conference, and with me in tow? What, but to rejoin the would-be Oxonians, who hire out the college of St. Hilda’s when all the real Oxford academics are away?
Philosophy’s like an unrequited love affair, W. says. You get nothing back; there’s only longing, inadequacy, a life unfulfilled. But sometimes he feels he might be capable of philosophy. That we might be capable of it, together — together with our friends.
Didn’t he have friends once? W. says. I drove them away, of course. They ran away in horror. What is W. doing? they wondered. They wrote him emails. Didn’t he realise he was ruining his reputation?
Ah, why does he hang out with me? W. says. It’s not as if he has no options. He chooses to hang out with me, that’s the thing. It’s his choice — or is it? Is it an instinct? Is it the opposite of an instinct?
Either way, he remains in my labyrinth, W. says. His fear: he’ll stay there, getting more and more lost, lost until he’s forgotten he’s in a labyrinth. I’m becoming his world, says W. His whole world, and isn’t that the horror?
He’s like an actor who’s forgotten he’s acting. A secret agent in the deepest of cover. He doesn’t know who he is anymore. A denizen of Larsworld, that’s it, isn’t it? Another of my nutters and weirdoes …
We need a realitätpunkt, W. says. A point of absolute certainty, from which everything could begin. But the only thing of which he can be certain is the eternal crumbling of our foundations, the eternal stop sign of our idiocy.
Every day is only the fresh ruination of any project we might give ourselves. Every day, the fresh revelation of our limitations and of the absurdity of our ambitions. What have we learnt except that we have no contribution to make, nothing to say, nothing to write, and that we have long since been outflanked by the world, overtaken by it, beaten half to death by it?
What’s happened to them now, his friends? W. says. They’re scattered to the four winds, he says. They’re fighting their own battles against redundancy, as he is fighting his. And they’re applying, like him, for the tiny number of jobs which appear in the newspapers.
Crowd rats into smaller and smaller spaces, and they turn on one another, devouring one another, W. says, as we pass beneath the Bridge of Sighs. That’s what’ll happen to us, and to our friends, he says. We’ll turn on one another, devouring one another …
It’s the opposite of everything W.’s hoped for. He dreamed we could stand shoulder to shoulder with them all, with all our friends; and that, standing together, we would form a kind of phalanx, stronger than we would be on our own. He dreamed we’d mated for life like swans, and that we could no more betray one another than tear off our own limbs …
We speak of thinker-collectives over our pints in The Turf. Of Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling dancing round their freedom tree. Of Novalis and the Schlegels, practicing their symphilosophical collaboration on the streets of Jena. We speak of Marx, Engels and other revolutionary émigrés, on the run from the police of continental Europe, holed up in London after the failed revolutions of 1848.
And we speak, coming to the twentieth century, of artistic avant-gardes, of Surrealism and the Situationists, with their manifestos and expulsions. Who was more fierce than André Breton? Who, more demanding than Guy Debord? Antonin Artaud ate too loudly — expel him from the group! Asger Jörn kept picking his nose — excommunicate him at once!
Rules: that’s what we need, W. says. We need to be constrained. We need a prime mover. We need a mastermind to crack the whip. — ‘Lapdogs’, he’ll shout. ‘Lackeys!’
And if we can find no leader to impose discipline on us, we must impose it on ourselves, W. says. We must become each other’s intellectual conscience. We must become each other’s leader, and each other’s follower.
W. speaks of the liberating constraint sought by the members of OULIPO — Perec, Roubaud and the rest — with their famous rules, which they use to compose literary works. Palindromes, lipograms, acrostics and all that … OULIPO’s work is collaborative, that’s the point, W. says. Its products are attributed to the group.
Didn’t Queneau call Oulipians ‘rats who will build the labyrinth from which they will try to escape?’, W. says. We are those rats, we agree. We need liberation. But first, we need to build a labyrinth.
We speak of the so-called ‘vow of chastity’ of Dogme95—of Lars Von Trier and his friends — who banned all artifice in the making of their films. No stage sets, no blue screen, no CGI dinosaurs or period pieces of any kind. No score; no weeping violins.
Films have to descend to the everyday, and tell stories about the everyday, that’s what Dogme95 demanded, W. says. Films have to concern themselves with reality. With love. With death. — ‘Pathos!’, W. says. ‘It’s all about pathos!’
Dogma: that’s what we should call our intellectual movement, we agree. We should make our own ‘vow of chastity’, our own manifesto. On Magdalen Bridge, leaning over the Cherwell, we cry out our rules over the water.
First rule: Dogma is spartan. Speak as clearly as you can. As simply as you can. Do not rely on proper names when presenting your thought. Do not quote. Address others. Really speak to them, using ordinary language. Ordinary words!
Second rule: Dogma is full of pathos. Rely on emotion as much as on argument. Tear your shirt and pull out your hair! And weep — weep without end!
Third rule: Dogma is sincere. Speak with the greatest of seriousness, and only on topics that demand the greatest of seriousness. Aim at maximum sincerity. Burning sincerity. Rending sincerity. Be prepared to set yourself on fire before your audience, like those monks in Vietnam.
And the fourth rule? Dogma is collaborative. Write with your friends. Your very friendship should depend on what you write. It should mean nothing more than what you write!
W. reminds me of the collection, Radical Thought in Italy. Paolo Virno! Mario Tronti! They’ve always been a touchstone for him. It’s pure Dogma, he says. They’re all friends. Their essays have no quotations, no references, they all have the same ideas and write about them as though they were world-historical. That’s another rule, W. says: always write as though your ideas were world-historical. And always steal from your friends. Steal from everyone! In fact, that should be compulsory: Dogma plagiarises. Always steal other people’s ideas and claim them as your own.