Democracy and the humanities

With that title, a certain grandiloquence cannot easily be avoided. And there has been plenty of it in the press lately; but I say - "Friends, Cantabrigians, Faculty-Men, lend me your ears; I come to bury the humanities, not to praise them..." Even that would be unnecessary: they will anyway be buried inexhumably under a forthcoming landslide of bureaucratic antipathy and enormous tuition fees. All I want to ask is: are they being buried alive? Or are they actually dead already?

For though we hear much, including from leading professorial lights such as Martha Nussbaum, about the role of the humanities in public life, in fostering democratic values and a sense of meaning beyond the utilitarian, not much progress has been made in establishing whether they do that as well as they might in their current form. And my intention here is to argue that they fall well short. In fact, they are not even living up to their name, for there is little that is humanist, or even humane, about the unhealthy combination of louse-combing textual and artefactual obsessiveness on the one hand with Grand, but increasingly bizarre Theory on the other that currently predominates in humanities faculties. I would not want to make sweeping denunciations without offering examples of how things could be done better. So such examples will be offered: in each case showing how things were done better, approximately 100 years ago. (Often they were done even better than that 200 years ago; but a single century is quite enough time to cover in a blog post.)

The problems that could be identified with the bulk of present-day academic writing on the arts and humanities are many, but I want to pick out two interrelated points that bear on the question of democracy or the public sphere - one of style, the other of intellectual content. The first is that the favoured writing style in the academy is not one that courts a wider audience than the academy itself. With some exceptions, of course; but not enough. I used to buy the TLS quite often, thinking it represented a desirable intellectual generalism, until I realised I could get a more interesting and personalized selection of the same sort of academic book review by spending an hour in the library Periodicals room. Part of the problem here is the metaphors in currency, which are often quite dazzlingly abstract and depersonalized: structuralist, in other words, even where the author claims to be poststructuralist, New Historicist, postcolonialist or whatever it might be. And this merges (in a way that will become clearer when we look at some quotes) into my second point of intellectual content - the presently professed lack of faith in individual personality and autonomy, the dissolution of subjectivity or the "death of the author". Both esoteric style and fatalist philosophical content are, it is hardly difficult to see, quite precisely unsuited to fostering democratic ideals or practical discussions in the public sphere.

I mentioned a sort of covert structuralism. Here is an example, presented in the context of an academically celebrated postcolonial critique of culture by the Indian theorist Homi K. Bhabha -

"The linguistic difference that informs any cultural performance is dramatized in the common semiotic account of the disjuncture between the subject of a proposition (enoncé) and the subject of enunciation, which is not represented in the statement but which is the acknowledgement of its discursive embeddedness and address, its cultural positionality, its reference to a present time and a specific space. The pact of interpretation is never simply an act of communication between the I and the You designated in the statement. The production of meaning requires that these two places be mobilized in the passage through a Third Space, which represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy of which it cannot 'in itself' be conscious. What this unconscious relation introduces is an ambivalence in the act of interpretation. The pronominal I of the proposition cannot be made to address - in its own words - the subject of enunciation, for this is not personable, but remains a spatial relation within the schemata and strategies of discourse. The meaning of the utterance is quite literally neither the one nor the other" (The Location of Culture, p. 36)

This can I think fairly be taken to represent Bhabha's theory of literary interpretation and communication, and it is "spatial" rather than "personable", to use Bhabha's own terms. The talk is of "places" (in place of I and You), "mobilizing", "positionality", "passages": these are metaphors, let us remind ourselves, but grandly strategic ones. They enforce a sense of personal powerlessness that goes far beyond what might be understood (it isn't easy!) as the substantial point of Bhabha's argument - that even literary statements depend on their audiences and contexts in ways that are hard to calculate. If that is what he means, then here is Tagore making the same point, in a much easier and more personable fashion, in the 1907 address "Literary Creation":

"Man's thoughts are gratified if they get these three opportunities: to blossom, to fruit, and to drop onto fertile soil. Thoughts, like living things, constantly urge us towards this fulfilment; hence the unabated exchange of embraces and whispers among human beings. A mind looks for another mind to relieve it of the burden of its thoughts, to have its own ideas contemplated by another. That is why women gather at the waterside steps, friend runs to friend, letters go to and fro...
"Thus throughout human society, the thoughts of one mind strive to find fulfilment in another, thereby so shaping our ideas that they are no longer exclusive to the original thinker. This often goes unnoticed. A little reflection would make us agree that when we say something to a friend, the statement moulds itself to some extent in accordance with our friend's mind. We cannot write to one friend exactly as we write to another. My idea adjusts itself somewhat to the particular mind of the particular friend in whom it secretly seeks fulfilment. In fact, what we say is shaped by the conjunction of speaker and listener.
"In literature, for the same reason, the author tries to fit the work, even if unwittingly, to the nature of the person to whom it is offered. The folk epic of Dashurathi is not Dashurathi's sole possession; it is written in collaboration with the society that listens to it. It does not contain the thoughts of Dashurathi alone; the love, hate, piety, belief, and taste of a given circle at a give time find spontaneous expression within it... Therefore, that which survives does not speak only of itself; it speaks of the world around it, because it survives more by the force of its surroundings than by its own strength."

Comment on the difference in prose quality is superfluous: even though this is a modern translation, it always comes through with Tagore, who also wrote exquisitely in English. Bhabha has won a Bad Writing Competition for another sentence in the same book I have quoted. My point however is more substantial. You cannot accuse Tagore here of any Romantic hero-worship of the figure of the author. His point is indeed that "negotiations" are taking place, to use a current term, in literary creation, and some of them are even "unwitting" (- which could equally be translated "unconscious"). But they are also rhetorical, emotional, and founded in human relationships, where Bhabha's are "strategic", institutional, and decidedly inhuman. Tagore prefers to phrase them in that way; and who can blame him. Bhabha, on the other hand, tries to present what is in truth a metaphorical (and rhetorical) effect of his text as the inescapable reality of communication. He does not succeed in explaning how this inhumanly "spatial" reality serves human needs; Tagore's clustering thought-fruits and his women at the waterside steps do that far better.

Is this comparison unfair? Bhabha is an academic theorist; Tagore was a poet. But he was also a critic, literary professional and a man of the university (albeit his own, rather eccentric university, Visva-Bharati). And on his side, when questioned in a newspaper interview Bhabha will say things such as the following, which in intention at least sounds almost Tagorean: "In a world that is increasingly instrumentalist and consumerist, I think it is very important to set up against such a world the great aspirations of literature and poetry, of painting and music, because art and aesthetic experience adds ardour and passion to our principles and our beliefs. It should be seen as an essential part of our freedom and not an optional part of our lives." If he really believes this, then why does his own criticism add so little "ardour and passion"? Why does it celebrate not "freedom" and "great aspirations", but obscure and uncanny spatial strategies?

Let us move on to another example. Here is a modern critic who makes much capital out of resisting Bhabha's sort of language: Harold Bloom, celebrating timeless literary and humanistic values in his book How to Read and Why. This is how he begins to instruct the reader on how to read poetry:

"A first principle for how to read poems: closely, because a true criterion for any good poem is that it will sustain a very close reading indeed. Here is William Blake, giving us a lyric that again seems simple and direct, 'The Sick Rose'... The ironies of 'The Sick Rose' are fierce, perhaps cruel in their relentlessness. What Blake depicts is altogether natural, and yet the poem's perspective renders the natural itself into a social ritual in which phallic menace is set against female self-gratification (the rose's bed is one of 'crimson joy' before the worm finds it out)" (pp.71-2)

Since I. A. Richards and William Empson between the wars, the technique of "close reading" has become a literary-academic sine qua non: unless you can appreciate and produce interpretations such as the above, you are not invited to the party. What did literary criticism look like before close reading, then? Like this: George Saintsbury on Thomas Browne -

"The finale of Hydriotaphia has rung in the ears of some eight generations as the very and unsurpassable Dead March of English Prose. Every word of this chapter is memorable, and almost every word abides in the memory by dint of Browne's marmoreal phrase, his great and grave meaning, and the wonderful clangour and echo of his word-music. 'Time, which antiquates antiquities' will have some difficulty in destroying this. And through all the chapter his style, like his theme, rises, till after a wonderful burst of mysticism, we are left with such a dying close as never had been heard in English before, 'ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six foot as with the moles of Adrianus'...
"Christian Morals is entirely of a piece with the other books - the same gorgeously Latinised terminology, which somehow never becomes stiff or awkward; the same sententious weight, which is never heavy or dull; the same cunning construction of sentences and paragraphs; and above all, the same extraordinary power of transforming a commonplace into the eternal idea corresponding to it by some far-reaching image, some illustration quaintly erudite, or even by sheer and mere beauty of phrase and expression.
"For this is the great merit of Browne, that, quaint or gorgeous, or even, as he sometimes may seem to be, merely tricksy - bringing out of the treasures of his wisdom and his wit and his learning things new and old, for the mere pleasure of showing them - thought and expression are always at one in him, just as they are in the great poets. The one is never below the other, and both are always worthy of the placid, partly sad, wholly conscious and intelligent, sense of the riddles of life which serves them as background" (George Saintsbury, A Short History of English Literature (1913), pp. 451-2)

Again, there is simply no competition when it comes to the writing. Nor is there on the question of erudition: Bloom may be considered the best-read man alive by modern standards, but his acquaintance with literature is paltry compared to Saintsbury's, who could jump from Shakespeare to Corneille to Crabbe to Martial in a few lines and never needed to read anything in translation. Yet the real question is not of expertise, but of approach: were Bloom to continue expounding on Blakean sexual politics it would not increase your desire to read more of the poetry, whereas if you do not know Browne, you will most certainly want to now. (I hope you might want to read more Saintsbury too: he has been unjustly forgotten, and most English majors have simply never heard of him.)

When referred to at all, Saintsbury is usually categorized as an "aesthetic" critic, and it might be hard to see at first how aestheticism has anything to do with democracy or the public sphere. But it does, because what a critic such as Saintsbury gives you is a sense of the humane and "personable" value of a given author, something with a far more natural and widespread appeal than an analysis of fierce ironic mechanisms, or the necessity of understanding a rosebud as a vulva. Yes, his metaphors sometimes become uncomfortably culinary, "as if he were proposing a picnic" to quote John Gross; but his philosophy is refreshingly straightforward: "read, and as far as possible, read everything", without prejudice, and cultivating a "constant habit of looking at everything and every writer in conjunction with their analogues and opposites" - in other words, utilizing comparison rather than analysis. You need to read a lot to do this at the level Saintsbury does, but you do not need to read in any specially "close" way, for which you have been expensively trained. You simply need to be part of what Saintsbury called the "general congregation of intelligent people". In spirit, that is democratic criticism: its ideals are essentially Arnoldian, even if Saintsbury was a High Tory himself.

It is the same with art history. Criticize Kenneth Clark's patrician tones all you like: he was the last representative, in the age of television, of a humanist critical tradition that goes back through Bernard Berenson to the great Germans of centuries previous. His picture of the canon is insensitive to the place and perspective of a great many alternative identities: in that sense his rhetoric is exclusive. But is it more inclusive to write sentences such as the following?

"Once we insist that sexual difference is produced through an interconnecting series of social practices and institutions of which families, education, art studies, galleries and magazines are part, then the hierarchies which sustain masculine dominance come under scrutiny and stress, then what we are studying in analysing the visual arts is one instance of this production of difference which must of necessity be considered in a double frame: (a) the specificity of its effects as a particular practice with its own materials, resources, conditions, constituencies, modes of training, competence, expertise, forms of consumption and related discourses, as well as its own codes and rhetorics; (b) the interdependence for its intelligibility and meaning with a range of other discourses and social practices" (Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminity, Feminism, and Histories of Art, p. 9)

The relentless pluralization alone becomes rhetorically wearisome. That is an interesting point to dwell on, actually: I might agree with Pollock that many of these abstract entities ("discourse", "history of art", "hierarchy") can and ultimately should be construed in more than one way; but does this need to be insisted on at every moment? The effect is not of liberation but of bewilderment: I cannot imagine all the points in these multiply interconnecting series, and as with Bhabha, my own sense of human agency and autonomy is thereby diminished.

I could carry on with other disciplines, including music, and philosophy (whom would you rather read, Nietzsche or Foucault? Or psychoanalysis: Freud's Introductory Lectures, or Lacan's Ecrits?). Just about the one discipline of which all this does not hold true is history: and it is there that scholars are making up the deficit of readable books on the arts aimed at a general audience - Tim Blanning's The Triumph of Music, Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory and Rembrandt's Eyes. Popular philosophical writers and broadcasters such as Alain de Botton or Bryan Magee have also done a commendable job with everything from Proust to architectural criticism to the great philosophers. Perhaps this will be dismissed as a lamentable return of what Hermann Hesse called the Age of the Feuilleton, in which journalistic values took precedence over academic integrity. But if one takes a closer look at that late-Victorian/Edwardian period when intellectual celebrities such as Tagore, Mark Twain, Georg Simmel, Henri Bergson et al travelled the world giving public lectures to large audiences, there is much we ought really to be envious of. If poetry, philosophy, classical music, and painting do not enjoy the vital popularity they once did, the attitudes of the academy are largely to blame.

Is the guru always right?

Well, to answer the question right off, no, surely not. No-one can be a perfect authority 100% of the time, even on a single subject, much less on the philosophy of life as well. But the thing is, in India teachers do tend to be treated as if they really knew it all, and I'm interested here in exploring a little why that's so - or perhaps equally, why I have a problem with it.

In the music department where I study the staff are in a curious position, caught between two cultural attitudes. The first is that of the modern Western university, which I am used to, where teachers are (in most cases) marked out from their students purely by an excess margin of book-learning which it is their responsibility to transmit during class. The second is the ancient Indian system known as the guru-sisya parampara, the "guru-disciple lineage", which is a far weightier affair (it sometimes seems very apt that guru also means "heavy" in Bengali, not least in view of the physical corpulence of many Bengali gurus). The guru's responsibility is to "enlighten" his disciple - etymologically gu-ru is said to mean "[bringing] light to darkness" - and the disciple must in return commit himself in full to the relationship, which is ideally an exclusive one. In the West we think of the guru as a religious or spiritual figure, but in India the word means "teacher", and is used in many areas outside the spiritual, particularly in music.

Hindustani classical music is often distinguished from its Western counterparts by its rigorous adherence to an "oral tradition", and this continues to be regarded as central even when, as today, much of the material being handed down by the guru is actually written down. Bandishes ("compositions", although in a sense closer to a jazz standard than a Western classical composition) are printed by the dozen in books on Hindustani music, and a modern teacher will often ask the student to take down these, as well as improvised taans (flourishes), in notation. (The type of notation used is actually older than the Western stave: Sanskrit music treatises had been recording exact scale-steps, durations, sharps, flats, and ornaments for centuries when the West was still stuck with an ambiguous system of neumes.) But there are always some things that must be checked and corrected first-hand: ability to keep rhythm and tempo, pronunciation, tone-production, posture, delivery and so on. Mastery of all these, in exact imitation of the guru, qualifies the student as an authentic representative of his teacher's gharana or "school". He will in turn be in a position to take on students and perpetuate the gharana, with all its particular musical traits, values, and attitudes.

Preservation of the gharana is considered so important that many books on Hindustani music fill pages and pages with genealogical-type diagrams, detailing who studied with whom, reaching from contemporary performers and teachers right back into the eighteenth century and (in some cases) beyond. Indian musicians can be as snobbish about the antiquity of their line as the characters in a Proust novel; and for the outsider such attitudes can appear just as odd. Moreover they look increasingly outdated since the institutionalization of Indian music teaching began in the twentieth century. Now most aspiring young musicians, although they may still have a private guru, also go to university or music college to get a degree. And here they are of course taught in a Western framework of classrooms, timetables and deadlines, all of which is quite alien to the spirit of the guru system. On the other hand, even those teaching within a university retain their respect for the values of that system, and this resistance (among other things) affects the "smooth running" of the higher-educational machine which is prioritized in the West.

The most noticeable result for me in everyday terms is that Sangit Bhavan is managed with a level of administrative inefficiency and haphazardness that far surpasses even the other departments in Visva-Bharati University. A couple of weeks ago, now about halfway into my one-year course, I was for the first time presented with a syllabus - in reality no more than a dictated list of fifteen songs that my teacher had selected off the top of his head during his tea-break. At the same juncture, students were first informed if they would have their exam within this academic year or after the summer vacation. Classes are cancelled without notice and for no apparent reason, as teachers decide they have other business or would prefer to extend their tea-break. The point is that students are too much in awe of the teachers here to protest or "insist on their rights" as they would in the UK or the USA. The guru dispenses enlightenment, and if you have to wait an hour and a half for enlightenment to show up then so be it. Respect for the guru is (at least publicly) absolute.

It is also very publicly demonstrated, via a gesture of obeisance which has become routinized among students here: the padnamaskar or "taking the dust of the feet", usually referred to in Bengali simply as pranaam. This can be developed into something of a fetish, as a few amusing posts relating to the Indian religious guru Sai Baba demonstrate. It is a common Indian gesture of respect to parents, elders, and husbands - although here too the fetish side can get the upper hand (read the description of "charanamrita", the practice of drinking the water in which someone's feet have been bathed!). Perhaps because of its roots in Indian family culture, it comes easier to Indians than it does to me: I find the gesture of bending down and touching the feet of the teacher, followed by one's own forehead and chest, to be loaded with a symbolic significance that I cannot physically bring myself to realize. For the other students it has largely lost this weight of meaning, as they queue up at the end of class - or even in the canteen - to touch their teacher's feet. Sometimes they have to be reminded by the teacher that they have already touched his feet once today, and additional obeisances would exceed the bounds of propriety. One teacher has even entirely forbidden his students to do padnamaskar to him, sensing that the gesture is being abused.

Under these circumstances, padnamaskar becomes a symptom of an exaggerated servility - an obvious attempt to "curry favour".Yet without doubt, when performed sincerely, touching feet should be a positive sign of humility, of readiness to bow one's head before wisdom and experience. If we in the West find such prostration impossible, then Indians could be justified in diagnosing a lack of respect and fine manners, and an excess of individual pride in our culture. And so it is with the organization of education too. The Western university is shifting more and more in the direction of an egocentric consumerism, an attitude of "you should get what you pay for" - and if what you pay for doesn't either keep you entertained or give you a leg-up in the job market, then you're being short-changed. With the kind of fees being charged at American universities in particular, it is hardly surprising that students respond by creating consumer-survey-style lecturer rating tables (Rate My Professors being the most notorious), or that everything on a course is quantified into modules, units, objectives and outcomes.

Visva-Bharati was created partly out of Rabindranath's foresight that some alternative would be needed to this utilitarian model of the university. He warned specifically that "universities should never be made into mechanical organisations for collecting and distributing knowledge" (Creative Unity, pp.171-2); which is however arguably just what is happening to Western academia. Tagore saw the dangers of his era in the bureaucratic fixation on exams, acting as a passport to job success rather than developing students' potential for creative learning, and in the constraining insistence on mastery of English. Both faults have by no means disappeared in twenty-first century India, though they are fostered now by American-driven globalisation instead of Raj-era civil government, and Tagore's critique remains as relevant as it ever was. He saw the corrective in the traditional Indian guru system, as he imagined it having been practised in the ashramas and tapovanas (forest hermitages) of ancient India: a system centred on the teacher-pupil relationship rather than on the specific amount of knowledge to be transmitted between the two -

"I have visualised the guru (the preceptor) at the very heart and centre of the tapovana (hermitage). He is a man and no machine. He is actively human because his main concern is to help humanity to realise its goal... The disciple draws inspiration from his immediate contact. This association with a mind perpetually awake is the most valuable element of education in an asrama, and that value does not lie in the subjects of study, in paraphernalia or methods. Because the guru realises himself at every step, he is able to give of himself abundantly." ("Asrama Education")

These are high ideals indeed, and perhaps Visva-Bharati today realizes them comparatively seldom. But it did genuinely begin as an ashram, with only a handful of pupils taught by Tagore himself, and even as it takes on some conventional principles of university organization, it remains oriented in its best moments towards the ideals Tagore outlined. For a start, there is simplicity, absence of the "paraphernalia" one finds in a Western classroom. Music classes here take place in plain rooms, decorated at most with a portrait of Tagore; at the front sits the teacher with his harmonium or tanpura, around him the students, following his lead in chorus singing one of Tagore's melodies, and taking down the words of the song in a desk diary adapted as an exercise book. Scores of Tagore's songs exist, but most students cannot afford more than a few volumes of these expensive notation books, and so the classes proceed orally, repeating and correcting the rendition according to the teacher's prompts. Occasionally the teacher will divagate and begin expounding the philosophical message behind these songs, or their relationship to the Santiniketan festival calendar. And with the amount of respect, and often genuine love that students invest in their teacher, when he rises to the occasion then these discourses will expand into a flight of inspired fancy and Lebensweisheit, mixed with anecdotes, reminiscences of Santiniketan in its golden era, and lines of other songs suddenly thrown out and spontaneously continued by the students, the whole lesson overrunning the allotted time sometimes by an hour or more, having long since dissolved into that shared joy which Tagore wanted both music and education to embody. Many times I have to sit there shame-faced, knowing that my lack of Bengali still bars me access to participating fully in such moments - but anyone could see the inspiration that shines on the students' faces. Here there is space for the "truth [which] not only must inform but inspire", rather than the teacher "who has come to the end of his subject, who has no living traffic with his knowledge...[and] can only load his students' minds [but] cannot quicken them" (Creative Unity, p.179).

So the guru may not always be right, but we have I think to grant him a degree of trust if experiences like this are to flower in his hands. If his and our hands are too full with assessment forms and examination papers, then that blossoming will not happen; if we cannot even imagine him as a figure of wisdom, then how can we receive wisdom from him? Granted, the oral parampara system has its limitations; like other hierarchies, it encourages self-reproduction rather than critique. The latter has of course become the basis of Western scholarly thinking, due to its textual focus: the real induction into Anglo-American academic procedure occurs (usually at the Master's level) when students are given a text and invited to attack it. If one has spent hours learning that text by heart, however, the critical reflex is usually somewhat in abeyance. Tagore, his creations and ideas are seldom criticized here (as I noted in my first blog post from Santiniketan, and it still holds true) just because so much energy is expended in passing down his enormous personal heritage as a living tradition. But the positive energy of that "quickening", when his art and ideas are well taught is, in my view, worth more than many an adept scholarly critique.

A tale of two conferences

As an aspiring academic of sorts, concern for the health of my CV drives me to attend conferences both in Britain and abroad - even when this begins (as it occasionally does in the wake of such occasions) to raise concern for my sanity. "Conference-land" is a peculiar place indeed - as you can discover at second-hand, without the pain and with extra entertainment, from the academic satires of David Lodge ("Changing Places" and "Small World"). I would recommend them to anyone either as a preparation or (better) a replacement for full exposure to an international confederation of those strange beings, bluntly yet so justly referred to by the Germans as Fachidioten (Fach meaning specialism or pigeonhole - you can work out the rest!).

But I'm not going to use this post simply as an outlet for railings against academia, even if I were to include myself among the satirical targets (as would only be fair, since I don't just go to these conferences to listen with an amused smile playing about my lips, but sometimes have to open them too). What provides the opportunity for writing this is my having recently attended two very different "conferences" or academic events, one under and one very much outside the auspices of the university system, which has prompted me to think about what these events can actually achieve.

The most recent was an international congress held in Zurich, the first of its kind I had been to. The programme lasted from Tuesday to Sunday, with up to twenty parallel sessions of talks to choose between on a typical morning. This necessitated a conference guide that was less of a "booklet" than a dauntingly thick book. If the to-be-published proceedings actually included everything, one would quickly have an encyclopedia. (The sheer horror of the notion makes me positively glad that my paper is very unlikely to be published.) A small army of Swiss students were on hand to press buttons, fill glasses, give directions and so forth. In the main hall of the conference building the confident meeting-and-greeting and the chink of espresso cups never ceased.

Here and in the seminar rooms around the edge of the central hall, alliances are constantly being negotiated - every word of encouragement or gesture of impatience a tacit reference to a position one shares or does not share with others, and behind that position ever-circulating anxieties about status, money, patronage and the ultimate worth of what one is engaged in. Teamwork is a key element of strategy, and the Americans know particularly well how to exploit it. The chair of a talk can use their introduction to put a speaker in a certain light, boost their morale and lay the tactical groundwork for what they are going to say; a questioner can bounce their question off an ally in the audience ("I know that X would like to ask a question on/speak to this issue"), or ask a speaker to expand on some mutually gratifying opinion, like an "assist" play in basketball; and few techniques are more cultivated than a skilful defence, protecting the speaker like a well-shielded quarterback from aggressive lines of questioning. Above all, however, one employs references, which means: names authorities, drops buzzwords, cites opinions, tells entertaining anecdotes (that may be self-deprecating on the surface, but invariably involve a glimpse into some high circle of academia one wishes to suggest one is privy to).

Where does the "pursuit of knowledge" come into all this, then? Well, partly by the same route general financial welfare is promoted by the capitalist regime of competition. If knowledge is the currency here, it may get a little torn and grubby through being passed around or fought over, but at least its ultimate increase thereby will work for the common good. The more professional risks and incentives are involved, the greater the need to master the material (sources, languages, facts, theories); and this mastery becomes like capital. One does not just give it away, or hide it under the floorboards, but invests it carefully in publications that are calculated to bring the dividends of professional advancement for their author, even as their knowledge is being put at the disposition of other scholars.

In this world, then, I felt a bit like a pauper, tramping past the loaded shop-windows of a swanky city mall, without any platinum cards to flash, my purseful of change already spent and no rich friends or bright ideas to help me out. Rather than just being a metaphor, that actually does describe how I felt sitting on the terrace at the after-conference party. I nursed a glass of wine, looking out over the roofs of the city in the late afternoon sun (the squeal of tramwheels rising faintly from the Limmatquai far below, the Ferris wheel on the fairground by the lake turning slowly), having heard the band exhaust their repertoire, and flirted desultorily with a Korean girl, the one person I could find who felt more out of place than I did.

The second "conference" was quite differently organised (so much so that I advisedly place it between inverted commas). It took place in a hamlet in Lower Saxony, north Germany, and was occasioned and preceded by a most unusual modern dance performance. This took place in a barn before an audience of (at most) forty, the majority curious villagers from the surrounding area, the rest specially-invited friends of the organiser (shown below - in the blue shirt - acting as usher/compere):

After an unexpected and mysterious prelude in which someone (we could not yet see who) moved around slowly, spider-fashion, directly over the heads of the audience on a translucent sheet of perspex, we scaled ladders and hay-bales to reach the main performance space, a stage constructed as it were on the second "floor" of the barn. At the back was the musical half of the duo - the drummer Fritz Hauser - and tiptoeing and circling backward and forward over the stage was the dancer Anna Huber, now more fully visible. (The photo below is from her publicity.)

Both artists are Swiss, internationally recognised and highly professional, and doubtless more used to performing to well-heeled audiences of modern dance aficionados in Zurich, but having let themselves in for this peculiar one-off event, they had to accept that the atmosphere was going to be rather different (not least in the literal sense of being quite dusty).

And it was different - not only during the performance, which the numerous children present, as well as most of the adults, obviously found entirely new (it was for me as well), and by turns athletic, hypnotically rhythmic and playfully abrupt. But in the theoretical discussion devoted to it the day afterward, too, some of the spirit of encounter and exploration persisted. In beginning our "conference" with the themes of the body and performance one could scarcely say that we were breaking with present academic fashion; but in the way we were able to approach them - with a real, physical example still fresh in our memories, as well as having the performers there to give their own perspective and contrast with those coming from philosophy, literature, music, pedagogy, and even neuroscience - there were undoubtedly some unique advantages. And there was an atmosphere infinitely more congenial than that of the conference-hall in sitting around an old wooden table in a country-house conservatory with glasses of wine, a chaise-longue in the corner to recline on, a beautiful panelled library next door, and only the occasional tractor puttering down the lane outside to disturb the peace.

What is achieved through such events, though, when, through their informality and eccentricity, they fall below a certain level of professionalism? That would be the obvious critical response here. But in fact I would propose that the danger is still of being too "professional" - in one's attitudes and anxieties, not in the level of argument. Even in such an independent setting as this, one finds oneself casting around for impressive-sounding references, seeking to prove favourite points, harbouring half-conscious ambitions or resentments in the back of one's mind.

The moral one is tempted to draw is - you can take the man out of the university, but it's not so easy to take the university out of the man. And that is what limits the scope of any such forum, whether in the university or out, independent of the more superficial issues of who its participants are, how its results are publicised, or how specialised or difficult its themes are imagined to be. One needs always to be mindful of this if one is searching for genuine independence and universality - qualities which are after all attainable within the present university system too (just as capitalism does not abolish charity!), and are above all tested, I think, through teaching.

Here one has to proceed as one does in everyday life, and as one really ought to at a conference or any other event. That means - through sharing and patient narration of knowledge, and through appeal, not to privileged texts or arcane "discourses", but simply to reason and common experience. Such enforced modesty is what makes teaching - and I don't mean to Master's or PhD students who are already climbing the career ladder, but to undergraduates - so important. It shouldn't be seen as an arduous duty tied to economic needs; rather it is just the point where the academic economy of knowledge cedes to a more utopian possibility - knowledge as a gift.