Working as an academic, I have noticed how life has changed. It has been a long time since questions have been answered in the negative. The hierarchy game is no longer played (as far as I can see). When I first started at the University of Sussex the answer to the question, 'who's your favourite critic?' was more than all too often answered with something like, well not F. R. Leavis. This is mostly because no one really wanted to be pinned down and tripped up. For example, if the person giving the answer had said something positive like Walter Benjamin, invariably a question on his Arcades Project which few had read at that point, would begin. It was a real one-upmanship. If you answered Jacques Derrida (thinking about things like deconstruction) someone would ask if you had read Demeure which he wrote with Maurice Blanchot… it would go on like that, a kind of coffee shop bragging rights. Milan Kundera tells such a story when, after he moved to Paris from Prague (after the Prague spring and Soviet occupation) he was asked if he like Barthes. Well, he was the big name at the time but Kundera's response was marvellous when he replied, oh Karl Barth, the inventor of negative theology, yes you can't read Kafka without knowing his work. Mostly its a game, but oh, the times I been in conferences and the like and have asked a question or commented on something and the speaker has no idea what you are talking about, but pretends they do, is growing. I wonder why that is? Perhaps its TV and critical 'opinion' because we no longer read as we did. I mean, The Iliad finishes well before the end of the fall of Troy but could you imagine making that as a TV special and then leaving the big scene out. Oh well, that's just a musing. Actually its more like me talking to myself - are we really who we used to be, only if you're lucky now:
