Consorting

Middle children are alleged to be calmer than first-borns because they make their entry in the second act – even if it is also in a sense as the second act – of a play that has already been going for some time. They assume that everybody else on the stage knows their lines and cues. Many inaugural enterprises depend on the shared confidence that others involved in them know why they are there and what they are doing, even if you don't. It often turns out that everyone was assuming all along everybody had access to a script. My own arrival on the scene of the London Consortium followed in this tradition. Paul Hirst who had been the Academic Director of the Consortium since its establishment in 1998 had been planning to retire in 2004, but died very suddenly a year before. I had been appointed as Academic Director a year in advance to understudy him but found myself taking on the role in October 2003.

I do not recall the Consortium ever issuing anything like a mission statement, though there would certainly have been shared scorn at the idea that this was the kind of thing on which an academic programme ought to spend its time. Yet many of those involved in its activities spoke and acted as though there were in fact a shared understanding and commitment to what the Consortium was for. But though there was a great deal that was missionary about the Consortium, I was never convinced that there was ever anything that could plausibly act as mission control, or indeed as a Major Tom.

It was often said that the Consortium was opposed to the relativism that was supposed to hold sway in the humanities, and when I once let slip that I thought I would have, under peine forte et dure, to describe myself as a relativist, it was akin to owning up to drinking my own bathwater, which I suppose relativism must have seemed to some to resemble. But the antirelativism of the Consortium was a thing of will rather than settled principle (I think I can, I know I can), since nobody was ever likely to agree on, let alone articulate, what the grounds of nonrelative and unrevisable truth and value were supposed to be, apart from the negotiation and articulation of value itself, which is oddly enough more or less what relativists think, or relativists of my criminal stripe.

The other thing that the London Consortium held out for, consorting a little oddly with this abstract antirelativism, was interdisciplinarity. I once heard Mark Cousins explain (swayingly, at a party, where many of the articles of faith of the Consortium tended to be articulated) what our kind of interdisciplinarity meant, and it has stayed with me, as a standing rebuke to the claims of interdisciplinarity that have now become grimly and greyly orthodox throughout the academic world. I have come to think that the promotion of interdisciplinarity has actually become a method of theme-control, ensuring that everybody marches in time to the same tunes, sung in the same languages. When have the humanities ever been more uniform in their methods and outlooks, than since interdisciplinarity became their gold standard? By contrast, Mark declared that to be interdisciplinary was not a matter of religious conviction, since the point of interdisciplinarity was not to be interdisciplinary on principle, and at every possible eventuality. Instead interdisciplinarity was an uncomfortable choice forced on any scholar who felt a hunger to be more serious about a given topic, which is bound to require more than the resources of one discipline, least of all a discipline that claimed proprietary authority over it. To be interdisciplinary was simply not to close your eyes to all those people who will have had interesting things to say about your subject of concern, if only you bothered to find out.

For this reason, the best, and perversely, the most principled thing about the Consortium was not its principles but its practices. Rather surprisingly, and wholly against the tide, then and now, the Consortium began life as a programme for PhD students, whom it required to follow taught courses, two a term, of six weeks duration. In North American graduate schools, taught courses are designed to assimilate students who have often followed diversely ill-assorted undergraduate courses to the academic guild membership of philosophy, biology or art history, as it may be. Graduate students have to follow so many years of these courses that those who eventually submit to submitting what Paul Hirst called the ‘bound blue monster’ of a PhD thesis are too old ever to have thoughts of running away again. The London Consortium’s courses were of six weeks’ duration – long enough to give a whiff of addictive possibility without being long enough to risk the miseries of full-blown dependence – and were deliberately intended to put interesting obstacles in the path of the kind of students produced from UK universities who had completed single-honours BAs and thought themselves ready for full reception into the academic church of their choice. It was only after the PhD courses had been running for some years, and in response to the requirement of UK funding bodies that applicants for PhD funding should have undertaken a ‘research-preparation’ Masters course, that the Consortium MA was reverse-engineered from the doctoral courses. I have recommended this inverted way of proceeding, naturally in vain, on several occasions since.

Almost more exciting than the teaching of these courses was the way in which they were devised. They were always taught in collaboration, and, though you usually got to choose your teaching partner, sometimes it was more like cellmates in the Scrubs, or the contingent comity of hospital beds in the song (‘I’ve got one friend lying across from me/I did not choose him, he did not choose me’). We collectively resolved, God knows how, since as usual, we probably had different convictions about why we thought it was important, always to discontinue these courses after three years and, as in the venerable joke about the frequency with which Victorians took baths, whether we needed to or not. What is more, courses were not gracefully phased out and in, one or two at a time, which would have been rational and efficient, but marched out and shot in entire cohorts, like the members of a Stalin-era committee.

This process required every three years a course development meeting, run over several days in what was more literally a smoke-filled room than current inhabitants of our precautionary times can possibly imagine. Brecht thought that allowing audiences in the theatre to smoke would encourage critical rumination, but the dragonish in- and exhalations of a Consortium course development meeting tended rather to produce the passionate intensity of the hashshashin. Dozens of pitches would be made for six-week courses on all kinds of topics, most of which would be shouted down or laughed to scorn for their predictability, plausibility or pusillanimity. Eventually four courses would be left sufficiently upright among the smoking ruins to be selected to run for the next three years. In my apprentice years before I became Academic Director, it was then my job to steer these courses through the despised college committee in Birkbeck devoted to quality assurance. I cannot remember whether it was at this committee that the course titled ‘Shit and Civilization’ was objected to on the timorous grounds that it might inflame the Daily Mail, but I have got too used to telling people of Paul Hirst’s sweet-and-sour alternative proposal of ‘The Ordure of Things’ to give it up now.

Some of these courses may strike readers today as less incendiary than they might have done at the time, but it would be nice to think it was because they were before their time rather than completely out of it. We tried always to have a close-reading course devoted to an important text chosen precisely because it was demanding to read, and therefore good for you. The Stoicism course was chosen precisely because it was the kind of topic no incoming student could be expected to know anything much about. These courses were outlandish precisely because they seemed so antique in a programme that advertised itself as having something to do with present-obsessed cultural studies (one of the blind spots of the Consortium was its violent aversion to topics from popular culture, though I often tried to sneak them in). Other courses offered oblique ways of coming at concerns that were already starting to seem wearily present and correct. Global warming was assayed through the history of polar exploration, ice-cream and skiing in the course Coldness. Twenty years before the imagination of apocalypse became fully part of the routines of mainstream culture, the course on Catastrophe was run brilliantly by Tom McCarthy and Aura Satz as a parody bureaucratic commission of enquiry.

My own habit of trying never to write, except, obviously, for money, about topics with established curricular credentials, but always to try to imagine research topics to which one would also have to imagine some new way of paying attention, belongs to the dispensation suggested by these courses. It also encouraged the Carrollian itch I myself tried to induce in students and colleagues to try to think of impossible things – glory, as it may be, or impenetrability – to think about. I hope this was never a licence to flibbertigibbet dilettantism, for it was clear that some forms of interdisciplinary enquiry committed you to a deal of sizar-like slogging in unfamiliar academic histories and idioms. The overarching principle of this way of proceeding might simply have been Pay Attention.

The other distinctive and in some ways positively utopian feature of the London Consortium was the teaching staff it assembled. In the early days, our assumption was that the partner institutions would supply the greater breadth of disciplinary and practical expertise that we sought to offer to students. It turned out that the curatorial staff of galleries and museums did not really have the competence or availability to provide the kind of supervision we aimed to supply. So, from around 2000 onwards, we began to recruit others to what we somewhat grandly called our Faculty, sometimes from other academic institutions, though our strong preference was for what might be called unaligned academics, people like Patrick Wright, Denise Riley, Aura Satz, Marina Warner and Anthony Julius, who had managed to sustain an academic career without being salaried in academic institutions. We did not have the resources to pay them a full salary, but the fees we offered for teaching on our courses and supervising theses were sufficient to create what in the early days of the Royal Society was known as an Invisible College, of unique variety and distinction. This was augmented by external supervisors: we offered students the audacious promise that they could have any supervisor in the world, so long as they agreed, and, for a flat fee of £1,000 a year per student, they often did. Oddly enough, this sat rather well with the history of Birkbeck, which attracted complaints in Parliament when it was the London Mechanics Institute that its departments tended to act like independent republics, so that, if a group of students decided they needed a Professor of Aramaic, they went out and acquired one for themselves. The model developed by the London Consortium was sufficiently attractive and plausible to stimulate parallel ventures elsewhere, in the form of the Sydney Consortium, a collaboration between the Writing and Society Research Centre in the University of Western Sydney with other cultural institutions, and the Lisbon Consortium, both of which are still, as I write, in operation.

But the most distinctive feature of the London Consortium was the fact that it was the students – their curiosities, demands and, sometimes frustrations – who taught us what the London Consortium was really for, and could be. It was our students who realised for example before we did in the 1990s and 2000s how important everything signified by curating would become. We could not have provided what we did to our students without their active and enquiring lead. I think a smaller proportion of our students than in most universities came to us expecting a Consortium MA or PhD to be a guaranteed pathway into academic life, this being a sign of their shared appetite for risk, and the reason that the projects they pursued were so refreshingly unlike those in other university departments. In the end, a considerable number of our alumni have in fact found occupation in some area of academic life. Others are writers, artists, critics and theorists of various kinds. Most are teaching others in some way.

It is perhaps apt that a programme that seemed so perversely inclined to spring to the defence of prematurely lost causes should itself now risk being lost to view, but no less melancholy for that. Those who presided over what was represented as the temporary suspension of the Consortium following the period of terminal riot, ruction and recrimination in 2012 promised that the students would be supported through to their graduation (they were) and that the website would be kept accessible (it was not). No new students have been enrolled since that date, and the suspension has become permanent. Perhaps in the end what was best about the Consortium was just the fact that it was such a committee-construed camelopard, though, as Aristotle knew, chimeras lack the capacity to reproduce. No pleasure, according to Kingsley Amis, is worth giving up for the sake of a couple of extra months in a nursing home in Weston-super-Mare and graduates of the programme can perhaps console themselves that the Consortium never survived long enough for mere survival to become the point of its existence. Instead of plodding on into coincidence with its own posterity, like other, more ancient institutions (‘forgotten, but not gone’, as Terry Wogan said of Barry Cryer at a dinner in his honour), its premature cessation offers the salty provocation of example. It is an example I still see asserting itself in the work, of different kinds, on different fronts, of its alumni. I hope that the records and memories assembled for this issue of Critical Quarterly will help reassure them that the London Consortium was not in fact all a dream, they themselves being the proof that it is not quite past the wit of man to say what dream it was.