One of the hardest things to understand in India is the way in which caste and class relate, and how caste, in particular, still holds sway over the way in which individuals are perceived and treated. India is currently enormously optimistic, despite the world economic crisis, and aggressively aspirational posters for MBAs, English and computer classes adorn lampposts in even the smallest of beach towns. The immense gap between even basic infrastructure, religious tradition and cutting-edge technology seems to have been bridged with remarkable ease, so that it is not uncommon for places without clean drinking water to have broadband, and for trainee Brahmin priests to pray in temples while texting on their mobiles.

There is something utterly, utterly wrong and baffling, however, about sitting in the giant restaurant of a five-star hotel while someone tells you that half a billion people in the same country still defecate in the open for lack of alternatives, that the largest city Mumbai has no sewerage system and that you should brush your teeth with mineral water for fear of how dirty the tap-water might be. It's as if India has skipped from the Middle Ages to the 21st century, leaving out the parts where you had public works projects, New Deals or anything that would have provided the majority of people with roads, water or toilets. As a consequence, there seem to be two Indias - that of the burgeoning middle class, who can at least afford the mineral water they need to brush their teeth with, who study abroad, who entertain their clients in the five-star hotels and use swish new airports and take entrepreneurial Jet and Kingfisher flights - and the rest, who live and die where they grew up, live off the land and fetch water from a tank a mile away. When the British elevated certain castes to aid them in their colonial project (and why should either of them help the lower castes?) and when Gandhi privileged the village as the backbone of India life, the chances of establishing fully-workable infrastructure diminished until now, depressingly, it seems almost too late.

The immaterial economy of course still needs tangible things like wires for telephony, computers for global networking and classrooms for e-learning, but these are easier to implement, if undeniably precarious (power cuts, power surges) than the bigger things like plumbing and water-filtration plants. You can sling some power-lines from village to village relatively easily, but digging up the crowded town to lay pipes is difficult and expensive.

If collective public projects are impossible, then it's every aspirational young man and woman for him or herself. Nowhere is this better reflected than in the astonishing organisation of the personal ads (or rather, 'Matrimonials', as marriage/alliance is the desired outcome rather than romantic distraction) in Indian newspapers. In the Sunday Times of India, appear the following categories, a mix of modern outlooks ('Cosmopolitan'), health conditions, jobs, qualifications, marital status, religion, eating habits, age and, above all, caste:

WANTED BRIDES
Cosmopolitan
HIV Positive
Manglik
Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribes
Second Marriage
Senior Citizen
Agarwal-Bisa
Brahmin
Garhwali
Jaiswal
Khatri
Kshatriya
Kurmi
Kayastha
Sahu-Teli
Swarnkar
Saini
Vaish/Jain
Vishwakama Panchal
Maurya
Agarwal
Agrawal
Bihari
Mangaloreans
Marwaris
Rajput

WANTED GROOMS
Swarnkar
Vaish/Jain
Agarwal
Agrawal
Marwaris
Rajput
Bengali
Gujarati
Kannadiga
Malayali
Oriya
Punjabi
Sindhi
Tamil
Telugu
Assamese
NRI/Green Card
Doctors
Government/Defence
MBA/CA
Buddhist
Christian
Hindu
Muslim
Sikh

Here are some of the entries:

WANTED BRIDES

Cosmopolitan

- 36 Years old Vegan IIT mathematics professor with boyish good looks who hates dairy products seeks a suitable vegan girl (vegetarian who avoid milk products). Caste No Bar

- At 41 with one marital experience I trace the destined one proposing that I am discreetly on my conviction of serving best inclusive cause of humanity amid vice and virtue of ever mingling global values! Is it thou disposed so? Respecting element of secrecy I am at ... on Sundays (10-5)

- Prominent Industrial Hindu Family looking for very fair, extremely attractive only, convent educated girl, from cultured family with good values, for their '78 born, never married, 5'9" non-smoker, teetotaller, fair, very slim, good featured, Ivy League educated son.

Vaish/Jain

- South Bombay based affluent and cultured open minded Jain status family invites proposals for their highly qualified son working as an Investment Banker iin New York, MS, MBA & PHD from Stanford and MIT (USA), 5'10", very handsome, Nov 78 born

There are references here and there to horoscopes, good families and of course all the women are very beautiful and all the men very handsome. The main thing that features across caste/educational/religious lines is the term 'fair', that is, light-skinned (for the women at least). Indian TV is filled with incredibly pale Indian women and adverts for skin-lightening creams play constantly. This seems very depressing. What does it mean, this desire for hyper-whiteness? The white skin of Northern Europeans is in reality rather wretched: prone to blushing and burning, dry, papery, blotchy, easily wrinkled and terribly thin. But I don't think this is what the whiteness-fetish is about, neither to be like nor to resemble their Hyperborean distant neighbours - instead it perhaps forms a kind of internal differentiation between the two Indias - the new, entrepreneurial MBA-getting India and the backward, village-dwelling, manual labouring India. The white skin of the indoors-working immaterial labourer against the outdoors-living, sun-tanned, agricultural-worker. The new economy divides and conquers better than the British ever could.

[from Joel]

Pigs are not much in evidence here: a few wild boar there, the odd ham sandwich in the bakeries in Puducherry, an ex-French colony. Pigs are nothing compared to all the cows, cats, dogs and goats. Vishnu apparently got to be one for a little while, although he was really more of a boar than a pig. As his boar avatar, Varaha, he churned up the earth with his tusks and rescued the stolen Vedas. See - pigs and books, pigs and books...Here he is:



Anyway, happy new year from IT. That is, erm, me. Next week I have to mark around a hundred essays and write two articles, so I suppose I should enjoy the last couple of days of taking pictures and drinking that odd chicory-coffee they serve here (it gets less unpalatable each time you drink it, oddly). I have enjoyed India very much, but you'll be pleased to know that I have not suffered a single spiritual experience. As marking is impossible to perform without taking a break at least after every paper, expect a deluge of photographs and half-remembered accounts of the trip in the next week or so...am I telling this to you or to myself? Curious...

A message from Collapse:

Dear Friends,

We are delighted to announce that, following a short delay, Collapse Volume V: The Copernican Imperative will be published on 15 January 2009, and can now be ordered in advance from www.urbanomic.com. As usual, this volume will be printed in a limited numbered edition of 1000.

The volume includes contributions from: Carlo Rovelli, Julian Barbour, Conrad Shawcross, James Ladyman, Thomas Metzinger, Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, Milan Cirkovic, Keith Tyson, Nick Bostrom, Martin Schönfeld, Immanuel Kant, Iain Hamilton Grant, Nigel Cooke, Alberto Gualandi, Paul Humphreys, and Gabriel Catren.

Copernicanism tore asunder the fit between the world and man's organs: the congruence between reality and visibility.
- Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World

In his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo proclaimed, through his mouthpiece Salviati, that he could 'never sufficiently admire the outstanding acumen' of those early advocates of Copernicanism who, 'through sheer force of intellect' - that is, without even the benefit of a telescope to confirm the theory observationally - 'had done such violence to their own senses as to prefer what reason told them over that which sensible experience plainly showed them to the contrary'.

Since Galileo published his work in 1632, recognition of the deeply counterintuitive nature of scientific findings has become virtually commonplace, and the 'explanatory gap' between the 'manifest' and 'scientific' images of reality has long been a central concern for philosophers and philosophically-minded scientists alike. In this volume of Collapse, we bring together samples of the most intellectually challenging contemporary work devoted to exploring the philosophical implications of 'Copernicanism' from a variety of overlapping and complementary standpoints.

As in previous volumes, the involvement in Collapse V of several prominent scientists alongside major contemporary artists and groundbreaking philosophers and is designed to open up new perspectives and new directions for thinking outside disciplinary constraints. From multiple philosophical and artistic perspectives, and from scientific fields as diverse as theoretical physics and cosmology, biology, mathematics, cognitive neuroscience, and astrobiology, the volume addresses the issues of the 'deanthropomorphisation' of reality initiated by the Copernican Revolution, the relation between scientific and philosophical (Kantian) 'Copernicanism', and the enduring gulf between the spontaneous image of the world bequeathed to us by evolution and that revealed by the physical sciences in the wake of Copernicus.

With several of the contributions in the form of in-depths interview, Collapse V: The Copernican Imperative is an accessible and thought-provoking volume exemplifying that characteristic blend of speculative audacity and scientifically informed insight which has always been the hallmark of 'Copernicanism'.

Contents of Volume V are as follows:

In Anaximander's Legacy, theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli (co-founder of Loop Quantum Gravity and author of Quantum Gravity) charts the historical dynamics of science's ever more radical overturning of the commonsense image of the world from Anaximander through Copernicus to the 'unfinished revolution' of twentieth-century physics - a revolution which, suggests Rovelli, challenges us to find a way of understanding the world in the absence of the familiar stage of space and time.

Rovelli's question 'Can we think the world without time?' is one which has preoccupied renegade theoretical physicist and historian of science Julian Barbour (author of Absolute or Relative Motion? and The End of Time) for the best part of five decades. In our interview The View From Nowhen we discuss the nature of his radical rethinking of the foundations of physics, his arguments for the non-existence of time and change, and the influence his ideas have exerted on contemporary quantum gravity research from outside the halls of academe.

In his contribution to the volume, Turner Prize winning artist Keith Tyson - well known for his intricate and provocative artistic displacements and extrapolations of scientific ideas - presents a Random Sampler from a Blocktime Animation.

In Alien Science, our interview with Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (authors of dozens of ground-breaking popular science books, including their co-authored works The Collapse of Chaos, Figments of Reality, and What Does A Martian look Like?), we discuss with them the continuing collaboration between mathematician and biologist; the key conceptual innovations of their co-authored works; their trenchant criticisms of what they see as the overly conservative and unimaginative nature of contemporary astrobiology; and their positive programme for a new science of alien life, beyond astrobiology, which they call 'xenoscience'.

In Sailing the Archipelago, cosmologist and astrobiologist Milan Cirkovic provides a sophisticated defence of anthropic reasoning (understood in terms of 'observation selection effects') against the charges brought against it by the likes of Cohen and Stewart as part of an ambitious project of laying the 'philosophical groundworks' of the nascent science of astrobiology.

In Where Are They?, philosopher and transhumanist Nick Bostrom (Director of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, author of Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy) revisits Fermi's Paradox, employing probabilistic 'anthropic' reasoning to motivate the conclusion that, far from being a cause for celebration, the discovery of extra-terrestrial life would in fact augur very badly for the future of the human race.

In his (2006) motion-sculpture Binary Star artist Conrad Shawcross gestured beyond Copernicanism, suggesting that life in a solar system where there is 'no such thing as one' would disturb fundamental epistemological assumptions. Exploring the Shadows of Copernicanism in his work over the last decade, Shawcross, with editor Robin Mackay investigates its relationship with the philosophical trope of Copernicanism, and previews his latest work Chord, to be unveiled in 2009.

In an interview charting the journey from Copernicanism to Enlightenment 2.0, Thomas Metzinger (philosopher of neuroscience, author of Being No One) discusses his 'self-model theory of subjectivity', the potential social and cultural ramifications of the findings of contemporary neuroscience, and responds to criticisms of his radical eliminativist position with regard to the existence of 'selves'.

In his Thinking Outside the Brain, philosopher Paul Humphreys (author of Extending Ourselves: Computational Science, Empiricism, and Scientific Method) proposes that computational science is fast displacing humans from the centre of the epistemological universe, speculates on the possibility of a 'science without humans', and presents his proposals for a radically non-anthropocentric empiricism.

The paintings of Nigel Cooke present a meticulously conceived landscape of painting. His contribution, in the form of a new series of paintings Thinker Dejecta, suggests a kinship between his figure of the vagrant painter at the end of representation, and that of the dejected thinker whose insights only succeed in displacing him further from the centre.

In our fourth and final interview, Who's Afraid of Scientism?, James Ladyman (philosopher of science, co-author of Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalised) discusses the forlornness of contemporary analytic metaphysics and the prospects for a radically naturalised metaphysics which would fully take on board the most counterintuitive findings of contemporary physics, finally dispensing with the habitual ontology of 'little things and microbangings' which continues to hold sway in contemporary 'pseudo-naturalist philosophy'.

In his The Phoenix of Nature, Martin Schönfeld (artist and philosopher of nature, author of The Philosophy of the Young Kant) presents us with a vivid picture of Immanuel Kant profoundly at odds with the recent popular characterisation of him as a conservative, anti-Copernican thinker, via a stimulating exploration of his early cosmology. Here we are presented a radically anti-anthropocentric, anti-Christian, naturalist, speculatively audacious Kant who pushes 'Copernicanism' to its limits; who abolishes the hand of God from, and introduces a history and evolution into, the Newtonian cosmos; and who as early as 1755 strongly anticipates the fundaments of what became the Standard Model of modern cosmology only in the 1930s.

To accompany his piece Schönfeld also contributes a new translation of Immanuel Kant's Concerning Creation in the Total Extent of its Infinity in Both Space and Time, an extended excerpt from his 1755 Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens in which his astonishingly prescient cosmology of 'island universes' and the birth and death of 'worlds' is most magnificently and perfervidly portrayed.

Tackling the great philosophical 'Copernican Revolution' head-on, Iain Hamilton Grant (philosopher, author of Philosophies of Nature after Schelling) examines the Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism in the light of the 'antinomies' of naturalism.

In A Throw of the Quantum Dice Will Never Overturn the Copernican Revolution, Gabriel Catren (Director of the project 'Savoir et Système' at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris) presents what he calls a 'speculative overcoming' of recent influential quasi-Kantian interpretations of quantum mechanics. Rather than being limited to a mathematical account of the correlations between 'observed' systems and their 'observers', or pointing to the inherent 'transcendental' limits of physical knowledge, Catren argues that quantum mechanics furnishes a complete and realistic description of the intrinsic properties of physical systems, an ontology which exemplifies the Copernican deanthropomorphisation of nature.

In Errancies of the Human: French Philosophies of Nature and the Overturning of the Copernican Revolution, Alberto Gualandi (philosopher, author of Deleuze and Le problème de la vérité scientifique dans la philosophie française contemporain) indicates the features common to certain speculative philosophies of nature in 1960s France and problems facing contemporary evolutionary biologists.

Collapse V: The Copernican Imperative
January 2009
Ed. D. Veal
450+pp tbc
Limited Edition 1000 Numbered Copies
ISBN 978-0-9553087-4-1
£9.99

STILL AVAILABLE
Volume IV 'Concept Horror' [Limited copies - edition almost sold out]
Volume III 'Unknown Deleuze'
Volume II 'Speculative Realism'
Volume I 'Numerical Materialism'

For further details please see website.

[On the way to Fort Cochin, about which more later. Difficult to upload pictures so the photo-essays will just have to wait until I get back to Delhi...]

There's an advert on the plane, an Indian version of the Mastercard one which tells you that somethings are priceless and other things are expensive, but that it's okay because you can put the expensive things on credit. It's quite revealing: a group of young middle-aged Indian men meet up for dinner, they're all doing well, suits and money and aspiration made good. Perhaps they are in IT, or finance. The scene of them buying things and then eating in a five star restaurant is inter-cut with older sepia footage of them as poor youths, trying to ride a motorcycle, lying on dirty mattresses trying to get a broken tape-player to work, and so on. The problem is, the disparity between the images of their previous lives and the current one is too great – these are not just middle class kids becoming upper middle class, although this is what the advert attempts to show - these are poor kids becoming really rich ones. The juxtaposition is inadvertently jarring, something sticks in your mouth: both economic scenarios seem disgusting by contrast, both are excesses of one unsustainable kind or another, yet this is all to the good, this is to be welcomed. Indeed, the final image bears the slogan 'celebrating 25 years of Mastercard in India'.

Celebrate they well might: as extreme as the economic disparity between the techno-elites and the crippled men who beg at car windows may be, the sweet smell of aspiration is everywhere: in every advert for a new apartment block, in each boast for the speed of broadband connection on signs by the side of the road, in every school promising to teach you e-knowledge and business English. But why not? Although India will suffer as everyone will from the dire outcomes of all the combined Ponzi-schemes of the Anglo-American financial imaginary, they are buffered slightly by a more old-fashioned kind of economic morality that says don't borrow too much more than you can pay off, don't have too much personal debt, don't lend to people who won't be able to return the cash. Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger darkly invokes the figure of the India entrepreneur, all dynamism and techno-affirmation, but it's still relatively difficult in India to borrow money or employ people against the promise of financial pixie dust. Besides, if 70% of your population lives on 20 rupees a day, it's going to be hard to intricate them into a web of complicated mortgages and large personal debt.

We fly to Delhi on Jet airlines, a relatively new Indian company whose seats have décor, I imagine, like that of a sofa belonging to a classy Indian aunt. I watch Citizen Kane on the little screen. I ponder the term 'yellow journalism', and wonder if every trauma-memory corresponds to a single mysterious word. I rather hope so, as I like both words and jigsaw puzzles, especially if people are the latter and keys to their identity the former. Seven hours into the flight I realise that there is something profoundly strange and wrong about watching Hart to Hart and reading Axel Honneth whilst flying over Afghanistan. I drink more coffee, as I seem to do in ever increasing amounts.

New Delhi is becoming even newer, all building sites and construction signs. A huge metro extension is being built in time for the Commonwealth Games in 2010. All the notices for the building sites are hand-painted, as, in fact, are most of the signs we see on cars, autorickshaws, shops, policestations and religious buildings. We get a ride in a car named, of all things, Ambassador. It is based on an old Leyland, much like the Peykan in Iran, which is modelled after a Hillman Hunter. After the first corner we get a flat tire. As Wilson the driver fixes it we look around at the building site and see a man digging holes with a pick. I wonder how long it'll take him to dig deep enough to put a metro in it. The first evening we attend a book launch at the India International Centre, driving past the place where Gandhi was assassinated, now a giant memorial building. Someone tells me that in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, there's a giant white monkey who scares away the other monkeys. He is called an 'anti-monkey'. I am inordinately impressed by this, and hope that there are many 'anti-humans' who perform similar functions in the world.

Delhi is insanely confusing, with dozens of roundabouts subtly altering your direction every few minutes. All bearings are lost. By the side of the road there are people sleeping, rough shacks and fires of burning plastic. Men with gnarled limbs beg at the windows of the cars at the lights. Much like Iran, the traffic is an adrenaline-inducing combination of near-misses and a mysterious underlying flow. Horns are used constantly, but far more to indicate mere presence than as an act of aggression. Sometimes the two-carriage road appears to have five lanes as several different kinds of traffic jostle for position. I give up worrying.

We go to a dinner party. It takes us a very long time to find the house and we get lost several times. I work out why when I read The White Tiger, whose narrator asks:

'Who built Delhi in this crazy way? Which geniuses were responsible for making F Block come after A block and House Number 69 come after House number 12? Who was so busy partying and drinking English liquor and taking their Pomeranian dogs for walks and shampoos that they gave the roads names no one could remember?'

Our host is an Iranian woman married to an American Muslim convert, who is an expert on a particular kind of Mughal carving. Their house is filled with extraordinary works of art, much like many of the houses I saw in North Tehran. I speak to a man who works at the photo archive in Delhi, who specialises in painted images, portraits almost obliterated by oils and other materials, so that sometimes you can only tell it's a photograph by the odd untouched shoe or minor object. He tells me that in the past five years or so, India has come to recognise its own home-grown photographic talents, that young photographers have stopped trying to emulate foreign artists or producing images of India they think the outside world wants to see. Photography currently seems much more of a politically interesting artform than the others. Has the image become so corrupted that something meaningful - perhaps - has come out the other side?

[Currently in southern India marvelling at all the colours and goats and things, but thought that some of my readers might very well be interested in the following annoucement. Back soon! Merry Pigmas!]

New Metaphysics

Series editors: Graham Harman and Bruno Latour

The world is due for a resurgence of original speculative metaphysics. The New Metaphysics series aims to provide a safe house for such thinking amidst the demoralizing caution and prudence of professional academic philosophy. We do not aim to bridge the analytic-continental divide, since we are equally impatient with nail-filing analytic critique and the continental reverence for dusty textual monuments. We favor instead the spirit of the intellectual gambler, and wish to discover and promote authors who meet this description. Like an emergent recording company, what we seek are traces of a new metaphysical "sound" from any nation of the world. The editors are open to translations of neglected metaphysical classics, and will consider secondary works of especial force and daring. But our main interest is to stimulate the birth of disturbing masterpieces of twenty-first century philosophy. Please send project descriptions (not full manuscripts) to Graham Harman, graham@rinzai.com. Open Humanities Press is an international Open Access publishing collective. OHP was formed by scholars to overcome the current crisis in publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately available online through www.openhumanitiespress.org.

[Recently I spent a couple of days in Madrid as the guest of someone invited to speak at a public viva - 'an academic WAG' as that other diminutive wag, J, put it, with her usual edgy affection. Madrid was very cold, but overwhelmingly pleasant, as most other parts of Europe tend to be the moment you leave London.]

Terminal Four at Barajas Airport was designed by Antonio Lamela and Richard Rogers. It looks like a warped bath mat. On the ceiling.

But it does have some nifty seventies, um, vents, or something.

Madrid Metro has a TV! On the tracks!

Lovely Gothic net on this building.

It's a monument to the group-in-fusion! (It's actually to remember the 1977 massacre of Atocha when neo-fascists killed communist lawyers.)

An overload of signs sells knives and wine. A lovely combination. Most of the shops in Madrid are sweet shops. I have no idea why Madridians need so many sweets.

Possibly the best cinema I've ever seen. They were showing Buster Keaton shorts.


Hygiene and Disinfection. Always important.

There were lots of gaps in Madrid. Many of the gaps were covered in a strange kind of rusty fur.

He's a hangover Dr, apparently, who appears to work at a bar.

Madrid Plattenbau!

Do pairs of shoes on wires always indicate violence?

Try telling that to the market five minutes away, which seemed to sell only knives. And stripy socks.

A Beckettian pharmacy.





The best thing about Madrid was the Christmas decorations, which looked like ufos, planets and metal iceflakes.

Where some see crisis I see opportunity: nice to know Spain is doing its bit for the financial crisis. While we were there the Spanish bank Santander suffered major losses in the wake of the Madoff Ponzi scheme.


Perhaps whoever owns the t-shirt should do something about all the liquidacion.

Bird feathers at the Royal Palace swirled in the icy wind.

This is a monument to the Spanish rebellion against Napoleon's occupying troops. Mmm, rebellion.

This says something about philosophers living in huts. Perhaps it directs visitors to Todtnauberg, in a roundabout sort of way.

Be Different, the sign on the front of this 'Fetish Lounge' instructs us.

This is the Torre de Madrid. It was once the tallest building in Europe.

The Torre de Madrid and the covered Edificio Espana.

A beautifully designed manhole cover.

Another great cinema, sadly disused.

The Edificio Carrion.

From the other side. Is this streamline moderne, Owen?

If you put a euro in the pot, the cute woman in the middle opens her shell and shakes your hand.

Sala X. Another cinema. Another great sign. Madrid really gets typography.

The ghost of a shoeshine boy.



Clocks everywhere! A city needs its timepieces...how else to measure its speed?



Regeneration meets degradation. Regeneration sometimes wins, though it really shouldn't.

I like cities that remind themselves what they are by putting signs on their buildings.

Transformers....bank decor in disguise.

The 1928 Equitativa office.

While I somehow missed all the Cervantes monuments, I managed to locate the birthplace of Ortega Y Gasset, which was nice.

John Mullarkey sent me this photo by Mike Nelson. It features Deleuze in a hat teaching Meno's dog about geometry. Oh yes! John thinks that Badiou is wrong about animals; I think that Badiou is subtler about animality than some might think. In Ethics, Badiou makes it clear that there is no opposition between embodiment/finitude/animality and becoming a subject. The human animal is requis to be 'the immortal that he was not yet', it is the 'sole foundation', support, of the subject. In other words, it's not that you can simply treat the animal part with disdain, chuck yourself down escalators and hope nevertheless to be in a fit state to revolt, love or think about maths. To remain with the mind/body division and decide in favour of one is to concede far too much on either side. And how absurdly long has it taken me to realise this. Stupid philosophers, drunk on their own reason or stultified by their own incarnation! Do not give up on that part of yourself that you do not know, whether it be your occluded animal desire to persist, or your obscured capacity to think beyond the bodies and languages of the 'visible' world. Some minimal degree of self-preservation has got to come in handy at some point, doesn't it...the world has enough sad and hostile affects without soft flesh needing to internalise them any more than is strictly necessary. I suspect most people worked this out a very long time ago.

Sometimes, I have to say, I don't feel entirely unlike this pig, except a bit less jolly about it.

Still, for family reasons (although not my family, obviously, who stay in the fields whenever possible) I am going to India this weekend for the duration of the Christmas holiday. Blimey. I wonder if my mordant-ish photo-essays will work in this context. I suspect not, but will no doubt make some anyway. Horrah!

Um, by the way, thanks to everyone who has sent me an email lately, especially if I didn't get a chance to reply. The film/philosophy ones were particularly useful, and I'll put up my final course outline shortly so you can see what I did with the suggestions. To all the meat-world friends (some of whom are also virtual friends of course) I didn't get a chance to see...soon, soon! A thousand snouty kisses...

The Archbishop of Canterbury has surprisingly reignited the row today over the separation of church and state by saying it is "not the end of the world" if the established church were to disappear.

His comments are made in a wide-ranging interview, in which he also discloses that his favourite films are The Muppet Christmas Carol and Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev. From here.

Ads with a great reflection on the meaning of second-hand clothes, and the visceral and social barbs they latch on to the very derma of class-consciousness...other children's skin indeed...

As a child of the rural middle-class, that strangely tangential group, my upbringing, you won't be surprised to hear, was full of dirt and the myriad producers of dirt – mud, worms, snails, dead mice, dead snails, the mole splattered by my father with a spade, cows, horses, badgers, foxes, pheasants, quails, squirrels, earwigs, woodpeckers, donkeys, peacocks, spiders, rabbits, greenfly, wasps, silverfish, crows, bats, magpies, butterflies, pigeons, geese, ducks, cats, dogs and all the feathers, fur and muck that accompanies such a menagerie – and we didn't even live on a farm, though the three nearby more than made up for it, as did my father's love of educational vivisection performed on mice for the benefit of my brother and I's understanding of mammalian insides.

Possessing neither the pride that comes from having very little, nor the hygienic aspiration of the nouveau riche, my brother and I were permitted an unbridled interaction with nature. Indeed, my brother would frequently attempt to eat various bits of it, consuming mud, insects, plants and stones before moving onto the synthetic delights of lego men and paper. Pity my poor Ma as she raked through poo looking for that little plastic construction worker - but had he been wearing a hat? Did we find all the bits? When we made 'perfume' for her from crushed up petals and muddy water, did she laugh before dumping it on the flowerbeds? When my brother pushed me in the pond, how long did it take to pick every piece of pondweed out of my hair, to check that no baby newts had slithered into my pockets, that no pondsnails had affixed themselves to my trouser-cuffs? I remember nothing, no smartening up, no scrubbing, no brushing, no 'cleanliness is next to godliness' speeches, no disgust at the muck of others. Little wonder that I was terribly bad at my first job, cleaning offices at the weekend for £2.50 an hour, and that my boss would leave irate notes saying 'use more bleach!' and 'put more toilet duck in!' But why? It'll only get dirty again...better some kind of homeostatic moderate mess than the infinite anxiety of microscopic dust.



Although my parents' house is relatively clean, it suffers from frequent incursions. The wasps' nest that took months to destroy, one of its members crawling into my shoe and stinging my toe as I passed out from the shock of it, the squirrels that gnawed their way into the attack to chew up old books and vinyl sleeves, the petrified birds that sometimes spiraled down the chimney, bashing their heads on the panes of the windows in a counter-productive bid for freedom. When my brother accidentally unleashed a cockroach infestation, the special traps with their sticky tape caught dozens of tiny insects, like an unfair industrial-strength spider's-web. Catching a greenfly in a plastic tube, I watched it die over a day or two, its colour slowly draining away as it fluttered, helpless, on the windowsill. My father was sometimes called upon to treat local animals that the vet couldn't hold down. Sedated dogs shared the chair with their owners, and I got to keep the teeth from such operations, adding them to my collection of sheep vertebrae, rabbit bones and my prize dessicated bat that we found pinioned to to the back of the boiler. Whatever didn't dry off for mildly macabre storage could be left out for the owls, including the poor guinea pigs that had spent their lives eating our vegetable scraps and each others' ears.

As for clothes, well, who cared? I've written before of the closed universe of the countryside, and of a world without commerce – whatever was in the house was all that there was, whether it be my mother's John Updike novels or my father's Fairport Convention records. Sometimes second-hand things would turn up, but far less out of poverty than out of a inward-looking village ecology – your child would fit these now, my second child would fit the things your eldest has just grown out of. I remember once, unusually, weeping over the loss of green coat given to a younger girl after I had outgrown it, seeing it daily in the playground with its small frog patch. How small, how silly children are.

Unlike the young Ads' physical repugnance at the grime of others, any distinction between dirt and cleanliness seemed entirely absent in my youth, the stench of slurry mingling all too cyclically with the burning of leaves or the compost mouldering in the copse. I never once remember my parents telling my brother or I to clean ourselves up or ever forcibly doing so. In retrospect, we must have been rather dirty children, and it was often far too cold to take a bath. Perhaps there should have been some kind of rebellion at a later stage, some sort of adolescent disdain for childish outdoorsiness or hypochondriac abhorrence of germs and bugs, but it never really happened. I did indeed take a dislike to nature, predicated on its lack of words or novelty, as if that was somehow its fault, but if anything, I have come to like a certain kind of dirt even more than before. I revel in the idea that hotel sheets are at once both the most slept in and the apparently cleanest things in the world, that the vintage dresses I wear were once worn by someone else, that the second-hand books I buy contain the strange hairs of earlier readers (which once caused me to speculate on the possibility of cloning dead thinkers Jurassic-Park-style from the eyelashes and curls caught in the seams of their libraries).

The Polish story that Ads cites – that 'confident enough in their ability to buy new clothes that they at last have taken to wearing old ones' – does indeed indicate something altogether interesting and historically specific about a civilisation's attitude towards the detritus of its own past. Does the American infatuation with newness in part reveal its desire to shuffle off its old ties with dusty, dirty England, and with its poorly-washed women? Think of Hugh Hefner's claim that 'the Playboy girl has no lace, no underwear, she is naked, well-washed with soap and water, and she is happy'. Would she be content eating worms? I somehow doubt it.

Helen DeWitt with an interesting addendum to the Massimo de Angelis and David Harvie paper I linked to recently.

'...the fact is, the instructor, no matter how brilliant, cannot specify what the learning outcomes of the course should be, because it is not in his or her power to assert that measuring up to his or her understanding of what is the case is the best outcome for the course.'

Absolutely true, this (not to mention the uncomfortably unclear tautology of 'aims and objectives' which DeWitt also highlights) - there is something both wearying and impossible about churning out endless 'aims and outcomes' for courses, as if writing prescriptions for the ether. Do students in week 12 go back to the list and check them off? Do they feel cheated if they feel they haven't achieved such-and-such an aim? I've never once seen or heard about this happening. Who are they for? Some benchmark big other, no doubt, whose opaque desires the external validation committee must internalise when pronouncing on the continued survival of the degree programme...

Meetings oscillate wildly between boundless enthusiasm for new projects and total despair - collaborations! (could we not please think of another word? It's very difficult not to think of French Nazis) interdisciplinarity! (like people from different subjects smacking each other on the arse with a paddle) international recognition! (like the world looking in a mirror...aargh! The face of Hegel!). This for a while then the 'but staffing issues...funding...' claw of cynical realism starts its inevitable throttling...

Although it currently looks like a good idea to be a public servant of one kind or another (as the spivs in shiny shoes run off to teacher training college), it won't be long before the financial crisis hits universities hard (funny how the 'trickle-down' is so much more effective when it's the redistribution of loss). Small departments are in big trouble. Any good will extended towards the future ('give us five years to prove how good we could be!') will be retracted in the name of short-term savings. Informed once again the other day that our department was not in the strongest position because we had no 'stars', it was hard not to imagine senior management pitting small programmes against one another in a kind of X-factor head-to-head (But she once had a piece in the Guardian! But he appeared on Newsnight! Isn't he friends with Martin Amis? Doesn't she have contacts in the city?).

The management solution, of course, is to cut the time allowed for research (while at the same time push for constant publication) and demand cuts in teaching ('why can't you run seminars with 20?') in favour of the churning out of grant applications. Sod the students! Once they're here we've got their money, who cares if they repeatedly tell us they want more teaching and more seminars and more intellectual engagement? And PhD students! Get lots of them! They bring in tons of cash! Too bad you don't have enough time to write anything on a topic that someone might want to come and work with you on.

Dominic has the final word:

Zizek is a raving theory-fiend who spends his spare time building models of concentration camps out of matchsticks, and populating them with figurines of characters from Hitchcock movies. His publications have a sinister, mesmerising power which enables them to turn otherwise decent people into fanatical communists, slavering with blood-lust and restlessly prowling the halls of academia in the vain hoping of finding some kulaks they can liquidate. Also, he talks very quickly in a faintly humorous Eastern European accent, and our informants in the former Yugoslav Republic tell us that he was personally responsible for everything unpleasant that has ever happened in that otherwise moderate and convivial region. His beard should be burned and his books shaved, and his legions of sycophants should be given Cognitive Behavioural Therapy until they realise it's time to grow up and get proper jobs.

This is a 100% reliable summary, and you now do not need to read anything by Zizek, ever.

On the way to work I see this advert. Just as well I recently finished my book on women, work and the utter evil of chocolatey-feminism in time for next year's festive season!

Janice Turner writes a non-dim piece about the context for recent protests against 'Miss University London', a heavily-corporate-sponsored beauty contest which apparently seeks not only 'external beauty' but 'the quality of character with which people carry out their lives', according to their website. Far from seeing this little claim as a piece of politically correct flimflam designed to placate those who would otherwise cry 'objectification!', we should believe them, as they are absolutely right. 'Character' and looks can no longer be opposed, for there is no longer any inner dimension to speak of, such that one could be 'beautiful on the inside'. Perhaps one is still allowed to be good looking and dumb, for appearances can usually suffice, but certainly not the other way around. Why is this?

Clearly, anything you have on your side, whether you’ve worked/studied/paid for it or not, is part of your job-seeking arsenal. Far from being something to keep in reserve, or to be relevant only to those on close terms, manner and appearance are all. This is not simply a matter of 'looking smart' for work, but rather of accepting a situation in which all comportment counts, up to and including one’s most basic subjective and physical attitudes. The University beauty pageant girls do indeed know 'their precise market worth, are savvily aware of their assets and oversee them like hedge fund managers' as Turner puts it. And whether those 'assets' are educational or mammary, one must work them as best one can! In a bear (bare?) market, every smile, every swish of carefully tamed hair must be invested wisely!

As the accountancy undergraduate who was named as Miss London School of Economics says "I believe that we are post-feminism." Mmmm...post-feminism...smells like shampoo...

Choosing to be ugly, to remain ugly, to refuse to dress up or comb one's hair or shave one's legs is perhaps less a statement of sexual identity these days than a kind of sartorial fuck you to the perky world of work. Don't you know that there's no excuse, young lady? Haven't you been watching all those make-over programmes? Have your poo prodded, your arse poked, your hair styled, your old wardrobe incinerated, your confidence lightly roasted in the oven of CBT and get out there, girl! Work it, baby!