Maths is key to grasp Being. Two and two is four. The symbol of an empty set is a barred circle. Nevertheless, the Real of intellectual life is plain and square. I have met Paul Taylor four times so far. Four times he’s quoted Henry Kissinger saying “academics are so bitchy because the stakes are so small”, another variant being “academic politics are so bitter because the stakes are so low”. True. But everybody knows Kissinger was a powerfully cynical and corrupt politician.

In the key note speech officially opening this (now ending) academic year, another politician said something to the contrary before a senior scholarly audience: no researcher unprepared to take risks should be allowed to hold a position in academia. As I didn’t witness the talk I don’t know if what followed was background concurring murmur or extended self-congratulatory applause. What I know is that had I watched it on a video recording no amount of canned laughter would have been long and loud enough to compete with my own inner sniggering smiley battalion’s. In any case, the fact that this speech took place in the Basque university and was given by the still active but so honestly powerless president of the Basque regional (sub)set up is totally irrelevant. The order of merry oratory fantasy is more universal than that and, as far as we are specifically concerned, also cuts across many fields within the territory of the humanities.

Consider, for instance, the post-what-have-you cultural studies cartography refashioned and redesigned over and over again over the last thirty to forty years or so. More-than-modern Badiou disagrees with wild periodisations. For him there are two main moments in modernity: the classical period (say from Renaissance humanism to enlightened rationalism) and the romantic period to which we still belong. The whole deconstructive mode would fit perfectly the romantic mood (emphasis on differe/ance and diversity, ethical othering…).

Within the context of cultural studies, the post-war group of communist historians and New Left heterodoxy preceded in Britain the study of post-Marxist multiple agency. The post-structuralist politics of subjectivity, gender/sexuality and race/ethnicity were now to deny centrality to any collective idea of class-consciousness. Simultaneously, postmodernism became a keyword as cultural studies travelled overseas from Birmingham to Illinois. Almost everywhere ever since, post-industrial or post national or even afterwards post-feminist and post-diasporic studies have postponed any meaningful engagement with old but always pressing political and social questions, deemed too unfashionable and burdensome. It was always better postulating the advantage of dealing with everything new, (from the new global technoscapes of popular (sub)cultures on to the new emergence of hybrid, fluid, nomadic and transoceanic identity politics or the new discourses, say for the sake of the argument, of post-colonial resistance against phalogocentric authority). This, in turn, has also paid good dividends, namely widespread institutionalisation and recognition within the new post/inter/trans-disciplinary atmosphere that has impregnated the humanities and language departments.

Without risking a hasty overstatement poststructuralist and postcolonial studies have become now a new canon. However, the very discursive radicalism nurtured conceals a rather more modest political agenda. Or does anybody believe it is somehow possible to develop a consistent political and cultural critique on the airy weight of some, literally, empty signifiers? Please, insert the word ‘empowerment’ don’t forget to mention ‘subversion’ and ‘carnivalesque reversal’, challenge eurocentric binary oppositions, somewhere along the line use notions such as dystopic, nomadic, and de-essentialise… and for the title of your final dissertation emulate the legendary British working classes traditional dish by coming with something like “place, space and gaze of …”

Ok. I’m done with the bitter bitch bit. After all I still believe in the nutritional value of fish & chips (and mushy peas). But what is there left to raise the stakes? Agreed: what were at the time pioneering narratives opening up powerfully destabilising research paradigms have become now dull languages of ‘resistance’. Within the context of a successful neoliberal renormalization from above of the radical cultural studies agenda that once captivated me, the case clearly is that I vastly contribute to support what I nominally ‘challenge’ and ‘contest’ from below without really ‘disrupting’ or ‘subverting’ anything at all. In this respect it seems to me that while the edge on which my intellectual interventions stand increasingly narrows under my feet, the void of nothingness itself widens to abysmal proportions.

Yet it is in this precise juncture where everything invites political suicide that no-nonsense old-timers à la Badiou come to the rescue. Hold it there! Never take words in their apparent plain meaning. On the edge of the void is not a bad place to be. Not only does it keep you sharp but it also nominates a situation in which the very possibility of what’s to come cannot be anticipated. As far as you know you could become a real subject who is sitting right in the thick of a potential event the dimensions of which are unpredictable.

So here we come full circle again. No conservative politician, Basque or otherwise, should patronise academics by urging them to take risks. Why don’t they themselves? Here I give them some tips. Historically, in pre-post political times, successful revolutions proper did not take place in university campuses but outside old regime prison walls, in battleships, factories, mountains and the streets. Moreover, the usual aftermath was that a fair amount of heads would roll (certainly not spliffs) and summary executions were also the norm. Granted, there is ample archival and documentary evidence of student revolts, which are, nevertheless, notorious for their resounding failures. Hence students should be entitled to the best education available, devoid of all wishful rhetorics and, last but not least, Paul Taylor’s arithmetics of academic life were never meant to be as squarely dismissive as it might have appeared at first. He hasn’t expent twenty years in libraries, he would say, to then feel embarrassed about it. Therefore, if you are embarrassed about your privileged position or something then you are still in time. I concede, you are already late for Nepal but I’m pretty sure there are many other places in the world where you can dirty your hands.

In the mean time learn, learn and learn! If you want peace of mind prepare for a war of words.