AndrewGibson

Steve Connor in London 1979–2012

This is a brief, personal, perhaps rather idiosyncratic tribute to Steve,my long-timeLondonUniversity colleague and confederate. It’s basically a tale of threeepisodes and it’s shamelessly anecdotal. It is not an exercise in nostalgia. Thethree vignettes are no doubt rich in multiple and various historical andbiographical significances, and I invite you to supply them, and, as Beckettsays, provide your own aspirin. I’m not even sure of the date of the firstepisode. Given the other two dates in question, I would like to say 1986, in theinterests of symmetry, but I rather think 1985, or even 1984. For readers notfamiliar with the more or less recent history of the University of London, in1984–6 it was still a strongly federal institution. Since it was a federation, andwhat it federatedwere the different colleges, it had a federal Board of English.This was responsible for matters (as its administrators might have said)pertaining to the syllabus for and examinations inEnglishwithin the collegesof theuniversity. In otherwords, itwas a centralised systemwith a centralisingeffect. Some years ago, though he might not want to say the same thing now,Steve toldmehe regretted the passing of the Federal Board, and I felt and stillfeel more or less the same. But this is partly because of the extraordinarynumber of learned, articulate, sometimes amusing and eccentric specialistsin different spheres of English Studies that it brought together from acrossLondon in discussion, debate and intricate negotiation. The trouble was thatthis very system tended to make for conflict, paralysis and stagnation. Thebalancing of interests that were political rather than intellectual drasticallyblocked change or slowed it right down, with the result that the Londonsyllabus increasingly looked opulent but arthritic, notably in comparisonwiththe emergent radical English departments, like Sussex and Southampton.

Enter the lists a young Steve Connor. I think it would be right to say thatSteve, myself and one or two other younger intellectuals in London Englishfound the then state of affairs problematic, not least in that we knew thatEnglish elsewhere had been undergoing a formidable injection of ideas fromcontinental European philosophy and theory, was indeed, in some degree,involved in a process of Europeanisation. The London English syllabusincluded an optional course on the European novel and one on Europeandrama, but otherwise rolled on relentlessly through the history of English

literature, through the so-called major periods, within which long sequenceswere compulsory for students. At what for me was its greatest meeting, theFederal Board of Studies sat down, as it regularly did, to deliberate on itssyllabus. Renegade Connor seized his chance. I can offer only a miserableimitation of the panache and bravura with which he did so. The LondonEnglish syllabus, he declared,was like awashingmachine. So for instance youhadawashprogramme, theRenaissance, followedby rinse, theCivilWar, thenspin, the Age of Reason, and hey presto, one’s clean laundry emerged as theeighteenth century.Hence a newprogrammewith, at length, spin, the FrenchRevolution, and rinse, Romanticism, out of which, hey presto, appeared,shining whiter than white, the nineteenth century . . .

At this point, as in a forest after a thunderstorm, a hushmore appalled thangrave spread across the serried ranks of the Federal Board . . . except for thoseof us who burst into delighted laughter. London English would never be thesame again; indeed, but a few years later, the federal LondonEnglish syllabushad effectively become defunct. Now I might wistfully imagine presentingSteve andmyself as stalwart allies in thefight for themodernisation and evenpostmodernisation of London English; two little Malcolms in their struggleagainst the eunuchs, to misquote the title of David Halliwell’s now half-forgotten play. But the truth was, asmy vignette suggests, that I sat there likea squat, gobsmacked Sancho Panza, chewingmy turnip onmy donkey, whilstan extraordinary, lean Don Quixote tore down every windmill in sight,managing to make them all look small.

On to other subjects, fast forward: in 1999, I organised a year-long seriesof lectures at Senate House on the theme of ‘Materialisms’. Contributorsincluded IsobelArmstrong,AndrewBenjamin,ThomasDocherty,NickRoyle,Luce Irigaray, AlainBadiou,Drucilla Cornell, JonathanDollimore andSimonCritchley. If you add to that list the names of some invitees who expressedtheir support for the series but finally did not contribute (Rachel Bowlby,Robert Young, Jacqueline Rose, Geoff Bennington), and discount those whocame in from outside the UK, you have what seemed to me at the time toamount to an intellectual community, or at least a significant section of one.This community, however, certainly did not exactly consist in any sharedendeavour or set of positions. Insofar as one might hypothesise its existence,this was as a set of orientations, dispositions, identifications, and therefore aparticular configuration at a particular historical stage in the culture.

Steve gave a lecture in the series. I remember three principal aspects of it.Firstly, he declared that it was time for a decisive separation of literary andcultural theory and criticism from politics, the end of what I take to be thepost-1960sAlthusserian fantasy, so influential in theUSabove all, that theorycould in some sense be politics or stand in for politics, the model for ageneration whose politics thereafter never really tested itself beyond the

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campus. ‘When I do literature and theory’, Steve announced, ‘I do literatureand theory, andwhen I do politics, I do politics’. Secondly, hewas exuberantlyand charmingly derisive, as only Steve can be, about a discourse or discoursesthat had at length become a mantra or mantras, bogged down in the inertrepetition of terms like difference, alterity, hegemony, signifier and signifiedand,well, discourse. I could continue at great length.Thirdly, Steve announcedhis turn to cultural phenomenology.

Now I might wistfully imagine presenting Steve and myself as stalwartallies in the fight for a new materialism as opposed to a theoreticism thathaddeveloped abad case of elephantiasis, two littleMalcolms in their struggleagainst the eunuchs. But the truth was that I sat there like a squat,gobsmacked Don Quixote, chewing my turnip on my donkey, whilst anextraordinary, leanSanchoPanza toredowneverywindmill in sight,managingtomake themall look small. (Think of this as a tiny homage to the importanceof the question of repetition and difference in the work of Steve Connor.)There was, I now think, a sense in which Steve had understood the possiblesignificance of a series of materialisms in 1999 as drawing a certain kind ofline under a phase of British intellectual life much better than I had. Ifmaterialism challenged a heady abstraction grown conventional, it alsochallenged the ground of my imagined community. Indeed, therewas a sensein which that imagined community itself came undone during the seriesitself. For as things transpired, almost every materialism proposed differedmore or less drastically from the others. Materialism immaterialised, as itwere, to use another Beckettian word, as it would not have done twenty oreven ten years previously. In keeping with that, within five years – though themajor determinants were surely at least as much historical and politicalas intellectual – my imagined community had dissipated or becomeunimaginable, itsmembers spiralling out into posts in theUS or elsewhere inthe world, into research chairs or research-only appointments, earlyretirement or indeed the London Consortium. And in this fashion worldsvanish.

Given this atomisation of materialism itself, it was perhaps unlikely that Iwould follow Steve into cultural phenomenology, and I didn’t. But therewereat least twoother if minor reasons. Thefirst is not justminor but trivial: I havea rather awkward relationshipwithobjects. It beginsbadlywith screw tops andrecalcitrant flaps at the fridge door in the morning, and ends in late eveningwith toothpaste tubes and the threat of acrimonious divorce. But the secondreason involves Steve and is personal.When I gavemy inaugural professoriallecture, again, in 1999, Steve very kindly agreed to give the concluding address,and this he did generously, brilliantly and wisely. But what I remember mostwas his arrival in my office. There I was, shivering in awe and trepidation atthe magnitude of the occasion, and Steve walked in . . . and at once started

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talking aboutmy bags.He did this so avidly that I thought hemight eat them.I gazed at Steve. I gazed at my bags. They were nondescript brown paperbags. They contained twenty years of lecture notes. Yet Steve continued to talkabout my bags, and how they might be placed in a greater world of bagdom,all the way to the lecture hall. What was at stake, here, I wondered? Was Imyself like one of my bags, an undistinguished object stuffed with inchoatemiscellanea? This, I submit, was the cultural-phenomenological Ur-traumapar excellence.

But on to other things, fast forward. Early in 2012, I hear that Steve is goingto Cambridge. I am delighted for Steve, think it will be good for Cambridge,good for him too. But at the same time I experience thenews as something likethe objective end of Bloomsbury. This of course is a thoroughly dubiousconcept. In thefirst instance, though I sometimeswrite as though the oppositewere the case, I don’t really have a clue as to what the ‘objective end’ ofanything is. Secondly, there have of course been many Bloomsburys. TheBloomsbury of the Bloomsbury group is not that known to Graham Greenein the late 1930s,which is not that overshadowedbyFitzrovia in the late 1940s,which in turn is not that dominated by the expanding, modernising, late-imperial university from the 1950s to the 1970s,which is not that of the largelypost-imperial university which I supposewasmine and Steve’s, and certainlynot the same as theworld of today’s emergent, privatisedBloomsbury. All thesame: Steve and I have seen less of each other over the past ten years, sincehis turn to cultural phenomenology and the Consortium. I think we haveprobably mainly run into each other when our paths have crossed as wewalked in opposite directions through Russell Square. But that has seemedreassuring, in a way, because my Steve Connor is integrally a part of myBloomsbury, and his presence in it, if only occasional, underwrote itscontinuing existence.With his going, it dies too.

Of course, it has in fact been dying since 1999 or thereabouts. In 1999, Ithrewmy 50th birthday party in the University Tavern on Store Street. Stevecame, treatingmymild-mannered, civil servant brother, a very goodman butno intellectual, to an extraordinary disquisition on Bazalgette and theVictorian sewer system.Mybrotherwas later to remark that, because Iwas theonly London academic he knew, he’d always thought we talked shit, but nowhe’d listened to Steve, he knew someof us could also talk shitwith genius. Butwhat Iwant to pause on is the location. In the 1970s and 1980s, theUniversityTavern was a great haunt of London academics and students alike. Many ofus drank there. Just three or four years aftermyparty, however, it was startingto become what it is now, the new College Arms, largely catering to a newbranch of the University of Law, with nary a serious academic to be foundthere. Enter the newBloomsbury. Steve is leaving, and Imyself will be less incirculation that I once was.

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Now the moral of my tale may seem obvious. Wherever Steve makes aparticularly scintillating showing, things collapse or come apart. But actuallyI have a quite different image in mind. I don’t know if any of you have donethis, but when I was a young parent we took our two beautiful, blonde littleboys to the Italian coast one summer. (Sorry about the Aryan touch, but theyclearly didn’t get it from me, and anyway, they were beautiful.) Now I amreliably told that blonde children of the north are an object of hypnoticfascination to Italians, because they love children but don’t produce blondeones. So every daywewent down to the beachwewere surrounded by a groupof adoring young Italianwindsurfers. This turned out to be a boon, since theywould play lovingly with the children at the water’s edge all day and I couldput my knotted handkerchief on my head, drink my beer and improve mysunburn. But every now and again, one of these boys and girls would get up,hoist awindsurfingboard from the tide, and suddenly swoopup in an ineffablygraceful curve, breaking through the breakingwaves, riding their crests, thenshooting out on a great trajectory into the blue and the sunlight. I would lookon with a kind of stunned admiration; and that’s how I think of Steve.

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