Pierre Bourdieu writes of the mason who forewent the ritual meal that was supposed to be eaten in the mason’s honour after he had constructed a house. He asked for 200 francs in exchange for the meal in addition to the 1,000 francs for the construction itself. What is wrong with that? The event of the meal – the taste of the food, the animals killed to supply that food, the friendships which are formed and reaffirmed over that meal, conversation and conviviality - is nonrepeatable. Money cannot measure it; and thus, prior to economics, there are relationships of trust and honour.
But then isn’t money, too, a form of trust? – Isn’t it an expression of the honour of the state which issues currency? But money overflows the state (this is why Aristotle distrusts it) and dissolves everything; eventually, it is unbound from any particular issuing authority; it disappears into the ebb and flow of international finance. To place our trust in money is to wager the future, our future, the future of the world insofar as finance works beyond our operation.
What is the price of thought? How can we assign a price to thought? We already know that books are written by professors for other professors, that the research ‘star’ no longer teaches and the real work of the university is delegated to part-timers, contractual labourers (people like me whose labour can be bought much more cheaply than that of the 'star'). But then what is thought worth if it travels only from coterie to coterie? And what does it mean that its credentials as research is judged by those same coteries?
The academic 'star' system circulates. Those on teaching contracts revolve around the 'stars' like little planets (they are employed when they are on research leave). Thought happens nonetheless in the interstices of academia, away from the business of securing or demolishing reputations, away from the hustle-bustle of the all-star conference.
What is the price of thought? Soon in the UK it will be the students who will contribute the greater part of university revenue. They pay for us - but what do we repay them?
In a ritual, a gift is given: the taste of the meal, the food itself for which animals were sacrificed, ties of accord and friendship. Here is an interval in the time of work, a brief festival in which what matters is a gift, a sacrifice. And in the lecture hall? Who lingers in their teaching? Who knows the name of their students? I think of the intimacy of an encounter in which the teacher gives something of himself – is given, wagered, in a meeting which catches him, too, by surprise and through which he receives a gift in turn, that is, the gift of the presence of the student, this student, as more than a countable body from whom work is expected. This is not, above all, a reciprocity, an economic exchange, but a redoubled giving in which the matter of the world is retrieved from disappearance – your body, mine, your gestures and the timbre of your voice, its grain and the idiom of my gestures; the way you laugh and joke and move through the world and the way I move, the way you set me in motion.
This is not a face to face encounter. To teach in the subject I teach is to lead the student through books. Grace: to read together, to give oneself over to reading, where no one is the master of the book, and the teacher is just the one who safeguards the book's inexhaustibility. The teacher, standing guard over the book, allows it to resonate in the experience of each reader.
Thus the lecture room can become a utopian space, in which each greets the other before any information is exchanged - a welcoming, an acknowledgment, in view of the unknown that is to be thought even as it shatters the image of thinking. Is it a matter of a kind of communion? A sharing? Neither, unless one can affirm with these words an experience of what is welcomed differently by each of us as turns us aside from ourselves. Each of us changed. Thus the class might find its ritual and perhaps its religion and hence the great chance by which it outbids monetary value. This is how each of us, teachers, students, can take our place as thinkers, laughing, chattering but always in view of the thinking that changes us, before we are anything else. As thinkers? As the ones who are turned by philosophy what matters most. As thinkers, then, drawn to one another by way of the redirection of our attention.