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.

据称，中间的孩子比长子更冷静，因为他们进入第二幕——即使从某种意义上说第二幕——已经上演了一段时间的戏剧。他们假设舞台上的其他人都知道他们的台词和提示。许多创始企业依赖于共同的信心，即参与其中的其他人知道他们为什么在那里以及他们在做什么，即使你不知道。结果往往是每个人都假设一直以来每个人都可以访问脚本。我自己来到伦敦财团的现场也遵循了这一传统。自1998年联盟成立以来一直担任学术总监的Paul Hirst曾计划在2004年退休，却在一年前突然离世。我提前一年被任命为学术主任来研究他，但发现自己在 2003 年 10 月担任了这个角色。

我不记得联盟曾经发布过任何类似任务声明的东西，尽管对于学术项目应该花时间做这件事的想法肯定会有共同的蔑视。然而，参与其活动的许多人的言谈举止似乎实际上对联盟的目的有着共同的理解和承诺。但是，尽管财团有很多传教士的作用，但我从来不相信有任何东西可以合理地充当任务控制，或者确实充当汤姆少校。

人们常说，联合会反对本应在人文学科中占据主导地位的相对主义，当我有一次说出口时，我认为我会在peine forte et dure 之下，将自己描述为一个相对主义者，这是类似于承认自己喝了自己的洗澡水，我想相对主义在某些人看来一定很相似。但是联盟的反相对主义是一种意志而非既定原则（我想我能，我知道我能），因为没有人可能同意，更不用说阐明，非相对和不可修改的真理和价值的基础是什么应该是，除了价值本身的谈判和表达之外，奇怪的是，这或多或少是相对主义者的想法，或者是我的犯罪倾向的相对主义者。

伦敦财团坚持的另一件事是跨学科，有点奇怪地与这种抽象的反相对主义相结合。我曾经听过 Mark Cousins 解释（在一个派对上，摇摆不定，在这个派对上，联盟的许多信条往往被阐明）我们这种跨学科性意味着什么，它一直伴随着我，作为对联盟主张的长期谴责跨学科现在已经成为整个学术界冷酷和灰色的正统。我开始认为，促进跨学科实际上已经成为一种主题控制的方法，确保每个人都及时行进到相同的曲调，用相同的语言演唱。自从跨学科成为他们的黄金标准以来，人文学科的方法和观点从未如此统一过？相比之下，马克宣称跨学科不是宗教信仰的问题，因为跨学科的要点不是原则上的跨学科，也不是在任何可能的情况下。取而代之的是，跨学科是一个令人不安的选择，迫使任何学者感到渴望对一个给定的主题更加认真，这必然需要超过一个学科的资源，至少需要一个声称拥有所有权的学科的资源。跨学科就是不要对所有那些对你关注的主题有有趣看法的人视而不见，只要你愿意去发现。取而代之的是，跨学科是一个令人不安的选择，迫使任何学者感到渴望对一个给定的主题更加认真，这必然需要超过一个学科的资源，至少需要一个声称拥有所有权的学科的资源。跨学科就是不要对所有那些对你关注的主题有有趣看法的人视而不见，只要你愿意去发现。取而代之的是，跨学科是一个令人不安的选择，迫使任何学者感到渴望对一个给定的主题更加认真，这必然需要超过一个学科的资源，至少需要一个声称拥有所有权的学科的资源。跨学科就是不要对所有那些对你关注的主题有有趣看法的人视而不见，只要你愿意去发现。

正因为如此，财团最好的，也是最反常的，最有原则的不是它的原则，而是它的做法。相当令人惊讶，并且完全逆潮流而动，当时和现在，该联合会开始作为博士生的项目生活，他们需要遵循教授课程，每学期两门，为期六周。在北美的研究生院，教学课程的设计目的是让那些经常学习各种各样的本科课程的学生成为哲学、生物学或艺术史的学术行会成员，就像它可能的那样。研究生必须学习这么多年的这些课程，以至于那些最终提交 Paul Hirst 所说的博士论文“绑定蓝色怪物”的人都太老了，再也没有逃跑的念头。London Consortium 的课程为期六周——足够长，可以给人一种上瘾的可能性，但又不会长到足以冒完全依赖的痛苦的风险——并且故意在这类学生的道路上设置有趣的障碍来自英国大学，他们已完成单项荣誉学士学位，并认为自己已准备好完全接受他们选择的学术教会。只是在博士课程已经运行了几年之后，并且为了响应英国资助机构的要求，博士资助的申请人应该进行“研究准备”硕士课程，Consortium MA 才被逆向工程从博士课程。从那以后，我曾多次推荐过这种颠倒的进行方式，但自然是徒劳的。

几乎比这些课程的教学更令人兴奋的是它们的设计方式。他们总是合作教学，虽然你通常必须选择你的教学伙伴，但有时它更像是 Scrubs 中的狱友，或者歌曲中医院病床的偶然礼遇（'我有一个朋友躺在对面我/我没有选择他，他也没有选择我'）。我们集体下定决心，上帝知道，因为像往常一样，我们可能有不同的信念，为什么我们认为它很重要，总是在三年后停止这些课程，就像关于维多利亚时代洗澡频率的古老笑话一样，是否我们是否需要。更重要的是，课程没有优雅地逐步进出，一次一两个，这本来是合理和有效的，

这个过程需要每三年召开一次课程开发会议，在一个充满烟雾的房间里运行几天，这比我们预防时代的当前居民所能​​想象的要多。布莱希特认为允许剧院里的观众抽烟会鼓励批判性反省，但联合课程开发会议的龙气吸气和呼气往往会产生hashshashin的激情强度. 将针对各种主题的六周课程提出数十种推介，其中大多数会因为其可预测性、合理性或胆小而被大喊大叫或嘲笑以蔑视。最终，将在冒烟的废墟中留下足够直立的四个课程，以供选择在接下来的三年中运行。在我成为学术主任之前的学徒岁月里，我的工作是通过伯克贝克学院专门负责质量保证的被鄙视的大学委员会来指导这些课程。我不记得是否是在这个委员会上反对名为“狗屎与文明”的课程，理由是它可能会激怒每日邮报，但我已经习惯于告诉人们保罗·赫斯特的酸甜苦辣现在放弃“The Ordure of Things”的替代方案。

其中一些课程今天可能会给读者留下深刻印象，因为他们可能不像当时那样具有煽动性，但最好认为这是因为他们早于他们的时代而不是完全脱离时代。我们总是尝试开设一门专门针对重要文本的细读课程，因为它要求阅读，因此对您有好处。之所以选择斯多葛主义课程，恰恰是因为这种主题是任何新生都不可能了解的。这些课程之所以古怪，恰恰是因为它们在一个标榜自己与当下痴迷的文化研究有关的项目中显得如此古老（该联盟的一个盲点是它对流行文化话题的强烈厌恶，尽管我经常尝试潜入）。其他课程提供了一些间接的方式来解决那些已经开始显得令人厌烦和正确的问题。在寒冷课程中，通过极地探险、冰淇淋和滑雪的历史分析了全球变暖。在天启的想象完全成为主流文化常规的一部分之前 20 年，汤姆·麦卡锡 (Tom McCarthy) 和奥拉·萨茨 (Aura Satz) 出色地开设了关于灾难的课程，模仿了官僚调查委员会。

我自己的习惯是，除了显然是为了钱，从不写关于具有既定课程证书的主题的文章，但总是试图想象人们还必须想象一些新的关注方式的研究主题，属于这种习惯这些课程建议。这也鼓励了我自己试图在学生和同事中引起的卡罗尔之痒，试图去思考不可能的事情——荣耀，可能是，或者不可理解的——去思考。我希望这绝不是胡说八道的业余爱好者的通行证，因为很明显，某些形式的跨学科探究会让你在不熟悉的学术历史和习语中像西扎一样苦苦思索。这种处理方式的首要原则可能只是“注意”。

伦敦财团的另一个显着特征，在某些方面具有积极的乌托邦特征，是它组建的师资队伍。早期，我们的假设是合作机构将提供我们力求提供给学生的更广泛的学科和实践专业知识。事实证明，画廊和博物馆的策展人员并没有真正的能力或可用性来提供我们旨在提供的那种监督。因此，从 2000 年左右开始，我们开始招募其他人加入我们的学院，有时他们来自其他学术机构，尽管我们强烈偏好可能被称为不结盟的学者，比如 Patrick Wright、Denise Riley、Aura Satz , Marina Warner 和 Anthony Julius, 谁在没有在学术机构领薪水的情况下设法维持了学术生涯。我们没有足够的资源支付给他们全额工资，但我们提供的课程教学和论文指导费用足以创建皇家学会早期被称为隐形学院的学院，该学院具有独特的多样性和区别。外部导师加强了这一点：我们向学生做出大胆承诺，只要他们同意，他们可以聘请世界上任何一位导师，而且他们经常这样做，每年收取每位学生 1,000 英镑的固定费用。奇怪的是，这与伯克贝克学院的历史吻合得很好，当伦敦力学研究所的时候，它在议会中引起了抱怨，因为它的部门倾向于像独立的共和国一样行事，所以，如果一群学生决定他们需要一位阿拉姆语教授，他们就会出去为自己聘请一位。伦敦财团开发的模型具有足够的吸引力和合理性，可以刺激其他地方的平行企业，以悉尼财团的形式，西悉尼大学写作与社会研究中心与其他文化机构的合作，以及里斯本财团，正如我所写，这两者仍在运作。

但伦敦财团最显着的特点是，正是学生们——他们的好奇心、要求，有时还有挫败感——教会了我们伦敦财团的真正目的和可能的目的。例如，我们的学生在 1990 年代和 2000 年代意识到策展所代表的一切将变得多么重要。没有他们积极和探究的领导，我们不可能向学生提供我们所做的事情。我认为，与大多数大学相比，我们的学生中有一小部分希望我们的硕士或博士学位成为进入学术生活的保证途径，这是他们对风险的共同偏好的标志，也是他们所追求的项目的原因与其他大学院系不同，令人耳目一新。到底，事实上，我们有相当多的校友在学术生活的某些领域找到了工作。其他人是各种各样的作家、艺术家、评论家和理论家。大多数人都在以某种方式教导他人。

一个似乎如此反常地倾向于为过早失败的事业辩护的计划现在应该冒着被忽视的风险，但同样令人忧郁。那些在 2012 年末期骚乱、骚乱和相互指责之后主持联合会临时停摆的人承诺，学生将在毕业前得到支持（他们是），并且该网站将保持可访问性（它不是）。自该日期以来，没有新的学生入学，停学已成为永久性的。也许最终关于财团的最好之处就是它是这样一个委员会解释的骆驼，尽管正如亚里士多德所知，嵌合体缺乏繁殖能力。根据金斯利艾米斯的说法，没有乐趣，为了在 Weston-super-Mare 的一家疗养院多呆几个月而放弃是值得的，该项目的毕业生也许可以安慰自己，该联盟从来没有存活足够长的时间，仅仅为了生存而成为其存在的意义。它并没有像其他更古老的机构那样缓慢地与自己的后代重合（“被遗忘，但并未消失”，正如特里·沃根在为巴里·克莱尔举行的晚宴上对巴里·克莱尔的称赞），它的过早停止提供了一个例子的咸味挑衅. 这是一个例子，我仍然看到它在校友的不同类型、不同方面的工作中表现出来。希望为这一期汇集的记录和回忆 它并没有像其他更古老的机构那样缓慢地与自己的后代重合（“被遗忘，但并未消失”，正如特里·沃根在为巴里·克莱尔举行的晚宴上对巴里·克莱尔的称赞），它的过早停止提供了一个例子的咸味挑衅. 这是一个例子，我仍然看到它在校友的不同类型、不同方面的工作中表现出来。希望为这一期汇集的记录和回忆 它并没有像其他更古老的机构那样缓慢地与自己的后代重合（“被遗忘，但并未消失”，正如特里·沃根在为巴里·克莱尔举行的晚宴上对巴里·克莱尔的称赞），它的过早停止提供了一个例子的咸味挑衅. 这是一个例子，我仍然看到它在校友的不同类型、不同方面的工作中表现出来。希望为这一期汇集的记录和回忆Critical Quarterly将帮助他们向他们保证，伦敦财团实际上并非完全是一场梦，他们自己就是证明，人类并没有完全丧失智慧说出它是什么梦。