I was sitting peacefully in Raffles yesterday, reading Wittgenstein's Nephew (Thomas Bernhard), when two people sat down next to me. Mr O started to talk. His voice could only be described as the voice of someone who knows.
"Thousand Plateaus is a work of...[inaudible]...,"
He then tried to address his interlocutor's concern about the contents page:
"...transversality of concepts, you see..."
The hapless student tried to drag the discussion on to familiar territory - a novel he'd lately read involving 'virtual-something'. Big mistake, friend.
Mr O swept aside this impoverishment with a short speech about the difference between the possible and the virtual (I hope this is right - I am writing from memory, and my shameful ignorance isn't helping.)
The momentum built up during three minutes of continuous talking made him almost unstoppable:
"...Deleuze and Guattari™ are only interested in the aesthetics of composition..."
He didn't say "...my dear boy," but he could have.
Mr O has adopted the attitude of the expert. He has reached that point in his intellectual development where he is permitted to drop the hesitancy, and the tentative sounding remarks. He stops thinking for himself, but now has a duty to think for others. His role is pedagogical.
I took an immediate dislike to him.
No comments:
Post a Comment