‘I know that,’ said Geena, stung that he thought she didn’t. ‘We got that in Reflexivity 101 – the system needs critique and simultaneously recuperates it.’
‘You understand how,’ said Ahmed, resettling his glasses on the bridge of his nose, ‘but you don’t understand why.’
‘No,’ said Geena. ‘I don’t.’
‘And because of that, you don’t understand what happened to you last night.’
Geena nodded. ‘Yes, but – I don’t see the connection.’
She had her hands clasped in front of her, partly, as before, to stop the shakes and partly because she was so eager to know the truth that she felt she was almost praying.
‘It’s banal,’ Ahmed said. ‘“Delay is the essence of the period”, as Ticktin said.’ He shrugged. ‘Sorry. It’s as simple as that.’
Geena shook her head. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘The global system has reached the stage where the whole show can only be kept on the road consciously. And for that it needs all the critique it can get. On this side the critique has a left-wing coloration: Marxist, feminist, ecological, et cetera. On the other side it tends to be right-wing: free-market, libertarian, Hayek bloody Hayek. Either way, the critique holds each variant of the state-capitalist system to its own promises, and on both sides it is kept going, quite consciously, because the alternative is too disturbing to contemplate.’
‘The Naxals? But you said they weren’t—’
‘“Any kind of alternative, but rather an extreme form of the destructive tendencies of the global system itself”, yes, thank you, Geena, so I did.’
‘What alternative, then?’
‘The one that’s implicit in the system itself.’
‘Oh.’ Geena felt disappointed. ‘Socialism. Like anybody would ever want that.’
‘Well, indeed,’ said Ahmed, in a wry tone. ‘It would be so terrible that the most important task in politics has become preventing people from realising that they’re already almost there. That train has left the station. We’ve already crossed the border. State-capitalism can flip over – or rather, can be flipped over, overturned – into socialism in the blink of an eye, the moment people become conscious of the possibility. The point is to prevent them becoming conscious. Both sides already have relative abundance, universal education, extensive planning, formal democracy. Imagine the horror if people got it into their heads to put all these together for the purposes of, let’s say, liberty, equality, fraternity!’
Geena couldn’t imagine it, but she laughed to show she’d got the joke.
‘Oh, the horror!’
‘I’m not being ironic,’ Ahmed said. ‘The economy and the environment are in such a precarious balance, it’s like we’re riding a unicycle on a tightrope over a flaming abyss while juggling chainsaws. The last thing you want in that situation is some clown bounding along behind you and contesting the saddle. So… the question becomes one of maintaining control over the underlying population. Here’s where what they did to you and what they didn’t do to me comes in. Over there, well, I’ve told you what they’d have done to me. What the cops would have done to you – a student fleetingly suspected of not being fully on-side – would have been to beat you black and blue, taking care not to mark your face or break bones or cause internal injuries, and either arrest you or send you on your way, lesson learned. And you come crying into the office of your supervisor, and she, or he for that matter, gives you a hug, and a coffee or something stronger, maybe even offers a cigarette, and a spiel that would be nothing like as direct as the one I’ve given you. If you were to read a transcript of such a conversation in Moscow University, you wouldn’t know what they were talking about. But they would.
‘Whereas here, it’s a sterile pin, a sticking-plaster, a helpline to prolong your feeling of being a victim, and no hug from me. Contrary to received wisdom that control over there is physical and over here it’s ideological – hegemony, false consciousness and all that Critical Theory 101 guff – it’s almost exactly the other way round. Ordinary, non-political, everyday life is far more regulated here than it is in Russia or India. Why else do you think we maintain the low-carbon regulations, the holiday-flights ban for instance, and all the preventive health measures, when syn bio has cracked the carbon problem and fixed cancer and heart disease?’
‘That sounds kind of… Foucauldian,’ said Geena, trying to keep her mind on an academic track. ‘Like, it’s all about control over bodies? Biopower? But isn’t that already part of the critique?’
Ahmed laughed. ‘Exactly! Bloody Foucault’s where they got the idea from!’
‘There’s just one problem with what you’re saying,’ Geena said, leaning forward. ‘The unicycle thing, yes? It seems to me there are two unicycles on this rope, and they’re heading towards each other.’
‘Yes,’ said Ahmed. ‘Hence the overwhelming importance of delay. They might just slow down and meet in the middle, instead of colliding. And then we have a chance of, maybe, heading in a common direction, off the rope.’
‘But meanwhile, the flames from the abyss are reaching the rope, and the Naxals are busy trying to saw through it.’
‘Yes,’ said Ahmed. ‘Speaking of which.’ He jumped up, looking unexpectedly cheerful. He took his glasses off and slipped them in a shirt pocket, behind the obligatory row of pens. ‘Here, let me show you something. Could you give me your specs for a moment?’
She dug the glasses out of her bag and passed them over. Ahmed synched them with his desk screen, rotated the screen so that they could both see it.
‘Nothing private when you last wore them?’
Geena shook her head. Ahmed began rattling his fingers on the desk.
‘OK,’ he said. Scenes blurred past on the screen as he spoke: Dawley Road, Hillingdon Road, the aircraft… ‘I’ve skipped back to yesterday evening, about teatime, scrolling forward, slow down – ah! Here we are! That little bit of graffiti. The source of all your woe. Now… let’s just open that up, see the projection raw.’
A sudden flourish of the fingertips, fortissimo. The corner-ofthe-eye glimpse of wall and lettering gave way to a screenful of letters and numbers that seemed to Geena pure gibberish. Ahmed scrolled.
‘See that string?’ he said, pointing and highlighting. ‘It’s an IP address, which…’
Another flourish, another screen.
‘… just happens to be the IP address of your glasses. The graffiti could be seen by you and nobody else.’
‘Shit!’ said Geena, heedless of speech codes. ‘The cops planted it! For me!’
Another rapid-fire rattle, and the screen went blank.
‘Uh-huh,’ said Ahmed, handing back the glasses.
‘Why?’
Ahmed shrugged. ‘Fishing.’