“Celeriter nube, otiose paenite,” says Lacan, because he cannot help himself. Marry in haste, repent at leisure.
“Seriously?” says the Boy. “Latin? Is Caecilius still at the atrium?”
“’Fraid so, old fruit,” says the Editor.
From atrium to lake. The polar bear continues his dance: two steps forward, one sideways, two back. And do the funk. He is patrolling his kingdom, even if it is the inside of a crate carried on a Russian container ship for three months.
The Man decides, and not for the first time, that Theory will help.
This is not a good sign, although Lacan looks pleased. He has the air of a schoolmaster about to hand out a worksheet. The Man is ready: pencil sharpened, wound exposed, hoping that if the thing can be placed inside a system it might finally stop hurting.
“You wanted an ’ology,” says the Boy.
No one answers, because it is not entirely misplaced.
Then, just as Lacan is preparing to set his timer, the French hand of a nurse is delicately placed to his forehead. He cannot possibly continue, he laments.
“I am indisposed,” he says.
He retreats toward a bench with great dignity and lies down. The physio, Barry, will give him a good rub, Shankly says.
In Lacan’s place appears a broad-shouldered man in a heavy coat. The air of a provincial headmaster who has read everything and enjoyed almost none of it.
“A substitute teacher,” says the Boy brightly. “Day off then.”
“And you are?” asks the Editor, already worried.
“Bourdieu,” says the man. “Pierre. I gather the usual one has been making everything about your mother, your lover and your panic. Tiresome, but not unusual. Today we will discuss class, taste, position and why you keep pretending not to know what you are doing.”
The Boy’s face falls.
“So no love today?”
“Oh, love will turn up,” says Pierre. “It always does. But today it will behave less like poetry and more like a post office.”
The Man hates him immediately.
Bourdieu does not accuse him of stupidity. That might be survivable. He accuses him of mispositionality.
“Mispositionality?” the Editor asks. “Is that a French thing?”
It is not a French thing. Even Michel Platini has never heard of it.
“You speak of intelligence,” says Bourdieu, “as though it were a private possession. It is not. Intelligence must be converted. Into credentials. Taste. Confidence. Ease. The right to be boring without being dismissed.”
“The right to be boring,” says the Boy. “That’s a good one.”
“It is called authority,” says Bourdieu.
The Boy knew this before the Man. He knew the smell of rooms where adults spoke as if the right to speak had been issued in advance. Cleverness was not enough.
Babonski from the depths of the forest shouts “cunt.” He too knows cleverness is only a part of life’s great loop
Bourdieu glances towards the great ape. “What is this word cunt I keep hearing,” he says. “I have never come across this before.”
He continues. “Cleverness has to be carried in the right body, with the right accent, the right clothes, the right economy of gesture. Otherwise it becomes performance.”
“He’s got an ’ology,” says a voice suddenly, brightly, from somewhere just behind them.
Maureen Lipman stands there, coat on, handbag ready, looking at the Man with that particular English mixture of pride and mild disbelief.
“He’s got an ’ology.”
The Boy laughs.
The Man says nothing.
The PhD was perhaps the purest version of this. The London School of Economics. Words that could be carried into almost any room like a passport to cleverness.
The Man had used it shamelessly and pretended not to. Not as scholarship, not really, but as entry. A way of arriving already formatted. It opened doors to rooms he did not especially want to enter and certainly did not want to obey once inside.
Bourdieu looks almost pleased.
“Excellent,” he says. “Consecration as sabotage.”
The Editor writes this down, then crosses it out.
And the Man sees, with some irritation, that this is true. The PhD had not released him from institutional cleverness. It had bound him to it. It allowed him to arrive already defended, already half-insulted by the need to be there.
Bourdieu, pitiless and accurate, continues.
“You did not merely want to understand the field,” he says. “You wanted the field to recognise your understanding of it.”
Yes, yes, but too much, the Man thinks.
The great map unfurls and the Man feels the terrible comfort of being explained by something Large.
At that point Foucault arrives, pushing a wheelbarrow.
He emerges from the trees like a groundsman who has been working in less supervised parts of the institution.
His bald head shines, eyes bright with over-indulged curiosity. He looks like an escaped monk, or a pervert, or both.
“Who’s this bald pervert with the wheelbarrow?” says the Boy.
“Michel Foucault,” says Lacan weakly from the bench.
Foucault smiles.
“I heard structure,” he says. “Naturally I came.”
Foucault parks the barrow beside the lake. He does not join the lesson. Head slightly tilted, he starts.
“Very nice,” he says. “You have built yourself a structure.”
Bourdieu stiffens slightly, not offended. “It is accurate,” he says.
“Yes,” says Foucault. “That is the problem.”
The Man feels it immediately. A sense of redundancy.
“I needed to understand it,” he says.
“You needed to stop it,” says Foucault.
The Boy looks from one to the other. “So which is it?” he says. “Structure or… whatever this is?”
Foucault smiles, Foucaultianly.
“Structure is where you begin,” he says. “It is not where you live.”
Bourdieu opens his mouth, then closes it again.
The Man feels the pull immediately. The old comfort of explanation.
“What happens after?” he asks.
Foucault gestures toward the lake.
“You cross,” he says.
“Cross what?” says the Boy.
Foucault shrugs.
“The place where explanation stops doing the work for you.”
The barrow slips slightly in the gravel.
“Your problem,” says Foucault, “is not that you do not understand. It is that you continue.”
The Boy goes very still.
“That’s not fair,” says the Man.
“No,” says Foucault. “It is not fair.”
Bourdieu looks at the barrow now, not with irritation but with a kind of professional respect.
“So, what do you propose?” he says.
Foucault leans on the handle. “Nothing grand,” he says. “Interrupt the practice. Not once. Repeatedly. Badly. Without theory. Without permission.”
“That’s it?” says the Editor. “Yes,” says Foucault, darting back into the woods.
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