by Ken MacLeod
Coffee, though, you couldn’t digitise that. Its smell and the warning twinge that went along with it. Ahmed came in with two plastic cups and pushed the door shut behind him.
‘Now,’ he said, back behind his desk, ‘Geena, could you please…’
He waved behind his right shoulder in the direction of the ceiling-corner camera.
‘Oh, sure,’ said Geena. ‘Dr Estraguel, I’m requesting that you turn off the internal surveillance camera, and I’m affirming that I’ve read and understood the college regulations in this respect.’
‘Fine, OK.’ Ahmed slipped on his glasses and looked over his shoulder up into the corner, then snapped his fingers. ‘Right.’ He settled back and sipped. ‘Fire away.’
Geena picked up her cup and put it back down at once, so as not to spill it. She clasped her hands together on her lap. She told him what had happened.
‘Oh, Geena!’ Ahmed spread his arms. ‘I would…’
‘Thanks. I know you can’t.’ She sighed. ‘I’m all right, really. It’s just… I named you, you know, as someone I knew who was sort of radical… I didn’t accuse you, didn’t point a finger’ – she caught her breath, tried to laugh – ‘so to speak, as far as I can remember, but to be honest it’s all a bit like white noise in my head, and I’m so sorry.’
Head in her hands, by this point. She sniffed hard. She heard a drawer open and close. Some light weight was scuffed across the desk.
‘Tissues,’ Ahmed said.
‘Thanks.’ She blew. ‘Ugh.’
Steadier now, she took a sip of coffee. ‘Like I said, I’m sorry, Ahmed.’
‘You have nothing to apologise for,’ he said. ‘Anybody would do the same. It’s expected.’
‘I brought your name into—’
Ahmed waved a hand. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said. ‘Not for a second. They can’t touch me on any of that nonsense.’
‘You’ve written an article about the Naxals,’ Geena said, as if he needed reminding. ‘A few years ago now, but…’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Ahmed, with a fleeting smile. ‘“The Pure Theory of Primitive Military Accumulation”. You’ve read it?’
‘Yes, and… it could be interpreted as sympathetic, or at least – what do the cops call it?’ She struggled to remember the phrase thrown in her face the previous night. ‘“Soft support”.’
‘Ah, fuck.’ Ahmed exhaled the word on a long breath. ‘Pardon my English, Geena.’ He glanced over his shoulder, as if at the recording device that wasn’t running. ‘I trust that will be interpreted as an expletive and an intensifier. It’s just that I’m a little taken aback that you might think that they might think that way.’
He touched his steepled, spread fingers to his mouth and nose, repeating this several times, his gaze abstract. Then he smiled, disarmingly.
‘It’s like… you missed the memo. Missed a class, or something.’ Again with the smile. ‘I mean, don’t take this personally, it’s not a criticism of you, if anyone’s failed it’s me or one of my colleagues. Think methodology, Geena.’
Geena thought. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘You mean, a mathematical, materialist analysis of Naxal theory and practice can’t be construed as even soft support, because it’s critique, and critique has to assimilate the construction being deconstructed.’
Ahmed raked fingers backward through his hair.
‘True enough, as far as it goes,’ he said, sounding impatient. ‘You didn’t miss that class. But actually, what I was thinking of was more the question of their methodology. That of the repressive state apparatuses.’
He clasped his hands behind his head, tilted his swivel chair back, and rocked a few times.
‘It’s textbook stuff, to be honest,’ he said. ‘But maybe we don’t spell it out clearly enough at the undergraduate level, and we sort of assume our graduate students will pick it up by some kind of tacit process, which… is pretty naive and remiss of us, all things considered.’ He brought the seat back to horizontal with a bump, and leaned forward, elbows on the desk, expounding. ‘Sorry about that. Seriously. So… here’s the thing. Over on the, ah, other side, the smoky states, an article like mine – which was immediately put on the reading list of every staff college in the world, on both sides of the Warm Front – would have been enough to get me in serious hot water, and I don’t mean metaphorically in some places. And even the Russians and the Indians are, well… you know… very much hands-on in dealing with dissent, which is I suppose understandable enough in that the Naxals, to say nothing of the underlying population, are a much more immediate threat over there. Over here, on the other hand, including in China, based on the long experience and political nous of stable ruling-class fractions, blah blah, you know the story – on our side, as I say, it’s an absolute given that all revolutionaries are paper tigers. That Mao allusion isn’t a joke, you know – China’s where it all started. When you have a completely capitalist system run by completely conscious Marxist-Leninists, the relative autonomy of ideology becomes obvious to everyone whose opinion matters. I’m talking about the hegemonic class fractions, people who’ve been to Oxbridge and Harvard and Beijing, not your MBAs and politicians and journalists – not to mention the scientists you’re working with, bless their Daily Mail-reading hearts, or their Guardian-reading hearts for that matter – or any other such-like foot-soldiers, but what the civil service used to call first-class minds. They all get a very good grounding in critical theory at university, that’s part of what their parents are bloody paying for, even if they grumble in the comment columns about their little darlings coming out with all this subversive stuff that leftie lecturers have filled their heads with.’
‘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, e
xtensive 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.’
‘It’s that specific?’
‘It’s that specific. Let no one say the state is not concerned about the individual.’
Geena smacked a fist in her palm. ‘We’ve got them!’
‘What do you mean?’
Geena stared at him. ‘I mean, we’ve got a legal case. Entrapment, provocation, whatever, it can’t be legal, can it? I was going to ask… a friend about all this, get some advice, but… I couldn’t because… well, I named her and… anyway. So I came here to ask you, and you’ve… This is brilliant! Thanks, Ahmed! I knew you’d help me.’
‘This never happened,’ Ahmed said.
‘What?’
‘I’ve wiped the record of our little investigation. You won’t find a trace of it on your glasses, or on mine, or on my desk.’
‘Why?’ Geena asked, dismayed.
‘It’s better not to talk about these things. Better for you. Just ignore it, say nothing, and, believe me, it’ll be like it never happened.’
‘It won’t be to me!’
‘No, and I’m sorry about that, but it will be to the police and all the rest of them. They’ve made their point. As long as you don’t take it further, they’ll leave it at that. But if you do… well, that’s… I was going to say rocking the boat, but what I should say is, shaking the rope.’
‘In other words,’ said Geena, ‘all that you said, all that sharp criticism, it doesn’t mean anything.’
‘It means everything,’ said Ahmed. ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to explain, dammit! It’s all conscious. Including, you know, this.’
‘This… what?’
‘This conversation. This moment. Everything I’ve said. It’s all understood. It’s understood because I and people like me have explained it to them, in the same terms as I’ve explained it to you. With footnotes, references, bibliography…’
‘Oh,’ said Geena, in a dull, flat voice, feeling that she too had understood, at last. ‘They got to you, too!’
‘They got to me a long time ago,’ said Ahmed, in a tone of mild regret. Half-smiling, he drew his glasses from his pocket and put them back on. He waved into the corner to the right and above, and snapped his fingers. ‘Surveillance on.’
He walked around her to open the door, returned to his desk and sat down, then leaned forward, elbows on the desk, and smiled brightly.
‘Right, that’s the personal matter out of the way. Hope our little chat’s been helpful. Any time, my door’s always open. Now, about your thesis…’
Around mid-morning, Geena walked off campus, up long paths among green meadows, feeling quite cheerful. Spring was definitely in the air. At the edge of the campus she swithered about walking to Hayes, and came down on the side of catching the bus from Kingston Lane. As she waited at the bus stop, she mused over why she felt so much better, despite the anger that seethed inside her. Birdsong and blue sky had a lot to do with it, she decided, but underneath all that was a solid foundation of understanding, of acceptance. The world was what it was. Critique had always left her with a vague sense of obligation to find fault with the world. Now she understood it as part of the world, a spinning flywheel that helped keep it upright and rolling along. It was all right to enjoy the world. She always had, but she’d always had the nagging suspicion that intellectually it was hard to justify uncritical enjoyment. Now that suspicion was gone. Everything was as it had to be. Amor fati and carpe diem, that was the ticket.
And what she was enjoying right now was her rage. She accepted it. She let it flow through her
. She observed her hands shaking. She noted with interest their spontaneous self-positioning into strangulation mode: open, mirroring each other, fingers and thumbs curled. She could very easily imagine them around Ahmed Estraguel’s neck. Deliberately she let them relax, and stuck them in her pockets.
It was the betrayal that did it, she thought, the blatant way in which a man she’d have expected to be outraged at what had happened to her had been merely sympathetic. And the way in which all the techniques of critique she had so painstakingly learned had turned out to be an instrument of the very systems of domination they anatomised. It was as if she had been naive. Ahmed had explained it as something that should have been obvious all along. There was no going back from that, she realised. From now on she was inextricably in a different subject position. She understood.
