St Anselm’s College: Senior Common Room Discussion
The room is already occupied when Professor Quillibrace enters.
Mr Blottisham is standing by the window holding a printed copy of the series as though it might begin to behave better if handled correctly. Miss Elowen Stray is seated, reading slowly, pencil resting beside her notebook in a way that suggests she is not yet convinced the pencil will be needed.
Quillibrace closes the door with care.
“Well,” he says, looking at the document rather than the people, “this is either a serious piece of work or an extended refusal to declare its topic.”
Blottisham looks up immediately.
“It’s about images,” he says. “Clearly. It says so in the title.”
Quillibrace does not respond. He turns a page instead, as though the title may yet correct itself under scrutiny.
Stray speaks softly.
“It begins,” she says, “by refusing to begin with images.”
Blottisham frowns.
“That’s just rhetoric. You always start with images if you’re talking about images. Otherwise you end up—well—like this.”
He taps the paper.
“Talking about not talking about images.”
Quillibrace adjusts his glasses.
“It does not, in fact, begin with images,” he says. “It begins with the refusal to assume that ‘image’ is a stable category. That is a different move entirely.”
Blottisham brightens slightly.
“Ah. So it does question images. Good. So we agree it’s about images.”
Stray’s pencil lifts, hovers, then rests again.
“It’s not clear,” she says, “that ‘aboutness’ survives the first page intact.”
Blottisham ignores this.
“Right,” he says, “so we’re dealing with images, but in a… philosophical way.”
Quillibrace exhales through his nose.
“We are dealing,” he says, “with a sequence of constraints on what can be presupposed before anything like an image is allowed to stabilise.”
Blottisham nods confidently.
“Yes. So: images.”
A pause.
Stray looks down at the first paragraph.
“It removes objects,” she says.
“Yes,” says Quillibrace.
“It removes relations between objects.”
“Yes.”
“It removes a containing field.”
“Yes.”
“It removes a viewer.”
“Yes.”
Blottisham looks increasingly satisfied.
“So,” he concludes, “it removes all the difficult parts so it can focus properly on images.”
Quillibrace closes his eyes for a moment, as though counting something that is not numbers.
“It does not remove them in order to simplify the subject,” he says carefully. “It removes them in order to determine what must be presupposed for ‘object’, ‘relation’, and ‘viewer’ to become available in the first place.”
Blottisham nods again, more slowly this time.
“So… it reconstructs images from the ground up.”
“No,” says Stray.
All look at her.
She taps the page lightly.
“It does not reconstruct images,” she says. “It suspends the assumption that ‘images’ are where we begin.”
Silence.
Blottisham leans back slightly.
“That sounds like reconstructing images with extra steps.”
Quillibrace opens the document again.
“I suspect,” he says, “that the difficulty here is not conceptual complexity, but directional discipline.”
Blottisham brightens.
“Oh good,” he says. “So it is about direction. That’s manageable. Which direction are we going in?”
Stray looks at the first line again.
“It refuses to say,” she replies.
Quillibrace nods once.
“Precisely.”
Blottisham pauses.
“…That seems unhelpful.”
Stray, after a moment:
“It is unusually precise about what it refuses to assume.”
Blottisham sits down.
“This is going to be one of those papers, isn’t it,” he says, “where you understand it better after you stop reading it.”
Quillibrace does not look up.
“Yes,” he says. “That is typically the sign that it is working.”
Blottisham frowns.
“That cannot be right.”
Stray, quietly:
“It might be the sign that we are used to thinking with objects too early.”
Blottisham looks between them.
“I’m perfectly happy thinking with objects at the correct time,” he says.
Quillibrace turns a page.
“That,” he says, “is exactly the problem under investigation.”
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