A copy of the manuscript has acquired pencilled annotations.
No one claims responsibility.
Blottisham: I've reached the chapter on certificates.
Quillibrace: My condolences.
Blottisham: It says certificates don't merely record competence.
They display certainty.
Surely that's nonsense.
A certificate tells you someone has passed an examination.
Quillibrace: Does it?
Blottisham: Well... yes.
Quillibrace: It tells you someone has passed an examination.
Whether they remain competent twenty years later is a rather different proposition.
Blottisham: You're quibbling.
Quillibrace: Habitually.
Stray: I don't think the manuscript is criticising certificates.
It's asking why every society invents objects that allow confidence to become visible.
Blottisham: Visible confidence?
Stray: Qualifications.
Uniforms.
Titles.
Official seals.
Identity cards.
Academic gowns.
Even architectural styles.
They're all ways of making invisible judgements publicly recognisable.
Blottisham: That seems perfectly sensible.
People need to know whom to trust.
Quillibrace: Precisely.
The manuscript never denies that.
It merely observes that trust rarely remains invisible for long.
It acquires furniture.
Blottisham: Furniture?
Quillibrace: Offices.
Buildings.
Certificates.
Letterheads.
Committees.
Bronze plaques.
Human beings possess a remarkable talent for furnishing abstractions.
(A pause.)
Stray: That's rather an interesting phrase.
Quillibrace: Which one?
Stray: "Furnishing abstractions."
Quillibrace: Consider justice.
It begins as an idea.
Very soon it acquires courts.
Robes.
Buildings.
Procedures.
Forms.
Appeals.
Archives.
The abstraction becomes inhabitable.
Blottisham: I should hope so.
An unfurnished justice would be intolerably draughty.
(Quillibrace looks at him for a moment.)
Quillibrace: I withdraw any previous implication that you never contribute.
Stray: The manuscript makes a similar point about graphs.
People often become calmer merely because a graph has appeared.
Blottisham: That's because graphs contain evidence.
Quillibrace: Sometimes.
At other times they merely contain axes.
Blottisham: Surely people can tell the difference.
Quillibrace: You have attended fewer meetings than I had imagined.
(A brief silence.)
Stray: Perhaps graphs do something before anyone has interpreted them.
They suggest that uncertainty has entered an orderly environment.
Quillibrace: Exactly.
The graph says,
"Someone has been looking."
Whether they have found anything is occasionally a secondary matter.
Blottisham: That seems rather unfair to graphs.
Quillibrace: On the contrary.
Graphs are innocent.
It is people who invest them with ceremonial significance.
Stray: Ceremonial?
Quillibrace: We often imagine ceremonies are opposed to practical activity.
Most are practical.
They establish confidence that collective action may proceed.
Blottisham: You're suggesting a graduation ceremony and an engineering inspection perform related social functions?
Quillibrace: In one respect, yes.
Both publicly declare that a transition has occurred.
One concerns persons.
The other concerns bridges.
Neither would function particularly well if conducted privately in a cupboard.
(Blottisham smiles despite himself.)
Stray: So perhaps the manuscript isn't saying that certificates, graphs and procedures are empty symbols.
It's saying they are visible stabilisations.
Ways of allowing large numbers of strangers to coordinate around shared confidence.
Quillibrace: Well put.
The difficulty begins only when the visible stabilisation quietly becomes more important than whatever it was stabilising.
Blottisham: Can that happen?
Quillibrace: Universities occasionally mistake rankings for education.
Hospitals mistake targets for health.
Governments mistake announcements for policy.
Individuals mistake reputation for character.
The pattern is not uncommon.
(A thoughtful silence.)
Stray: So the manuscript isn't warning us against symbols.
It's warning us against forgetting the distinction between the symbol and the work it was created to support.
Quillibrace: Yes.
One might almost formulate a general principle.
Human beings construct visible signs in order to coordinate invisible judgements.
Every so often...
they begin coordinating around the signs instead.
Blottisham: That's rather depressing.
Quillibrace: Not at all.
It is merely another maintenance problem.
Like roofs.
Or plumbing.
Civilisations require periodic reminders of what their symbols are for.
The conversation concluded with an unexpectedly vigorous disagreement over whether the Senior Common Room silverware functioned primarily as cutlery or institutional memory.
No inventory was taken.
No comments:
Post a Comment