‘London’ gives us all a lesson in the art of ‘performative studying’.
Allow me to introduce you to the concept of performative studying.
Performative studying is when you work as conspicuously as possible, in as conspicuous a place as possible, but without actually working.
Every weekday, I arrive in the bar at 9am, making sure I arrive outside the door for 8am. That way, the bar staff pass me every morning on their way into the bar. ‘I just can’t wait to start working!’ I say, as they shuffle past me, awkwardly.
Once, one of them even replied to me. They said, ‘Can’t, you work in your room?’
‘No,’ I muttered feebly, ‘I can’t focus in there.’ Which is the truth: I can’t focus anywhere.
So, I go into the bar. I pick the most central table—the one halfway between the door and the sofa, usually. I get my laptop out, I get a pile of books out (I always put Hobbes’s Leviathan on top), and I start working.
That is to say, I don’t start working; I start pretending to work.
I get out my fountain pen and start scribbling furiously in my notebook, flipping Hobbes’s Leviathan open to a random page and reading it, angrily. Except I’m not reading it. And the notes I’m making aren’t related to Hobbes’s Leviathan. They’re not even related to Locke’s Second Treatise on Government — they’re just squiggles on a page.
I wait for the bar to fill up, which it soon does. When the moment is right — when the bar is nearly full — I breeze up the counter, ordering a chai latte and complaining loudly, ‘I’ve got so much work to do!’ I chat excitedly with the invariably bored-out-of-their- mind staff member about the complexities of Hobbes’s conception of the state — which, of course, I don’t understand.
Once, one of them even had the gall to point it out to me. They said, ‘You seem very focussed on Hobbes’s conception of the state. But half of Leviathan is about religion, no? Why don’t you talk about that for a change? It’d make a nice change from all this talk about the state.’
‘Fuck off and give me my chai’, I replied, my confidence suddenly shaken, my façade on the verge of discovery.
I take my chai latte and return to my table. I down the chai latte all in one go, in a raging cascade of Hobbesian fury. It doesn’t matter that it’s boiling hot and burns my mouth, which starts bleeding. Nasty, brutish, short — that’s how I like it.
I move on from Hobbes’s Leviathan now. Everyone’s seen me reading that. I’m not getting their attention anymore. So, I wheel out all thirty-four volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I open a random page. It’s entitled ‘Jan Smuts, Prime Minister of South Africa (1919-24, 1939-48)’. It might be interesting, it might not be. I don’t care. It not like I’m going to read it or anything.
I start blurting out random passages. ‘God, “the divide between the Afrikaners and the English speakers” must have been really hard to bridge!’ I cry, attracting the attention of concerned onlookers. ‘I wonder how they ever managed it!’
Enough of this. I’m bored. I go to lunch, bringing all thirty-four volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica with me. I commandeer a trolley from the Porters’ Lodge to help me carry them all. I sit in the middle table — actually, not in the middle table, on the middle table, precariously balanced on a fake candlestick. ‘I have so much work to do!’ I shout.
I’ve timed my entry so that I arrive at 12.15—just as everyone’s arriving from lectures. I open up the twenty-sixth volume. I tear out a page. Before I shove it into my mouth, I see that it’s about ‘General J. B. M. Hertzog, Prime Minister of South Africa (1924-39)’. ‘Why is it always the South Africans?’ I cry. I redirect my anger into eating — yes, eating — as many pages of the twenty-sixth volume as I can, howling furiously all the while. That’s right. If they see me literally eating knowledge, they’ll know I’m smart. And maybe then my parents will love me.
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