Formerly, if you were doing a bit of writing in a cafe and there was a solitary person on the next table reading or whatever, you were safe. They were engrossed and silent and would not disturb. But this is no more. Not because a friend may join them. That wouldn't matter. Instead what happens is this. They are slouched against the wall, their features impassive. Suddenly, there's a tinny tune and in a second the little music box is clamped to their ear. This box, this prosthetic mouth-ear jerks the hitherto bovine individual into life, releases the squeaky voice, the gleeful soul, otherwise safely padlocked behind the vacant eyes. And so, for the next ten or twenty minutes, noises and gestures - the whole visible bodily surface is animated. Waves of emotion pass over the face and through the hands and vanish. Smiling, nodding furiously, suddenly puzzled: none of these things are connected to the immediate physical context nor to a publically audible voice. All that separates this gesticulating chattering person in front of you from madness is the small object held to the ear. Indeed, I can never help but reflect how I would perceive this person, how I would react, if I knew for certain that, all the while, the device was in fact switched off, and they were simply blabbering into some insane and echoing silence.
Anyway, today there was indeed one such person in the cafe, and the abrupt shift between bovine inaction and sudden stentorian animation was particularly marked. And I thought: because all her gestures and shouts of surprise etc are addressed to an absent being, because they do not connect to their immediate context nor to an audible voice, it is as though this person has been 'cut and pasted' from another environment - a board meeting, or a pub, a living room - onto this space right infront of me. Such an effect can be almost theatrical, in a Brechtian sort of way: these gestures, removed from their proper space, are placed in inverted commas, offer themselves, with lewd availability, to critical analysis, were anyone still that way inclined. Actually, although I said that if you didn't know that these people were talking on a mobile, you'd think they were mad, perhaps they are anyway, like the Lacanian example of the beggar - the beggar who thinks he's a king being no more/ less mad than the king who thinks he's a king. Or what's mad is this society of individuals, cut and pasted from mutually exclusive contexts, nuzzled side by side in autistic proximity, oblivious and deaf as never before, always elsewhere and in communication with the absent Other.