Once upon a time, there were thinkers at Cambridge, Wittgenstein says. Real thinkers. They strode around the philosophical landscape like Titans. They threw the boulders of thought around, made war on each other, bellowed in the frosty air.

There were once disputes at Cambridge. There were once enmities between dons. This one wouldn’t speak to that one; this one would leave the room when the other entered; this one would denounce the theories of the other in his lectures, and have his theories denounced in turn. There were once schools of thought, in dispute, but circling around the same problems. There were once disputes about methodology. About legitimacy. There were old rivalries between Cambridge colleges, and between Cambridge in general and Oxford in general, and between Cambridge and Oxford as such, and the rest of the world. But it’s all smiles now, Wittgenstein says. All, hello, hello. All co-operation and amiability. All soft skills and placation.

Oh, the dons are busy, he knows that. The dons are busy in their Centres and Institutes. The dons are fully occupied bidding for funding. The dons are busy fighting for money in internal markets. The dons are seeking research monies. The dons are bidding for E.U. investment funds. The dons are looking for corporate sponsorship!

The dons are busy! More busy than anyone! The dons are launching spin-off companies. The dons are busy on the new campus – the business campus. They’re courting venture capitalists over lunch. The dons are seeking business partners across south-east Asia. The dons are looking to export the Cambridge brand! They’re opening a replica of the campus in deepest Shanghai!

But really, the don has become only a parody of a don, he says. The don is no longer part of anything. The don lives only in the performance of donnishness. In a kind of fakery. In a sense, that only makes the don all the more powerful, he says. That makes the don all the more anxious to hold onto the illusion.