Remembering how Cicero fought all kinds of dreadful administrative battles to keep Philosophy open. Cicero, going to the most gruelling meetings. The most trying meetings. Which is where, in fact, she developed some of her most crucial thoughts as the dialectical opposite to said meetings.
How else would she have been able to develop her insights into politocracy! Into synthetic biology! Into psychic warfare techniques! Into information control! Into conditioning tactics! Into compulsory positivity! The condition of all of these was academic bureaucracy.
How else could she have been able to diagnose the determinative value of the technological system – of systematisation, schematisation, tabulation, qualification, rationalisation, mechanisation, standardisation – were it not for her own experience of exactly these things?
The way she used to speak about escape! About the significance of the exodic act! About the cultivation of tactical failure and ineffectiveness in and as study – to drifting, scattering and vagueness: our role, she used to say. Our specialism.
She kept Philosophy open for us, I say. To bring us on. To let us come into our own.
I wouldn’t say that, exactly, Ava says. She could be pretty insulting …
But it was a kind insulting, Magellan says. It was meant to spur us on.
It was meant to crush us, Ava says.
It was, like, a Jedi training, I say. She was our Yoda. She wanted to deepen our sense of disgust. To rise from our ashes. It was a use-the-force-Luke kinda thing.
… I’m still crushed …, Ava says.
Philosophers you must be! Magellan says, in his best Yoda voice. Think for yourselves, you must!
It was a bootcamp, I say. She wanted to toughen us up. Particular you, Hans. She could tell you were a soy boy.
And then she … disappeared, Ava says. She went travelling or whatever. Took her career break.
Do you think that was a coincidence? I ask. She wanted to set us free. To see how we did without her.
She made you leader, Marcus, Hans says.
She did, more fool her, I say.
And then this: the Organisational Management move, Magellan says. Do you think it as just coincidence that it happened just after Cicero left?
Like they were planning it all along, Ava says. They were waiting until the coast was clear. When they knew no one would put up a fight …
Unless …, I say.
What – what do you know? Hans asks. What were you privy to?
Unless the Organisational Management move was part of Cicero’s masterplan, I say.
What!?
I don’t know any more than you do, I say. But if you think about it …
Cicero wouldn’t betray us like that …, Magellan says.
Unless it was like her insults, I say. Her so-called Jedi training …
You mean … Ava says.
First, she left, turning the department over to us, I say. Then, she plotted for it to be moved to, like, the opposite of philosophy.
But why? Ava asks.
To push us into becoming what she wanted us to be, I say. Philosophers.
Philosophers!? Us? Ava says.
Not academic philosophers, but the real thing, I say. Thinkers who embody their thought. Who live it. Who incarnate the thinking life. For whom thinking was a matter of the flesh.
But she thought we were idiots! Ava says. She told us so! Over and over again.
Cicero always enjoyed farce, Magellan says, thoughtfully. She wanted to deepen the farce … To push farce to its maximum …
I can’t believe it … Ava says. That kind of self-sabotage …The philosophy department she’d so lovingly built up …
Philosophy is a living against: Cicero always said that, I say. You must live as not: that’s what she said. Be university philosophers as not university philosophers. Be applied ethics philosophers as not applied ethics philosophers. Be tame academics as not tame academics. There’s a way of living in the opposite direction.
So we have to live in the opposite direction to Organisational Management, Magellan says. That’s what will intensify our resistance. Our thought.
Exactly! I say.
And the fact that it’s Organisational Management isn’t a coincidence, Magellan says. Cicero wanted to bring philosophy into collision with what she knew from university administration. With the endless administration of the world. Its ceaseless management. With the coordinates we’re given. The social coordinates. The governmental coordinates. The biopolitical coordinates. The philosophical coordinates …
Our philosophy will have to go underground, I say. It’ll be about an inward revolution. Pure refusal. Pure retreat. Like, an inward principle of subversion, revolt and antinomianism. A way of living against the world.
It’s just nihilism, Ava says. More nihilism!
Nihilism will flip and become something else, that’s what Cicero’s banking on, I say.
It’s some gamble! Hans says.
Cicero’s a gambler, I say.
And then – what? – is she going to return to see what she wrought? Hans asks.
Then, who knows, I say.
Work in Progress 