News: they’re moving the Philosophy department into Organisational Management.
General shock. Can they do this sort of thing? Without consultation? Is it allowed?
Apparently.
Walking. Longsands.
Is there a rationale? we wonder. Have they explained themselves?
They don’t have to explain themselves, Hans says. They just act.
But it’s so absurd! It makes no sense …, Ava says.
Of course it makes no sense, Hans says. That’s the point …
It’s mockery – in plain view, Magellan says. They’re laughing at us.
It’s self-mockery, I say. The uni’s laughing at itself … At everything a university once was …
But do they really know what they’re doing? Magellan asks. Can’t they sense the nihilism – even if they’ve never heard the word, nihilism?
They did it because of the nihilism, I say. It’s to deepen the nihilism.
It’s just some random thing, Ava says. Some stupidity. Some manager or another wanted to make their stamp on the uni. Some idiot–
– They’re all idiots –, Hans says.
– Wanted to launch some interdisciplinary initiative, or something, Ava says. Wanted to shake things up …
What about Organisational Management? Hans asks. What’s in it for them?
Our student numbers, maybe, I say.
Laughter.
Our international reputation, Magellan says.
Laughter.
Our general sanity and well-adjustedness, Ava says.
More laughter.
Why couldn’t they just have left us alone? Ava asks. Why couldn’t we be allowed to go on as we were? It’s cruel … it’s needless.
Discussion.
Because they’ve declared war on philosophy, we agree. They know that it’s philosophy they have to go after. Not history! Not the fine arts! Not music! Not English literature! But philosophy, alone among the humanities …
It’s because they sense something about philosophy, we agree. They feel a kind of awe of philosophy, despite everything. They know us as a threat – unconsciously. They experience us as an enemy, in some recess of their minds.
It’s a matter of unavowed revenge on philosophy, we agrees. On the humanities in general. There’s a whole institutional unconscious at work. A desire for revenge. On humanities expansiveness. On humanities freedom of thought …
And that’s why the closure of philosophy would never be enough, Magellan says. The humiliation of philosophy: that’s the aim.
This is a shock and awe move, we agree. This is a cow-the-humanities move. This is a watch it or you’re next move.
It’s like parking a tank on your front law, we agree. It’s to prove that they can do exactly as they please, no matter how mad. That they can simply bend reality to their will.
The uni can do what it likes: that’s what this says, we agree. Anything could happen! The greatest absurdity! Who would be crazy enough to move philosophy to organisational management? The uni would! Because the uni can!
The madness of the world is showing itself, I say. The madness behind the world. A deluge of madness! A mad flood of insanity! It’s quite sublime in its way …
You shouldn’t examine it too closely, Magellan says. Don’t think about it too much. Ponder the logic of the Organisational Management move and you’ll go mad, too.
Maybe we should go mad, I say. Maybe that's what it'll take. But it has to be our madness, not theirs – not the madness of humiliation, but … but, like, cultivate-your-own-legitimate-madness madness, as Cicero used to say. Which is to say, the madness of philosophy …
*
If only Cicero were still with us.
Cicero, our erstwhile organ grinder! Cicero, the old head of the philosophy dept … Cicero, who handpicked us–us–to work here … Cicero, who plucked us–us–from our provincial universities … Cicero, who scouted the conferences for … what? Not the up-and-coming, we were never that … The desperate! The put-upon! The cornered!: That’s who we were …
Cicero sought out the prospectless! The defeated – spiritually! Financially! Psychologically! Cicero looked for the lower class! The skint! The disturbed! The personality-disordered! Who’d never normally be given a lectureship at a Russell Group university! Us, in other words.
Cicero actually wanted our kind around her. The end times will see a parade of deformities and grotesques, she used to say. Mental deformities, she said, not physical ones. Mental sports! The psychically twisted! The cognitively contorted! The equivalent of Hieronymous Bosch’s Hell, but in thought …
Only freaks of thought could philosophise from the end times, Cicero said. Only thinkers of deformity could philosophise out of the experience of the coming collapse. Which was quite impossible for Cicero herself, with her deep philosophical culture, with dozens of keynote speeches behind her, with decades of immersion in the great works of philosophy.
She wanted to surround herself with the genuinely doomed. The authentically prospectless. She wanted Hopelessness incarnate … Philosophical wreckage … She wanted to be the captain of a ship of fools, and she got her wish.
We were to be the doom speakers of the end times. We were to voice disgust’s disgust. Horror’s horror. We were to speak the truth of our times: the mad truth. Which is why Cicero brought us here. Why she combed the conferences to find our kind.
My God, do you remember who we were? What we were? The humiliations visited upon us. The years of rejection, post PhD. Living hand to mouth. Barely getting by on benefits and scraps of part-time teaching. We were whores! Academic whores, begging for work, trying to publish. Living from foodbanks and charity shops …
Cicero saved us! She gave us jobs! Brought us to Newcastle! She wanted to let us be ourselves in thought.
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 Cicero … disappeared. She went travelling or whatever. Took her career break.
Do you think that was a coincidence? I ask. Come on, Ava, you were actually going out with her …
Briefly, Ava says.
What was she like in private? I ask.
Drunk, Ava says. She was a drunk.
Sure Cicero drank. How she drank! She emptied whole bars! And we emptied them with her! There was a whole discipline of drinking, we remember. We had to watch over our nights of drinking. Less they slip into complacency. Less they fall into pubism. Drinking mustn’t be consolation, Cicero always said. Mustn’t allow our reconciliation to the way things are.
The pub is not a place for petty moaning! Cicero used to say. For sharing problems. There was to be no huddling together to cry into our beer. No whisky lamentations about the state of our lives.
The pub was not to be a retreat, but a launchpad … A space capsule … We were looking to flare upwards. To burn upwards.
And yet: Cicero’s sadness, in the face of the attacks of the university. Cicero’s defeat, in battling the university. Even as she insisted that adversity helped her. Even as she said that that’s where her best thoughts were coming from. How else would she have been able to develop her insights into political ponerology, except from repeated attempts to close philosophy down? Into psychic warfare techniques and conditioning tactics, except from her tussles with deans? How else would 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 experience of the instinctive academic hostility to philosophy?
The way Cicero used to speak about escape, as we drank … About the significance of the exodic act! About the effort to snatch a little transcendence from the day. About not wanting to be buried with her defeats. About her desire to roll away her stone. About resurrection! About wanting a last chance to redeem her sufferings!
There we were, drinking at Jilly’s with Cicero. Affirming our right to drunken assembly at Jilly’s … Jilly’s, where we’d drink ourselves out of the lowlands. Out of the valleys. Jilly’s, where we approached, with Cicero, a promontory of drinking. Where we’d discuss the big picture and the very picture.
Things, it is true, would devolve into chaos. Hans, invariably taking his trousers off. Ava and Magellan, singing duets. Me, lying on the sofa. Everyone at the bar, in the final hours, doing shots together. Even Klaus the barman. Especially him! Klaus, pulling out his guitar. All of us at the bar, singing Roy Orbison’s Crying. And all of us crying, tears running down our drunken cheeks …
Cicero enjoying the spectacle. Hans, loudly demanding DISCO! Music he could DANCE TO! Magellan, regressing to childhood. Ava, doing a solo Rhinestone Cowboy. Great work with the microphone stand. Me, in some drunken debate about who would win in a fight: Gnostics or nihilists …
Cicero, seemingly happy in her cups as we were happy in ours. Cicero, like us, in the last redoubt, taking a last drunken stand. Against what? Against technics! Against nihilism! Against managerial evil! Against the all-seeing eye, never sleeping, always watchful! Against technocracy!
And afterwards, back to Cicero’s place. Afterwards, ascent to her flat, overlooking the Tyne. Overlooking the North Sea. There, in the living room of her flat, in the Sir James Knott Memorial complex. In the pre-dawn, the sun just about to rise. There, and at that moment, Cicero would begin to Talk, hushedly at first. Quietly. Almost tentatively, to begin with.
Cicero, sharing … hypotheses. Personal opinions. It could be this … My conclusion is … I’m led to speculate that … This is how it seems to me … If we consider the matter carefully, then … Hushedly. Tentatively. And yet, a kind of Certainty in her voice. That there was something True here. In the very fact of her Talking …
Cicero, voice lowered. Cicero, speaking quietly, but with great intensity. As though she’d waited the whole night to tell us this. As though she’d waited her whole life to tell us this. And that we were the only ones she could tell it to. We thought-freaks who could take what she said and weave it into a new philosophy …
And we, sitting round. Eager to listen, eager to learn. But tired, tired, lacking her stamina! Cicero, speaking as our eyelids drooped. Until we, her audience, fell asleep one by one, and who knows that she didn’t go on talking as we slept … Cicero, talking to the air when the last of us fell asleep in her living room … Talking to no one in particular as she lay soft blankets over us … Murmuring as much to herself as to anyone as she rolled down her Roman blinds to shield us from the rising sun …
If only we’d written it down: Cicero’s theory (her anti-theory), Cicero’s mythology! But we could never remember it, after. Even freshly awoken … Even on the Metro back to home … We could never quite bring it to mind, never recall the essential details, never reassemble the logic that led Cicero from one thought to the other …
Only a few words from the great wave of her words. Stuff about the theogenic process, we remember. About blind increate formlessness. About the aboriginal nonground. About banished fundamentals. Stuff about politocracy … iatrocide … directed evolution … biometric control. Stuff about stealth sterilization … psycho-neural captivity … homo borg genesis …
Only memory of the great stillness of Cicero’s words, that accompanied them. The calm background of her speech. As though what was said bore within it another speech, a speech without words, a murmuring speech, a susurrating speech, a speech without words and without syllables.
Only recollection of an endlessness. A movement of dispersion. A threshold, spreading out to include all things … To weave everything into its vast web. Encompassing the entire horizon. All things comprehended, all things thought. All things included. All things woven in, all history …
Cicero, queen of infinite speech. Cicero, sovereign of the hours between the dog and wolf. Cicero, ruler of the pre-dawn, of the end of the night, where the river of speech opened out and out, like the Tyne itself outside her flat, but wider than the Tyne, braiding into distributaries, fanning into a delta, spreading and wide.
Cicero, who resigned nonetheless. Cicero, who handed in her notice. Who left Philosophy, which she had done so much to defend. Who turned it over to us, her idiots. Her imbeciles. And left her flat in the Sir James Knott Memorial block. And set of travelling, who knows where. Who knows how (a lottery win? An inheritance? Some deal with the university?) …
Work in Progress 