What’s this meeting about, anyway?
We need a plan of action.
What for – the resistance?
To prepare for the transition.
What about you, Fiver? What have you heard through the admin channels?
Fiver shrugs.
So we’re waiting for them to make our move.
Have Organisational Management given us any instructions? What are we supposed to be doing?
We’re supposed to be reflecting on interdisciplinarity. Modules we can offer both to philosophy students and Organisational Management ones.
And make sure our module descriptors are accessible to all. That Organisational Manage students can understand what they’ll be studying.
Don’t use long words like ontology or metaphysics. If we can make our modules business relevant, then that’s a bonus.
Business relevant. Those words are like a knife in the heart.
We’re supposed to come up with at least five action points.
Action points – what are they?
Like resolutions. Things we’re going to do.
What are we going to do?
I think we should go for passive resistance. Drunken resistance. Mead resistance.
What would Ghandi do? He wouldn’t drink mead. He’d put on a dhoti. It would be dhoti power. Get your dhoti on, Shiva.
Just don’t do what they say.
They’ll sack us!
So paranoid. Be like water. Make concessions. Bend a little.
Once their students are on our modules, we have to please them. Make our customers happy. Which means we’ll have to entirely change the modules.
Which means we don’t want them on our modules. We have to repel them. Subtly. We just have to make them unappealing. Word the descriptors in such a way that the students don’t choose them.
Cunning.
They talked of a bunch of our students doing an Organisational Management module. As a trial.
It’ll destroy their minds! It's not exactly what they signed up for, is it? How cruel.
Philosophy has to go underground – deeply so. It has to disguise itself as business studies if it’s going to survive.
They’ll be sitting in the lectures, monitoring us. It’ll be like Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures in the midst of the war. The SS sitting on the classes. Taking notes. Making sure Heidegger was Nazi enough.
Which is why Heidegger was writing in his notebooks – all that secret stuff. SS are wankers, basically.
About how Jews were rootless cosmopolitans, not to be trusted.
That and other things.
I think we should expose them to the worst. Don’t fucking compromise. Go down in flames. Just let ourselves be destroyed.
We’re on a war footing – this is the war against philosophy. We can’t let them win. We have to go clear eyed into the disaster. Without compromise. Today’s a good day to die, an so on.
We’re extinguishing the European philosophical torch. Dropping the fucking baton.
Do we really want to get sacked? End up out there again. Teaching part time.
If we just compromise … Give a little … We don’t have to think of it as a defeat. It’s not the end of all things. The end isn’t actually nigh.
Isn’t it?
Worse things happen at sea, and all that. Look, we don’t have to take ourselves so seriously. Any of this. I mean, it isn’t a disaster if we end up with a few O.M. students taking our modules. And if a few of our students do some of their modules …
Yes it is! The honour of philosophy – doesn’t that mean anything to you?
Not really.
We’re so atomised. So individualistic.
Look, the disaster’s happened. Nothing matters anymore. Everything is so fucked, it doesn’t matter if things get just a little more fucked. It’s not actually the end of the world.
But it is.
How do we resist the darkness? What will we say to our children?
They won’t ask us. They won’t be born. We’re sterile, idiot. Or if we’re not sterile now, we will be. And if they are born, they’ll be poisoned, just like us.
Famine will have got us long before then. And war. And general … euthanasia. And the great culling. And the deliberate depopulation.
The world ended some time ago: isn’t that clear? So what happens now … doesn’t matter.
It’s like forcing the messiah, succumbing to this. Becoming apostates in order to make things worse.
We’ll show the farce for what it is. We’ll bathe in the farce. Laughing.
But it will send us mad.
So what! Let’s go mad, like Hoelderlin. Famine will have got us long before then. And war. And general … euthanasia. And the great culling. And the deliberate depopulation.
What style?
We’re just servants of the apocalypse. Of the destruction of meaning.
We’ll bring the lightning – Cicero’s lightning. We’d actually make it happen. The skies would open.
It’s about increasing the tension. In the university. In our own hearts! Deepening the contradiction. Living it. The charge will increase. Lightning will strike …
What was so great about lightning, anyway? Cicero had some idea it could be transformed into love.
Into love?
Neighbourly love. That’s what we she said.
A new love will be born … somehow. Love will spread. Go from one to the other. A secular miracle.
How? Will we love the organisational managers?
I don’t know.
Some new epoch will open.
Is that what they drank in Braveheart? Probably.
You’ve heard of fundamental moods – this is fundamental mead.
Fuck off.
Crack open the mead. Let’s see what it does. Let’s channel the Anglo-Saxons, or whatever. When Newcastle was the capital of Mircea. And it was all about monks.
It’s business as usual, for the time being. But I don’t want it to be business as usual. The whole world is business as usual.
Work in Progress 