I can’t take work seriously. I can’t think work is leading me anywhere. That there’s anywhere good to go. I mean, what’s our motivation? What’s it for?
That never used to bother us. We never used to ask those questions.
Of course we didn’t! We took it for granted: our work! It was what we’d always wanted to do. We had jobs! We could work at last! We could write through the days and nights, when we weren’t teaching. That’s what we wanted, wasn’t it?
We could pretend it was worthwhile. Fuck, it didn’t even matter whether it was worthwhile. It was what we did, because it’s what we’d always wanted to do – all our adult lives.
And now? Now that we’re in Organisational Management, it all seems to pointless. It mocks us, our ambition – what we want to do. It’s become ever more absurd, and therefore more intolerable.
We’ve been forced to see what we are in the mirror of Organisational Management. We’re being shown to ourselves.
We thought we could just live out our whole lives in delusion – in fooling ourselves. But the Organisational Management move shows us the real conditions of our lives as … philosophers, or scholars, or whatever it is we are. The farcical conditions! The laughable conditions! The great lie of the university! Of the humanities! Of philosophy! Of all of Livia’s great schemes …
Except Livia wanted us to see the lie. She wanted us to know it – the absurdity. That’s why she moved us to Organisational Management.
Deepen the farce: that was her credo. Turn the screws. Just descent and descent. She wanted only to deepen the nihilism. Turn the nihilism up to eleven.
Work in Progress 