Author: Lars Iyer

We’re not made for these depths. For this air pressure.

I’m feeling queasy. What’s the opposite of the bends – that you get from descending? … Depth sickness, like altitude sickness … Have to get used to it. Have to acclimatised.

I think I’m going to pass out.

Look: Fiver’s getting one of his nosebleeds …


Anyone getting Kafka burrow vibes?


Glistening walls. Feldspar. Minerals.


It’s supposed to connect with old mine workings. Is that what we’ve reached?


The tunnels are being developed as a tourist attraction. It’s still under construction. The plaques haven’t been put up yet. Some parts of it haven’t been blocked off. It’s complex. There are layers and layers of it. It’s structured just like a brain.

What is it thinking, this giant brain?

It’s thinking, Organisational Management, piss off.


So the old department really down here?

That’s the legend. And some of them are still here

The paragrads are supposed to be.

And we’re descending why?

To consult our elders.

Our elders will despise us. And rightly so. We’re a desecration of everything they stood for.

They must have died long ago. It’s forty years since it was closed.


But they’ve gone native, that’s the thing. They’ve become highly skilled in the ways of living underground. Like the mole people in the tunnels in New York, kinda. But they’re not just surviving. They’re not just scavenging. They’re more like philosophical Fremen. Except they have black in black eyes, not blue in blue ones.


We should go native, too. Learn their ways. Hide out down here. Become the resistance.


Have you heard of the legendary mudworms of Newcastle? Thirty foot long … Sliding through the top soil …

Fuck off with your mudworms.

Seriously – the old philosophy department have learnt how to tame them. To ride them, even. You can see them sometimes on the Town Moor …

We could summon a bunch of them and ride them to the Organisational Management campus. A magnificent sight! A whole load of them. And present an ultimatum to Alan and Organisational Management …

And aren’t we suicide survivors, postgraduates? Haven’t we died from British philistinism – even our own philistinism? Haven’t we essentially killed ourselves – and more than once?


Haven’t we only even been allergic to ourselves? Appalled by ourselves?


It’s really only a question of how many times we’ve died. How many times we’ve been actually put to the death. By Britishness in general! By British anti-so-called-pretentiousness! By British philistinism (in everything but music!) By British anti-intellectualism! By British hatred of the intellectual! Which becomes the self hatred of the intellectual! And we’ve done the killing ourselves. Our Britishness is what made us kill ourselves.


We’ve died so many times, postgraduates! We’ve done nothing but die. Truly our lives have been nothing but a life in death.


Of course, becoming a postgraduate is a kind of death. Like becoming an ascetic in India. You die to your former life. To your former philistinism. Figuratively. Actually.

*Our negativism. Our deathliness. What did we ever want to do but die to the world?

And that’s what you want, too, postgraduates. This is a field trip, of sorts. This is a study trip. What is a PhD dissertation but a Descent? But a katabasis?

*No accident that so many thinkers have died figurative deaths. Their health is fragile. They’re mentally disturbed. Of course!

As we are, too, for better or worse.

Of course, it’s not sufficient to be mentally ill to think, but it is necessary, postgraduates. You must have passed through some kind of death, known some kind of loss. You must have been killed – martyred. You must be dead in some way. Of course!

You must have been stretched on being’s rack. Crucified, in your own way. By existence! By having to continue to exist! You must have been slain, and not just once. Because of your interests! Because of your pretentiousness! Because your love of high falutin’ ideas! Your temerity to want to look up from the trough.

Solemnity in the darkness, postgraduates. It suits us, the darkness. We’ve even fallen silent. It’s even stilled our chatter.

Do we have nothing to say in the darkness? All the better.


Descent is the only thing left to us, postgraduates. Descent from such a world! Escaping such a world!

Comes a time when you have to give up on the surface. When you can only go under. When you can only submerge yourself – stay  with the shadows.

Comes a time when you need to rest in darkness. To close your eyes in darkness. To take deep, dark breaths below the surface of the world.


Thought has been driven into the earth. To hide in the earth. To feel the rich moist darkness of the earth.

Thought likes to sink. Thought descends. Thought’s on a katabasis, too – of course it is. Thought wants to go down, only down. And it’s forced to go down. There’s no place for it in this world.

Just as there’s no place for us. It’s inevitable that we descend. That we go down. In search of a place we can be. A place we can bear.

Whereas really what we want is to find the other of all places, postgraduates. The final shadow. The final darkness. The final secret, where we can lay down our heads.

A tomb: isn’t that what we’re looking for? Somewhere to be buried?


What is study ever but a descent, postgraduates? But a journey downwards, in the darkness? What has study ever been but a journey into the unknown? A plunge? A voyage into oblivion? What is the scholar but a mole?


A descent into death. But we’re familiar with death. We know death inside out. Do we need any more death? What can death do to us know? Where’s death’s sting? We can’t feel it.

Nothing to be afraid of. Nothing to flinch from. Death, doing its death thing: we’re used to that. We even revel in that. We feel comfortable among the shades. What have the great European philosophers been to us but shades. What was reading their work for us but a descent to be among the shades?

A steel wall.

What is this?

The Sanctuary. The Organisational Management campus is building down.

So we can’t go any further? Our, like katabasis is blocked?


They’ve built their own coffin, basically. That’s where they’ll die, behind steel walls. Fortified walls. Killed by their underlings …


Postgraduates, gesturing.

There’s another route! See? So we can down further.

Another tunnel.

We’re deeper than the Organisational Managers now. We’re deeper than their sanctuary. We’ve got the dibs on depth. Depth is what we’re about, if nothing else. I mean, we may be dreadful, truncated beings, but we have depths. We may be fuck ups of the worst kind, but we’re buried, right?


The Organisational Management types want a katabasis of their own. They want to descend. They want to go down. What’s an Organisational Management katabasis like? What do they want? What’s their descent?

Their descent is into philosophy – only they don’t know it.

The underground. The underearth. The underworld. We’re descending into ourselves. Which means into our stupidity.

Does our stupidity have any surprises left? Is there anything unknown in our stupidity? Are there any other dimensions of it, our idiocy? Anything left to surprise us? To catch us unawares?


The underground lesson. What is it? What are we supposed to learn? What’s it all supposed to be About?

Why does there have to be a lesson?

Why can’t the lesson be that there are no lessons. That nothing Means anything. And that that’s the point.

The pointless fucking point.

Futility – our whole lives. What we do, what we say. Meaning nothing. Resounding in nothing. Just further hollowing out the nothing. Deepening the nothing.


Our lives, echoing in nothingness. Shouting out their nothingness. Like they’re defiant, or something. Like we want to proclaim our nothingness. Like it’s nothingness pride day, or whatever.


Our voices – I’m sick of our voices. I’m sick of listening to what we have to say. The way we fill up the void with our talk. The way it echoes and resounds: our talk. I want to take a vow of silence.

Livia raised us. Livia suckled us. Like wild cubs. Livia took us in. Livia fostered us. It was a philosophical fostering. You need a philosophical parent, for philosophical fostering. You need a role model. An exemplar. Someone whose life you could imitate. Who lived philosophy as a spiritual practice.

Livia practically gave birth to us. Livia practically suckled us. Of course, you’re a philosophical child for a very long period. Until your mid thirties. Only then will you become an adult. Only then are you weaned. Can you wipe the milk from your mouth …

In the ruins – really, it’s only even been about the ruins of European thought, for us. We’ve only ever know the aftermath. The after-party.

The party of continental philosophy’s over, essentially. It hasn’t been cleared away, the party; there are still a few stragglers, sipping last bottles of wine, but it’s essentially over. The thrill has gone.

Thought has moved on, perhaps. It’s somewhere else, or perhaps nowhere. But we’re still alive, somehow. We latecomers, amusing ourselves among the scraps. The scapings … Looking out for souvenirs …


There are high times in the life of thought … brief, brilliant bursts. And then the falling away. Then the dying of the light. Then the dimming of the day.

No more fireworks. No more shouts of triumph. No more hullaballoo. No more masterworks.

It’s the hangover. Its the perpetual day after. A time for European bathos, and everyone knows it, even if they pretend they don’t.


The truth of the ruins – that we alone know. To which we alone belong.


At least we recognize the ruins as the ruins. At least we’re not pretending that the party’s sill going.

We want the ruins. We want the ruination. This is where we make sense, in the ruins. This is where we belong, as ruiners – in the ruins.


We’ve been waiting for the ruins all our lives. We’ve always wanted the excuse of the ruins: it’s all ruined, so what can we do? Haven’t we wanted to say that to ourselves? It’s all over, so what role might we have?

The comfort of the ruins. Being at home in the ruins. Wanting the ruins, all along. So as to be able to explain ourselves. Account for ourselves.


We couldn’t do much because of the ruins. Nothing could be expected of us because of the ruins. It was the ruins’ fault. We have the ruins’ alibi. We always wanted to give the ruins as an excuse.

These weren’t the times. There was nothing we could do. There was nothing for it.


Who are we going to be, in the ruins?

Will we really come into our own here? Will we really make sense here? Will we really not have to be explained? Accounted for?


The ruins are our milieu. Our territory. We can exhale here. Relax.

Nothing is expected of us. There are no magnum opuses to be written in the ruins. We don’t have to whip ourselves through the most difficult writings. We need expect nothing more of ourselves.

After all, what can you do, in the ruins? Just lie back. Nothing to be done, right? And isn’t that beautiful? No more work, and the desire to work. So-called work. Imitation work. Faux busyness. No more of that.


The ruin excuse. The ruin alibi. The ruin ruse. If only we were allowed to live forever in the ruins. Then we’d become true idlers. True enjoyers of the world. True sybarites.

We’d make sense! Where there is no sense. Where nothing means anything.


Nothing to see here. Nothing to be done here. Nothing to be here.

No appointments to be kept. Nothing to be taught; no lectures to be written. Nothing to be marked. No assessments in the ruins. Let it lead nowhere. Let the ruin-wind blow away our works in progress. Let the ruin-computer-bug wipe away our Word files …

Mother wants our Gnosticism. She wants to understand why would reject all her worlds. She wants to know why we’re turned to the other of all worlds. To the earth, the restful earth!

Mother wants the secret of our katabasis. She wants to know why we seek to descend into the earth, to find the earth. Mother wants to know why we want to be disgusted. Organisational Management wants to know!


Organisational Management wants to watch us in the ruins.


Our katabasis – our fall. Has Organisational Management ever fallen? Does she know what it is to fall? To descend?


Organisational Management wants the low. We’re the ones from whom it can learn.


Organisational Management wants to seize upon the unmanageable as the unmanageable. The unorganizable as the unorganizable. She wants the darkness – in its darkness.

Why? To do what?

To increase its dominion.

No – to rest from being Organisational Management. Organisational Management, too, wants to lay down its arms.


Mother wants our Gnosticism and Gnosticism in general. She wants our despair. She wants to learn everything – even the unlearnable.


Mother wants to learn disgust. And the philosophy of disgust. And philosophy that is grounded in disgust.