Can’t believe the world’s still bothering to exist. I mean, really – why? Doesn’t it know? It’s all past its self-by date. All of it. And everything. All of this. It’s missed the perfect moment to … end.
I mean the way it all continues is just … tasteless. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. Being isn’t what’s supposed to be. What it was, in the good old days, eh Helmut?
And the days go by and go by, and what do they add up to? They don’t … culminate. They don’t build to anything. They’re not going anywhere.
Should they be going anywhere?
It’s life in deferment, right? Nothing can be finished. Nothing can be done definitively. Nothing can be accomplished. Not once and for all.
The unending end. The end that can have no ending to being the end. Ending can never end. Yet it’s still an end.
How much money have you brought in? Let me guess – no money. How many successful philosophy bids have there been? How have you done with the research councils?
How useful are you to the world? How are you changing things for the better? How are you meeting the societal challenges?
We’re doing very well. We’re the UN’s good boys and girls. We’re getting all sorts of brownie points. They think we have the right attitude. We’re making our presence felt.
Organisational Management research, rippling out into the city and beyond. From the O.M. campus to the world.
We’re plugged into the governing system of the world. Into the public private partnerships. Organisational managers are everyone’s favourite.
We’re putting out best O.M. feet forward. Bubbling upwards. Rising in all the metrics. We’re top of the academic pops. You’ve teamed up with a winner, philosopher. We’ll show you how to succeed.
I don’t want to succeed.
Don’t be sulky. I don’t like sulky. How’s about some good attitude? I can see why you guys are plunging down the league tables.
Let me see the postgraduates. Bring me to them.
I just want to see them. Frolicking. In the wild. Doing postgraduate things. Running free. Free range!
I want to bathe in postgraduates.
A single postgraduate is enough to explode the world. Is that right? And a whole cadre of them …? Harness that postgraduate energy, and …?
They’re not even postgraduates anymore. They’re part of no university. Except their own one.
They’ve entered some new space. They’re post-post graduates, or whatever. They’re post everything. Opening out to infinity. Just opening out and out.
Remember – they’re c. They’re something else now. They’ve interrupted their institutional studies indefinitely. They’re busy with something else now. With … studying without end. Inoperable study. Without project. Without measurable outcomes. Without purposes or plans. Freed up from all instrumentality. With no necessary relation to an end. Without any developmental teleology.
They’re studying without destination. They’ve freed themselves from testing, accreditation, from graduation ceremonies. They have no-one standing over them – no supervisors. No authority. No one officiating.
They’re in a perpetual state of suspension.
They’re experimenting with what they can do. With what they can be. That’s their delight, which is unfathomable to us.
They’re no longer what they learned to be. They no longer say what they learned to say.
They don’t feel any guilt about what they haven’t yet achieved. They don’t feel a sense of failure – unlike us. They don’t hanker after greatness – not like us.
They’re not about hope – in the future. They’re not about deferred gratification – about sacrificing the present for the future. They’re not waiting for happiness to arrive.
They’re always escaping. In perpetual parabasis. They’re always seeking an exit from the scene.
They’re students as not students. They’re postgraduates as not postgraduates.
It's an occupation of sorts. They go amongst us, these post postgraduates. They use the same library. They walk the same corridors. But they’re suspending the function of these places.
Never belonging to this world. Never wanting to be part of it.
The reality principle: they don’t know it. They haven’t been inducted into the present world. They never accepted it. Its terms and conditions.
They were never broken, as we were, by part time teaching.
Authoritarianism and dependency-creation: that’s what management is about.
We need elite leadership because of the irrationality of the working class. The tight regulation of the working class. They’re collectivist! Undisciplined! Irrational! They’re not able to secure individual futures. They don’t show the right kind of self-care.
They’re unthinking out there, beyond the stony wastes. They’re prone to drift The risks of the mismanaged life. Easily led. Susceptible to demagoguery.
They need to be policed. Manipulated. Moulded and modulated.
The recalcitrance of the majority: this is why planning and management can never end.
We’re all about moulding and modulating our subjects. About creating acquiescence. Shaping and reinforcing behaviour. Encouraging useful potentials and rejecting others.
The great management task. The great moral reconstruction. The great re-education.
An interventionist management. An elite administration. New kinds of … social collaboration. The re-engineering of the subject.
The world needs an active intervention. New kinds of leadership. A restructuring. Human resource management of the highest kind. New systems of incentives. Of regulation.
All human action is to become economically driven. All values! The polity and the economy are to become one.
We’re deploying the finest minds on motivation theory, leadership innovation, marketing and branding.
It’s about working out how to organise production best. It’s about the best functional solutions.
it’s politics – a new model of politics. It’s a totally political endeavour to order and reorder. Subsuming the whole of society to capital. Making sure there’s no gap between economy and polity. Via the elite guidance of Organisational Management.
We’re investors in ourselves, right? We’re self organisers. Self managers. Self starters. We’re stores of useful data and information.
They don’t know their own best interests. They don’t know what they should want.
It’s about moral reform. About engineering a new kind of soul. Recasting the working class as bourgeois subjects. With bourgeois cares.
There are great productive gains to be made.
We’re the last despairers, postgraduates. This is the last and lowest form of despair. Despair has fallen to us, which is why despair itself must despair.
We’re, like, professional mourners, postgraduates. The kind they hire to wail and tear at their clothes. To fall upon the coffin.
Except we’re mourning the end of a civilization. We’re mourning because no one else will. Because no one else sees it.
Sometimes it feels as though it’s only us. That we’re the only ones. There are tears only in our eyes. For what has passed. For what is sinking into history. An entire civilization! And philosophy is sinking with it. And of course, the humanities. We’re anachronisms, postgraduates. We’re irrelevant.
We’re like coelacanths, caught in the ocean depths. Our time has passed – in fact we’ve never even know it, our time. Essentially belated: that’s what we are. It’s nachträglichkeit. It’s return of the repressed.
And what about you? You’re even more out of time than we are.
You can’t go home again, postgraduates. Because we were never home. There never was a home for the humanities, let alone philosophy. There was only ever temporary accommodation. Only tents pitched in the desert. Only a rest break.
True exile: that’s our true vocation. Exodus. The humanities are only ever on the way out. And we’ve been turfed out again. We’ve been cast out again. The deepest exile of all. Into Organisational Management. Into the anti-philosophical. Not merely indifferent to philosophy, but antithetical to it. Actually hostile to it. In essence. What shelter will philosophy find in glorified Business Studies?
How hard we’ll have to fall, postgraduates! How far we’ll fall! Truly, we’ve never know falling like it.
The logic of the world is leading here. The logic of the new world. The Organisational Management campus is only what the world’s becoming. What the world already is, in essence.
The O.M. campus is only showing us where we already were – for some time. It’s being revealed to us. The essence of the new world. What it is, what it looks like.
Our fate is not in our hands. The dice have been rolled. Where are we being taken? Where are we being led? Will we acquit ourselves well? Will we honour our philosophical ancestors? Will we be brave? True? Will we bear with us the honour of philosophy?
The new regime. The new reality. A world order as organisation and as management.
We’re exposed. Our hearts are beating in the open air. We’re taking risks – terrible risks. We’re all but offering up our sanity.
Management theory isn’t just time and motion studies anymore. We’ve got a bit more sophisticated than that.
O.M.’s about human relations. It’s all about practices, routines, behaviours, norms, rules, regulations, emotions, affects.
Look, management is about economics, sociology, psychology, accountancy … it was a science. That was the way management started claiming it as a science in the late nineteenth century. Well, it’s an art now. We need the humanities to help.
Philosophy’s part of the creative sector, really. All the humanities are. Which is why Organisational Management is turning its attention to the arts.
O.M.’s curious about the humanities. O.M. wants to find out more about the humanities. O.M.’s interested.
We need to be able to draw on the general intellect – language, affect, cognition, creativity, emotion. Even your despair will be useful – do you see?
O.M. can play with whatever it likes. It can have its fun now that it’s taken over the entire world.
It’s all idling. Entertaining itself. Fooling around with the humanities.
They want our freedom. They want our free time. They want our idle talk. They want our stupidity, our most precious resource. They want our capacity to bullshit. To talk rubbish.
They want to work out the secret of the humanities postgraduate. If they crack you, then they’ll understand philosophy. And if they understand philosophy …
The philosophico-literary: they want that, too. Nothing is incidental to them. They want to know all. To study all.
Philosophy is the final frontier for O.M. The humanities are. It’s the last thing to be conquered. It’s like we’re the end level Boss. Except we’re the anti Boss. We’re so weak. We’re so fucked. We shrinking, worldwide.
So you’ve chosen to break the wild horse of philosophy. Break us, and you can break anyone. Break our despair.
Open innovation – that’s what it’s all about. Organisational Management isn’t about R&D. We leave that to the people we bring on board. You guys are the R&Ders. You’re doing the real innovation – you guys in Philosophy. We’re drawing on your brilliance. On the ideas we harvest from you. It’s built on the model of open source software.
Open-source parasitism, more like.
I’m, like, the Queen of the Pulse. I’m at the heart of the Pulse. Only I know how to use it, really. I am the Pulser. You need a Pulser. Like, an operator. I know how things work.
I’m the Pulse Queen. This is reality for me. This is what’s really real.
This is who I really am. This is where I come to life. I have webbed fingers here. I don’t know why.
It can really fuck up your sense of reality. Or it can show you that reality – what we call reality – is fucked up.
Maybe none of it’s real: Philosophy. O.M. You. Me. Alan. Maybe I never was married …
You can talk to it, but you have to say Pulse first, so that it can hear you.
Hey Pulse-y … surprise us. Show us something really beautiful. I want to see the most beautiful thing you can make. The most beautiful sunset, or whatever. The most beautiful beach scene. The most beautiful meadow. Wow us, Pulse. I want to see your greatest hits.
The Pulse is, like, an alien intelligence. Like it’s trying to learn about us. To communicate with us, even. Like Solaris.
Is the Pulse listening? What does Pulse make of all this?
We’re Pulse Buddies. I’m not sure what that means. It merges our dreams, or something. It’s reading us, scanning us. Making whatever it’s making in response. Dreaming for the both of us.
When they turn the world to shit, there’ll always be the Pulse.
The feel of real, baby. Forget your VR goggles. This is all-encompassing. It means your life won’t suck quite as much. You can go somewhere without going anywhere at all.
There’s a pressure sensitive underlay. Omnidirectional.
The limits of reality are your own imagination, etc. Do anything. Be anyone Go anywhere.
We have a Secret, philosopher. You’re my Secret and I’m your Secret. Tonight’s all about the Secret. We’re going to live forever in the Secret. By grace of the Pulse.
What do we share? What are we being shared by? The sharing itself – that’s the answer, philosopher. The Pulse is a sharing. It opens a space. It opens a time. That we can share.
It’s the evening’s gift to us. It’s the Pulse’s gift to us. A space outside of space, and a time outside of time. It’s intimacy’s gift. The gift of contact. We don’t have to lie anymore. We don’t have to be who we were, out there.
Who are we being shared by? God? Is that the word for it? Or the sharing itself. Friendship. Or love. Or … what?
Contact, philosopher. Isn’t that what life’s all about? I want contact.
Don’t you get tired of being yourself? I do. I’d like to be … someone else. A philosopher, for example. But it’s not just any example. Maybe I’d like to do what you do. Or what you don’t do.
We’re not who we were. Just for tonight. We’re changing each other. We’re giving each other … potential.
Just one night. That’s all it’s going to be. I don’t want to leave my husband. My … lifestyle. I have something to maintain. But for just one night, I will. I want out, for a night. For tonight.
Tonight will be forever, right? Tonight will touch eternity. Everything will revolve around tonight.
The whole campus revolves around this. Everyone will have their own personal Pulse one day. Their own virtual reality studio. When reality becomes unbearable, there’s always VR, right?
It’s like lucid dreaming, or something. It makes you dream. Only it’s not your dream. It’s, like, the dreaming. That’s an aboriginal thing, isn’t it? What the world is: a dreaming. A dreaming of the gods.
The Pulse lets Organisational Management dream. It’s what O.M. dreams of. The secret is that O.M. doesn’t want to be itself. And that’s what the Pulse allows. A release for the organisational manager. A space that you don’t have to organise, or manage. That disorganises you. And unmanages you. From the pressure of being so utterly O.M.
Work in Progress 