Author: Lars Iyer

I can’t believe Daria’s missing this. I can’t believe she’s staying at homes. Sensible woman. She can’t stand it when we’re drunk and doomy, she says. But we’re always dark and doomy.

She’s staying in to write her magnum opus – that’s what she’s doing. It’s her ticket to a job somewhere else – that’s what she things. She’s on the way out. She just wants to pass through our skies like a meteor.

Don’t meteors burn up?

Like a comet, then.

She has other plans … Maybe to bust out of Philosophy altogether.

Into what?

Comparative Literature, maybe. Modern Languages.

A cunning move.

Though Modern Languages are doomed. And Comparative Literature doesn’t really exist in the UK. America, maybe.

America … is that where she wants to go? What a move …

Anyway, she’s got her head down … wants to complete her monograph, and then she’ll be off …That’s why she’s indifferent to the whole Organisational Management thing. She’s not like us. She won’t go down with the ship. She won’t be shipwrecked, with the philosophical ship.

My God. These buildings. So vast! So high! Babel all over again. Did they think they could build whatever they liked? Apparently. And the names for these buildings. Can’t you feel the evil?

 

Did Satan fall to earth here, on the Organisational Management campus?

Which chapter of Revelations are we in, on the Organisational Management campus?

 

All that’s left to us are more or less spectacular suicides. Which no one will understand.

 

We’re lost in the coils of our evil. Lost in the coiling, the writhing. Lost in the agitation of our sin. Lost in the deepening of the Fall.

 

Does the horror know itself as horror? Does it feel its own horror? Is it innocent, in its horrifyingness?

Remembering our old Philosophical Studies parties. When Cicero was in charge.

Guests from all over the university … Cicero’s guardian angels, she used to all them. Lofty people! Senior people! The great and the good, among the academic staff, like a protective guard, over our unit. Over Philosophy!

And that choral music Cicero used to play. Beautiful. And the way we’d head out on the town. To Jilly’s. Cicero liked that.

And back to hers, sometimes … Out to the coast. Ascending the stairs to her flat, in the Sir James Knott Memorial building. Falling asleep one by one, Cicero laying soft blankets over us …

The Organisational Management campus.

We’re losing ourselves. Forgetting who we were. What it was like outside – outside the campus. In the real world.

Becoming vague. Becoming brain-fogged. Is it something in the air? Are they pumping something into the air? I wouldn’t put it past them.

Some anti-philosophy gas. Some anti-thinking substance.

They’re probably raining it down from the clouds. From the controlled sky. From the controlled clouds. Raining barium and strontium and God knows what else -ium. Pouring it down.

 

We have to remember … the people we were. The great names of philosophy. Recite them. Gilles Deleuze. Franz Rosenzweig. Recite quotations. Whole pages! In the original language, if we were capable of that! Like mantras!

I think the Organisational Management / Philosophy merger is going to, like, break reality. It’s an omen. Like the birth of a two-headed cow.

An omen of what?

That reality – so called reality – is crazy and out of control.

We knew that.

I thought all the craziness would just blow by like some hurricane and leave us alone. I thought we could batten down the hatches and be okay. I thought we could just hide out until the end of civilization, or whatever … But no: our rock’s been lifted! We’ve been seen. The university’s peering at us, which is never a good thing. The university’s making Decisions, which can only be a disaster.

 

You know how it is in these times. Everything is backwards. Everything is inverted. Doctors are here to destroy health. Big pharma to make sure we stay sick. Banks are here to destroy the economy. The weapons manufacturers will make sure we stay at war. Science is here to destroy the truth. Psychiatrists to destroy minds. And unis are here to destroy education.

And philosophy?

To implement Organisational Management.

My God!

 

They’re decommissioning the old reality, and implementing a new one. Right in front of our eyes. And everyone’s going along with it. A thousand years of darkness: that’s what’s coming. Slavery. A slavery system. The new Hell. They’re building Hell. A false reality. A fake reality.

And they’re rolling out the new narrative.

 

And all the academics playing along. Pretending not to pretend. They’re faking not faking it. Brilliantly! Intuitively! They’re following their orders so deeply, they don’t even appear to be orders.

And all at once, moving together. Lie a flock of birds, all turning together. All at once. Like a shoal of fish.

Mass behaviour. Mass formation. Mass hypnosis. They’re acting as one.

Things are shifting. But they act as though nothing’s shifted. As though it was always like this.

Their sanity is insanity. Their moderation is immoderation. Their calm is panic. Their confidence is fear.

 

The trap is closing.

No – it’s closed.

 

So it reached us. So what? What did you think would happen?

It’s supposed to be a thinking campus. A campus for ideas.

What do these buildings think about?, I wonder. What is the glass and steel thinking? And these paving stones? These fancy lampposts? And what do they think of us, wandering through?

They’re monitoring us, that’s all I know. They’re listening to our conversation. For keywords and phrases. They’re measuring our body temperature. The rate our hearts beat. Any … agitation we might be feeling.

 

They’re reading our minds, I reckon. They know that we’re against them. They know that we’re negation – pure negation. That we hate them.

They’re probably spraying things to calm us down. They’re pumping something into the air, to alter our mood. They’re probably changing the lightning, to make us see things differently.

 

Campus surveillance. This is supersurveillance. They can see into your soul. If you actually have a soul … If they haven’t sucked it out.

They can read our thoughts … Our misinformational thoughts. Our disinformational thoughts.

They could dispatch drones to kill us, if they wanted. Set off personalised smart bombs, or whatever. Launch a little plague designed just for us.

 

Haven’t we always feared it: a knock on the door? The secret police?

But what’s worse: that there will be no knock at the door. That they have us contained, that’s all – perfectly. They know we won’t do anything. They know we’re not any real threat. They have us contained us. In the uni. In the humanities. In Philosophy – particularly in Philosophy.

We’re no threat. We’re innocuous. We’re accounted for.

The campus is a world – completely self contained. You can’t see anything beyond it. It’s a whole horizon.

 

This campus … You could live out your life here. All your needs, catered for. Material, intellectual … Spiritual needs, God know. The whole hierarchy of needs. Everything but … Everything except … what?

The opposite of all this. The need to go in the opposite direction to all this. The need to escape all this. The need to see the destruction of all this. An apocalyptic need: is that it?

 

Only an auto-da-fe of the Organisational Management campus will do. A setting fire to the entire Organisational Management world. Only that could make sense of it.

It’s a question of Organisational Management destruction. Of Organisational Management being offered up to the sky. Of some magnificent potlatch. A destruction as great as the campus. The unmanageable – as explosion. As destruction. As the end – of this

But all this steel and glass won’t burn. These pavement tiles. Nothing burns here. Which is entirely on purpose.

 

One day all these paving stones will swell upwards. Break apart. And the earth will reveal itself. There it will be: an open wound: the earth.

Rending – just that. Tearing. The revenge of the Earth, welling up beneath the campus. All the buildings, heaving up. All the glass and steel. The Earth, rising up to meet the sky. And that will be the most beautiful day of all.

 

We need terrorists. Where are the terrorists when we need them? We need someone to blow up this campus.

God, you’d have thought a campus like this would just conjure up terrorists. Through some weird dialectics. You’d have thought it’d just call them into existence, through its sheer hubris.

Fiver, so weak.

He’s all but collapsed. God, he never complained! Never said a word!

He’s running a fever! Carry him, PhD students! Make yourself useful.

If only we could fashion some kind of bier …

Five, mouthing. He has something to say. Leaning in to listen.

Fiver’s vision. Of the future. The near future, Fiver says. Something terrible had happened. It was dark. Like, permanent twilight. There was no light in the sky. And it was so heavy. Like gravity had been turned up. The simplest movements cost such effort.

And there was this terrible disconnection, Fiver says. Everything was muffled and distant. If you shouted, you wouldn’t be heard. If you cried out, no one would hear you.

I looked in books – familiar books – but couldn’t understand them, Fiver says. All the words were corrupted. I listened to music – music I used to know. And all I heard were terrible tones …

I saw people running for their lives, with their children, Fiver says. I saw fake people: like robots, but flesh and blood … Wraps, they were called. And the wraps were possessed. They were Inhabited by … demons.

And there were these time loops, Fiver says. That people got stuck in. Repetitive behaviours. Just looping round and round … And the weirdest thing was that you couldn’t die. Like, if you died, you’d just come back to life.

Cold! It’s so cold!

We’re thinking only of mulled wine – will they serve mulled wine?

I think alcohol is banned on campus now.

Mince pies, then! Will the mince pies be warm?

Can you imagine how bad university catering mince pies will be?

At least Organisational Management towers will be heated. At least there will be the warmth of other bodies.

 

Can’t you say a prayer or something, Perry? cant you rouse our spirits? We need your faith, Perry! Some muscular Christianity, or whatever. We need spiritual comfort. Isn’t there a passage from scripture that you could read out? Some handy psalm?

We need to believe that the world’s a gift. That it’s all been bestowed for our benefit. That there’s more than the Organisational Management campus!

Maybe we need some Holderin. Who can quote Holderlin? In German! Where’s Helmut when you need him?

Sheltering from the wind.

Our PhD students are turning blue. They want to warm their hands.

Passing them the hipflask. Giving them a nip. That’ll warm them up.  

You’re representing us at the Organisational Management Christmas party, postgraduates, don’t forget that! There’s to be no Organisational Management merriment. You’re to regard the enemy with suspicion! Dislike!

Just because we’re fraternising with the enemy doesn’t mean we can let down our guard.

 

The postgraduates are miserable. The postgraduates need a pep-talk.

Don’t weep, postgraduates! You won’t fall as far as us, postgraduates! You won’t be as abject.

We’re defeated, postgraduates! Cosmically! Actually! But you … you still have hope. You have to have hope. Just as we have hope, but not for us. But for you, postgraduates! For your nobility! Your incorruptibility!

What are you favourite Christmas carols, postgraduates? What warms your postgraduate hearts? Belt them out! Silent Night! The Christmas Song! The messianic expectation of Little Drummer Boy. Nothing more moving.

 

No, we mustn’t let them freeze to death.

The most painful thing in the world: having your PhD student die before you. No PhD supervisor deserves that.

PhD students are our future. They’re supposed to outlive us, live beyond us. Reach farther. Achieve what we’ve never been able to achieve.

We’re their Doktorvaters and Doktormutters, as they say in Germany. They’re our Doktorkinder … what’s the plural of Kinder?

We’d sacrifice ourselves for them. We’d lay down our lives for them!

We have to live to pass on our wisdom. What we’ve learnt. All that we’ve done. Our own work … they can carry it forward. They can quote us. Remember us. So that it will not have been in vain. So that we will not have been in vain.

Our academic careers … will have meant something. Because it led to them. It bloomed in them. It reached full flower in them.

Our Doktorkinderen. Fruit of our academic loins! Suckled on our philosophical teats!