Author: Lars Iyer

They have something in mind. Why can no one see it but us? There’s a logic to it all. A pattern. A great shaping. At societal level. At the economic level. At the political level.

There’ll be a new society. A new economy. A new politics. It’s all being brought in. Installed. In different phases. At different tempos. Sometimes gradually, sometimes rapidly.

The old world’s being replaced. The old world’s behind dismantled, and a new one built. It’s clever. It's even brilliant. The enemy knows what it’s doing. Working on multiple fronts. With all these vectors of attack. And all at once. And all without anyone really noticing. Clever.

They have the media, of course. They’ve the politicians. The policy makers. They have the institutions. They’ve driven the common sense from us. They’ve educated it out of us. They’ve indoctrinated it out of us. They know what they’re doing.

They have behavioural psychologists in their team.

 

They’re remaking our world. They’re remaking us. We’re being … refashioned. We won’t be who we were.

It’s not only the contents of our thinking that they want to change. But its logic. That’s what it means to remake us.

It’s cunning …. It’s deft …

 

And ourselves? What can we do to save ourselves? A kind of practice. A way of living. Life – lived. An ethics – why not. Or rather, an ethos. With its own … spiritual exercises.

Which mostly involve drinking. Which are mostly about … inebriation.

 

A dezombie-fication, in the pub. A de-robotification – there in the pub.

 

We’re drinking ourselves sober. We’re sobering up – from the world. We’re awakening – from the world.

And from our stupidity? Maybe.

Unless our stupidity is our awakening. Unless it’s a salvific stupidity. Unless it’s saving us, our stupidity. Our obstinacy. Our stubbornness.

 

Only human unpredictability can save us now. Human unmanageability. Human perversity. Human twistedness. Human stupidity – why not call it that. That’s what we have to call upon in our students. That’s what we have to awaken.

A great call to the stupidity of our students. From stupidity to stupidity. From our stupidity to theirs …

Let’s just take our fucking lives. That can be our Movement. Total negation. Total despair – realised. Come alive.

Let’s just leaving our fresh fucking corpses.

And a manifesto. Put it up online.

Or maybe no manifesto. Leave it reasonless. Don’t explain it. Or anything. It’s more powerful that way.

What message do you think we’d send?

That life isn’t worth it. That nothing’s worth it. The odds are stacked against you. The house always wins. So you might as well just … get out of the game. Press fucking eject.

But they want us killing ourselves. They want us declaring that we’re out of the game. They want us fucking resigning. To get the numbers down. It’s all about population reduction. So they’re spreading an ideology of self-loathing and suicide. By killing ourselves, we’d just be doing what we were supposed to. We’d be change agents for mass suicide, which is what they want.

 

It’s hardly a movement we’re starting. It’s a free floating disgust. A contagious disgust. That will spread through the world. A rejection of all things – even life. Especially life. Life’s not what we want. Living itself – is in bad taste. Suicide … is the only honourable course of action. We might as well just kill ourselves now. Straightaway.

 

Who was that group who gave up on sex. Like, a long time ago. They died out pretty quickly.

The Shakers …

Yeah, them. Well, so will our movement – die out, I mean. But we’ll die out all at once. At one stroke. We’d be the had-enoughs. The fuck-it-alls. It’d all be about abstinence – but abstinence from life.

And the very fact we were philosophy lectures would only add to it. People would expect reasons. Logic. A general argument why life isn’t work it.

So we have to write a manifesto. Explain why.

A glorified suicide note? No: the fact we didn’t would show our state of mind.

What: craziness?

We’d had enough of explanations .. reasons … logic: that’s what would strike them.

Who?

The discerning. People who know how to read the signs.

Naive. They’d love a mass cull of zoomers. Of gen-xers. Of everyone really. We’d just be playing into their hands.

 

The young people do not want to live. Nor do the middle-aged people. Nor the old people. A collective death-wish. That we’re articulating. That we’re letting speak. Death for everyone. Death here, there and everywhere.

 

The world is too much. There’s too much world in the world. We’re dazed. Hit by some blow. Staggering.

We’ve let ourselves be cornered.

By what?

By life. By having to fucking life. There’s another way. There’s a way of escaping. Of evading.

 

They want us to dispose of ourselves. They’re spreading these ideas, and using us to spread them. That’s what philosophy departments are for, nowadays. The whole of the humanities. It’s suicide training, nothing else. Throwing-yourselves-out-of-the-window training.

 

We have to go further. Go deeper. Our despair isn’t despair enough. Our hatred isn’t hatred enough …

 

Philosophy’s being taken over by an eliminativists. Killing yourself types. Because of climate change. Because of Malthusiasnism: because there are too many of us on the planet.

The Newcastle eliminativists … that’s who we are. Following a fucking script.

 

Applied philosophy: that’s what we’re about. Applied nihilism. Practical suicide.

We’re suicide influencers, basically.

 

Can we not talk about killing ourselves for a few minutes?

 

You get offered euthanasia for mental disorders in Canada. Why not philosophical ones? We have to save people not kill them. We need to give people a reason to live in this degenerate world.

We’re a pirate department. On the high seas of philosophy. Don’t lie!! It’s an untruth! What delusion!.

We’re a disaster department. We’re a scuttled department. We’re not even a department. A unit! That’s what they call us: a unit!

And we’re a sinking unit. We can’t recruit. We’re being kept open as an indulgence. As a joke. Their joke – the university’s joke. We’re adrift! At sea!

 

We should be shot like mad dogs. Of course. Imprisoned! And we should be allowed to hang ourselves in prison. For our own dignity. To uphold it somehow …

Because there’s some last dignity we all have. Any of us. A dignity that isn’t even ours …

This is their last chance, our PhD students. They know it. Their last few years. Just as these are our last years – though we have more years than our postgraduates.

We love their unworldliness. Their doomedness. The fact that they’re fucked. Which mirrors our own unworldliness. Our own doomedness. The fact that we’re fucked.

 

They’re copying us, our PhD students. They’re learning from us. It’s accelerated development. They’re moving quickly. But where it will get them? Not as far as us, which is the tragedy. They won’t end up in jobs, like us. They won’t end up working at some half-decent university, or indeed any university.

There are barely any jobs for European philosophy. For non-technocratic philosophers. Nothing for genuine questioners. We slipped through, it’s true. But we were lucky. It was a flaw, a fluke. It happened entirely by chance.

 

They’re copying our gestures, our mannerisms, our PhD students. Even our doom, which is more advanced than theirs. Which has more twists and turns than theirs. Which is more complex, no doubt more mature than theirs.

But it’s coming on, their doom. It’s developing, their doom. It's ripening …

 

They should shoot themselves, our PhD students. And shoot us, first – their teachers. For giving them vistas. For opening them to too many things. For providing them with names. With books. With the grounding for reading such books … It was cruelty: the vistas we showed them. The books we told them about. The films! The music!

 

How tender we’ve been with them, our PhD students. We’ve been generosity itself to our PhD students. As though they were our own children. Which they are in many ways: our own children.

 

The suicides of our PhD students: we expect them. They’re not going to live long out there. They’re not going to last long, not in the world. They’re sensitive. And the world is cruel.

What’s the point of lecturing on anything but the terrible world?

So let’s lecture on that. The pointlessness of lecturing. The pointless of everything.

It’s not the world that’s the problem, it’s Organisational Management. Get rid of Organisational Management and you liberate the world. Is it that easy?

What’s the most anti Organisational Management we can teach? What does it mean to do Organisational Management in the opposite direction?

Like, disorganised unmanagement. Chaos. All that stuff.

Let’s change all our modules. Let’s destroy Organisational Management with our teaching. Let’s become a war machine against those fuckers. Let’s blow them up.

Should we rename our modules? Call them, like, I hate Organisational Management. Organisational Management sucks.

It’s about changing the content. Changing the direction. Teaching undercover. We’re behind enemy lines, basically. We’re secret partisans. We have to equip our students to see all the agendas. What this is all About. We have to help them diagnose the horror. And not to give in to suicidal despair. For now, anyway.

 

Let’s get ourselves sacked – honorably. Let’s destroy our careers. I’m tired of having a career.

 

Study has to become the opposite of Organisational Management. It has to be something Organisational Management could never appropriate.

It can’t be about philosophy, with some determinate content. With a syllabus … It’s about non-learning. About no-syllabus. About wandering infinitely in the darkness.

We should help our students on strike – some profound strike. Striking should be our lives – our whole lives. They shouldn’t be tested. Shouldn’t be under any kind of pressure. They shouldn’t have to complete a thing.

 

It’s a question of sharpening philosophy against the whetstone of Organisational Management. Of rediscovering philosophy, in a sense. Letting it come into its own. Become what it is – what it has to become. Now.

 

Philosophy has to be allowed to drift away from anything useful. From anything to do with results. It has to float away. And take studying with it. And all our students.

We have to rediscover the beauty of philosophy. In its perfect uselessness. The lotus flower blooming from the humanities. In the navel of the humanities. The most beautifully useless subject of them all.

Philosophy has to be made uselessly stupid. And our students, too. We’ll have to lead out students into stupidity – the great stupidity, greater than the biblical desert. We’ll all have to become stupid, together. Perfectly stupidity. And that’s where we’ll meet one another: in perfect stupidity.

 

Our teaching.

We have to be anti-processors. Spanners in the works. We have to stop the flow. Pull the emergency brake. There must no more processing.

The students need a rest. A holy pause. It’s their only chance. Their change to see the divine Nothing. At the heart of all things. At the heart of the uni. At the heart of us. At the heart of philosophy.

They have to learn to live against. In the opposite direction. They have to live in the world but be not of it. Trust – must be eroded. The sense of reality … that this is real. That their world is real …

 

*We have to encourage our students to dwell with their potentiality. To step back. To rediscover what they might be … or might not be.

It’s about opening them to a vocation, a calling. For nothing in particular. For anything. And to remain in that indeterminacy. To stay eternal students. Eternally stupid. Stupid, but with a sweet stupidity. A gentleness. Poised on the brink of … what?

 

What is our freedom? Perversity. The capacity to be perverse. To be strange. Negation. Negativity. That’s how we show it. Our philosophy. Our questioning. That we’re not just victims.

What are we then?

Negators. Nihilists, if you like.

 

Hatred – that’s what out freedom has contracted into. That’s what it’s become. Some point of negativity. Some seed of negativism. That’s what it’s made us into, the system.

Only hatred is left to us.

That’s what love’s become: hatred. Our capacity for friendship: hatred.

And what we hate is what we have in common. An instinct of hatred toward the same things. An instinct for horror at the same things. A basic flinching – a recoil at the same things. It's what saves us. It’s what keeps us together, in dark times.

The same sense of machinery working in the dark. That there are vast and shady … manipulations. Power-grabs and counter power-grabs. Great armies clashing in the dark.

The same sense that there are shifting planes of darkness, that’s all. Powers. Principalities. That we can’t even catch a glimpse of our true rulers.

The universe should get drunk, too. Join with our drunkenness.

The universe should give up! The universe should set aside its plans! They don’t matter. They’re not leading anywhere.

Every living thing must drink! Must be drunk! Every non-living thing! There must be drunken rocks and drunken stones. Drunken skies! Drunken stars!

Everything should be drunk with us. There should be a great drunken celebration. Of all things! Of everything!

 

The pub. This is our Church. This is our Temple. This is our Shelter.

This is the centre of all things, and immune from all things. The world turns around us here. All things turn around us. We contemplate all things as at a distance.

 

Our drinking. It’s how we reach what we are not. How we deviate from the Plan – even our own Plan.

Suspension. Means, losing their ends. Means, uncoupled from their ends.

We’re holding fate back. The inevitable. We’re not letting the world be the world, at least for a while.

 

Keep drinking! Stay drinking! There are drunken conversations that we simply must have. A drunken intensity which we must maintain. A drunken paranoia. A drunken conspiracy-theorising. A drunken drunkenness.

We’re drunk on each other. We’ve turned each other drunk. We’ve turned each other wild. Are we good for each other? Is this good for us?

We’re made each other high. We’ve made each other mad. That’s the effect we have on each other. We’re accelerants. Catalysts. General intensifiers.

We spread our disease. And even increase our disease. Our madness! Because we should call it by its name: madness!

In a kind of contagion. An illness. We’re running a fever. We’re running wild. We’re febrile. We’re dreaming crazy dreams.

The blooming of our drunkenness, it’s bearing fruit. Its yield. Bountiful. Plentiful.

Our ideas, carried in a mad flow. Our enthusiasm. Our love of film! Of music! Of books!

The signs and wonders that keep us alive. That make life worth living! These life buoys … These oxygen masks …. As our ship sinks. As our plane crashes.

 

Drunken recommendations of books! Of films! Of music! That we’ll forget. Unless we write them down … But we’ll never be able to read our own drunken handwriting …

Drunken explications of film plots. Of novels. Drunken renditions of favourite songs.

 

A mad drunken seeing of connections. A drunken discernment of patterns …

 

We’re drunken enthusiasts. Drunken culture-devourers. We need succour. We need something for our souls. To keep our souls alive.

 

Getting drunk and watching epic Eastern European gloomfests …

We drink for stupor. We drink to be stupid. To clear out all good sense from our head. All common sense.

We drink for encounters. We drink to meet the Outside. We drink to Reach … We drink to … Discover …  

 

We drink to be ready. To raise our heads. To look up at the sky and to look through the sky … The system’s sky.

As if something from the sky could save us. Some catastrophe, reaching us from the sky. Some incursion. Some roaring from the heavens.

 

The sky. Something sees us up there. Something’s watching. On the other side of the night. Of endless space.

Someone’s eye is upon us. We do not live in vain. We do not drink in vain.

And that’s why we drink. To remember. To get up off our knees … And then to fall down again. For a moment’s respite …

 

Our method; our drunken method. To follow the drunken path, a little. Even as it meanders. Even as it appears to go nowhere. Even as it leads nowhere.

 

We want to see the absence of God. We want to see the empty sky.

Transcendence. We’re thirsty for transcendence. We drink for transcendence. To be reminded. That the world system isn’t complete. That this isn’t all there is. That the irruption can come from without, and only from without. That the revolution happens in the sky, the empty sky, the starless sky.

The divine Nothing. The Nothing as the divine. The divine absence. That’s what we’re waiting for. Absence as the divine. That leaves nothing standing. That spares no one.

 

Drunken prayer is more effective than sober prayer.

We want a miracle! A drunken miracle!