Author: Lars Iyer

Agamben’s the only one with any honour! He’s the only one who saw through the lies! The rest of them, for all their talk of biopolitics had no idea …

No wonder all the postgraduates migrating to the alt right. What else could we expect? We were deserted! Deserted by the intelligentsia. By the thinkers we used to look up to. The gods and goddesses were wrong about everything – except Agamben.

The New World Order: did Jean Luc Nancy ever write about that? The Central Bank of Central Banks! Where’s that, in Badiou’s analyses? They didn’t see! They couldn’t tell. They were as full of Trump Derangement Syndrome as anyone else …

And now they’ll die of the poison that slops through their veins. Serves them right. Like everyone else! We’re the only ones who saw it. We’re the only ones who are immune.

 

The kids are all going alt right. All the funky right wing stuff. They can read the world, postgraduates. They see what’s going on. They’ve been poisoned, Sterilized, probably …

What the left’s become. Technocrats! Corporatists! War-mongers! Authoritarians!

The way the left were played. Like a fiddle. With such ease. The way the left’s buttons were pushed. Obvious. Simple.

The great names of the left: fully in favour of tyranny. Chomsky and Graeber and so on. Lovers of the state. Lovers of state measures. Of the corpotocracy. Their instincts didn’t save them.

The true left is underground, deep underground. Deeper than the Old Mole. And perhaps even lost underground. Perhaps just asphyxiating there. For lack of light.

 

The hopeless compromise of the left. The travesty of left. Didn’t that pain us most of all. Finally, our expulsion from the left.

The true left wanders in the night. On a very distant orbit. A comet, tail turned to the sun. Not approaching – receding. Gone.

We have to make a new left for ourselves now. New forms of solidarity. With each other, since we’re the only one’s left. Since there’s no one to turn to anymore. We have to be our own left.

 

It’s gone – that world has gone. We’re the last ones left, pretty much. A few, here and there. The move they made – so brilliant. They used the left’s virtues against it. The left’s desire to do good. To be kind.

 

Our old sense of the left. Our sense of who we were and what we were. Our old points of orientation. The stars we steered by. The ground beneath our feet – all gone.

The left died, and will not be resurrected. The left’s lost. We’re lost. And we have to wander all alone.

The night of the left. The left, deprived of the left. Who are we supposed to be now? What’s supposed to happen next? We’ve been beached. We’re lost.

No politics – no more politics. Does that make us anarchists? Perhaps.

There are moments when it’s revealed, it’s clear: the legal aspect. The economic aspect. The societal aspect. The Private Public partnership aspect. How it stacks up. The whole coercion cascade. It’s complex …

Ah, the grand conspiracy. The down the rabbit hole stuff …

All the rabbit holes. A while fucking warren of rabbit holes …

Do you really believe these things … in the cool light of day? The big picture The very big picture. Look at us: we reach. We theorise. We put things together. Spuriously. Paranoiacally …

 

Is that what philosophy’s become: conspiracy theories?

Sure, conspiracy theories …

I always forget them when I’m sober.

But that doesn’t mean that they’re not true. The hangover is the lie. This world …this everyday world … is the lie …

If we hate this world, its because we love another. If we want to destroy it, it’s to create another. We know what love is, but only through our hatred. We know what creation means, but only through destruction.

Our horror-dreams … Our nightmares …

Our truest feeling: to invert the inversion. To set this world right – by destroying it. We have to live in the intensity of our hatred.

Philosophy itself … is a controlled opposition. What did Stalin say: the best way to control the opposition is to become the opposition.

So we’re Stalinists …What?

We’re part of the system … We play a role …

Fuck off …

They need us. They need us in the pub, drunk. They need us pissed and conspiracy-theorising. They need our … dubious theories of social control. They need our total paranoia. They need us teaching our shit to brain-numbed students.

They need our damaged brains. Our sodden intellects. We’ve been placed here for a reason. A nefarious reason. A wicked reason … We’re pieces in the great chess game, right? A game being played over our heads. They know what they’re doing …

 

They’re playing us at a deep level. We’re working for them, in some deep sense. At some fundamental level …

We’ve been deeply, deeply programmed. More deeply than we know.

 

We gasp for meaning. Like fish gasping at the surface in stagnant water. We’ll take anything. Any conspiracy theory. Any wildness offered us.

We need an Explanation. We need a Cause. We need a Theory.

Which is what they want – exactly what they want. We’re supposed to be half mad. We’re supposed to be crazy.

Maybe our paranoia has its uses. Our pathologies allow us to grasp things. See things. That we shouldn’t.

Yeah – false things. Look, we’re typical products of the end of an economic cycle. That’s our type. That’s who we were and how we were formed. The only chance we have, the only possibility, is to get transcendental. Explore how our kind were produced. We didn’t just come from nowhere.

We have to see ourselves from afar. Have to reverse engineer the process through we were formed. We didn’t just come from nowhere … We need to work out what not only what kind of beasts we are, but what they wanted by making us this way – by programming us like this.

Don’t you see? We have to be suspicious of everything – everything. Of our every thought …

We’re like medieval peasants. We read the word as a series of signs and wonders. It’s like we’re in Seventh Seal, or something.

God, what this world has done to us. Rule by fear. Rule by apocalypse. The deranged world has sent us deranged.

The home zone to be. Vast tracts.

Showing how researchers, businesses, progressive home owners can live side by side, Driss says, reading. Progressive home owners only, note. I’ll bet there’s serious vetting …

They’ll want good-attitude people. Positive people. Solutions-focused people. Bigger-picture people. Communitarian types. Who care about the planet. Not nay-sayers, like us. Not draggers-down-of-others.

Pictures of living pods, stacked in low rises, with grass roofs. Synthetic biological trees. Vertical farms. And robot squirrels, strengthening stress points. Adding carbon resistance patches.

All pods autoregulated for efficiency. Their energy codes synchronised. All of them biomimetic, incorporating biological architecture.

All pods AI run. AI, programming specific air quality, scent and solar intensity … AI, continually filtering the air and capturing carbon … AI, examining your piss, analysing your pancreatic function. And your shit, analysing your gut bacteria and antibiotic use.

AI, fermenting the right soybeans that are growing on your roof. AI, directing your smart-oven to suggest food customised to your unique digestive system and give you personalised and dynamic nutrition plans. AI, making sure your smart-sink can mix the right biotic mix in your water. 

And it’s cold! So cold! They have different weather here, on the Organisational Management campus.

Cold! It’s so cold!

Sheltering from the wind.

Our PhD students are turning blue. Our MA student! The postgraduate students are dying of exposure.

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

A pep talk: You’re representing us at the Organisational Management Christmas party, PhD students, 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 Organisational Managers probably bought their PhD students from a plan. They probably built their PhD students. But you are human all too human. Human 1.0. You’re delicate. Brilliant! Brilliant in your delicacy! In your half-derangement. My God! We’ve brought you this far – we don’t want to lose you now.

Don’t weep, PhD students! We’re defeated, PhD students! 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, PhD students! For your nobility! Your incorruptibility!

No, we mustn’t let you freeze to death. The most painful thing in the world: having your PhD student die before you. No PhD supervisor deserves that.

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

We’re your Doktorvaters and Doktormutters, PhD students. And you’re our Doktorkinderen. You’ll carry forward our work. You’ll 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 you, PhD students. It blossomed in you. It reached full flower in you.

You’re spears flung through the philosophical night, PhD students. You’re soaring! At the height of your flight! You’re like we were, ten years ago – our younger selves. You’re younger versions of who we are. Not yet compromised. Not yet all loss-of-innocence. Not yet fully disappointed. Not yet crashed up against the reality-principle. Against the so-called real world.

If you’re alive, then our idealism is still alive, PhD students. If you’re warm, then our hopes are warm …

The vastness of the campus, the Organisational Management campus. They’ll bring everything here – the rest of the university. It’s all going to be reinvented here.

The Organisational Management maw! Swallowing everything! Scooping up everything. Swallowing the humanities, in one gulp …

Soon, the rest of the university will be brought here. Relocated here. Soon, the whole university, will be reborn on the Organisational Management campus! Soon it won’t just be Philosophy in Organisational Management, but History. But Geography. But Physics! But politics! But the Fine Arts! But Mathematics!

And History will be the history of the application of Organisational Management. Geography can be about the still uneven application of Organisational Management. Politics can be about the technocratic perfection of Organisational Management. The Fine Arts, can be about the décor of Organisational Management: of its glass and steel foyers. About the public spaces of its new campuses.

And Philosophy will concern Organisational Management as a philosophy. About Organisational Management not so much a subject area, but as a way of doing things. A practice. A methodology, if you like. As a logic. As a way of approaching problems. The problem of life! The problem of everything!

*

Soon, everyone will be studying Organisational Management … Nothing but Organisational Management …

Organisational Management, becoming the all-subject. The ur-subject. All unis will essentially be Organisational Management unis, nothing else. They’ll simply be about organisation! And management!

In the beginning, there was Philosophy, and all the other disciplines split off from Philosophy. In the end, there will be only Organisational Management, as all the other disciplines have been subsumed by Organisational Management.

Which is why the move to Organisational Management must be understood in its chiliastic dimension, we agree. In its eschatological dimension. As what is happening everywhere, but in miniature. As obeying the logic of the Last Days. This is why it has to be fought. Why we have to resist. The fate of the world depends on it …

A total management solution. A total organisational solution. That’s what Organisational Management is aiming for. A population control grid. A bio-fascist security grid.

They’ve studied the great control systems from the past. They’re up on the techniques of Hitler and Mao. The ancient Romans. They’re keen students of tyrannical history. But they’re going to raise it up a notch.

They’re perfecting their digital slavery system. Their behavioural psychology. Their neurolingusitic programming. They’re altering our minds. Tenderizing our minds. They’re ruling by group psychology and fear. By black magic, in other words.

*

Helmut, performing one of his famous etymological analyses.

The essence of Organisational Management is neither organisational nor managerial, he says. Organisation – from the Greek organon, meaning organ. The term emerged in mid fifteenth century, as act of organising, which came from the medieval Latin organizationem. Sense of ‘that which is organised’ by 1807. Meaning ‘system, establishment’, from 1873.

Manage, from the Latin non manus, hand and agere, to act. To handle, train or direct a horse: that’s what the word, manage meant in the 1560s. Being shaped by physical manipulation: that’s what it means in the 1670s. Governing body of a collective: that’s what it meant in 1739. The word management to refer to the act of managing by direction is first used in the late sixteenth century.

And what happens when you combine the words? Helmut asks, rhetorically. They’re essentially saying the same thing. An organisation is managed. Management happens through organisation. That’s what changes.

*

Organisational Management! Business Studies – that was the old name … A dead name … But now, Organisational Management is naming itself as such. It’s coming out into the open as exactly what it is. It doesn’t need to disguise itself any longer.

Organisational Management can be brazen – quite open. It can walk in daylight. It can be abroad. There it is, unabashed, unashamed, nothing other than what it is.

*

And what’s the role of Philosophy in all this? The etymology of philosophy: we all know that. Unlimited desire. Infinite yearning. Eros, as Plato would say.

Does Organisational Management know that? Do they sense something missing in Organisational Management – a kind of philosophical phantom limb? Maybe they want more. Maybe they Desire. Yearn in their own way. In an Organisational Management way.

They’d like to be more than they are. They’re all about logistics. And order. They’re all about procedures. About methodology. But they want something else. They’re not sure what they want, but they think it might be us.

This merger … This mind meld … Do they want to tame us, or untame themselves? Do they want to bind us or loosen themselves? It’s about a double becoming. A becoming-organisational-management of philosophy: that’s what they want, explicitly. But won’t there also be a becoming-philosophy-of-organisational-management?

The secret of Organisational Management: Organisational Management masochism. Organisational Management self-loathing. Perhaps Organisational Management is weary of being what it is. Perhaps Organisational Management wants philosophy to decomplete it. To part-destroy it. Perhaps Organisational Management wants to opened up. to bloom. To unfold all its dimensions. And we’re part of that …

We have to drink harder. We have to drink more.

We have to reaffirm … the power of assembly. Drunken assembly.

We’re not drunk enough. We’re not angry enough. We’re not appalled enough. We not screaming enough. We’re not hateful enough. Our blood isn’t frothing over.

We’re too low. Too scattered across the lowlands. We need alcohol to lift us up. To bind us together. To bring us together. We have to find the ardency. The hatred. The high seriousness.

We need to reach a promontory of drinking. To be able to look out – see what’s happening. Take in the whole fucking panorama. Feel the whole campus beneath us. The whole of Organisational Management.

We become visionaries when we drink. We SEE when we drink. We need to be out of the lowlands. Out of the valleys.

This is why we have to drink. To climb up. To attain it – a viewpoint. To be able to SEE. With the right intensity. With the intensity of focus. With the right narrowness of focus.

But we haven’t found our way to the plateau, not yet. We haven’t ascended in our drinking, climbed upwards. We haven’t risen in our drinking. The stars don’t flash above us, not yet. The sky doesn’t wheel around us. We haven’t found our way to the Great Drinking.

We’re looking to see the real sky, not the satellited sky. Not the Skynetted sky. Not the chem-trailed sky. Not the full-of-nanoparticulates sky. Not the all-set-up-for-holograms sky. Not prepared-for-the-fake-Second-Coming sky.

We want to see the real sky, a tear in the fake sky. A crack in the old sky. We have to tear their sky open. We have to destroy their chem-trailed sky. Their full-of-aluminium-and-barium sky. Their poisoned sky. From which poison rains down upon us.

Height – we drink for height. We thirst for elevation. For transcendence – why not? 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 real sky …