Author: Lars Iyer

Our hope: a black dawn is rising. The dark sky is opening. The greater sky. The blacker sky. Our hope: the sky of non-meaning is rising. The nihilistic sky.

To be saturated by it: the nihilistic sky. The sky of nihilism. Passing through us, every pore.

A nihilistic wind is blowing. But a freeing nihilism. A don’t-take-any-of-it-seriously nihilism. A this-is-not-your-world nihilism. An anarchic breeze nihilism.

 

The greater Sky. The sky of disaster, the stars blown out like candles. That’s our sky. Which makes us laugh. Which our laughter up to. Thank God for that sky, which means we’re never fooled.

The sky that laughs through us. That rips through us. That trembles through us. The sky that shines through our eyes. Our sky. Our relief. Our distance. Which means that we will not be fooled.

Our laughter is the laughter of the sky. Our salvation. Our happiness. Our freedom. Our alibi. Our gladness. The night that we hold between us. That laughs between us.

What the uni could be …

What could it be?

A point of resistance. A fightback.

Oh yeah? This is where thought goes to die – everyone knows that.

 

We academics are not just good for nothing. We make it all worse. We supply it all with its legitimating discourse. We’re shock troops for the Destruction. We’re part of selling the Destruction. Of giving it a language.

 

We’re placeholders. Lieutenants of the nothing. We’re keeping the place for NOTHING. Nothingness speaks through us.

The void blows through us, right? We’re void thinkers, void writers. The void speaks of itself through us. The void calls out to the void in our students.

 

Our irrelevance is, like, incredible. It amazes me. I’m stunned by it. The irrelevance of the whole humanities.

We’re beautifully irrelevant. I’d say ornamental, but we’re not even that. We make no difference whatsoever.

We actually glory in it, our irrelevance. We drink toasts to our irrelevance. To the great joke played on us.

We’re not even irrelevant – that’s the problem. The humanities are a tool. We’re useful idiots. We’re actually selling the collapse.

 

Teaching into nothing. Into the void. Who are we trying to reach? What are we trying to say? What, to bring across. It never mattered. It doesn’t matter. It’s speech for nothing. We prepare our lectures in vain. Put together PowerPoints in vain. For no purpose.

 

We teach from a script – their script. We don’t know it, but we do.

 

We have to understand the way we’re being played. All of us. How they’re using us.

They – who are they?

They are fucking legion.

 

What are we for? What do they have planned for us?

 

We think we can just do our academic thing. Our philosophy thing.

We think we’ve been allowed to do something. We think we’ve been let off the leash. But we’re on the leash.

We think this is our chance. That it’s a kindness. That we’ve been indulged. That the world’s relented. But the world hasn’t relented.

We think we’ve got one over on the world. That this is a little reprieve. We don’t want to look the Organisational Management gifthorse in the mouth. But we should.

*The slow invasion of nothingness. The slow voiding. Is that it? Is that how it’s going to happen? A slow numbing. The poison gradually reaching all the extremities?

There’s not even a magnificence to the collapse. It’s not even some sublime spectacle.

Not yet. That’s not how things fall apart in an advanced civilization. It’s slower than that.

 

Look, the collapse won’t happen all at once. It’s like the fall of Rome. Unless you lived in a city and actually saw the barbarians sacking it, you’d barely know it was happening.

Collapse was slow, you lived in a fancy villa. Gradually, it gets harder to get food. You’re forced to go local. You turn your swimming pool into a pig sty. Your fancy guest rooms into stables.

Your world contracts. It takes a whole. But one day, you find yourself demolishing a wing of your house to build a cow shelter or whatever. It’s the slow fall apart.

No way – this collapse is going to be different. It was escalator up, and it’s going to be elevator down. Like, empty lift-shaft down. Like a collapsing building, falling in real time. It’s going to be bad …

 

We have to find the level of the collapse. To let it play out through us. Just roll through us. Just let it find itself in us. Come to itself in us. Fill us.

 

We’re drinking the collapse – don’t you see? This is liquid collapse.

The world’s, like a total institution. There’s got to be somewhere else. Somewhere we can flee to. We need to get out.

But go where? With what means? How?

Travel. There are other cultures. Other countries.

They’re all the same. Its all becoming the same. It's the same logic. Invading everywhere. And we’d just carry it with us, that logic. Because we’ve internalised it. Because we’re following it ourselves. There’s no way out.

 

Come on, we’re doing alright, aren’t we? We’re not sentenced to cross amputation in some Saudi jail? We’re not be held for ransom by some crack high child soldiers. We need some perspective.

I’m sick of perspective. I’m sick of being reasonable. The only solution is to throw ourselves out of the window. Right now. All at once. No more compromise. No more of this.

 

The demands made upon us. That we reshape our souls. That we be trained. That we get used to this. That we put the collar on. This is their world. Their rules. This is their system. It’s entirely against us … our kind. We need to become philosophical pirates. Outlaws. Robin Hoods.

How the fuck do we do that?

 

We’re so easily discouraged. But that’s part of it, our discouragement. It’s part of the problem.  

We want the universe to act for us. Apocalyptically. In a great pre-emptive strike. In a cosmic disaster, that began long ago, spreading through everything. That’s destroying the universe atom by atom. Wouldn’t that be beautiful?

This is actually a mental illness.

I hope it is. I hope everyone’s going mad from this. Everyone in the universe!

We’re dead! The walking dead! The irrelevants! The inexcusable! The indulged-because-they’re-allowed-to-live.

We volunteer! Cull us now! Or better, let us cull ourselves! We’ll spare you the trouble!

Make suicide efficient and productive. Suicide booths on every street! Euthanasia stations!

Make it simple and we’ll just do away with ourselves. We’ll take ourselves out. We’ll remove ourselves from the equation.

Cup of tea, anyone?

Stop offering tea. It’s aggressive, offering tea. It’s so deflationary. So bathetic. So British. The great leveller: tea. Well, I’m the enemy of tea. I refuse to drink tea, ever again. I’m making a stand against tea.

I don’t even want to see you drinking tea in front of me. You drink tea in a deflationary way. As if to say, all this is nonsense. UnBritish nonsense. You’re an enemy, basically.  

Have a nice cup of tea – as if it could all be reduced to that. Settled by that. A nice cuppa. Come on.

Next you’ll be offering biscuits. Tea and biscuits! Tea and fucking biscuits! It’s torture! Biscuits! Who eats biscuits? No one over the age of twelve should eat biscuits. Biscuits are the enemy.

Chump actually ate all the biscuits.

You fucking pig, Chump.

What about coffee? Coffee’s more continental. And you can add spirits to coffee. Which is also continental.

What should we be drinking? Absinthe?

Do you have any spirits?

Opening the cupboards.

Day old beer, God!

So he took his life. Sounds wonderful. Sounds beautiful. Sounds like he actually did something with his life.

Yeah, take it.

But that was actually the result of a decision, right? He was doing something – acting …

Suicide’s a beautiful idea. Imagine it: a suicide not from despair, but from joy. The joy of meeting the end. The joy of not having to live any longer. The joy of suiciding out of joy. Not sadness, not depression. Nothing medicalizable.

See, I think the best thing would be doing it out of fucking freedom. Doing it for NO REASON. Doing it because you’re tired of having REASONS for everything. Tired of REASONING THINGS OUT. Tired of life being reduced to REASONING THINGS OUT.

So why don’t you do it?

I’m happy he’s done it. I want to contemplate it. I want to think about it. I want to turn it over in my head. His act … As freedom. As perfect freedom.

 

What’s WRONG with you? What’s wrong with us, talking like this. Talking about this?

We’ve got too much time … We’ve had too much education … We’ve read too many books …

 

Look, there’s so much shame, isn’t there? In just continuing. The Organisational Management move is only part of it. It just makes it clear: the general farce. The general stupidity of going on. Of getting more and more entangled. More wrapped up in all the nonsense.

There’s a way out. There’s a way fucking OUT! There’s a way of cutting through the fucking Gordian knot!

I’m tired of living on their terms. At their fucking sufferance. I want to die on my own. I want to shut their world OUT … I’ve never been more certain of anything. I’ve never been clearer about anything. It’s not a defeat, it’s a victory. It’s a way of winning. I want to win.

 

I can’t fight! I can’t suffer these humiliations! It’s quite impossible. I’d throw myself from one of the new Organisational Management campus towers right now, if I could. That would show them. That’s how I’d reveal the truth of the new Organisational Management campus …

 

Ha! Look at me, I’m fucking glorious! I’m fucking exalted! This is it! This is my fucking peak! It’s beautiful! I feel so DEFIANT! Maybe I’ll start a movement. Maybe there’ll be a million youth suicides. Would that be a good thing? It’d be a protest. Against nihilism. Against meaninglessness. Against THEIR world. Aren’t we tired of THEIR world. Of their fuck ups. Of what they’ve done.

 

A suicide should be a vacuum. Should be a little break in the ceaseless communication, in the ceaseless stupidity. But that’s not what would happen. Stupidity abhors a vacuum, right?

They’ll explain it away. They’ll blame it on depression. On personal matters. They’ll rob you of the glory. The whole making yourself sacred thing. The whole sacrificing yourself thing.  

So they would, the fuckers.

 

Who’s going to join me?

So you want a suicide pact now? Fuck. No chance.

Someone’s got to die. It’s got to happen tonight. Now.

No one’s going to die. No one ever dies. We’ll live long, long lives.

We’ve no control over our lives, right? We’re reeling … all the time. One thing and then a-fucking-nother. And all of it absurd. More and more absurd. So we need control over our deaths.

 

Some fucking insubordination. Some rebellion of angels. Some angelic revolt.

 

I don’t want to mean. I don’t want to be part of the meaningful world. There’s too much meaning … did you ever think that?

Or there’s the wrong meaning. That’s it, isn’t it? That the true meaning has been overlain by the false. By pseudo meaning.

No, there’s too much meaning. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or false.

*The only thing we haven’t failed at: failure.

Bullshit. We’ve got jobs. We’ve got careers.

We failed at failure. We fucked up at fucking up. Real fuck ups would just be lost out there. Dead. Or drunk. Real failures would have blown their brains out.

Look at us: living on. Going on. Fucking surviving. How dare we! If we had any honour, any integrity, we’d have hung ourselves years ago. But we don’t, do we? We’re too mediocre to, like, grandly fail. To commit some auto-da-fe.

Instead … here we are, disappointing everyone, disappointing ourselves … God, if we really felt it. If failure actually reared up inside us. If we really knew it, our failure – how we’ve compromised ourselves. And compromised philosophy. And compromised humanity itself, probably.

 

I’d like to write a book called, Why I Write Such Bad Books. But even that’s a kind of grandstanding. A rubbing it in. A making-success of failure.

When the real horror that we didn’t fail, not completely. We’re survivors. We didn’t kill ourselves. We never actually had enough. We didn’t actually take our own lives. We didn’t just give into the current, let ourselves drown. We didn’t just disappear into the everyday, just, like, dissipate.

Our kind is ineliminable, somehow. Like we’re cockroaches, surviving against all the odds … But that’s too flattering. It’s not as if we have a strong survival instinct. It’s not as if we’ve struggled to live.

We did a bit. When we were looking for work.

Okay, it wasn’t easy to get jobs …

Anyway, we did make it. We did get jobs.

Only because Cicero picked us out from the scrum. Only because we tickled her fancy. It was chance, not anything else.

It was because we were failures – runts of the litter. Cicero could see it, and took pity on us.

 

*We made it … Because we couldn’t imagine ourselves doing anything else. Because we were too unresourceful … because we were too uncunning. We weren’t made for the world, right? We couldn’t stand the world. We just wanted a quite corner to, like die in.

But we didn’t die, right?  We did it! We succeeded! Cicero let us through. The great gatekeeper. And it was wrong, because of all the others out there, cleverer than us, just scraping by. Better than us, living in their cars, or whatever.

And we were lucky.

Luck! It’s part of the whole thing. It’s like the system’s deliberately laughing itself by letting us through. It made an exception on purpose. Come on, do you really think its back was turned. That we’d been allowed to slip through? The system’s in auto destruct mode. The system’s allergic to itself. It’s got some auto-immune disease.

It was Cicero, bucking the system.

It was the system, choosing Cicero to choose us.

 

Humanities academia is a holding pen, that’s all. They’re a place to put us, our kind. To keep us gently defanged. To keep us out of trouble. To stop us becoming suicide bombers, or whatever. To protect us from the full force of nihilism, of world horror, that might turn us into proper radicals.

They’ve parked us here to keep us from doing any real damage. Just like they’ve parked the students, too. For their three year gap year. Their gap in the head year. And for our life long gap year. Our life long gap in the head year …

 

We have a mediocre kind of survival instinct. We didn’t actually go down. We’re not tragically flawed, or anything. We’re not Jude the Obscures. We slopped through. We flopped through. We threw ourselves onto the beach.

And now here we are, with our offices, with our views. With printers on our desks.

The whole process of job-getting was mediocre, like ourselves. Look, the systems’ moved elsewhere. Its frontier isn’t here. None of this is important. We haven’t breached the system. We haven’t found our way in.

We want to think that we’re grand failures. We want to find grandeur in our fuck up. But the fact is, we haven’t fucked up. We’ve got along. We’ve survived. We’ve found ourselves into a Russell Group university. We’ve lucked out. We rolled the dice, and here we are.

There’s no meaning to this. Can you bear that? It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t not mean, either. It’s not meaningless, not entirely contingent.

Here we are. No one cares. There’s a great shrugging of shoulders. A great meh. Here we are, writing out bad books and it doesn’t matter, one way or the other.

Cicero admired us, in some way. Our lowly beginnings. Our lack of credentials. The fact that we’d essentially birthed ourselves. That we’d formed ourselves out of nothing. That we’d conjured ourselves from our reading. That we’d emerged from the corners and cracks, from provincial England. From rooms in obscure places.

Our lives of non adventure, non importance. Our lives, in which we’d never travelled. Didn’t know the great capitals of Europe. Had no idea about far flung parts of the world. Our lives in rooms, reading books. Our lives, laptops open, tip-tapping away.

Our narrowness! The fact that we’d experienced so little. That we were so uncultured. That we could converse on such a narrow range of subjects. That we were so ungrounded – intellectually, culturally. That we’d sprung out of nowhere; emerged all at once.

Cicero knew the kind of people we were. Without dimensions. Without breadth. Who’d been isolated. Lost, even. She knew who’d she plucked from obscurity, bringing obscurity with them. She knew we were people of the everyday, people of the outside. From the boondocks, from the provinces. From hidden corners. From cracks and crevices.

Cicero knew we were people from without. Who were part of nothing. Who’d each resigned themselves to a life of futility, a life for nothing, a life out of step, a life untimely, a life outside, a life in the shadows, a life in irrelevance, a life stranded, a life friendless, a life in isolation, a life locked away …

Cicero knew we’d already given up. That we were reigned to isolation, to being misunderstood, to lives on benefits. She knew that all the doors were closed to us. That we were Jude the Obscures; Thomas the Obscures. That we were on the outside, and permanently so. That the academic world wasn’t for us – it was other people.

We surrounded ourselves with books, in the provinces. We were buried in books, in our cracks, in our crevices. And we knew no one else who read such things. Who knew about such things. Our culture heroes that no one around us had heard of. Thinkers from forgotten times, irrelevant times. Writers from some literary time that was no longer. What we sought in philosophy! What we looked for in literature! Hopeless impractical! Hopelessly out of time!

The way we invested philosophy with our hopes. With our lives. With our Desire, greater than anything. The way we placed all our ardency in literature. The way we read it in our Despair – and our desire to escape from Despair.

Philosophy! only those with empty lives could expect so much from it. Literature! Only those utterly lost could expect it to find them. It impressed Cicero, who had it all at her fingertips. In her book lined study. With books in several languages.

Did Cicero romanticise the working class (us)? No doubt. Did she have great philosophical hopes for the disenfranchised (us)? Of course. Did she have great literary dreams for the lost (us)? Without doubt.

You need philosophy more than I do: she said that once. And what you want from philosophy is greater, too. The way we looked upwards at philosophy – that impressed Cicero. The way we held literature above everything. As drowning people look upwards to be saved.

We were creatures of the depths. Dwellers in the lowlands. Would-be thinkers are the best thinkers, Cicero said. Thinkers who do not presume they think. For whom thinking itself is a problem, and never straightforward. Thinkers who make a problem of philosophy – of what philosophy is. Of what thought is.

Thought was a matter of life and death to us: Cicero could see that. Philosophy was a question of being able to live. Of not being ashamed of having lived a life. Of not being ashamed of being human.

A chance: that’s what philosophy was to us. To redeem ourselves. To lift ourselves up. To burn upwards in thought. To offer our lives to something greater.

Our burning hearts. Our burning brains. Our burning eyes. Cicero loved our ardency. Our blazing. Wasn’t that what academia, in its entirety, lacked? Wasn’t that what was missing? We could set the university on fire. Simply burn it up. And wasn’t that what Cicero would like to see?

We were on first names with death: Cicero could see that. Old friends. We knew death, and death knew us. We knew the world out there would lead us to our deaths. Our early deaths, our violent deaths. We knew the world out there had no place for us, for our kind.

And the idea of death had been a comfort to us, Cicero knew that. It had made life bearable to us. And death was something of which not to be afraid. Death: finality. A final term. Finitude – release.

And now, with our jobs, that life had become more bearable for us? Now that the thought of death was no longer a comfort? Now that death had backed away for a while; now that death was held in abeyance for a while?

Cicero knew that death was still there, at the end of our nights. She knew that death still surrounded us like a miasma, like a halo.

The old philosophy department – back when they still had departments. Back when they weren’t just units. The philosophy department of yore. That had survived decades before it was closed. The love its former students had for the old philosophy department. Even the fame of the old philosophy department.

Which wasn’t at all geared up for what academia became, back in the ‘80s. Which wasn’t part of the Research Assessment Exercise world! Which wasn’t part of the league-table world! Of the National Student Survey world! Which wasn’t part of the everything-is-measurable world! Of the all-is-quantifiable world! Of the publish or perish world.

And of course, they didn’t publish, so they perished. They were biding their time. Thinking their thoughts. Actually studying. Actually discussing ideas. Naturally, it had to close. Naturally, it had to go! It had to be wiped out! Its memory destroyed.

The old philosophy department. Only the oldest academics remember it! And some of them, with a tear in the eye. Some of them, voices shaking, who remember  what happened. By the blindness of management. The tearing-apart of the old academic culture. The work of decades. A philosophical culture, carefully forged, carefully honed.

And we, to think, were the new philosophy department. But hidden! Under another degree title, History of Ideas. Under another course code. And concealed, in the Centre for Thought. Pretending to be something else: a wise move. A wise stratagem. Not drawing attention to itself.

A crypto-department. Hidden, for the moment. Until we’d reached sufficient numbers. Until we’d grown enough to come into our own – to emerge as a philosophy department at last, unafraid and unabashed. But until then … we were a secret. We were hidden.

Because if it was known that the university harboured a crypto-philosophy, we would only have attracted the wrong kind of attention. If our existence were not carefully concealed, then our enemies would make their move  – out of jealousy, or incomprehension, out of enmity for thought; or even because of the troubled memories that the closure of the old philosophy department stirred up.

Because that’s how they were seen the old philosophy department: as trouble. As difficulty. As an obstacle. To the seamless transformation of the university.

The old department didn’t struggle with the university. They didn’t fight. They simply continued to do what they did. They ignored the dictates. Simply continued with their philosophising.

Which is exactly the reason that they were regarded as trouble! Which was precisely the rationale for closing them at once! A university without a philosophy department: unthinkable, once upon a time. Inconceivable, not so long ago. But the university didn’t mind. The university was unbothered.

And if we showed ourselves too soon, then we’d meet the same fate. If our existence was known … But as it was, thanks to Cicero, virtually no one knew about us. We were a secret, owing to Cicero. We were hidden under the aegis of The Centre for Thought – an innocuous title, but shelter enough.

We knew that it would be some time before we could roll away our stone. Emerge, intact as a philosophy department unto itself, successful, which the university wouldn’t dare to close. We knew it would be a while before we’d be out in the open: a philosophy department, a real one, conjured apparently from virtually nothing, with all the departmental paraphernalia – with external examiners, with external validation, with correct paperwork. Created it would seem pretty much ex nihilo, with all the accoutrements of a successful department, with robust student numbers, with well-published and respected staff, with representation on all the major faculty boards. Philosophy had just bootstrapped itself into existence, straight into the league tables, recruiting forty of fifty students a year, contributing very meaningfully to the university coffers: that’s how it would appear.

And in the meantime? We skulked. We kept out of sight. No one knew about us. And they didn’t know what they didn’t know. We kept undercover. Samizdat. Keeping quiet. Talking to no one. You never know who’s on who’s side, Cicero told us. Who might say the wrong thing. Even if they meant well. Even if they wanted to champion us. The wrong word in the wrong ear, and we’d be closed.

Underground philosophy. Secret philosophy. In, like, a cave beneath the uni. No one knew we existed, not really. Hidden-in-a-basement philosophy.But there was freedom in that. We could do teach we liked. Write what we liked …

But then Cicero left. Cicero disappeared. Why then – at that moment? Were we successful enough to stand on our own two feet? Had we consolidated our position enough to survive long term? Did we have prospects now? Would we survived if our existence was revealed?  

Cicero must have known what was going to happen. The Organisational Management move … so terrible swift. All at once. With sublime force. The decision to move Philosophy to Organisational Management! Striking down from high! Like lightning! A Decision had been made!

We’d been seen! Our rock had been lifted! Publicity! Light! Managers banged tables. We were to be moved! Our fate had been decided!

And of course, we were frightened. We weren’t used to the attention. We wanted the darkness back. We wanted our peace and quiet. We wanted the lack of scrutiny we used to enjoy. We wanted to be undistracted from our labours – from our teaching, from our writing.

But now the university was peering at us. The university was making Decisions. Now: scrutiny. Now, the university peering at us. And Cicero wasn’t there to help us! No more cover! No more silence! No more peace! No more darkness!