Work in Progress

Remembering how it used to be. Remember our part-timers’ summers.

The summer signing on. The summer humiliation. The summer dole office queue. The summer farce of pretending to apply for jobs. Of proving that you were job-seeking.

Wasn’t summer when our humiliation was at its deepest. Our suffering? Because it was summer, and we couldn’t partake of the summer. Because summer blazed all around us, and we couldn’t let it touch us. Couldn’t let it lift our spirits.

Because we were abandoned in the  summer. That’s when we were abandoned most deeply.

Left to fend for ourselves. Left behind. Left over. Cast aside. Not needed.

And having to force ourselves to work. Making ourselves work on those long summer days. Writing our papers. Rewriting our papers. Studying the day long. And trying to write! Trying to publish!

And never understood in the dole office. What were we doing with our lives? Where were we going?

And skint – so skint. A tenner a day – was that all we had to live on?

Writing with the summer. Writing under summer. Under summer’s influence.

Summer, idling in our work. Letting itself be pressed like flowers into our summer work. Summer, lying down on summer in our philosophical work.

 

And planning great works – long works. Several summers long works. Across the summer. Across this summer, and the next. Opening ourselves not just to this summer, but the next one. To all summers.

 

And, in the evening, drinking summer cider and honey beers with our music friends.

 

And for the first time actually sitting around a table with our music friends in a beer garden.

After a day of righteous work. After a day of writing.

 

And drunk with summer. Summer-drunk. Summer-staggering.

In a summer trance, up above the Ouseburn Valley. Looking into the trees.

 

And our work was of the summer just as cider is of the summer.

 

And evenings drunk. Evenings – nights – knowing the happiness of drinking. Through to the early hours.

 

And cycling home. Cycling across town. From the Ouseburn Valley, and down the Tyne.

 

We were substantial people, after all. Flesh and blood, after all. Ghosts no longer. We were anchored on the earth, after all.

Friends – did we have friends? Were we friends with each other? Our music friends: were they real?

Didn’t the music department initiate us into the arts of life? Didn’t we learn the culinary arts from them, the music department? Of the meal, lovingly prepared. Of the ceremonies of communal eating.

The good things to life. Traditions of hospitality. Of which we knew barely anything! Which we’d forgotten since our distant childhoods.

 

The musicians always cheerful. With their jam sessions. With their folk nights. With their internationalism. With their mandolins. With their ouds.

 

We needed help, that’s what our musical friends knew. We needed to be shown the light.

We needed not to die for a while. We needed non-destruction. Non-suffocation. Non-death. Non-murder.

We needed a musical breather. Needed a musical timeout. A musical holiday.

 

But didn’t we sometimes scare them, our music friends? Couldn’t we be too dark for them, our music friends? Couldn’t we say things that frightened them, our music friends? Didn’t we have to make a positive effort to be chipper, with our music friends?

We didn’t want to scare our music friends. Didn’t want to perturb them, our music friends. Couldn’t we threaten to lose them in some doom philosophy spiral? In some deadly philosophical vortex?

We had to unlearn what we’d learnt in those part time years. Had to normalise. Be brought back into the human fold. Relearn our human skills.

It was like we were wild children, who could only communicate in hoots. Like we were Kasper Hausers – only semi-civilised. Still out beyond the human pale.

 

We’d been all but down and out. All but dossers. Technically homeless, for all those years. Subsisting on less than the dole would pay. Cashless. Prospectless. Each mad, in their own way. Each contorted. Each crabbed.

 

But we were inside now. The fight of our lives was over. We had to relearn the human arts. The arts of living. We had to be brought back into human civilisation.

We weren’t outcasts anymore. Not staggerers and stumblers anymore. Not obscure – not lost. We’d been Found.

Drinking isn’t drinking yet, in some way. We haven’t attained drinking – haven’t reached it. There is a drinking beneath drinking. A depth. That we have to find. Let ourselves sink to.

 

So long as it’s vigilant. So long as it’s an intensifier of world disgust. So long as it makes it cry out against this world – this fallen world.

 

Be not conformed in this world. Be not sober, in this world. Accept nothing!

 

Let us never rest in drunkenness. We slur – yes. But it doesn’t mean that we should think any less forcefully.

 

It’s Dutch courage. Philosophical courage. It’s resistance-courage. We’re drinking against.

Some Eastern European doom wine. From the black terroir of Mitteleuropa. From some old-growth European forest somewhere.

 

A terroir that keeps memory of fatality. Deep doom. Darkness falling on darkness.

 

Pure pathos. A fundamental mood in a glass. European doom, right? In liquid form. As the blackest of black wines.

 

This is radioactive wine – cancer in a glass.

(Toasting) To cancer.

Maybe this will make us immune from cancer.

Maybe it’ll give us cancer.

Is there anything good about cancer?

 

Black wine from former communist soil. From what lay behind the former iron curtain. The wine of tyrants and apparatchicks and concrete high rises and shortages and queues. The old communism, quite different from the coming communism …

 

Drink to hate. Drink to feed the hate. Drink to let the hate leap up. Black flames, from the black soil.

 

All the world’s poison has seeped into this terroir.

You’ve heard of the water table? This is wine from the poison table. There are whole rivers of poison down there, flowing through the darkness.

 

The terror of dark suffering. Where so much blood has been split. Communism and fascism and despotism. Globalism now.

 

It smells like sulphur.

 

Corpse wine – that’s what it tastes like: corpses.

 

Gnostic soil. Buried-alive soil.

A draught of the oldest Europe. Some curse from the earth.

 

The horror in the ground. Not Lazarus resurrected, but Lazarus rotting, and deep underground.

 

Why did Cicero want to make us drink these things? Why did she leave these bottles to us?

To remind us not to trust the world. Not to trust the earth, and any terroir of the earth. You do not belong here: that’s what Cicero wanted to tell us.

 

Nothing lives in the soil of this terroir. No earthworms. No slugs. No burrowing moles. No millipedes. No bacteria, even. Algae, or whatever. Nothing grows in the cursed earth.

 

Nothing ever hibernated in the soil of this terroir. Any animal that built its burrow down there would be screaming with horror. Any plant would wither immediately. There’s just poison, incubating in the darkness.

 

The earth of this terroir has a fever. The earth is sick. The earth’s chest is rising and falling. The earth’s febrile. Sweating.

 

The terroirs of Alexy German and Bela Tarr. The thick deep darkness.

 

This wine’s turned. It’s zombie wine.  It’s undead. Like a zombie turns.

 

Libate the camps with black wine, then see what happens.

What’s supposed to happen?

Organisational Management isn’t what you think it is. It’s not all mechanistic anymore. It’s not all about managerial omnipotence. It’s not all economico-technological determinism. We’re not all about reductionist models.

It’s not about hierarchies of power. We’re against the organizational monoculture. We’re for pluralism! The small! The local! It’s about policy and ecosystem changes that might allow alternative businesses to grow.

The margins, not the centre: that’s where we should look for future modes of organising. No more giganticism. We need to explore an organizational variety. We need to open up diverse potentialities. We have to counter the thinning out of the social imagination.

It’s about solidarity, stewardship, dignity, compassion and care. You know – sowing seeds of hope.

 

It’s not about exclusion or privatisation. This campus is a context for sociality. Space for human coexistence in relationships and interactions. We want to open the future, rather than closing it down. We want to challenge the managerialist imaginarium …

Forget the Organisational Management textbooks. Tear them up! Forget the O.M. pundits. Participative management – that’s what we’re looking at. Organisation as artistry: that’s what we want to explore. Management as an artform.

And that’s part of the reason we’ve brought you guys on board. It’s about transboundary knowledge exchange, production and transfer.

Philosophy’s fallen into the pit. Our pit. We’ve dragged Heidegger into our pit. And everyone else!

We play with these ideas, like children. We don’t know what they’re about. We don’t understand their stakes.

That’s our charm.

It’s like all we do is try on costumes. Drive about in clown cars. Stamping about in shoes that are too big for us.

And? So?

We’re not worthy of philosophy. We’re not serious.

That’s what Cicero loved about us.

European philosophy without the continental stuffiness: that’s what she said. And without the UK reverence for stuffiness.

European philosophy without the philosophy. Or the Europeanness.

 

We can’t take it seriously.

We can’t take seriously our taking things seriously. We can’t let us ourselves get pompous … pretentious.

Always joking. Always taking the piss.

That’s what saves us.

Saves us! We destroy everything we touch. Even philosophy! Even Heidegger! Nothing survives – not even Heidegger.

He was a Nazi.

Why do we have to be like this? Why are we so unashamed? Is this all we can be? Is this all I can be?

Faith Zone. Do they really think they can speak of faith? Are they that stupid?

Unless it’s diabolical mockery. Unless it’s deliberate diabolism.

 

Faith Zone. This is where Organisational Management has risen to its full Satanism. This is where you can feel it.

 

Do the organisational managers dare to speak of faith? Don’t they know their limits? Are they that stupid?

Unless it’s a sign of diabolical intelligence.

 

Faith Zone. It’s deliberate diabolism …

And which side was Cicero on – angels or devils?

Contraries – it was all about contraries, for her. The angel and the devil. Good and evil. Maximum tension – that’s what she wanted.

So why is her wine so demonic – it’s confusing?

Tension again. She wanted us disgusted with the world. Looking beyond it. God’s beyond the world, right?

 

Who are we supposed to be? What Cicero wants us to be?

 

We’re the test subjects of Cicero – that’s all. An experiment of Cicero

 

What if Cicero’s the devil? What if she’s Satan? Do you ever feel, like, that Cicero’s diabolical?

 

What if she’s just telling us more lies? What if Cicero is another liar?