Work in Progress

Faith Zone, Sophia says. This is going to be good.

Faith in what? Driss asks. What is there left to have in faith in, on the Organisational Management campus? It’s nihilism itself, right? Disenchantment itself. Nothing remains of God but the void: that’s what this campus says.

Cicero would approve, Furio says.

Cicero would say that the campus shows things as they are, I say. Creation stripped to the bone. Naked … facticity. The whole creaturely realm, not as some holy gift – sorry, Io – not as some magic.

God isn’t revealed through the world, according to Cicero, I say. God and the world are antagonistic. We have to know the world as illuminated by nothing, by no meaning, by no direction.

And that’s the campus? Sophia asks.

That’s the test of the campus, Driss says. That’s what the campus is pushing us towards.

We have to hold onto the … nihilistic perception, I say. Have to hold on to what creatureliness shows us – that’s what Cicero would say. The worst the world becomes, the greater the chance for redemption.

For Cicero, there was a new faith … which is made from doubt and disbelief, I say. Which creates itself out of the void – the divine void. God has to spring anew from his nothingness.

And God will do so, I say. Because we demand the meaning of meaning. Because we shake the bars of this world – cry out. Because we know that what there is is horror.

No, Io says. No.

Can you find meaning in this campus, Io? Furio asks. Seriously? In the faith zone. In that tawdry half-built Millennium Dome thing?

This whole campus is nothing, Io says. It’s lost. It’s pushed God away. It’s left the realm of God – voluntarily. It’s renounced God. It can only be destroyed – that, I accept. But you want to burn up the world. You hate the whole world.

Be not conformed to the world: isn’t that what the Bible says, I say.

Don’t be conformed to the human world – sure, Io says. To the Organisational Management world. But that’s not all the world is.

The deepest nihilistic fall of the world: that’s what we need to know, I say. The whole of the Creation has to be allowed to fall into the night. God’s withdrawal from the world has to be complete. And that will be the revelation: a new form of revelation.

There’s still goodness in the world, Io says. Still beauty. Still truth.

I actually think Faith Zone is the deepest nihilistic fall of the world, Driss says. It really is tawdry.

It’s supposed to be for all faiths, according to the plaque, Furio says. It’s about the common core to all religion.

Organisational Management syncretism: that’s all we need, Driss says. Some cavitated temple, consecrated to fuck-all …

They want us to worship the void – their void, Io says. They want us to pray to the void they’ve created.

The Faith Zone is also a panicked reaction to the void that they’re creating, Driss says. They can’t face it – what they’ve opened up. The nihilistic fall of everything.

I thought the void was all about vastness and lawlessness and chaos, Sophie says. I thought it was on our side.

But Organisational Management wants to keep it under control, Driss says. Seize it for itself.

I’m confused, Sophia says. Is the void good or bad? How can you tell if it’s divine or not?

We have to become the antinomians, I say. The bearers of the alien fire. Waiting only to see the flash of the transcendent in the immanent. The apocalyptic fire of divine love.

What do you see, Fiver? What’s the Faith Zone about?

Abomination, Fiver whispers.

Something terrible’s going to happen here, I know it, Io says. Something vast – vaster than this campus. Something good – that will appear evil. Something merciful – that will appear merciless. Isn’t that right, Fiver?

Fiver, silent.

Faith Zone. This is going to be good.

Faith in what? What is there left to have in faith in, in Organisational Management land?

Organisational Management’s an essentially nihilistic project – that’s the thing. It’s just pure functioning. And functioning has no meaning.

All Organisational Management reveals is the void. Which is also what it’s most afraid of. Which is why it’s so busy organising and managing.

Organisational Management is nihilism itself. Disenchantment itself. It shows the world as purely function. Which means mostly deeply fallen.

 

The faith zone.

It can only be absolutely generic. Absolutely bland. A hollowing out of all temples. A cavitated temple, consecrated to nothing.

The evacuation of God: that’s what Organisational Management’s about. That’s what the campus is about.

 

Nothing remains of God but the void, that’s what this campus says.

 

It’s supposed to be for all faiths, according to the plaque. It’s about the common core to all religion.

 

Organisational Management is a panicked reaction to the void that it’s created. To the way the void is coming to itself – the way it’s awakening to itself, opening its eyes. Becoming absolute. Becoming all …

 

They started it. If they weren’t hollowing everything out. If they weren’t nihilizing the world …

 

From a certain perspective, the meaningless of the world is itself meaningful, that’s what Cicero said. It actually means something.

 

When the world is purely functional, the conditions of meaning must come from outside – that’s what Cicero said.

Faith zone.

It’s like millennium dome, only smaller.

 

This is the Organisational Management idea of religion. This is Organisational Management syncretic religion. Mixing them all up. Blanding them out.

 

Faith zones. They’re building these all over the world. You can just nip inside for a quiet pray. For a bit of meditation. Yoga, maybe. To contemplate the great Emptiness. The great Void.

 

The Organisational Management holy of holies. It’s a contemplation space, rather than a temple. You can rent it out for classes and so on.

 

This is what they take religion to be.

Must have really strained their Organisational Management imaginations.

Official religion, right? Meeting our spiritual needs.

 

Faith zone: they want us to worship the void – their void. They want us to pray to the void they’ve created.

 

The void: is that what they believe in? There’s nothing to believe in: that’s the point.

 

Organisational Management’s voiding the world – it’s quite deliberate. It’s a nihilism factory. But it will perish by what it creates.

There’s a meaning deficit. It’s sucked all the meaning out of the world. The better to organise it. The better to manage it.

But there’s a midnight hour coming, when it’ll have to state into the void of itself.

 

Organisational Management’s created the void that it fears. By destroying everything but the void.

Faith zone. But faith in what? What is there left to have faith in?

The void. The nothing. Which Organisational Management wants to seize for itself

Is that what Organisational Management’s about? I thought the void was all about vastness and lawlessness and chaos.

Organisational Management wants to police the void. Show that the world is there to be inventoried. Organised. Managed. And yet the void is also what Organisational Management is most afraid of. It’s what Organisational Management has nightmares about.

 

Meaninglessness, after all meaning is exhausted. Chaos, after all order has failed. That’s what lying in wait, in the Organisational Management night.

Organisational Management is an essentially nihilistic project – that’s the thing. And they think they can avoid the implications of nihilism.

And what’s so different about us?

We’re Gnostics. We have the alien fire. We can make meaning from meaninglessness. That’s our magic. That’s what Cicero taught us. We understand what it means to live against the world.

Doesn’t this campus know its own evil? Doesn’t it understand its own hubris? Doesn’t it understand the dimensions of its sin? That it’s already damned, and utterly so?

Something terrible’s going to happen here, I know it. Something vast – vaster than this campus. Something good – that will appear evil. Something merciful – that will appear merciless.

The wrath of God. The fury of God. The Justice of God. It’s real, and it is coming.

 

This whole campus is nothing. It’s lost. It’s pushed God away. It’s left the realm of God – voluntarily. It’s renounced God. It can only be destroyed – don’t you see?

Our first summer as full timers. Our first summer when we were actually paid.

The campus, quiet in the summer. The campus, pace slowed down. The silence of the corridors. The peace in the corridors.

All the better to work. All the better for our unbroken labour.

Day after day, at our desks. In our offices. Day after day, with books open – real books, not PDFs, from the library. Day after day, at work at our desktops, with their vast monitors – twenty inches across. As big as the sky, practically. That actually worked. That weren’t continually crashing.

And a printer on our desk, on each of our desks! A laser-printer. With unlimited ink! Unlimited paper! So we could print out what we liked! Free of charge! To edit in pencil on the page!

And our cabinets – its drawers. One drawer for each essay we were working on. One drawer for each work in progress.

Working together, and apart in our separate offices. Hanging out at the end of the day, in righteous tiredness. Sundowners at the Free Trade. Going to catch a band at the Tyne.

 

Summer, opening. Summer, widening to admit us.

Like we were a secret of the summer. Like we could hide from the world in the summer.

 

The great resting of the uni, after the academic year. A great Calm that we belonged to. Because we were of the uni now. Because we had full time jobs. Because we were paid over the summer. Which meant that its rhythm was our rhythm. Its expiration, ours. Its outbreaths and inbreaths … Its uni yoga.

 

The great peace of the uni: that’s what we knew. The height of the sky – even the chem- trailed sky.

Freed into the summer. Flying up in our work into the summer sky. Like summer kites.

Like our work was part of the summer, of it. Summer on a page, on a screen.

Like we were Protected. Like we were God’s, and serving God. Like our work was part of God.

 

The paradise of work. Work’s happiness.

Good days – work filled days. Days gravid with work. Giving continuous birth to work. Finishing each day, knowing from where you’d proceed tomorrow. Knowing how you’d take it up again.

One day, giving unto another. Work, exploring itself, giving unto itself. Multiplying itself over the days. Carrying us with it, as if we were only a particle of our studies, bourne along by it.

Deadlines far off. Submissions months away. No urgency to publish, as there was before. No panic. Our hearts, not beating high. No stress nosebleeds. No contractions of the stomach.

Time! We had time!

Imagining what we might produce with years of summers like this. Eight hundred page masterworks, like those of Blumenberg or Moltmann. Significant works. That would carry out names forward.

 

We’d forgotten our stupidity for a while. We were allowed to forget it.

We lived in potentiality. Sunbathed in it. In what we might write. In what we might do.

 

Our first summer as full timers.

Bathing in potential. Illuminated by it. Singing with it.

 

Our second summer.

Ready to set to. Reading back over our previous summer’s work. Reading it. Looking back. All our drafts. All our work in progress.

Did we begin to doubt then? Had we already begun to doubt? Wonder about our abilities? Wonder about what we might really do, given time? Give peace? Given a full-time job?

The second summer. The summer of struggle. Struggling with ourselves! Struggling with our work!

Where the evenings weren’t quite so peaceful. When sundowners at the Free Trade didn’t feel quite so earned.

Was that when Cicero began inviting us over to her flat in the James Knott Memorial Building. When we first tasted her wine as we looked over the mouth of the Tyne?

Still, she held back from laughing at us. From open contempt for us.

 

Our third summer.

Summer of rain. Summer of disappointment. Summer of thwarted projects.

A summer that wasn’t a blank canvas anymore. A summer that wasn’t innocence. Wasn’t emptiness. A summer that didn’t just open and open and open. A summer that didn’t keep us like a secret.

The third summer, abandoning us to our nontalent. To our inability.

And Cicero was waiting. Cicero was gentle at first. She as patient – she’d waited a thousand days for this. Cicero, consoling us. But you could see the glee in her. She saw. She understood. We weren’t the summer’s anymore.

Now our Trillians nights began. Our drinking to oblivion nights, with Cicero in tow. Now Cicero revealed the truth of her stupidity-analysis. Showed her true inverted messianism. Now she told us what we’d been bought to Newcastle for.

 

And the fourth summer? That’s when we heard: we’d be oved to Organisational Management by Christmas.

All our lives, primed for apocalypse. All our lives, ready for apocalypse. Full of apocalyptic expectations. Alert for all the apocalyptic signs. Wanting apocalyptic meaning.

Because that’s what it gives us: meaning. We think the world’s so meaningless, so fallen, that only the end can give it significance.

Our real problem is the non-apocalyptic. It’s existence, just endlessly existing. Endlessly ending and rebeginning … All the daily stuff … To think, it has the temerity to go on. Despite all our wild eschatology.

And isn’t that why we’re eschatological: because you can’t bear it just going on.

Contemptus mundi: that’s our motto.

Fuck off with your Latin. I hate your Latin.

The best conspiracy theories are the sublime ones. The wilder, the better.

You’re trying to fill in the void with your crazy theories. When really, there’s just the void – just nihilism.

Just capitalism, you mean. Late capitalism.

The organisational management move. Were we recruited as part of some dastardly plant to discredit European philosophy? To make it look ridiculous? To destroy its reputation? To drag it down even further? is it part of some country-wide plot? Were we just one of the many chess pieces that had to be moved into place?

 

The organisational management move. A movement in the void, of the void. It was the void hiring us, the void bringing us in. The void that was the centre of all plans. The void desiring. Laughing. The void moving all the pieces. 

Nihilism at work. The void at work, as it’s always at work.