Work in Progress

Allowed to surface. To come up from our years of obscurity – our years of service teaching. Of paid-by-the-hour teaching. Of seminar teaching for the full-time lecturers.

Years of holding ourselves back. Of never speaking our own minds. Years of never giving our own takes on things. Years of never having had the floor, and now having the floor.

Let off the leash. Unmanacled. Muzzles taken off. Now what? What were we going to say?

What happens when the subaltern speaks? When our kind found ourselves at the lectern? What happens when we were allowed to pace the stage? To wield marker pen on whiteboard? To turn on the visualiser? To flick from PowerPoint slide to slide?

What, when we had people to listen? Our own audience! For the first time!

What, when we were entrusted with the students of the wealthy? With Russell Group students? Who actually showed basic literacy. Who could actually sit still for an hour.

To be listened to. To be heard. Isn’t this always what we wanted? To design whole modules. Whole classes. We had an audience. Students were listening. Notetaking!

And Cicero, herself listening. Cicero pacing up and down outside the lecture room, following what we were saying.

Raw at first. Sometimes, words strained. Sometimes, voices trembling. Sometimes, drops in volume. Whispers. The students had to lean in … Students were all but confidants … Build at other times, build. Mounting. Break-out. All but bellowing. Crescendos. Great peaks …

Following our notes at first, in those early months. Following our slides. And then? Putting aside our notes. Turning off our slides. Extemporising. Letting words come.

Pure pathos. Half remembered quotations. Citations ‘from memory’. Sudden … accelerations. Decelerations. Hushed speech. Exhortations. Enconiums. Hortatory stuff.

And all our lives in what we said. Our misspent lives! Our derailed lives! Our misplaced lives! Our humiliated lives! Our resentful lives! Our lives outside!

Our whole lives, offered up. Spoken. Not from on high. No ex cathedra. Not from the lectern, pretending we were at Oxbridge.

Lecturing from the pit! From the pit of our lives! From our suicidalism. From our years of whoring. From our being outside.

What we’d waited to say. What we’d always wanted to say.

Great sadnesses. Great isolations. Great dereliction. Mourning songs and abandonment songs. Great ululations from our years of humiliation! From exploitation!

But there was joy, too. Of having survived. Of having escaped.

All the joy of being allowed to speak. Unleashed.

I’m, like, transcendentally bored. I’m bored of every possible world. Everything that could possibly exist. The whole order of things. Everything that is and was and could be.

 

The usual no how on. The usual, flop on. Jog on. Roll on. Carry on. My God. What’s a modern day Gnostic to do?

 

The great joke of it all. The joke of the whole world, which is worse because the world doesn’t even know it’s a joke.

 

You get new names during the apocalypse, Cicero said.

It’s not the apocalypse yet.

It might as well be.

 

Nothing ever rises to apocalypse. The world never just bursts spontaneously into flame. The world itself can’t be bothered to end. The universe limps on.

 

She was a Gnostic dandy. An Oscar Wilde of the eternal end.

 

What’s made us like this?

Nihilism, right?

Nihilism plus some extra craziness. Some wild desire for hope and transcendence and whatever.

Sure, we’re Gnostics. Or neo-Gnostics. Just like Cicero.

We’re not even philosophers, that’s what they don’t understand. Not even anything. Not even anyone. Not even … whatever. We’re not part of this, and not part of anything.

 

There can no more philosophy. No one can believe in philosophy. Just like no one can believe in God.

 

Is there a negative philosophy, like negative theology? Where it’s apophatic? Where it’s all about what it’s not?

 

How can you be anti-philosophy? Philosophy’s, like, everything. Not to do philosophy is still to do philosophy – that’s the philosophical trap.

 

Anti-philosophy. Someone French is bound to have thought of it in, like, 1912. They’re so far ahead.

Look it up.

Fuck, there’s loads of stuff on anti-philosophy. It was all the rage in France in the ‘70s.

Typical.

There’s some guy who gave up philosophy for … sailing. He’s written a whole treatise on it. sailing and antiphilosophy.

Wow.

We’re always too late. 

What about non-philosophy, then?

That’s taken – come on. There’s a whole school of non-philosophy. Don’t you know that?

What about hyperphilosophy?

That’s not bad …

Or ultraphilosophy. Surphilosophy … like surrealism. Where Sur means beyond.

People would be expecting things from a movement called Surphilosophy. We need to lower their expectations. This is a fuck up philosophy. A philosophy for the fucked up. Philosophy that isn’t philosophy. That’s not quite philosophy. Not even anything.

Not even philosophy: that’s a name.

Do you think?

Not even philosophy … look that up.

 

Imagining it. A whole not-even-philosophy movement.

Would it mean we have do things? Like, work at anything? Run a not-even philosophy journal? A society? Hold conferences. Run some not even philosophy series for a publisher?

Fuck that. You shouldn’t have to do stuff if you’re not-even-philosophers. It should be like, slacker philosophy. Where it’s not about arguments, or theses, or positions, or being for or against anything.

What about ontology?

Not even that.

Metaphysics?

Not even that.

Ethics?

Not even that. Not even anything. Not even philosophy.

Just being lazy useless bastards, then.

It’s more like some suspension of philosophy: that’s how I  think of it. Where we lay down the usual philosophical tools.

Where we get drunk together, in other words.

No, not even that.

Where we hang out.

Not even that.

Where we don’t organise anything. Just sit on the fucking beach.

Maybe.

 

Would we become the latest thing? Would word spread through the more alert postgraduates? Through the more vibrant postdocs? For MA students looking for something really transgressive? Would blurred photos of us circulate on the net?

Drink is the question. Drink is the answer. Both at once.

 

Let’s drink to that. Let’s drink to everything. I’m feeling very expansive, with my drinking.

 

Drink is the answer, probably. Or is it the question?

Stop being so clever. I despise clever.

 

We’re not not alcoholics.

 

The world is disgusting.

We know that.

More than usually disgusting.

Maybe so.

 

Trillians. Where everybody knows your name.

And hates it.

 

We’re disgusting. God hates us.

 

We’re not drunk enough. We’re not angry enough. We’re not appalled enough. We not screaming enough.

 

There’s a hole down which we have to fall. It’s not enough to remain upright! There’s no excuse for uprightness!

 

What if the disaster never comes? What if the world never ends?

Oh God don't say that.

 

We need to discover the void – that’s why we drink. To remind ourselves of it. to bring it close.

Drink is the means of access to the void. And the void itself.

We’re, like, drunken Buddhists. Drunken Zen Buddhists. Looking for Enlightenment. Wherever we can find it.

You can’t overthrow the world, everyone knows that. All you get is more world.

 

This world is over – over. This world is finished. Why can’t anyone see that? This world has run out of world.

 

A posthumous life: that’s what this is. We aren’t alive. This isn’t life.

 

There’s a way of living in disgust – pure disgust. A way of living in hatred – pure hatred. Purifying hated. That is even a kind of joy in its purity.

 

When are they going to come for us?

They’re already got us, idiot. This is already a prison. This is already death.

 

We’re alive, but why? For what purpose? How do we use life? What do we do with it: life?

This can’t be called life, can it?

Life, in search of life. Life, missing life. We’re looking for life. That’s what life’s for. We’re searchers.

 

God is death, idiots. We're waiting for the divine DIGNITAS. The godly strangler. The celestial executioner. The one who drowns the kittens …

 

Nothing remains of God but the void, right?

Order cannot substitute for meaning: remember that. 

 

The world is a purely functional mechanism. The conditions of meaning come from outside.

 

From a certain perspective, the meaninglessness of the world is itself significant. It means something.

 

We demand the meaning of meaning. We shake the bars of this world – that’s what we do. Cry out. It makes prison no longer seem so bad.

 

Our despair – it isn’t even ours. It doesn’t even belong to us. It comes from outside.

The dynamics of self-hatred. The life of self-hatred. The life of the desire to die. My God, we’re making a whole lifestyle of it. Of our thrashings. Of our convulsions. Of our twistings.

 

Nothing hates itself like a human being. We’re the uniquely fucked up species, right?

What’s wrong with us? How did self-loathing become a form of enjoyment? Like scorpions stinging themselves.

It’s a re-education camp, this campus. They’re re-educating us through their stone. Through their towers. Through the patterns in the paving stones. Through their endless plaques.

The gentle walkways have a lesson. The building names.

And don’t forget the listening lampposts. Making sure we edit ourselves. That we don’t say what we shouldn’t.

Yes, we’re learning.

The behavioural psychologists designed it all. At every turn, some behavioural psychology’s trick. Some subordination strategy. Some capitulation technique. Some destroying of questioning and of the power to question.

Is the patterned pavement supposed to hypnotise us? Are the rivulets, with their channelled water, supposed to channel us, too?

We’re supposed to think that our kind is defeated, because of them. That we’ve been crushed. We’re supposed to think they’ve won, but they haven’t won. We think we have no chance – but we do. It’s just an effect of the campus – of this re-education camp.

They were eccentrics, in the old Philosophy Department. They actually had personalities. And idiosyncrasies. And character. It was before the great bland-out. Before all the eccentrics were driven away. Before the disappearance of Personalities, capital P. Before the elimination of characters.

There’s only smiling pleasantness now. Only amiability. Capability. Only, Yes I can do it. Only willingness! Hard-workingness. A perpetual jumping to attention. To get things done!

Only certain personality types will do. Who score high for Agreeability. For Communitarianism. There are no sovereign individuals here. No room for toxic individualism …

Only smiling pleasantness now. Only amiability. Capability. Only, Yes I can do it. Only willingness! Perpetual jumping to attention! To get things done!

Total inclusivity – the new form of exclusion. Total tolerance – the new form of intolerance.

The quiet revolution’s in progress. The coming of the new apparatchiks. The head boys and girls. All calm and efficient. The implementers. The new middle-management.

And beneath them: the infinite pliant. The gullible and steerable, the believers of every lie. All around us: the dupe-able. Predictable. The followers of orders.

Mild positivity. And no one to roll your eyes with.

Where’s God when you want him? There can’t be a God if this is allowed to go on. This campus is proof of the death of God.

But perhaps it is proof. Because the campus is lays out the maximum of evil. It takes abomination to the utter limit.

And then? What happens then?

The messiah comes. The messiah of destruction.

The apocalypse?

The Lord as killer: that’s how he should show himself. The Lord as killer: like in that Nina Simone song. Like Lord Shiva himself.

The messiah of destruction comes as the end times – nothing else. The Second Coming is the coming in fire. In flames. The Kingdom of Heaven is the putting to death of this world. In a good euthanasia, not a managed one.