What about the Humanities Liberation Army?
They don’t exist.
They will, though. They’re going to. If they put us under any more pressure …
We should start the Humanities Liberation Army. Right now. It should be us. We should lead the vanguard. Be the change you want to see, and all that.
We should look for Cicero in the tunnels. She’s probably gone underground – literally. Joined forces with the remnants of the old department. She’s probably running her operation from there.
The tunnel postgraduates have lost their eyes – that’s what I’ve heard. They don’t need them anymore. They feel their way through the darkness. Sniff their way through it. They’re terribly pale. And hunched over. They’re not quite used to standing upright.
What were these tunnels even built for?
To get the coal to the quayside. And for culverts – rivers they sent underground.
It was the postgrads who linked up the tunnels. They dug through. Dug more. So that we now have the catacombs of Newcastle, kinda like the ones in Paris. There’s a whole secret city down here. With its own rules. Its own way of doing things.
There’s, like, a natural cave system down here as well, apparently. Very ancient. With its own rock art.
Bollocks.
There’s a whole northeast command unit, I know that. It was built in case of nuclear war. As part of an alternative command structure.
And there’s bound to be some Newcastle billionaire building a bunker down here.
Our nation underground. Our philosophy nation. This is where all the humanities will have to go, in the end: to the tunnels.
Under the city. Actually, under the university. It’s the counter university. The university in secret.
The caves are deep. They’re like a honeycomb.
They’re like a brain. The counterbrain of Newcastle. The deep brain that’s thinking about deep things …
Cicero’s the ultimate white hat. She’s coming to save us. To overturn the tables.
So you really think Cicero is going to save us. Is it like QANON? Are there Cicero drops?
I found this weird X account. Sounds like Cicero. Listen. That’s her.
Postgraduate ardour. Postgraduate desire. There’s no stronger force in the universe. Except part time lecturer ardour. Hourly paid lecturer desire.
Our time as nearly men and women. As ghosts of full time academics. Drafted in for emergency cover. For maternity leave. As doubles. Doppelgangers. As Almosts. As Nearlys. As Not Quites.
And sometimes, your frustrations just bust out. Just break out. Free-style seminar rants. About those smug full timers. About how little they’ve achieved, those full time philosophers. About the complacency of full time uni staff. About their mediocrity. Which is what follows when like employs like.
About the unfairness of it all. About how many years you’ve studied. About how poorly you’re paid. And you can’t help it busting out of you. You can’t prevent it breaking through – erupting.
And bigger stuff. Wilder stuff. When you strut your edgelord stuff in front of them. It’s all going to collapse soon. The levels of debt – private and public. Like a Great Depression on steroids. When you talk dark. Talk apocalypse. To people who have to listen to you. Who actually pay to listen to you.
Your flights of oratory. Your pathos. Because you have that: pathos.
This might be your last chance, you tell them, your captive audience. These might be the last seminars you’ll ever run. Next year, someone else will be here before them. And the year after, someone else …
Your seminar students: the only people who’ll ever look up to you. Who’ll ever respect you. Who’ll ever think you have something to say. The only people in your life who take you seriously. And pretty much the only company you have, when you take them out for a drink after class.
Part time desperation of the heart. Bursting out of you in class. All your desperation. All your ardour. Your frustration at being paid per hour. At the terrible conditions of your labour.
The exploitation! The degradation! The great unfairness! Where you’ll only ever be unremembered. Uncelebrated. But busy keeping the whole academic show on the road. Keeping departmental life rolling forward on the back of your poorly paid labour.
The whole academic apartheid! The absolute division between the full time and the part time! Where the full time don’t even in recognise you in the corridor Where they don’t even know your name. Where you simply walk by them unrecognised, those for whom you are teaching.
Where you’re underlabourers. Invisibles. Nameless adjuncts, as replaceable as machine parts. Ghosts of the academic world.
There’s an oversupply of you, of your kind. There are too many of you, of your kind.
Which means that you or someone like you will always be teaching the seminars. Which means there’s always a new crop of freshly PhD’d part timers, looking for work. Desperate for work.
Reliables – that’s what you are. Dependables. Balancing teaching for several departments at once. Travelling here and then there. Crossing town. Teaching this and then that. Ready to be used until you’re burnt out and thrown away.
Standing in at short notice and even shorter notice. Parachuted in to talk of this and then that
Keeping it all going. Keeping the academic show on the road. Keeping it all rolling forward. But unacknowledged! Unthanked!
But how your soul burns! How your eyes shine when you teach!
Invisible one, your hearts beat higher than theirs. Buried one, your thoughts burn brighter. Obscure one, you feel more. Love more.
Oh precarity! Oh life on the edge! Your fate, not in your hands. So delicate, so trembling, your fate! Beating its wings, your fate! So tremulous, so sensitive, your fate!
If they’d only let you lecture! If they’d just let you run your own module. If only they could just give you a year’s contract. To show what you could do! How indispensable you were!
How you burn, inside. How you blaze, inside. How you scream inside,
The state of your soul! A Raskolnikov. A-that-guy-out-of-Hunger …
Philosophy could explode inside you. You could just explode with light in all directions.
These are Philip K. Dick days. Late Philip K. Dick, when he’d gone half mad. Only late Philip K. Dick would understand. Only the author of the Exegesis. Only Philip K. Dick gone Gnostic …
We need to get out Philip K. Dick heads on. To see the tech stuff as completely bound up with spiritual stuff.
We’re Cicero’s team. Cicero’s crew. Cicero’s seven.
We have to realise what Cicero found in us. Actualise it. Awaken ourselves. Open our eyes in the darkness.
We have to send our eyebeams out, piercing the darkness. Looking for what’s real. What’s true.
What did she bring us here for?
Come on, she didn’t have a plan. It wasn’t about a long term strategy. She was just an anarchist. Or a nihilist. Or whatever.
She brought us here for her own amusement. She wanted to be entertained. Gnostically.
It’s about pooling out strengths. Working together. Avengers-like. Justice-League-style.
This is about Cicero’s war with Organisational Management. She knew what was coming, and that we were the only way to defeat it. She brought us here as an army – not as some kind of sacrifice. It wasn’t just Gnostic perversity.
Sure, you go on believing that.
The postgraduates know a catastrophe’s coming. A great cull. Which they’ll survive underground. It was like those ancient people in Derinkuyu, with their underground city.
The postgraduates know what they’re planning – the enemy. They’re prepping. They’ve got this a vast secret pantry, stacked with tins. With sacks of lentils.
Underground: that’s where PhD students go when they don’t want to finish. When they’ve given up trying to get on in the academic world – to publish their work. To get research fellowships.
They’ve left the world, the underground PhD students. They’ve taken their leave. Renounced everything, Written letters to their loved ones, explaining. They’re like those Indian ascetics who have a mock funeral before they take up the mendicant life.
They’ve trained themselves in all kinds of things, the underground PhD students. Close combat. Akido – all that fancy stuff with sticks. They can see in the dark, pretty much. And read with the tips of their fingers.
Are they working on telekinesis. Because that would be useful.
Why?
They could steer the bore. Reverse it. Let it drill upwards. Drill away at the roots of the campus towers.
Our postgraduates know they can go underground, when the time comes. They know they can take the vow. Disappear.
Perhaps the underground postgraduates know a way to defeat all this. Perhaps they know a way to bring down the towers.
So let’s contact them. Contact Nimrod. Can you do that, postgraduates?
Postgraduates, shrugging.
Help us help you. Because if we don’t, the Organisational Managers will destroy you.
Do the organisational managers know about the tunnels?
They’re building tunnels of their own. Their own catacombs. The Organisational Management campus goes as deep as it does high.
Trillians: the bar at the end of the universe. The last bar, where it’s always the last night – the last night before the end. Where we’re always in mourning for everything’s that happened. Where we’re always looking back at our lives and the shape of our lives. When we’re always asking ourselves what it was all for? Whether we made the best use of our time on Earth? Did we act for the good? For the True? Did we serve the Beautiful?
Trillians: the last judgement bar, where we console ourselves for what we did. For what we did not do. Where we ask forgiveness in general. Where we’re determined to confess. To convert. Because there’s still time. There’s still one night left. Because there’s enough time for repentance.
Trilliians, where It’s always end time funk night. Where it’s always Ball of fucking Confusion night. Where it’s always dancing with tears in our eyes night. Holding each other. Weeping openly.
Trillians, where it’s always singalong time. Geordie knees-up time. Singing the old postgraduate songs. The old postdoctoral songs. Singing the new junior lecturer’s songs. The European philosophy tribulation songs. Singing the deep songs of the doomed humanities. Requesting Klaus Nomi’s Death so we can fall into each other’s arms, weeping for the humanities.
Organisational Management Christmas can only be anti-Christmas. What do they know of festivity? Of eating, drinking and making merry?
Maybe the drones will do something Christmassy.
They’re still busy with the Northern lights.
Is that really drones? I don’t believe it.
Is that a comet? Is that the star of Bethlehem, to light the way?
It’s a drone, sent to find us, because we’re late. They’re worried we’re lost.
The Apex – that’s where we’re heading. Shouldn’t we able to see it by now? How far we’ve come! But we haven’t got anywhere.
This wind! So keen! It’s like the campus was build to channel the wind. For wind corridors – wind tunnels. To blast us all. To punish us.
Maybe the wind’s trying to save us. It’s pushing us away. It’s driving us out.
We have to force ourselves against the wind to get anywhere.
Are we walking in circles? It all looks the same. It’s all the same and the deepening of the same.
The campus is some tautology. It is itself, nothing more. It’s the unplace. The noplace. Perfect indifference.
This is where nowhere is. Here, collapsing into nowhere. Nobody’s settlement.
Cicero knew how to flatter the apparatchiks. How to make them feel important. How to make them feel that all her ideas were their own.
Cicero knew how to play them. How to speak their language. She all but hypnotised them. She programmed the programmers in turn. Nudged the nudgers. Out behavioural-psychologised the behavioural psychologists.
Cicero understood apparatchik logic. She understood how to work the chain of command. She knew how to do management speak. HR speak. She could paly 4D chess better than any of them.
Work in Progress 