When there was once personality. And idiosyncrasy. And character. Before the great bland-out. Before everyone became infinitely pliable. Totally manipulable. Before we became gullible and steerable, the believers of every lie. Before we’d been standardised. Processed. Put through their nurseries. And schools. And unis.
Before we’d become foolable. Dupe-able. Programmable. Predictable. Before we became implementers. The carriers-out of orders.
What is the void, anyway? The death of God stuff? Haven’t we got over that yet?
The death of all authority figures. And anything that stands in for God.
And the death of the Self, maybe, with a capital S. The death of who we are.
The usual stuff, in other words. That was exciting in Paris around sixty years ago.
The void’s the great Zero The great nothing-burger.
Nihilism, in other words.
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.
We’re being allowed to theorize as wildly as we like because the truth is so banal.
The void is baseless human stupidity. And greed. And compliance. And going along to get along. And not noticing what’s in front of your eyes.
The void is utter human mediocrity. It’s no more complex than that.
So cock up versus conspiracy, right?
It’s just fuck up. Fallenness.
It was like, classy. Untouched by all the trends. Secure in its reputation. Content to be what it was and nothing more. Not panickedly casing trends. Not reinventing itself as a new media college or a digital economy hub. Not about to close down all the arts and humanities, just like that. Not chasing the overseas students dollar.
Allowing academics doing their academic thing. Solo researchers, to do their solo scholarly stuff.
Administrators didn’t rule the place. Management speak wasn’t ubiquitous.
A sense of intellectual history. Of tradition. A little bit stuffy, but that’s okay.
With fine Victorian buildings at the university’s core. There’s even a quadrangle … Even a Victorian tower, amidst the dreadful 60s blocks …
It wasn’t actually ashamed to be a uni.
It actually had a library. With, like books in. That wasn’t all empty space and disco music.
It had, like a senior common room. And a junior one. They had a staff bar.
No one wore jeans. Trainers.
It didn’t have to frantically self themselves at Open Days. The institution sold itself. Respectable. Was itself. Didn’t have some trendy bollocks animated website. It didn’t need one.
Its great buildings. Well maintained. Newly repointed. There was an actual sense of place. Of genius locii. That this wasn’t just some business park. It wasn’t some glorified adult ed college.
Where did it come from, Organisational Management? Did it just come from nowhere? Did it just arise from nothing? Who created it? With what powers? Who said, Let there be an Organisational Management campus? Who divided order from disorder? The campus from the stony wastes?
How did they get planning permission? Who allowed this?
Postgraduates, singing: The Loneliest Postgraduate. Supervisor Blues. My Deadlines Getting Me Down. Back in Them ol’ Undergraduate Days.
Their reedy voices. The postgraduate falsetto.
Maybe all songs are messianic, postgraduates.
Except songs that are actually about Satan.
Maybe singing itself is messianic. Raising the heart. Lifting it. With a hope that’s not of this world. That comes from elsewhere. That’s the fact there is an elsewhere.
And even on such a night! Even here, the towers towering all around us. Buildings spouting cranes, all around us. Buildings, building themselves.
And your small, fragile voices, nearly lost in the wind.
We know you’re cold, postgraduates. And hungry. And that we’ve nearly run out of wine. And that there’s only a few of us, and so many of them. And that doom is almost all around us, as thick as the night. And that it seems that they’ve won so utterly. But it’s when the hour’s darkest that hope grows. What’s the quote, Sophia?
Never is God closer to you/as in the deepest doubt:/in the selfwithdrawn light of Zion.
No – not that one. Too complicated.
But where there is danger, a rescuing element grows, too.
Exactly, Sophia! That’s the stuff, Sophia!
Where there’s no hope, there’s hope after all. When the end seems utterly nigh, a new beginning appears.
We’re in a new era now, postgraduates. We’ve left history behind. This is a new epoch – a time of great spiritual danger. And great spiritual hope, too.
You’re with us in the time of the greatest uncertainty, postgraduates. The greatest darkness! As the Tribulation deepens. The last outpost of European thought in philosophy, pretty much. It’s down to us to keep the European philosophy flag flying, postgraduates.
You’re on the Nebuchadnezzar, postgraduates. Don’t forget that. The last best hope …
We know how we must disappoint you, postgraduates. We know who we are, the last guardians of European philosophy in this benighted country. We’re dreadful provincials! Obscurities!
No one knows our names. No one cites us! No one quotes from our work. No one reads our articles. No one invites us to speak at their conferences. No one’s inviting us onto editorial boards. No one’s requesting our work for journal special editions. No one’s headhunting us.
No, we’re not the people to study under, postgraduates. Our references won’t help you find jobs. No one will be impressed that you studied with us, in our department. We’re in no one’s Philosophy Gourmet Report. We’re low in the rankings.
We can protect you for a while, that’s all, postgraduates. We can help you win the last students scholarships. But that’s all.
No, postgraduates, we’re not philosophers of renown. All we can do is point you in the right direction. Guide us to what we cannot do, but that you might.
There’s still the shadow of your ardency left in us. We still know something of postgraduate intensity.
We’re not fat and complacent, postgraduates – not yet!
Easy fucking street. We’d come in from the cold. The good life! We were ready. We’d been outside. And now – we were inside.
Let the world go fuck itself. It could all go to hell out there, but it wouldn’t touch us for a bit. The outside wasn’t screaming in our ears anymore. It wasn’t, like, total battle stations for a bit. It wasn’t arma-fucking-geddon for a bit.
Standing on our own two feet. Actually launching in life. Living like other people live. We weren’t a problem anymore. We didn’t have to be explained.
A proper job! Now we could do some work -some writing. Now we could see what we were capable of.
Time! Offices! A library pass! No excuses anymore.
Yes, we were happy for a while. The whole honeymoon thing.
Cicero smiled. She knew it wouldn’t last, even as we carried out boxes of books into our offices. Even as we bought pot plants into our offices. Even as we brought art prints for the walls of our offices. Even as we perfected our office décor.
Even as we lined up our Heidegger Gestamsausgabe. Our Nietzsche collected works. Our Kant-in-German (like we could read Kant in German.) All the books we might read one day If we learned the languages …
Volumes of the Cambridge History of Philosophy: Malebranche. Scotus … Averroes …
All the lecturer accoutrements. All the lecturer accessories. All the lecturer general bits and pieces. But Cicero knew it wouldn’t last, our contentment.
Our splendid isolation. Our semi detached splendour.
For how long would we be left alone? For how long would Cicero be allowed to get away with this? For how long would she protect us?
We didn’t want to ask. We didn’t want to think about it. To give it the least consideration.
Our freedom – that was sufficient. That we had a future. That we could raise our gaze from the pavement. That we could look ahead. That we could even, God knows, look upwards.
The Northern Lights are fake. They want the sky. Just like they want the weather. This stuff is just some new kind of drone they’re working on. It’s still all being beta tested. They’re just seeing what they can do. Wait until they add in the voice to skull stuff. The stuff they tried out in the Iraq War, where the troops thought they could hear Allah telling them to surrender. They’re going to be able to stage the Second Coming, if they want to.
And why would they do that?
To make Jesus say that the New Jerusalem is imminent. By which what they really mean is the technocratic world government. Everyone will, like, hear that in their own heads. As if Jesus was talking to them directly.
Or they’ll simulate an alien invasion. And tell us that they only thing that can save us is a technocratic world government.
The Northern Lights are just nature’s just showing off. Cicero wanted us inoculate against beauty – that kind of beauty.
Don’t place your faith in beauty – natural beauty, Cicero said. Don’t look for meaning in the natural order. Not even in the Northern Lights, blazing sublimely.
Meaning’s transcendent or not at all. Meaning arrives from without – only from without.
Northern lights.
Blind – it’s all blind. Impersonal. There’s neither hate nor love. There’s no yearning – that’s just anthropomorphism.
Northern Lights.
That’s Satan blazing. I saw Satan fall to earth on the O.M. campus.
The Northern Light’s are nature putting on its display. Showing what it can do.
Or what the campus drones can do. Don’t believe any of this is real.
Are there Southern lights, too? You never hear about them. Imagine all the penguins, looking up in awe.
And still the Northern Lights. Still flashing.
They can’t be fake. It’s a message to us. God’s message.
What does it say? This is my sky, and fuck off organisational managers?
It’s saying that there’s something vaster than us – greater. Something good.
Are the Northern lights good? I just see indifference.
I swear I can hear the Northern lights. Are they supposed to make a sound? That rumbling?
That’s the drilling.
We need the great Rewind. The great Reversal. We need the Rebeginning.
We actually need to access other dimensions. Alternative realities.
How do we do that?
Sure, you can change the past. You can go back in the timeline and alter this thing or that. Like in Terminator 2 where they try to assassinate the guy who invented the Skynet chip – where they try to prevent Judgement Day, or whatever. But they can only defer Judgement Day It’s still going to happen. You can’t put off the inevitable forever.
So the O.M. campus is inevitable?
It’s a culmination. Everything they’ve been trying to do. It’s the outworking of a technological logic that’s been in play for ever since Brave New World. And We. And The Sleeper Wakes. And Metropolis.
Maybe the campus is just a campus.
Too boring. It can’t be that straightforward. Anyway, I like all our conspiracy theories.
Maybe they’re just moving philosophy to Organisational Management, and that’s all.
Come on, we need to exercise our imaginations. Cicero would approve. She liked us best when we felt confined. Cramped. When we felt up against it, which we nearly always did. When we conspiracy-theorised. When we speculated, paranoically.
She liked our conspiracy-theorising. The more elaborate, the better. The more farfetched. The more baroque. Had we ever even heard of Ockham’s razor? Apparently not. But all the better!
She liked our wild hypothesising when our blood was up. Our speculative madness. The madder the better!
Work in Progress 