All our lives, gathered up, waiting to be offered.
Offered to what?
I don’t know – just offered up. To the cause.
To what cause?
Of embracing Futility, capital F. Our Fate, or whatever … Our Fatelessness … Our pointlessness.
All we can do is gather up all the futility – all these failed days – and offer it up.
Everything botched. All the blind alleys. All the mediocre stuff. We just need to offer it up. To abandon it. Not to try and make anything of it.
They needed a rest, we told our students. A holy pause. To step back from what they were, or what they might be.
Discover what you might be … or might not be, we told our students. Stay with what is undecided. Remain in that not yet. And be, thereby, eternal students. Eternally studying. Eternally stupid, just as we are eternally stupid …
Stupidity: wasn’t that what we tried to pass on to them, our students? What was not yet, what had not become anything – not even philosophy.
An opening. A widening. An open grove of speech: that what we sought to find in teaching. Where we stood before the sky.
Blessed moments. Happiness in speech. Small utopias, where speech wandered into truth. Where our lectures received light from above.
Moments of calm in our teaching. Of stillness spreading around us. When we achieved a kind of simplicity. A limpidity. When we laid everything out, in a series of declarative sentences. Anaphorically. In a wisdom of despair – achieved despair.
The way speech stood up. Stretched itself upwards. In its plainless. In spoken simplicity. Without technical terms. Without terms of the art. Without jargon.
And we had the common touch.
We didn’t close our eyes and pretend we were at Oxford. We didn’t speak to our students as though they were scholar-princes-and-princesses of yore.
None of this was to be over their heads. None of this was to be as if to no one, to the open air, to ghosts of the academic past. We were addressing them and only them. They were the audience we wanted to reach.
We listened. We read the room. Took the temperature – the spiritual temperature.
Looking out at them. At their faces. Reading their eyes. Did they follow? Were they involved?
Thinking with them, and only them. Making it real, for them. Something vital. Something important. Making them feel it: the Seriousness. Of the topic. Of our discussion. Making them remember this lecture. This encounter. Now. Right here …
An urgency. A matter of life of death. Of utmost importance. That something would be missed if they hadn’t attended. If they hadn’t been present here. Today …
And moments of calm in our teaching. Openings out. Widenings. Our words, reaching the Open. Our words, sun-touched. Sun-dazzled. Light breaking across them.
We said the words and the light came. The light dazzled. The light sparkled. The breath of God came over the waters – and our words were the waters.
Words of truth, singing through us. Echoing through us. Like Sprachgesang to invisible music.
We spoke We were spoken. A kind of ventriloquy. A thrown voice, not our own. But whose voice was it?
And Cicero listening. And Cicero marvelling. As the stillness spread around us. As we reached an open grove of speech. As we reached the blessed moment. A utopia in speech.
Not-yet philosophy, speaking through us.
From what hovered before philosophy. That philosophy always betrayed. Philosophy, amnesiac, speaking through us. Philosophy stranded. Left behind. That wasn’t yet philosophy.
Philosophy, marooned before itself. Wandering without itself, without its memories. Because we ourselves had been marooned in life! Because we ourselves had wandered in life! Because that was the truth of our hourly paid condition! Because that’s what we’d known in our years of service teaching!
We spoke the truest word, which means the most abandoned word. The found word, which is also the lost word. We spoke what was forgotten before the beginning of the world. And of what would pulse there after the end.
Not yet philosophy! Not even philosophy! The breath before. The stillness before. As we laid everything out in a series of declarative sentences. Anaphorically. In a wisdom of despair – achieved despair. In the beauty of despair.
Apocalyptic hope – that’s the only thing available now: that’s what we told our students. Hope for the apocalypse – and what passes through the apocalypse. Hope for total change, which can only be preceded by total destruction. Where you can’t even hope for your own survival.
Apocalyptic energies – that’s what you have to harness: that’s what we told our students. It’s about marshalling wild energies, unpredictable energies, impossible to contain. Where all you can do is to let them be unleashed. Horror and joy, mixed up. The fury of destruction – that is also the fury of creation. The end and the beginning – both at once.
Telling our students about the new wars – the invisible wars. The electromagnetic wars. The psychotronic weaponry wars – the applied behavioural science wars, the neuro-linguistic programming wars.
Telling our students about neuroweaponry. About existential weaponry – about the deliberate collapsing of meaning, culture and social bonds. About the deliberate inculcation of free floating anxiety. About the conditions for mass hypnosis.
Telling them about the general technocratic agenda. The implantation of a global, full spectrum dominance control system. Of the seizure of the global commons: of food, water, energy, supply chain, money, mobility, private property.
Telling them about the move to politocracy and corporatism. About the transition from government to governance. Telling them about the coercion cascades, from the Bank of International Settlements down, through NGOs, through state governments.
We were instructing them about strategic financial collapse. About the controlled economic takedown. About the end of mercantilism and the rise of techno-feudalism. About the new monetary system, and the destruction of independent business.
Telling them about depopulation agendas. Iatrogenocide and stealth sterilization. Kill-boxing and Skinner-boxing. The great poisoning of food and water.
Yes, all that, and with Cicero listening. With Cicero approving.
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?
Work in Progress 