Work in Progress

But no relishing or savouring wine with us, Cicero said. We don’t linger over our wine. We don’t appreciate it. Of course not! We know nothing of the rituals of social drinking. Of the ceremonies of wine.

 

Cicero brought out her wine only at the very end of the evening. Only in those early hours, when we were back in her flat.

Desecration time! she used to say. Let’s see what you can do to my wine.

 

Cicero, bringing her wines to us with reverence – of the irony. Cicero, dusting each bottle off. Uncorking it slowly, gratefully. Pouring it ceremoniously. For us! She was doing it for us! She appreciated the irony, she said.

 

Cicero, extolling the length of the taste, not that we’d understand any of that. Cicero, taking us through the unfolding sequence of flavours, and she might as well have been addressing apes.

 

Cicero, swirling her wine. Sniffing it. Commenting upon it. Wine is about gentle sipping, she said, as we guzzled ours.

 

But no relishing or savouring wine with us, Cicero said. We don’t linger over our wine. We don’t appreciate it. Of course not! We know nothing of the rituals of social drinking. Of the ceremonies of wine.

 

The wine’s rising up to meet us, in the glass, Cicero said. Even you! It’s rising up to meet you!

 

We’re bingers! Wine destroyers!

 

We’re vicious drinkers – we make a vice of drinking. We’re desecrators.

 

Nothing virtuous about our drinking! No moderate exercise of an appetite! Not a stimulus to educated conversation! No reminder that life is a blessing! No cultivation of virtue!

 

Politeness! Manners! Amicable company! We knew nothing of that when we were drinking her wine.

So much discussion, in the university corridors.

What was Cicero about? What was she up to? Why did she want to create a new philosophy department at the end of career? Why bother? What was in it for her?

We were Cicero’s scrawl of graffiti .Her own private vandalism. Her enigmatic glyph, left behind for people to interpret.

 

We were Cicero’s revenge on the apparatchiks. The small-minded. The petty-souled. We were Cicero’s last academic act.

 

Cicero’s poisoned gift to the uni: us.

Her hand grenade, lobbed straight at them: us. Her booby trap, left behind: us. Set to go off, later: us. Cicero’s legacy …

 

The rot had set in – but Cicero wanted more rot.

 

A true philistinism: that’s what we embodied. A true vandalism. A true degradation. The gutter had been allowed to flow through the university.

 

The humanities have already collapsed – that’s what none of Cicero’s professor friends understood. The humanities are already over. And we’re what comes after.

Cicero’s gone scouring the world for great thinkers. Great non-thinkers. For thinkers even more useless than we are. Totally uneducated. Holy fools. And unholy fools. She’s probably scouring the asylums right now for truly mad philosophers, unlike us. We were never perverse enough for her. Never twisted enough …

Cicero’s looking for some place that can’t be organised, that’s what I reckon. Or managed. Far from the frontlines. Looking for some place that might be overlooked, for a few years. That might escape full  O.M. implementation, for a bit. She’s looking for a place to sit out the disaster. The coming O.M. world horror.

What if she just wanted to lie out in a hammock? Sit on some beach, a senorita on her knee? Teach some beach kids maths. A life in the sun – you couldn’t begrudge her that …

Cicero’s gone full Colonel Kurtz, I think. She’s somewhere really remote. Uncontactable. Hiding out. Living out her against-the-world fantasies. Her horror of the natural. She’s set the controls for maximum perversity. Maximum demonism. She’s trying to call up the anti-messiah, or something.

Cicero’s probably plotting in the tunnels with Nimrod. Trying to work out a way to bring the O.M. towers down.

Or she’s in the outerlands beyond the stony waste, tyring to drum up some raggle-taggle army, for when the time comes. A guerrilla army. She’s in training, for whatever happens. Learning how to use small arms. And big arms.

Do you think she’s going to appear when we really need her? In our most desperate hour? Right at the end … Assume her position as Head again, now that we were older, wise – now that we’d passed through the Organisational Management trial …

And meanwhile Cicero in her corner office. Cicero, busy with her mathematico-philosophical stuff. Cicero, flying in and out of America, on her mathematico-philosophical research funding.  Cicero, busy with her meeting with higher ups stuff. Cicero, doing whatever she did to keep it all going.

And leaving us to get on with things.

And all the while panning to fuck us over… For how long? Did she always know? Was it in her head all along? A few years, that’s what she gave us. A few academic years. And then … She called us in. A meeting. In her enormous office. A nine in the morning – strangely early.

Someone else was there. A stranger. Some professor. Some high up.

The Head of Organisational Management, Cicero told us, as we thought, in our innocence, What’s Organisational Management? We’d never heard of Organisational Management. We’d never thought about Organisational Management.

The Head of Organisational Management had come over from the new campus – the Organisational Management campus, Cicero told us. We’d only heard vague things about the construction of a new campus. We’d heard only general rumours at what they were building on the demolished Newcastle Brewery site.

The head organisational manager, in Cicero’s office. The head of Organisational Management, addressing us calmly. Asking us things about our work. Polite stuff. General stuff.

And then, the news: the head organisational manager wasn’t here for a social visit. The Head of Organisational Management had come to meet the Philosophy team, before our move to Organisational Management, and to the Organisational Management campus.

And the additional news: Cicero was retiring, and wouldn’t be part of the Organisational Management move. Cicero was leaving the university after her long and distinguished career, and now it would be up to us to carry the flame of Philosophy forward at the university.

Why do we have to feel so terrible?  Why do they have to drain the meaning from everything? Why the continuous demoralisation? Why can’t they let us feel good and then kill us?

They’re hoping we kill ourselves.

I just might.

 

Why do we have to live anymore? Why is it compulsory? It’s such an effort, living. Going on. But it’s not like you can stop very easily. Killing yourself’s an effort, too. I wish they’d get those death pods up and running.

 

I can’t reason. I can’t work things out. My brain doesn’t work. I can’t think anything through. There’s just his dullness. And flatness. And crushedness.

It’s like I live only in two dimensions. Like I can’t raise myself above any of this. That I’m nothing other than any of this. Except the awareness that this is what I am.

The campus, not growing up higgeldy-piggeldy, like a proper city. The campus, just planned and executed . Carried out, all at once. Lifted out of nothing. Someone, some organisational manager said, Let there be a campus. And there was.

 

Public spaces with no public.

There will be, once it’s finished. Once the entertainment zone draws people in.

 

Where’s the Old Testament God when you need him? The one who smites. Who rained stuff down on Sodom.

And Gomorrah. Don’t forget Gomorrah.

That was real, you know: the destruction of Sodom. It was some meteor, smashing down. Or some asteroid. Or whatever they’re called.

How do we, like, summon a meteor. Any meteor-whisperers among us? Oy, death from the sky! Oy, fire and brimstone! You’re overdue!

 

A comedy club, for things that are officially funny. Funny without infringing hate speech laws.

No anarchy of laughter. No spreading fire of joy.

Laugh-a-long technocracy. Permitted jokes. About permitted things. For the technocrats to laugh at. Somewhere for technocrats to go, after bowling. After cocktails. Or mocktails. Or whatever it is technocrats drink. The perfect start to a technocrats’ night out …

Wasn’t this what we always wanted? Didn’t a full time job lecturing in philosophy stand in for everything we ever desired?

Nothing earthly would satisfy us except that. Nothing else on Earth.

A full time, permanent academic job. That was it – that’s what stood in for everything else. A full time job teaching philosophy. So improbable … So impossible … So against the law of all things … So against everything that had happened in our lives!

 

To get up off our knees. To stand up, at last. To do something with our expensive educations. With our scholarships. To make sense of our research training. Of our student debt.

A job! A Career! Gainful employment!

You were pure yearning as PhD student. Of course! Pure desire! Pure faith! But you were allowed to be. That was expected of you.

And as part timers? Out in the world? With no scholarship? Sans the protective framework of an institution? With no place that was really ours?

The part time lecturer condition. The out-over-sixty-thousand-fathoms condition. Working a few hours a week here – and then there. A few hours here, and then there. At this uni, or that uni.

There might be work this term, or there might not be. There might be a few hours a week seminar teaching at this university, if none of their postgraduates wanted to do them. There might be a whole module – lectures and seminars – but they’d likely advertise for a proper post rather than entrusting it to us.

How to keep the desire? The yearning? How to clear time for reading? To write, despite everything? How to maintain the discipline? How to work on the articles were going to lift you out of this? That would wind up in some high ranked journal?

And sending your articles to high ranked journals, then middle ranked ones, then low ranked ones. And getting rejected by the high ranked ones, and middle ranked journals. And low ranked ones.

 

You, outside the gates. Outside the institutions. You, on your own. You, out there, with no one to count on. Overqualified for everything. Overspecialised. Over everything. Spoiled for anything else except academia.

You, outside. And still holding onto the desire. It was purifying, in its way. It mad you leaner, in its way. But you were simplified. You were streamlined. You were honed.

Reading in desperation. Reading – the last things you might ever read

Writing – trying to write. Sending things out. Applying for jobs. To speak at conferences. To publish in special themed issues of journals. On this theme. On that theme. Anything to enhance the CV …

The struggle of a whole life. Everything you were.

You don’t get to do what you want. To be what you want. Not ever girl gets to be a ballerina. Not every PhD student gets to become a lecturer. Put your dreams to bed. Do something else. There must be something you can do.

Become revolutionaries? Start some terror cell?

New university Hell.

All the humanities lecturers just waiting to be sacked. For the axe to fall. Humanities lecturers, in general misery. In perma-doom. With no sense of a future, rather than some daft management-imposed future.

 

The new university, trying to be everything but what it was.

Rebranding itself, panickedly. Raising new buildings, panickedly. Running up vast debts. Modernising its old ‘60s campus, on the never-never. With new cladding, with swoosh roofs. Erecting some enormous new sports hall. And closing down this subject area, or that one. Closing down the humanities, as it sinks down the rankings.

Everything about it screamed failed institution. Screamed failed state.

How long do dictatorships last? Years? Decades?

But this is a new kind of dictatorship, right? The whole digital thing. The control grid’s tighter.

Won’t it all just pass away?

Maybe it’ll last a thousand years. Maybe this is it forever.

Nothing can changed, right? The thousand year Reich begins here. A population control grid. That’s what they’re aiming at. A bio-fascist security grid. They’re looking for a total management solution. A total organisational solution.

They’ve studied the great control systems from the past. They’re up on the techniques of Hitler and Mao. The ancient Romans. They’re keen students of tyrannical history.

But they’re going to raise them up a notch. They’re perfecting their digital slavery system. Their behavioural psychology. Their neurolingusitic programming.

There’s a logic to it all. A pattern. A great shaping. At societal level. At the economic level. At the political level.

The old world’s being replaced. The old world’s behind dismantled, and a new one built. The enemy knows what it’s doing. Working on multiple fronts. With all these vectors of attack. This is there new normal.

Controllers and controlled – that’s all there'll be.