Work in Progress

We had a few good years.

Did we?

We were left alone. Allowed to surface. Come up from our years of obscurity. Step into daylight after years in the darkness. Step up to the podium. To be listened to! To be heard!

Isn’t that what we always what we wanted: to lecture our own modules, in our own name? To do it better than the lecturers we’d seen over the years. Than all the lecturers we’d lectured for! That we’d taught seminars for!

Coming up, breathing air after so many years of service teaching! Of seminar teaching for other people’s lectures! Of paid-by-the-hour teaching!

Our chance at last: to be in charge of a room full of students. To be guiding them, a room full of students. To be lifting them all the way up to philosophy, a room of students.

We had an audience. Students were listening, kind of. Notetaking, sort of.

And Cicero herself, listening. Cicero pacing up and down outside the lecture room, listening in.

Full of youthful zeal. The ardency of a fully operational postgraduate is a blinding thing. More powerful than any other force in the universe. They’re capable of anything …

You don’t understand the kind of people they are. So focused. So intense. They can beam laser beams from their eyes, pretty much. There’s nothing as powerful as postgraduate zeal, you know that.

 

Maybe the postgrad messiah will save us. Or does he just save postgrads? Will the postgrad messiah save us from Organisational Management?

 

The humanities postgrad messiah. That they’ve spent generations preparing for. Knowing that this would happen. The hour of the humanities greatest need?

 

The postgrad messiah is supposed to defeat the Bug.

Is the Bug the same as Organisational Management? Is the Bug behind Organisational Management, pulling its strings? Mysterious.

All I know is that the postgrad messiah is the anti-Bug.

 

We’re waiting for the postgraduate messiah.

In Newcastle?

It could be Newcastle. Somewhere in the UK provinces – that’s part of the lore.

Who made up all this?

It’s buried in the deep past. Which some postgraduates can see.

 

Like a Lawrence of Arabia of postgraduates. Who will lead them from captivity.

I hope we get to ride sandworms. Tell me there are sandworms.

 

Natural psychic abilities. All postgrads have them. They lose them when they graduate.

 

Postgrads go to live underground. In the Tunnels. In the hidden campus. Beneath this one.

What do they do down there?

Read. Prepare. Study. Gird themselves. For the Emergence.

And when does that happen?

That, I don’t know.

 

There’s this huge network of culverts beneath the campus. That’s where they live. There’s a whole postgrad civilization down there, supposedly. The campus below ground is greater than the campus above ground.

And what do they research?

Secret things. War against the Bug stuff. All this psychic stuff. They’re supposed to be able to levitate. They wander the ethereal plane. They do all this out of body projection.

 

The one who will lead us to paradise. That’s what they call him. And will save the university. And even the universe, we’re not sure. Sounds cool.

 

That’s why PhD students disappear on the brink of submission. They’ve passed through the Ceremony. They’re not the university’s now.

And then what?

They train other postgrads in the ceremony. And then go underground. The counter-campus. They live on weird mushrooms down there.

 

This isn’t just a party. It’s a ceremony. You’ll see deep postgrad rituals tonight.

 

It’s a Newcastle thing. Something to do with the closure of the old Philosophy department. A bunch of postgrads went underground and grew very strange.

 

I’ve managed to put it together. All the lore. Forty years ago, that’s when the department closed. It was very traumatic for everyone.

What happened to the lecturers?

Scattered. Some lost their sanity. Some died. Some retreated. We don’t know where they are now. Perhaps they’re underground, too.

And their postgraduates …

They wanted to preserve what they had there. To keep it going, somehow. And then did. In the secret campus.

 

The ritual of drinking the water of life. The hope is that they can recall everything their supervisors thought. And their supervisor’s supervisors.

 

It’s the postgrad faith that with the right link of supervisors and supervisees, they will produce the postgrad messiah.

And what will the postgrad messiah actually do?

Save European Philosophy. Let European Philosophy become something else in the Anglophone world. It won’t be about commentary – not just paraphrasing and introductory books. It’ll be it’s own thing. There’d be some … marriage of the European and the Anglophone. Of the two strands. Some great great European-style Anglophone philosophy.

Impossible.

That’s what the postgrads believe.

 

The great Darkening is coming. The postgrads know. When they close every European philosophy department in the country.

 

Postgrads are between worlds. Neither students, not really, nor staff.

 

Postgrads have nothing to lose. They are truth speakers. The most honest of all.

 

The postgrads are closer to things that we are. Purer.

 

Postgrads are the purest amongst us. They quiver with understanding. Tremble with it.

 

The postgrads are closer to the Truth than we are. It blows through them, the postgrads. Like wind through fields of wheat. Gently bowing their heads …

 

The postgrads: look at them, so cold, so pure … Shivering in truth. Frail, somewhat raw, but … strong, in a reedy kind of way.

Is there such a thing as stupid philosophy? For stupid philosophers. With all the pathos of philosophy. All the agony of philosophy. But at the level of stupidity.

What if philosophy is without relationship to intelligence at all? What if it’s more an attitude?

 

There are denser and looser stupidities. There are more compact stupidities and more gaseous stupidities. There are stupidities of heavy gravity and light gravity. There are stupidities that seem to float free of stupidity, but that are, nevertheless, stupidities. And stupidities that simply sink in to stupidity. That just entrench stupidity. Deepen it.

There are deeper and shallower stupidities. There are stupidities of descent and even stupidities of ascent.

 

Stupidity is not a beginning. But awareness of stupidity is.

A sense of being stupid is a sign that the stupidity isn’t complete. That stupidity isn’t just darkness.

An awareness of stupidity, half emerging from stupidity. Opening its eyes in stupidity.

 

Stupidity, become self-aware. Stupidity, opening its eyes. Stupidity, reaching … stupidly, admittedly. With little sense of what it was doing, granted. But reaching nonetheless.

 

Stupidity, trying not to be itself. Ashamed of itself, in some sense. Impelled not to be itself. Stupidity, gaining a kind of energy.

 

An anti-stupidity, within stupidity. A movement against stupidity, despite stupidity. How was it possible? How did stupidity discover this lightness, this motility?

But it had happened with us. Really, we should be objects of careful study. We should be wired up and tested. They should insert electrodes into our brains and see what happens when we read Hölderlin. What lights up and what doesn’t. To see what synapses are ignited. What pathways open up through the brain’s grey matter. Because something happens, it’s clear.

 

And how did our stupidity break open? What took root in it? What broke its surface? What opened stupidity to the light? To the whole vertical dimension.

What seed was cast into its depths, that made it open? What secret germination burst open its surface? How was it sown in us? How did it begin?

 

Somehow, light reached us. In the depths of our stupidity. In its utter darkness. Somehow, something was born from stupidity.

 

The lifting of stupidity. Its lightening. Stupidity, opening its eyes.

 

Perhaps that’s what Cicero’s doing: writing her long-promised dummkopf-analysis.

 

There should be some kind of stupidity-analysis. That should be making of Cicero. That could be her magnum opus: her treatise on stupidity, that would set out the critical method of stupidity-analysis. Dummkopf-analyses.

Sounds better in German.

And Cicero, like Moses, could lead us all from the deserts of stupidity by studying stupidity. Could be a whole new school of education.

How to turn stupidity inside-out. How to exposes its darkness, its density, to the light. Stupidity’s bloom: what’s that in German? It sounds almost like a line from Celan.

But we have a gift for stupidity. It’s not simple. A kind of meta-stupidity within stupidity, that’s part of stupidity. There’s a spirit floating above stupidity, that is more than stupidity.

 

Is there such a thing as noble stupidity, like the noble savage? Or is stupidity always grotesque?

 

We should really open a school of stupidity studies.  And perhaps that’s what she had already done, Cicero mused.

When you let the lunatics take over the asylum: what then? When you let the chimps take over the zoo?

 

But it wasn’t just a matter of letting stupidity loose in the institution.

Guided stupidity. Strategic stupidity. Cicero wanted to deploy stupidity, that was the truth of it. Let it lose like some virus. Just to see what would happen. Would it spread? Could you be bitten by stupidity as by a zombie?

 

Stupidity’s not simply a lack of intelligence. Stupidity is its own thing. With its own laws.

We, at  the bottom of the academic ladder of stupidity, are in fact spiritually higher than those many rungs up. That’s our paradoxical elevation … That’s the strange contradiction in which we live.

And it’s why we see further than the rest of them. The gifted. The bright. The high achievers. All of Cicero’s professors!

It’s why we know the light of the Most High as it shines through us: the Most Low. As it shines in our stupid faces – in our idiot’s faces.

When we talk of our stupidity – from it. When we say the most idiotic things. When we drink!

And how we drink! It’s a mainline to idiocy, and therefore counter-idiocy. It’s the royal road to stupidity, and therefore the opposite of stupidity. That lets brilliance pass through us. That turns our faces upwards. And lets us see the sky – and see through the sky.

 

The fools, the jokers, at the bottom of the ladder at least know there’s a ladder. Can at least dream of ascending, even though they can’t possibly ascend.

 

In perfect tension with the world, the universe, the university. In the agon.

To suffer it – and laugh about it. To laugh from it. Just as we laughed, on our drunken evenings.

Cicero saw it in us. Marvelled at it. What lightness! What a gift of lightness! A laughing crucifixion – was it possible? It was.

Suffering laughed. Despair laughed. And this was not a contradiction of suffering, or despair. It was their completion. Their bloom. Their highest flower.

 

The laughter of despair: that’s what Cicero needed to learn. But couldn’t. A working class thing? A British thing? She wasn’t sure. But it lay outside her. It wasn’t within her powers.

 

Us at our best, because we were at our worst. Us at our most serious, because we so laughable. Us at our most philosophical, because we could barely string a philosophical sentence together.

 

To feel at home in our exile. To feel close to brilliance in our distance from brilliance.

 

The place that shows our stupidity is exactly where we belong. Is our true intellectual home.

 

We cannot escape the Cross. We’re on the Cross. We’re Holy idiots, right there on the Cross, because of our holiness. Because of our idiocy.

The Lamb is being slain. The Lamb was always slain – from the beginning. There’s no respite for the Lamb.

 

Genius lies tortured. And is nothing other than this torture.

 

We have to consent to our idiocy. To affirm it. Even as we want it to be something else.

We affirm our idiocy by disavowing it. By turning from it. By seeing it in each other and by taking the piss.

That’s what redeems us: taking the piss. That’s how we know the other as geniuses and anti-geniuses. How we know each other as the greatest thinkers who’ve ever lived, and the worst.

 

The way we pull each other down. The way we laugh at each other. The truest friendship! That’s how we know friendship – as the opposite of friendship. As the torment of friendship.

 

We’re fools for Genius … For Philosophy, God knows …

 

How far Philosophy’s fallen. To find itself among us! Among our kind!

Does that mean we can save it?

 

Are we going to put philosophy back together again?

We’re going to smash it still farther. Until not even the memory of it survives. And that’s how we’ll save it. And ourselves.

 

The death of God, the death of the university: the same. The death of the university is only the outworking of the death of God.

 

Cicero killed the university. She broke the university.

 

The university lives on through us. Through this philosophy dept. We’re the university, and this, all around us, is a lie.

 

We’re the true uni. The true uni lives. In us. In our Board of Studies. In parody.

We’re the true lecturers. And we’re the true philosophy department. This is the truest philosophy department.

 

The dicers at the foot of the cross are actually on the cross, being crucified.

The great crucifixion is that there are dicers at the foot of the Cross, ignoring the Cross.

 

That’s why it’s fallen to us. That’s what happens at the end, the very end. We’re the ones who take it over. We’re the truest testimony to what it once was.

Our readings of Heidegger are the most faithful for our time. Our interpretations of Deleuze are the most profound for our time. Our engagement with Levinas is the most timely, the most relevant, the most important for our time.

Because it’s not timely! Because it’s not relevant! Because it’s of no importance whatsoever!

The experience of our evil. The only way we can love the good, the true. The experience of our untruth. Our errancy. The only way we can know what we’re not.

 

Goodness, revealed by evil. Brilliance, revealed in stupidity. Intelligence, shown by idiocy.

 

The existence of idiocy here below doesn’t disprove the reality of brilliance, but the very thing that reveals it in its truth.

Do you think?

 

We love the good, we love God, through our idiocy – and only through it. We can’t transcend our idiocy, can’t leave it behind. But our idiocy is the means.

We, the most stupid, are shown the light of the most brilliant. We read by that light. God knows, we even try to think by it.

We cannot love truth unless we love untruth. We cannot love brilliance unless we love idiocy.

Our mediocrity: that’s what we need to learn to love. Because only thereby will the unmediocre reveal itself. The great. The brilliant

 

We have to love evil. To love idiocy. We have to love stupidity. And mediocrity! Since we can never reach their opposites ourselves. Never purely. But who can?

And Cicero, giving us our opportunity. Encouraging us.

Does that make her the anti-Christ? A demon? What’s the opposite of a messiah? What’s the opposite of an angel?

 

Her irresponsibility … Satanic. Devilish.

Cicero was a mocker of God. Of the universe. Of the university. A Lord of misrule. An agitator. A chaos-monger. A disorder-wallah.

 

Cicero, encouraging us. Goading us on. She had a programme. There was a point she wanted us to reach.

A spurious point.

Of course it was spurious. What else could it be? Of dubious origin! Not to be trusted! As we come from dubious origins. As we are definitely not to be trusted.

 

Her perversity. And worse than that. Her Satanism. She was the mother of lies, after all.

The distance between us and true academics … is the crucifixion of the university. Is the sacrifice of the university.

And what’s worse is that no one notices it or cares about it, no one at the university. Which is yet another aspect of the crucifixion of the university.

The tension – the tearing. The distance between what is and what ought to be. The pulling apart of the universe – and the university.

That isn’t even suffered. That isn’t even remarked upon. That no one has noticed, apparently, but us.

But that we live, impossibly. In tension – in rending. That we suffer, in our way. And no one else notices.

 

We call it inadequacy. We call it our impostor’s syndrome. But it’s greater than that.

It’s our way of crying up like the psalmist, Father, why have you abandoned us? Old world, why have you abandoned us? Old standards, why have you abandoned us? The old sense of what’s right and wrong, true and untrue, why have you abandoned us? The old criterion between the bad and the good, between the worthwhile and worthless, why have you abandoned us?

 

This unbearable tension. Between us and the university. That cannot be resolved. Cannot be harmonized. Cannot be held together.

It’s too great, the tension. The contraries are not harmonised. The contraries remain utter contraries. In disharmony. In howling. There’s no one who could make sweet music out of this.

Is it our impostor’s syndrome? Or does it descend from God? Is it God’s gift to us – to know our shortcomings? To know what we’re not? To know how we fall short? Is this what God has given us: the knowledge of our idiocy?

And if so, why? Why increase our suffering? Why not allow us to be idiots who don’t know that they’re idiots? Why this self-consciousness? This self awareness? Which is only an awareness of being ridiculous. Of being laughable. Of being an object of deserving scorn.

We want our humiliation, of course we do. We want to be condemned. To be shot, or something. Put up against the wall by ardent student revolutionaries, if there are any left. By new Ulrike Meinhofs.

 

All we ask for is grace or extinction – one of the two. Grant it to us … one or the other.

 

All our thrashing about. Our crying out. Our moaning. Won’t some have pity on us? Won’t a foot come down and crush us, as we deserve? Or won’t a spiritual hand come down and lift us up?

Help us! That’s all we’re crying. Crush us or lift us up! One of the two! Help us. Because we can’t help ourselves. We’ve gone too far down our roads to help ourselves.

 

The fact that we’re allowed to continue. The fact that we are permitted to go on. What does it show?

We’re the products of mass higher education. Of its expansion beyond anything sensible.

We were given an intellectual chance when we didn’t deserve an intellectual chance. We were put before students who were likewise the products of the mass expansion. The mass inflation!

 

Really, we only increased the velocity of the fall – the university’s fall. Until it reached almost infinite speed. Until the fall itself opened as a black hole. That pulled everything into it – all of higher education.

And let it live on, in its destruction. In its mockery. In its desperation. In its contemptibleness. In its laughableness. In its pitifulness. But really, it was too grotesque to be pitied.

 

We were the destroyers. We were part of the Great Destruction. The democratisation. The opening of the gates of the academy to the comprehensive-school educated. To the working classes.

And not the working classes who’d been through grammar school. We weren’t the equivalent of Dennis Potter or Mark E Smith.

We’d been smashed by comprehensive school. Destroyed by it. We had been made stupid.

 

Such that we could only see ourselves as not belonging in academia. At having ended up her by chance, as much as anything else.

Not as rogue agents. As infiltrators. Because it wasn’t as if we had a plan. It wasn’t as if we tried to subvert it all from within. We weren’t part of some brilliant avant-garde. We weren’t part of some great cause.

This wasn’t some attempt to achieve hegemony. Part of some long march through the institutions. This wasn’t some Gramiscian thing. Some supposedly Cultural Marxist thing.

We followed no light. We had no mission or sense of mission. We had no goal in mind. We weren’t coordinated. We were here, that’s all. We’d found ourselves here.

Didn’t Cicero educate us in all things, pretty much? Poetry. Didn’t she teach us to love the work of Paul Celan and Friedrich Hölderin? The work of Rene Char? Making us read Hölderin out loud! In German! In turn! Passing Hölderin around a reading circle.

She’d make us read aloud, in German. She’d ask us what we thought it meant. How we might translate this word, or that word.

And extemporising commentaries as we read. And commentary on commentaries – the great commentaries on Hölderin. Cicero on Heidegger’s reading of Der Ister, as we read Der Ister. Agamben on Hölderin’s late fragments, as we read the late fragments. As if we’d understand! And we shouldn’t understand!

 

Our atrocious German. Our even-worse French. Our laughable ancient Greek. Our execrable Latin.

Reading Dante – in Italian. Reading Sophocles – in Greek! What else! And then Hölderin’s translation of Sophocles – in German! 

 

We had to be encultured, but not too much so, Cicero insisted. We mustn’t lose our barbarism. Our rough edges. Our mispronunciation.

We mustn’t lose our hatreds. Our horrors. Our sense of not belonging to the world. She loved us as vandals! As ruiners! With bared teeth!

Yet strangely capable of being moved. Something, somehow, there was an openness to deep European culture in us. Where had it come from? How did it survive?

Some sense of reverence … When we’d fall silent, and listening, in wonder. Marvelling … Despite our stupidity! Notwithstanding our stupidity! As if it awakened something in our soul. From a previous life! A previous incarnation!

How else could she account for it? How could Hölderin reach us? And Sophocles? But they did. It did, old European culture.

All the books no one reads anymore. All the forgotten names.

So the memory of Europe wasn’t dead after all. And if it was dead – even if it was dead – there were still those left who could be moved by its ruins.

And wasn’t that was highest in us: that capacity for reverence? Our uneducated enthusiasm? Our autodictat’s instinct? Hadn’t we led ourselves through so many European pages? All by ourselves? Hadn’t we read parallel editions. Mouthing the foreign words? Hadn’t we practically taught ourselves philosophy?

Somehow! Despite everything! Despite ourselves! Despite the atrocities of our education. Despite the reach of Analytic philosophy! Despite the corruption of the Anglophone soul! Despite the thought-poisons than ran through us! (Unless we read from the poisons. Unless it was the poisons that rad hoping for an antidote.)

 

Truffling through the ruins. Snuffling. Scavenging, like pigs. Led ourselves by our own noses.

 

As though we were playing in the ruins. Picking up things that moved us, without us knowing why. It was moving, desperately so.

 

And our writing! How Cicero liked the thought of us writing. The questions she asked us, about our writing habits. About our methods of production. How we sat as we wrote. Our posture. The expressions on our faces.

How seriously we took ourselves, despite everything! Of course it was a mock seriousness. A sham seriousness. An imitation of seriousness’s seriousness. But that itself was moving.

She loved our seriousness. She was amused by our seriousness. But even better, those moments in which we caught ourselves being serious. When we laughed at our own seriousness. Saw ourselves in a mirror, as it were. And couldn’t take our own seriousness seriously. Didn’t think we’d earnt it.

 

Our note-taking. Our annotation of books. Of articles. Our underlings. Our putting things in bold. Our comments. Our collections of excerpts.

She’d ask us to read our favourite quotations. She loved it when we stumbled over our words. When we looked to her for correction. There we were, in our thirties, still reading like children! And stupid children, not gifted children! No one hand corrected us before! No one had taught us to pronounce this, or that! Until now!

And even better when we were drunk and reading out loud. Best of all, when we were slurring, too. When we were full of drunken pathos. Soaring on our own drunken oratory, such as it was.

 

Cicero, laughing and clapping her hands, delighted. My philosophers!, she’d cry. My very own philosophical idiots! My dunces!

 

We didn’t know our own stupidity, not really. Which was probably a relief, Cicero said. Which is probably what kept us going.

 

As our postgraduates were to us, so were we to Cicero.

 

And yet we were capable of such moods. Such depths. Such hatreds. And such loves – why not – since hatred is always a kind of love.

Passions of the barbarians! Of the apes in the academy! Constantly revealing our non-scholarliness … Our clumsy-footedness … Our ill-education … Our linguistic incompetence …

It was a marvel that we’d learnt anything at all. And yet we had learned. A few things, at least. We had instincts – powerful ones. That dove us. That whipped us on through the most rebarbative texts! Whipped us through things we barely understood! Like savages. Reader-barbarians!

Greedily wrenching meaning from our texts – even spurious readings. From our readings – barbaric readings.

They’d make Cicero’s head spin, our readings. Our interpretations. They’d all but make her head turn round and round. She’d start, surprised. She’d flinch. And she’d second-guess herself.

Had we broken open some new scholarly path?, after all. Had we seen what no one else had seen? By force of passion? By sheer barbarism-power! By the power of stupidity!

We were maulers, distorters, primitives, but still … Didn’t we have some crude insights of our own? Couldn’t Cicero dream of a whole new school of barbarous interpretations? A primitive’s hermeneutics?

Was it really so mad to dream of a school of barbarised European philosophy? Something the British would contribute to the intellectual life of the world? Couldn’t we have stumbled upon a unique philosophical method – a stupid method? Outsider philosophy, in some sense?

 

Mouthing over our words as we read them. Following lines of text with our fingers.

Near illiteracy! And yet we seemed to need to read. And books that were too  hard for us – obviously.

We were drawn to high seriousness, despite our irreverence. Despite our flippancy. High seriousness! Why did we need it? Why did we look for it? How could we even recognise it? And yet recognise it we did.

Only the most lofty of books. And the deepest ones. The surprise of what we had read! The surprise of our acquaintance with Pindar, with Goethe, with Proclus. Cicero was amazed. What was it that had led us into those corners of the library?

The ancient books! In Green Loebs! In red Loebs! In facing translations. As if we needed them! As if we really were going to cross check the English against the Greek! As if we could actually even remember the Greek alphabet!

And didn’t we have Heidegger in German! Various items from the Gestamsausgabe. Auf Deutsch! The presumption! The ambition! The unlikehood! In what fit of optimism did we buy Unterwegs zur Sprache. And Was Heisst Denken?

And our French books! What a marvel! Those creamy Gallimards! La by Helene Cixous. Le Differend, by Lyotard. As if we going to read those in the original!

And even some Italian books – Virno. Agamben! God knows. Tiny books, with sixty or so pages. Exquisite. As if we were going to magically be able to read those books, just by being close to them!

 

But what an insight into us, our personal libraries. Once upon a time we really took ourselves to be capable of such things. We really thought we were going to be pan-European readers.

Our immodesty! Our hubris! Our secret aspirations! Our dreams! One day, we’d be able to read these books. We were too good for translations! We needed more! Who knows, perhaps we were going to translate them ourselves.

A glimpse into how we once saw ourselves. And maybe we saw ourselves that way still! Perhaps we thought that now we had open-ended contracts, the nearest thing to permanent jobs … Now we were actually gainfully employed, and full time … that we might bloom into our true scholarly capacities. That we might soar into our real vocation. Read in all the major European languages. Become proper scholars of the Latin, of the Greek.

Turn ourselves into new Hans Blumenbergs. Into European style scholar-philosophers. Writing eight hundred page magnum opuses, one after another. On complicated periods of European thought. On medieval philosophy, and that sort of thing. On ancient philosophy.

Magisterial! Epoch-spanning! Commanding whole eras of intellectual philosophy! Testament to years of patient scholarship! Yes, wasn’t that what we were going to write, now we had full time jobs?