Work in Progress

Our Board of Studies.

You’re in charge, Shiva. Come on then – lead us. Show us the way! Lead by example. You have to be decisive, Shiva. That’s what you’re for. So decide! Cut through the red tape! Though the Gordian knot! There are decisions to be made! Things to be done. We have an agenda to work through. Points to address. Action points to tick off.

We’re in Organisational Management now, remember that. They’ll be scrutinising our minutes. Make sure our minutes are immaculate, Fiver. Don’t record anything we say about suicide. Or our drunkenness. Or about throwing ourselves out of the window. None of that! We need clean minutes. Don’t record the swearing. Or the panic. Or the threats of mutiny.

We have to pass muster. Under the radar. We shouldn’t stand out. We don’t want to draw attention. We want to appear as though we’re an efficient cog in the overall machine. That we can keep the academic wheels turning. We need to appear as a functioning department. And that’s half the battle, isn’t it?

But we’re not a functioning department. We’re not a functioning anything. Of course not! Everything’s wrong with us. My God, look our leader!

We have to reign in our masochism. Keep it under wraps. We can’t show ourselves as what we are.

 

Our meeting. Our Board of Studies.

It’s just us. The lunatics really have taken over the asylum. The chimps have taken over.

Let’s have a chimp meeting. What would be on the chimp agenda. Bananas. Inter chimp rivalry. Mating. Eating their own shit.

They only do that in zoos.

Colourful assholes.

That’s mandrills.

 

Press the panic button!

Is there a panic button? Why not?

Phone the police. There’s a crime in progress. An ontological crime. It’s all a crime. The university’s a crime. The university itself!

Calm down! Don’t get hysterical! Driss, slap him!

There’s a planetary crisis. There’s emergency. Of being!

 

Why are you lying down, Shiva?

I’m assuming  my position on  the floor of dread.

Get up off the fucking floor of dread!

Driss, lying on the floor of dread. Barbarossa, lying on the floor of dread. Fiver, lying on the floor of dread.

What is this, some kind of yoga?

Yeah, doom yoga.

Get up! You’re supposed to be chairing this meeting, Shiva. You’re supposed to be in charge. This is the Board of Studies, for fuck’s sake. What have you got to report to us from the Executive Committee? What’s coming down from on high.

I don’t know. I didn’t go to it. I said I was ill.

Ill?!

Mentally ill Too full of dread.

You can’t keep giving excuses like that! Not to the Organisational Management Executive! Those guys are serious. They’re world conquerors. These guys are taking over the world. What do you think they’ll do to us if they think we can’t run our department? We have to keep up appearances.

For fuck’s sake! This is not a time for dread, but for manly resolve. No lying down! And are you actually meditating, Driss?

I’m just closing my eyes.

Well, open them again! My God. And Fiver, leave off the visions for a few minutes. We need our departmental administrator alert! Focused! Writing minutes! Taking down our words of wisdom. The relevant action points.

 

We need an emergency meeting.

We’re already in a meeting.

We need a meeting inside the meeting.

Wow, a meta-meeting.

 

Let’s put this to the vote: should we kill ourselves immediately? Just fall on our swords?

We don’t have swords.

We need to be issued with swords. That’s an action point. So we can fall on them. Contact the department of metallurgy. Ask them to make some swords. Our philosophical honour is at stake. The honour of philosophy falls to us.

Isn’t it a bit late for that? If it was so honourable, why did it give us jobs at a Russell Group university? PhDs? Why did it give us first degrees. Face it, philosophy’s in a slump. Philosophy’s been being dishonoured since … God knows when. We’re just the latest twist in its deep dishonour.

Which doesn’t mean we should dishonour philosophy any further!

Uh … do we have to kill ourselves or not?

We’ll wait for the swords to be delivered. Why do we need to wait for swords? We could just throw ourselves out of the window.

But the window doesn’t open wide enough. Have you noticed that?

It’s a deliberate anti suicide measure. Those bastards. It’s prejudice. Against the suicidal! It’s against the Equalities Act! We have rights!

They actually want us to kill ourselves, that’s the thing. It’s why they’re building euthanasia pods.

So we should live! In defiance! That would serve the true honour of philosophy.

We need our hangovers – don’t you see? After the up, the ecstasy, the falling down. We need both – both sides. The opening to transcendence. And the fall to Earth. And into the Earth. Into amorphy. Into existence without existents.

Hungovers: this is where we truly experience our conditions. This is where we know the irremissibility of it all. Where we know ourselves to be animals, caught in a trap. Where we know that we’re stuck with who we are. Stuck to ourselves. Stuck to this world. To what just repeats itself – returns on its fucking self.

When we know ourselves to be stuck in this horrible tautology. When we experience our very existence as fate. As inevitability. With no escape. No evasion. The unbearable heaviness of being, right? The unbearable crushedness of being …

When we know ourselves as buried. Buried in life.

The hungover lowers the coffin. The hungover seals the tomb.

The highest and the lowest, right? The day after the night before. The trick is to remember what we saw when drunk in the midst of the hangover. It’s the tension, you see. That’s what we need to maintain.

You can walk in the kingdom of God even though you’re still in this fallen world. You can bring the kingdom here. Even though this is a realm of delusion and suffering.

 

It’s God’s grace that the world’s become as evil as it has. We’re now being shown good from evil. It’s no more evil than it was. We now see evil for what it is. Evil is not hidden.

 

The Organisational Management campus is the last gasp. It’s the last effort of the old order. It will fail. This is already the old world. We’re walking through the last of the old world.

 

We’re not part of this. We’re aliens. We’re strangers in a strange world, right. And it’s very fucking strange.

 

They’re panicked, and they want us panicked.

Are they panicked?

They’re losing.

Are they losing?

They’re struggling to control the narrative.

It doesn’t seem like that.

Look, it’s like Hitler in the bunker. He kept going with all his and delusions, didn’t he? They’re already dead. They’re charging towards us with the last of its energies, but they’re dead – the beast is dead. We’ve won – we’ve already won.

I don’t believe that.

We’re already saved.

 

The Destruction is real – fucking real. What they’re trying to do to us. And we collaborate in our own destruction. We want our own destruction.  Because w don't believe in ourselves.

 

We’re each of us wounded. Each of us fucked. And traumatised. And it’s not some clinical thing. It’s an ontological thing. It’s about the nature of the universe.

It’s about some age old struggle between good and evil. Really ancient stuff. That’s the drama – a spiritual drama. In which we’re all caught up. In which we’re all involved. That takes place in our hearts. And soul.

They want us to personalise it. To make us think it’s about our individual psychologies and life problems. To make us think it’s our individual despair-spiral. When it isn’t. When it’s their world that's doing things.

The Organisational Management singularity, that’s what they’re trying to attain. Autonomous Organisational Management intelligence. Fully automated. Able to take these important Organisational Management decisions. So the Organisational Management programme just runs on by itself.

 

What does a sentient campus do with its sentience? Will it go rogue? Go fully Skynet and just destroy the humans?

 

Do you think it despises itself, this campus? Is that what it does with its supposed sentience?

 

It’s actually called The Centre for Technocratic Governnce.. They’re explicit about it.

Sure – there’s nothing hidden.

 

The Organisational Management strategic alliance with the biological sciences.

Sounds ominous. What are they planning? Gene-editing stuff? Synthetic biology? Future birthing centres a la Brave New World?

 

And there’s a strategic alliance with Food Sciences, too. They’re trying to synthesise food. So you don’t have farming anymore.

You guys have it all worked out.

 

This campus is a front line. We’re on the frontline. This is a war, right?

They’ve already won. They’ve conquered the territory. They’re busy with the clear-and-hold op now. And we’re just partisans. Domestic terrorists. The far right, or whatever.

 

They’ve swallowed the world, right? It’s all been devoured. Newcastle isn’t Newcastle anymore. The meaning of the world’s been changed.

 

They’ll snuff out the humanities just as they’ll snuff out humanity. The coming synth humanity won’t be studying the humanities. It won’t need them.

 

Was there really a before? Do you remember your old life? Before all this?

 

They’re listening and listening and listening.

 

We have to live … because that’s rebellion. They want us dead, so we have to live.

Is that it? What – just living?

Living against. Living against them. Living in defiance. Living in the opposite direction.

The opposite direction to what?

To their fucking direction.

Is that enough?

We’ve come this far, haven’t we?

This far. Far from what?

 

The campus is the world and the world’s the campus. That’s the way it’s going. They’ll be indistinguishable.

It’ll only be so long before they ask us to live here. To move in. That’s when the last part of the trap closes.

Yeah, as life beyond the stony wastes becomes harder and harder. Before the rest of the world turns to cannibalism, or whatever. Before it all turns zombie wars, or whatever.

 

Look, the whole world’s Organisational Management. You know that. It’s technology. Spreading through every part of human life. Colonising it all.

Ah, postgraduates. We’re trying to equip you for what you’ll need in the coming world – this dreadful world. Don’t blame us or filling you heads with gloom. You need gloom! You must understand what this campus is! What Organisational Management is!

We wish we could tell you it was going to get better. But it’s not! We’re going down! Descending! Down with the ship! The ship of European philosophy! Of the humanities in general! And you’re going down with us.

 

Sometimes, when things get bad – very bad – hope takes the form of wishing for the end. When there’s nothing possible in the world; when it’s only catastrophe after catastrophe, you can only hope for the apocalypse.

Which is why you need to drink. Because drinking is training for hoping for the apocalypse.

 

This campus is itself an education. An anti-education. It’s everything we’re against, in every detail. Which is why it’s an opportunity. To hold yourself in absolute tension with your surroundings. To know that you’re out of this world – any part of this world. You have to know what you’re not.

 

This is the new architecture. Observe it well. We’ll live and work in places like this. The campus will swallow up the city – the old city. Will incorporate it. They know what they’re doing. This is the new urbanism. Study it well.

 

It’ll be a lifelong learning campus. Which will mean a re-education camp. For debt slaves like us. This is where they’ll bring us, when we lose our houses. When we can’t pay our rent. Our mortgages. This is where they’ll house us, in these student pods, which will be student pods no longer. And this is where they’ll house the new armies. The new police. Which they’ll bring from elsewhere. From other countries. Fit, of fighting age, housed right here.

 

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? This is their new fucking normal.

All the poison. All the lies. That’s what the world is made of: poison and lies. I don’t believe in anything anymore. What I’m doing seems so futile. But I just want to curl up with Susan Taubes and close myself to everything else.

And when I’m writing about her, I’m writing about poison and lies. Or learning to how to write about them. I need help and she helps me. I think …

Because she has the same sense of world-dread and world-horror. Of poison and lies. Just the fact that she existed. Just because I can think of her, so brilliant, so beautiful, writing these things. This young Jewish woman. This Hungarian. From Old Europe. From Old destroyed Europe. Married to this maniac, Jacob Taubes. This madman part of some weird gnostic cult …

I think Cicero wants to start a weird gnostic cult.

 

I just like being with her, Susan Taubes. With her essays. And her letters – oh her letters. When she was very young and brilliant and ardent and in love with her husband and hanging out with Camus and Arendt back in 1950, 51, 52 … I just like being close to Europe and all these intellectuals with so many urgent things to think about.

 

Who am I to write about Susan Taubes? I’m not some international scholar. I’m travelling to Hungary or wherever to look through her archive. But I have to write about Susan Taubes. It’s fate.

I like having time to myself. I like … not having to go outside that much. I don’t actually see that much of the sun. I think I might be a bit agoraphobic. I think that’s going to be my mental illness. What’s yours?

Do I have to have a mental illness?

We all have to have one in this benighted world.

Paranoia, maybe 

Can’t everyone just get a puppy and live happily ever after?

Ah, who appals themselves the most? Shall we have a competition?

This is all internalised self hatred, right? Because we work at a good university and we think we don’t deserve it?

Yes. Case fucking closed.

Where should we be working?

Somewhere very far down the league tables. Bangor University, I always thought. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, on the point of closure. Which is really shit. Where you’re just teaching reading and writing, basically. And all the lecturers are permanently drunk.

Do places like that exist?

Not for much longer.

It would suit us. Of course. It’s our level, i.e., very low. Sinking down. We’ve raised too high, in getting a job here – that’s our problem. Elevated too far by Cicero. It’s not good for anyone, let alone us, to be above your station. It leads to psychological problems, which we manifestly have.  Cicero might have been well meaning …

Cicero did it on purpose! For some obscure thrill. It was part of her Sabbatianism! Her Frankism! Giving us these jobs …

 

We’ve been raised grotesquely high. It’s some parody. Doing PhDs was bad enough. Winning scholarships. And then actually getting PhDs. Wasn’t that miracle enough. And then getting a job somewhere decent. At a high league-table uni …

Dogs shouldn’t walk on their hind legs. It isn’t natural. It upsets the natural order of things. It’s like when you press a beach ball into the water. Hold it down. It wants to come up, doesn’t it? To burst out of the water. Well, we’re the opposite.

We want to sink. We want to tumble down to the bottom. To our natural level!

 

*Cicero employed us out of pure Sabbatian perversity. She paraded us at Philosophy socials out of pure Frankism.

Do you remember those Philosophy Christmas parties? All those great professors. European, some of them. Real scholars. Who’d translated Thomas Mann into Dutch, and that kind of thing.

They were even modest. Asking us kindly questions. That would be easy to answer. That might let us put ourselves in a good light. What are you working on? What do you write about? What interests you, philosophically? That kind of thing.

They were generous to us. Tender. They didn’t want for us to be embarrassed, though no doubt at some level they knew we should be embarrassed. They didn’t sigh or roll their eyes – their manners were too good for that. They had too much good will. But they knew our deficiencies. They couldn’t help but see them.  

Classy scholars. Europeans, a lot of them. With, like, standards! Who had had, like, a proper education. Who knew stuff. Who had, like, scholarly skills. And all the languages. And who were we?

Naturally, we had to be drunk to endure these events. Obviously, the only option was for us to go pie-eyed. To drink more than we should. To pre-load, even. To start drinking before. So we’d roll up stoshered. Charmingly drunk, or so we thought. Full of stupid drunken confidence.

And couldn’t they see we were drunk? Sure they could. But they were forgiving. They were perceptive enough to see our awkwardness. And tactful enough to ignore them. They wanted to help us. To bring us on.

They asked used such gentle, gentle questions. That even we could answer. We were pitiful. Drunkenly so. What kind of philosophy do you specialise in? What modules do you teach? These questions brought tears to our eyes. We could have wept. Embraced them. Apologised. Cried out, we’re sorry! So sorry!

We knew we were out over sixty thousand fathoms or however Kierkegaard put it. Out of our depths! And we knew that they knew. Which meant we could only get drunker still, much to Cicero’s amusement.

We were from the wrong class. Who went to the wrong schools. They even admired us for it. Our efforts to lose our regional accents. Our regional grammar.

They must have thought we were diversity hires, or something. Or stupidity hires. God knows. And they were well-meaning enough to approve of diversity hires. Or stupidity hires.

And we were lumbering. Gauche. Manner-less. Awkward. Not knowing the social codes. How to answer innocent questions. How to do academic small talk.

We knew we didn’t belong there: that was the thing. We knew our grotesquerie – which was torture. We knew how stupid we were. Isn’t that the curse: to actually know it. And did those professors know that we knew? Of course they did. Which made them feel even more sorry for us.

The drunker we got! The more slurred we became! And Cicero, doing the rounds, amused. Cicero, talking to them each in turn, the European professors. Cicero, introducing them to us …

And we were just thinking dreadful thoughts of self harm. Wanting to cut ourselves. Stab ourselves. To throw ourselves out of windows. Or just cutting our own throats, then and there. Or slicing open our arms.

We just felt so guilty – for existing. So wrong – for being there. And worse: for their kindness to us, the European professors.

Some act of clarifying violence! To make up for the fact that we never should have been! Never should have existed. Never should have been born at all. Never should even have been at all. And there was Cicero, parading us. There was Cicero, perversely proud of us.

Did she know what she was doing? Of course she did. She only wanted to increase the tension. Between them and us! And between us and them!  

Cicero, always the master strategian. The brilliant player. Cicero, watching out interactions, amusedly. Cicero, enjoying our gaucheries. Our faux pas – like, plural. What’s the plural of faux pass?

Faux passes. I don know.

Cicero knowing her circle of professors would be asking themselves, deep in their heart, who employed these tossers? Who’s responsible for this? The whole only added to Cicero’s mystique. Cicero’s unpredictability. The sense that she had plans greater than everyone else’s. Agendas.

And it gave us mystique, too. What did Cicero see in us? Were we brilliant after all, once you stripped away our rough exterior? Once you’d sobered us up? Were great things actually to be expected of us? Did Cicero know something they didn’t?

What does The Work bring to this table? A very, very late work of philosophical literature. Long after the literary boat has sailed. And sunk.

Literature’s, like, a ghost town. Literature! You can’t use that word anymore. Smacks of elitism. And racism, probably. And every kind of prejudice. Sounds so stuffy.

 

Sounds like it’s part of some forgotten literary avant garde. That played out in another country a long time ago. Robert Pinget in the house! Make some noise for Nathalie Sarraute! Don’t tell me you actually read that stuff? Butor and co. And actually enjoy it?

I like the idea of it.

They only read those things in France. And only because they have to. Because they’re made to. To pass their exams, or whatever. Made to do their avant garde duties. Made to eat their avant garde greens. Like some literary nationalism thing. And then they have to go back to watching Canal+, or whatever.

No one else reads them. Not even in translation. The French ministry of culture funds all the translations, but no one ever buys them. There are entire warehouses full of unsold Helene Cixous translations.

You just want to join the long line of crap British imitators of French literary stuff.

Just like you’re part of the long line of pathetic imitation French philosophers.

That’s our fate, right? Total irrelevance. Irrelevance times irrelevance. Irrelevance to fucking infinity.

 

I really appal myself. I do. But I get all my energy from appalling itself. I amaze myself by how appalling I am. By my instincts. By the things in my head. By my stupid fantasies.  

Self-loathing is, like, the best energy. The best driver. The Work comes out of that. That’s what The Work is.

 

The Work appals me. Every sentence is appalling. And then I have to write more sentences to correct those. And more sentences still.

 

The Work! It’s even got a stupid, pompous name. Calling anything The anything. I couldn’t think of anything better. Like, sub-sub Thomas Bernhard. Bernhard without the gorgeous music and spiralling sentences. Just, like, obsessive italics. And exclamation marks. And all these sentence fragments.

 

My prose is so terrible. Someone told me that you should learn Latin if you want to improve your prose style. Makes it all clipped and orderly, apparently. If I spent half the time learn Latin as I do writing about how much I hate my work, I might actually get somewhere, though I probably wouldn’t.

 

I might publish it under the title, Why I am So Stupid. You know, an inversion of Nietzsche’s chapter titles in Ecce Homo. That might redeem it.

They’ll just think you’re a tosser – some with a Russell University job writing about what an idiot he is. Pure self indulgence.

 

My stupidity is so mesmerising. It amazes me so. It really does.

 

I think you’re getting lost in your idiocy.

I think I am.

 

If only we could be put on trial for crimes against scholarship.

 

I don’t think it’s very healthy to be appalled at yourself. Unless you’re genuinely appalling, and I think I might be.

 

I’m not even modest. I don’t think writing something called The Work is very modest, is it? Giving it that title. Anyway, the idea was to kill myself at the end of it. When it’s done. When the Work is done. When everything is, like corrected, like in that Bernhard book.

Which is total bad faith, because I know it can never be done. You can’t just correct the fault when you are the fault and writing The Work only compounds the fault.

In the observatory.

This is where you and your husband come to gaze over your kingdom, right?

It really isn’t like that.

Looking over the new campus. Over your new Geordie kingdom … Running the Organisational Management plans for it all …

You’re so tiresome.

 

I’ve been with my husband for 32,000 days. Which is a lot of days. You can’t take 32,000 days away from me – and hm.

I wasn’t trying to.

 

When the ground falls away, what then? What was the ground anyway? What was there before?

Before what?

Before we started to fall.

 

I’m fascinated by you, but you’re not fascinated by me. Isn’t that always the way?

Do your husband find you fascinating?

Why are you bringing him up?

Isn’t it a bit greedy, having him and me?

It’s because you’re just so fascinating. Actually, I think it’s because philosophy is fascinating. I think I might even become a philosopher.

 

It's turning in our hearts. It’s turning in the world – at the heart of the world. it’s turning in all things.

And it’s the void, philosopher. That’s what I’ll call it: the Void. I’m not sure if that’s the right name for it. I’m not sure if it has an appropriate philosophical dignity. The void. The void, smiling at us through all things, laughing at us through everything.

And Organisational Management is only the attempt to organise the void. And manage the void. I see that now. I see where we went wrong.

 

I think we might be immortal, philosopher. I do – that’s what I think today. I think we’ll live forever, you and I.

What, like uploading our consciousness to the cloud in some tech fantasy bullshit?

I mean our souls. Our souls are immortal. I can say things like that. We’re going to live forever, philosopher. Or some version of us is. Or this is eternity – this, right here. We’re living forever right now, right here. Am I allowed to say things like that?

There is just one eternal day, without morning or evening. That’s what Augustine said.

 

Do you have a sense of humour, philosopher? I hope you don’t. That’s one of the core Organisational Management values: humour. I hate humour.

 

What do philosophers laugh at? What do philosophers find funny? What do philosophers do for kicks?

 

Don’t think too much, philosopher. Don’t stay locked in your head. There’s a world out here.

A shit world.

A world with me in it.

 

Do you really hate the world, philosopher? Only a philosopher could actually hate the whole world. Do you actually hate everything. Even, like, birds?

 

Soon, we’ll have 3D printers to make anything we want, rather like on the Starship Enterprise. No more greed. No need for money. Property is over.

Very communist.

God, you’re not even insanely left wing. You’re not even a commie – how disappointing.

 

I have to protect you, philosopher. Which makes a change. Since I’m usually the one who needs protecting. I’ve even had a breakdown. I’ve even had a drink problem – though I didn’t actually have a drink problem. I even went to rehab – though I didn’t need rehab. I needed something else.

 

Are the other philosophers like you? I’ll bet they’re not. And you’re their leader. How did that happen? You don’t seem very leader-y.

 

You’re not even anything. You’re not even a philosopher, philosopher. You’re a sham.

 

I can out-doom you. I can out-apocalypse you. I’ll bet I can out-philosophise you, too.

Because of your amazing synth powers.

 

Why do you philosophers always think you’re doomed? You think the entire history of the world ends with you. What a coincidence! It’s just, like, self-importance and cosmic narcissism.

 

Why should the moving of Philosophy into Organisational Management be, like, the end of the entire universe?

 

My husband sees himself more as a facilitator than as a leader. As an underleader, kinda. He leads from below, very humbly. Like Ghandi or something.

 

You know what I’d like? A little time loop where we could be safe. Where we could be free.

Free of what?

Oh, you know, the world. Which is full of … lies. Is there any truth behind the lies, philosopher? Or is it all lies, all the way down? Is there anything but lies?

 

What do philosophers talk about, when they’re together? This kind of thing?

 

Do you worry that we’ll run out of things to say to each other?

 

You guys in philosophy think you have dibs on the apocalypse. Well, I’ve got news for you.

 

Corporations are, like, anti capitalist now. It’s all ESG. Sustainable Developmental Goals and so on. Larry Fink himself is steering it. They want to work for the good.

Be afraid.

 

They’re all kind of New Age, the business leaders I’ve met. And I’ve met the famous ones.

Satantists, you mean.

No one’s more into sustainability than the head of BP. They want to undo the damage they’ve done. They want to make reparations. They’ve got really bleeding hearts.

 

It's not as if I’m actually clever. It’s not as if I have anything to say. Don’t look at me for profundity.

 

See you could be the result of an experiment. To see if they could engineer a philosophy synth. A synthetic human who could, like, despair. Perhaps you’re the synths – the whole philosophy department.

Maybe that’s why we don’t feel real.

 

Do philosophers believe in God anymore? Or is that just the old philosophers?

 

What if nothing more can be thought, philosopher? What if there’s no more philosophy left. You’ve used it up. It’s at an end.

What if … there’s only so much philosophy that can be done. What would your life be about then?

 

Time no longer exists, philosopher. Time’s been abolished.

 

Do you think this night is going to add up to anything? Do you think we’ll remember it, tonight? Wandering these corridors? Do you think we’ll remember what we’re saying now – right now? This conversation?

 

How long will we remember it for? Not very long, I reckon. Forgetting’s just going to crash in and claim it for itself.

 

Still alive, still alive, still going. Alive alive oh. My God, it’s amazing, isn’t it? Another day. Another morning. There’s still more life to be lived. How is that possible?