Work in Progress

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.

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.