Work in Progress

Cicero’s music by doomed people. Jimmy Carr. Donny Hathaway. Donald Drummond. And the others. She liked to hear madness, which she said she was a connoisseur.

A voyeur, more like.

Cicero was always on the hunt for Grundstimmungen in the arts, she said. She collected them. Savoured them. She was always on the lookout for Grundstimmungen artists.

She relished their tragic endings. Suicides. Drownings. Throwing themselves from great heights. She could tell you all about their deaths. It was ghoulish.

 

Cicero wanted to see us in the grip of those Grundstimmungen. To see what would happen. She liked to subject us to her doomy oeuvres. Play us James Carr, on a loop. Just as an experiment. To see what would happen.

 

Cicero loved our doomed intensity. She got high on it.

She was a vampire.

She called herself a connoisseur. An appreciator of doomed moods.

Maybe it reminded her of something from her doomed youth. Back behind the iron curtain. Of an Eastern European attitude. And an Eastern European resistance.

Cicero wanted to raise us as high as she could. Just to enjoy the dissonance. Just to draw from our impostor’s syndrome. Just to watch us squirm.

She was cruel. She liked to wreck things. She liked to turn the screws – on you or on the world, I’m not sure. She wanted to make thing … interesting. She was a torturer. By proxy.

Was it sexual do you think?

You always think things are sexual.

 

Cicero wanted to increase the tension, increase the polarities. Between high and low. Between the lofty and the lowly. She wanted to confuse the hierarchies. To invert the order. Play the devil’s advocate.

She liked to distort. To grotesquify. It was some weird form of camp, in its way. Some form of ironizing.

Was it her deep lesbianism? Queer behind the iron curtain: what could that mean? Can’t have been fun. Didn’t she lose her lover at twenty. A terrible loss.

The end times remember everything that’s happened, throughout all of history. Everything flashes before the end times’ eyes. Just like what’s supposed to happen in the last moment before death.

Except the end times aren’t a last moment. They go on forever.

 

Our approach. Our methodology. We just pick and mix from all the old stuff. From philosophical history. We hold up old ideas, old debates to the light.

We snatch things from history – out of history. We pick over scraps like children. Peer into history’s rockpool. These philosophers, their lives, their worlds, their problems …

Which is our way of mocking it all. Oh, not intentionally. We don’t mean to mock all the old ideas, the old debates by lifting them out of history, but we do. For what remains of their context? Their historical life?

And we mock ourselves, too. The very act, the very operation – pick and mixing from philosophical history. Out of what? Misplaced identifications. Spurious connections between those times and our present. The pretence that the ancient can be timely.

Self-mockery. Self-disgust. Peering into history’s rockpool, to see what we can catch. Philosophers and their lives and their worlds and their problems …

History laughs back at us. Those old things, those moments laugh and say, you’ll never have us. Don’t even try, fucker. You’ll never understand a word …

 

At the darkest moment, when the trap’s about to close, we turn to the past. We look for help. Surely there can be some connection between that old stuff and the present? Surely someone can help?

Gunter Anders with his nuclear bomb. Hannah Arendt, and her totalitarianism.

Philosophers with their own problems. In their own worlds. And here we are in our time, with our own problems, with all this stuff, happening all around us. And the past laughs at us. Because it has nothing to do with us. Because their problems aren’t our problems.

Will history stop laughing at us, do you think? Will we stop laughing at ourselves? I’m tired of laughing at myself.

 

It's the end times laughing at us, through us. Through our laughter. It’s the end times, amused, desperately amused, and by way of us, by way of our laughter at ourselves.

We’re the sense of humour of our age. But it’s the blackest sense of humour. It’s darkness as humour.

 

And don’t for a minute think that this is our laughter. That this is our sense of humour. We were raised by the end to laugh at itself. Trained to provide a little  light relief. Comic relief.

The end was bored being the end. And so we were born. The end wanted amusement. Jesters. So there we were. It wanted a funfair mirror. And there we were.

The end wanted to shout and laugh. It wanted life – a little life of death. It wanted to do its death dance. Pull its death moves. Do its dying boogie. And there we were, its caperers. Its acrobats.

The end got bored of its endlessness. It wanted puppets to dangle. To sing its end times’ songs. So there was our end times’ show. Our end times’ cabaret. The void’s own philosophical song-and-dance troupe …

 

Singing our end times’ songs. Doing our end time dances. Making our end time moves. The ends’ pet proles. The ends’ own Punch and Judy show.

 

This is the time when the void reveals itself. The black sun, blazing. This is the time when we see it at last. Like the anti-dragon in Games of Thrones. Breathing green fire, or whatever.

This is void time. The shadows are longest. All the alibis have failed. All the attempts to construct positive philosophies. Everything’s just falling into the abyss.

A black hole is turning, at the heart of things. Drawing all things towards it. The void voids, and we’re part of that voiding.

A general … ruination. A tearing apart. Nothing else convinces. Nothing has any … force. We can’t believe in anything. Can’t muster the belief. Can’t call it up.

 

We’re the type who appear at the end of a civilization. Stunted – intellectually. Deformed – in spirit.

Mental dysgenics been at work. A kind of de-evolution. We’re mutated, psychologically. Ill-made, in the head. Inclined to neurosis and suicidal fantasy. Borderline-personalitied. Burrowers. Moles. Full of resentment of mental strength and certainty.

No use for our kind.

At least the collapse will wipe us out. At least we’d be the first to go. We’re not exactly alpha males. Or alpha females. We’re not the surviving type.

We’ve got all the weak traits – the worst traits. We’re inbred, or something. Something went wrong at our births. We’re all left handed – did you notice that? Our faces are asymmetrical … We’re spiritually lopsided. That’s not a good sign, is it?

 

We’re the last kind. The degenerate kind. Our kind would have been selected out by evolution, long ago. Left to die … What kind of society should tolerate us? Would let us live?

You take impostor syndrome to the next level.

I condemn this world for not murdering us – in our sleep or otherwise. For not strangling us at birth. Then we wouldn’t have been allowed to grow up and pollute the world with these morbid thoughts. To have turned philosophy into … whatever we’ve done.

Mad Gnosticism! Hysteria about the void! Don’t you get tired of what we are?

 

All this twisted talk. All these things we should not say. The dead ends of our talk. The futility of it. Our futile words. Despite, despite everything.

It proves we’re not dead. It proves we are dead and talk with dead words. Words that do nothing. Create nothing. In the beginning was the word, right? And at the end – the anti-Word? The mockery of the Word.

Let there be light – I’d like to say that. I’d like for there to be light. I’d like to be able to separate light from darkness. And instead?

The Organisational Managers are utopians, that’s the thing. They believe in this. That they’re doing good. For humanity. They believe that they’re saving us, and saving the world.

Their manner is modest, but they have the greatest ambition. The Organisational Managers think they have it all worked out.

This is the culmination of some, like, centuries-old dream.

 

They think you have it solved. They think it’s all just an organisational  problem. A managerial problem. And that utopia is basically at hand.

They just weren’t organised enough, before. They didn’t manage properly: that was the problem. They didn’t have the digital tools. But they have now.

 

The Organisational Management campus is some vast blasphemy. It's the tower of Babel. Of course it is. It’s the Babylonian captivity, all over again. It’s every wicked city in the Bible.

 

Maybe we’re successively reincarnated to fight this. Over and over again. Us. Different versions of us. Since Babel, Since Babylon. Since the Egyptian captivity …

I like that Idea. I like being world-historical.

So the Organisational Managers are supposed to say, if it wasn’t for those meddling philosophical kids …

 

The Organisational Management campus is the desert. It’s the testing ground.

A new barrenness, a new scantness, a new emptiness. A new hostility! Which demands, in its turn, a new wakefulness! A new vigilance!

On the right timeline, would we have got Philosophy jobs at Newcastle? Would we have got PhDs? Would we even have been admitted to Philosophy degrees? Would we even have been born? On the right timeline, would we even have been conceived? On the right timeline, would we even exist?

On the right timeline, the old Philosophy department never would have been shut down. It’d still be there, thriving. Nimrod and the others would never have had to go underground.

 

On the right timeline, people like us wouldn’t be tolerated. People with thoughts like ours. With temperaments like ours. With anti-social attitudes like ours. People with worldviews like ours. With paranoia, like ours. People who dreamt of right timelines and not the ones they were living in.

 

On the right timeline, we’d never have been born. No thought more beautiful than that. No idea …

Never to have been born! Never to have opened our fucking eyes! Never to have been conceived! To be literally incon-fucking-ceivable!

 

I’m waiting for the lightning from the right time line. I’m waiting for be zapped through. Head to fucking toe. I want nothing to be left of me but a singe mark on the pavement.

 

No one has ever wanted to die more than me.

So kill yourself.

I don’t want to kill my self … I want someone else to do it. I want the lightning to do it. I want the sky to do it. I want the earth itself to say, enough’s enough. Which it is.

 

Are you actually teasing the sky?

I’m teasing fate. I’m tempting fate.

But fate can’t be arsed to do anything – it’s quite clear.

 

I always wanted to be eviscerated. Like on an evisceration table. Have you heard of those? They just throw you up there and leave you to the vultures to, like, pick apart.

Cicero brought us here to be a School. It’s like Avengers Assemble. But without super-powers.

But we have kind of super powers. We have our research interests. We have our scholarship. Driss has his psychofinalism. Barbarossa has his euthanatology. Io has her world history of salvation. Kitten has her pathophilosophy. Shiva has his holy negation. And Fiver …

Fiver is a visionary.

 

The last philosophical school. A school for the end times. The endless end times.

What does a school supposed to do? Embody thought. Live it. Teach it to others by example. Just, like, showing your philosophy to the world by the way you live. Being the change you want to see, and so on.

 

Our superior attunements. The depth of our moods. There’s a reason why Cicero assembled us.

 

We’re an anti-school. A non-school. Forged in the middle of the Organisational Management campus.

 

Our school of philosophy. Our school of not-even-philosophy. Of not-even-anything.

 

We haven’t known what we’re for. What our talents are suited to. Our anti-talents. What we’re not so very good at.

 

Wild laughter and black humour and drunkenness are actually an ethos. A way of life. Just like the Stoics had a way of life. Or the Epicureans.

 

Contemptus mundi: that’s our motto.

Fuck off with your Latin. I hate your Latin. I can’t actually believe you learnt Latin. I don’t actually believe in your Latin. Driss.

It’s about as good as your Greek.

 

So what’s our name? What do we call ourselves?

Neo-Gnostics.

We need a better name than that.

Void-lovers. I dunno.

 

We’re broken people … And did Cicero put us back together again?

Cicero liked our cracks. She liked us broken. Our broken edges. Broken philosophers are real philosophers, that’s what she said. In these times.

 

Our spiritual exercises. Drinking. Dooming. Living at the coast.

 

Hangovers are a spiritual exercise – did you know that?

Secession from the world – but to where? We need a new desert to escape into. We need a desert to open.

Organisational Management is the desert.

 

Internal exile isn’t half as meaningful as external exile. There’s nowhere to go but inside, in some sense. We’ll escape into our fantasies. Our delusions. Our crazed new religiosity.

All of this is but a sign of our total irrelevance. They can let us have this – our mad philosophy. And just get on with whatever they’re getting on with.

 

Our own private philosophy. Our so-called Jewish Gnosticism. They happy to let us busy ourselves with this. It’s clearly not going to blow the empire apart.

 

Full of thwarted world-flight. Of failed world-escape. Nowhere for us to go but inward. But inward to what?

 

They can hear us. Everything we say. They know it’s just posturing. We’re no threat.

They let us talk. They let us goof around. Laugh at everything. Because it doesn’t do anything. And nor do we.

Philosophy is irrelevance, right? It means nothing to anyone.

 

Saints’ laughter. A holy irreverence. Against, always against.

How could Cicero’s wine be off?

Because Cicero’s off. Because she disappeared. And left us here. With her wine. With the last of her cellar. Which has all gone off.

 

In wine is truth, right? In this wine, there’s something rancid. Something off.

This wine is corrupted. It’s us – we’re corrupted. We’re tasting ourselves. Our own corruption. That’s all we can taste. It’s all we know.

Driss, quoting: Take me back to the day when wine was invented.

Or maybe it’s because we’re uncorrupt that we can taste its corruption. How does it taste to you, postgraduates?

The postgraduates, retching.

 

Is there a clue in the  wine? A message in the bottle from Cicero? Some last message?

 

We need access to our special void powers. That’s what wine might give us.

 

Wine’s too good for us, anyway. We don’t deserve wine. We’re of the wrong social class for wine. It’s wasted on us. We couldn’t tell it was good or terrible.

Our palette isn’t exactly cultivated. It’s been destroyed by gut rot cider. By alcoholic’s white cider. By Wickd shots. By every kind of crap.

But perhaps wine elevates us. Perhaps it lifts us up. Breaks open horizons. Opens vistas. Perhaps we’re able to see further.

Cicero, praising our piss taking. Calling it magnificent. Our constant laughing at each other. A constant reminder that everything was fake. That it was all imposture. Who we took ourselves to be. What the university took itself to be. That none of it was to be taken seriously. That we were already sky high above it. And below it. Both at once.

 

Cicero praising the miracle of working classness. The middle class always approve of each other’s middle classness. But the working class … The banter. … It wasn’t just about bringing each other down. It was reminding each other that we’re more than this. What they take us to be.

That we’re uncapturable That every role we take is a play-role. Is fakery. That none of this is to be taken seriously. That it’s to be despised, really. Laughed at. With a great laughter. With a great and liberating laughter. That sweeps us away – whatever we take ourselves to be. Whoever we suppose ourselves to be.

What can withstand that? It’s not a middle class humour. It’s more abyssal than that. The middle class cannot let go of the world, whereas the working class despise the world. Because it’s not their world, the working class. It’s a world always imposed upon them, the working class. That is supposed to be good for them, the working class. Which is why they resist and cannot help but resist.

 

The people of Newcastle: will they resist?

They’re too good natured. There has to be hatred. And suspicion. Drinking cannot be about camaradie, as it often is among Geordies. This is not pubism. There has to be a programme. Hatred must be part of the mix. The people of Newcastle are too genial.

 

Of course we could not help but deepen the farce, Cicero said. We were, by nature, deepeners of the farce. Farce-plungers. There was about us a joy of loathing. A magnificent energy.

 

Coils of loathing. Paroxysms. Our self loathing – became a loathing of all things. We loathed of everything about ourselves – except what let us loathe. Except the very power of loathing. Except the power of the void, beaming out like the eye of Sauron.

There’s a void inside the sun. A black sun. And a void in the earth, at the heart of the earth. And a void on the campus …That’s why we laugh.

I can’t see it. I can’t find it. The campus is too … vast. When you’ve lost contact with the void … when you can’t laugh at everything – that’s when you know you’re in trouble.

 

We need to discover the void – that’s why we drink. The reassurance of the void.

Because it can reveal itself in joy – drunken joy. Impersonal joy. Laughing joy. The happiness of the void: there is such a thing.

 

The philosophy bomb will unleash the void.

Will it?

The philosophy bomb that changes absolutely nothing. That no one even noticed went off.

 

Our philosophy, wholly given over to the void. Due to our superior moods. Our elective attunements.

 

Void-drinking. Void chasing. Until we’re able to see it. Until it knows itself in us. In wine is truth, right? In wine: the void …

 

We needed to educate her in the void, Cicero said. In void studies. We need to press on with our void training.

She couldn’t reach it, not like we could. She couldn’t inhabit it. Which is why she liked to watch us drink. Which is why she liked to see us approach it, the void. In our laughing! In our shouting!

There was something exquisite, she said, in our mixture of despair and exhilaration. She hadn’t know that there could be a joy to despair. A lift. That despair could bear us heavenward, which it clear did. That there was a life to despair. That despair could bellow, as we did when we drank.

Why did our laughter turn bad? Why is our laughter abyssal? We laugh at ourselves. At our imposture. At who we dared to present ourselves as being. As crappy monograph writers. As conference discussants. We laugh at all that …

We look at ourselves from the point of view of the void – that’s the thing. We see ourselves with the void’s eyes. As the void sees us. And that’s what laughs in us. At us. At everything.

It’s not that we see through it all. It’s that the void sees through it all. It sees in us, through us. It knows itself in us. That’s what Cicero saw.

 

The void at the heart of every institution. At the heart of the university. That stares out from every institution.

A kind of blindness. Black, blind depths that see. That see us. And through us. And beyond us, like an X-ray.

And that’s how we see ourselves, too. Through ourselves. Beyond ourselves. Because anything that isn’t the void is a lie. And a stupid lie. And a joke.

And that’s our lives: stupid lies. Jokes. Except for the void. Except for what sees through us and beyond us, blindly.

 

The void is potential. Or impotential. It’s the not yet and the not even. It’s what’s never begun. And cannot end. That just turns in itself. From nothingness to being and back again, endlessly.

 

The void, hovering between existence and non existence. Just rustling and rumbling and sometimes sending out flashes of lighting.

 

And we laugh because we know. We laugh at everything because we know what returns at the heart of it all. And in our own hearts.

And the void laughs in us. That’s what it becomes in us: laughter.

 

We never believed in it – what they pass off as reality. Consensual reality. What is it about us?

Immigrant parents. General working class-ness. Driss was a refugee, for fuck’s sake. That’ s what we have in common. What turns us from every certainty in the world. Ever investment in the world.

 

We need to discover the void – that’s why we drink. To remind ourselves of it. to bring it close.

Drink opens the void. if you drink enough. In the right way.

Drink is the means of access to the void. And the void itself.

We’re, like, drunken Buddhists. Drunken Zen Buddhists. Looking for Enlightenment. Wherever we can find it.

 

Cicero was a philosopher of the void, is that it? She wanted to prepare the way for the coming philosophers of the void. That was our business, or yours, Shiva.

She knew that that was the counter philosophy of the age. That that was what was needed.