Work in Progress

What are they going to call it, the Organisational Management campus? They must have a better name than that.

The Aspire campus, or something.

Diversity campus. I don’t know. Fuck.

They should give it a Newcastle name. The, like, Ant n’ Dec campus. Or the Brian Ferry campus.

The Brian Ferry campus, that’d be cool.

They’re working on a Bryan Ferry hologram. A giant one, that strides about like a svelte Godzilla.

Have you seen the Sting one? It’s an eco-thing: Sting in the rainforest. It’s pretty good.

 

I can’t believe they’d fake the Northern Lights.

They’re doing it because they can.

Do they think they can just take over the sky?

Clearly. Obvs.

Isn’t the sky, like, part of the commons. Don’t we all own it?

As if. We don’t all own anything.

The sky isn’t ours anymore. It’s an advertising space.

Their Northern Lights are pretty good, you must admit.

Maybe they’re real. What would the Northern Lights be doing this far south?

 

We’re supposed to feel dwarfed. Humbled. We’re supposed to see our puny lives in some cosmic context.

It’s like one of those Stoic exercises. Where you see yourself as a citizen of the universe. As a cosmopolitan, or whatever.

 

It’s as though it were funnelling us, this campus. Driving us. As though it were some kind of cattle run. We’re being driven. Whipped.

 

How far do we have to go? Where is it, the Organisational Management tower?

At the centre of the campus, that’s what they say.

 

This is the world they’re getting ready for us. This is the prison.

 

Is it always winter on the Organisational Management campus? I’ll bet it is. Because the white witch has cast her spell …

Because the evil weather weaponeers are at work.

 

Is there such a thing as a snow mirage?

Why, what can you see?

Warm lights … a cheery welcome …

Don’t do it! Don’t torture us!

 

I’m dreaming of mince pies. They’ll offer us mince pies! And coffee. How about port?

Damn their Organisational Management mince pies! I shit on their Organisational Management mince pies! I don’t want Organisational Management coffee!

 

In the bleak fucking midwinter. In the Organisational Management midwinter.

Listen to the postgraduates singing, Driss whispers. Like cherubs!

Don’t look at them. They’ll get self-conscious.

 

It’s doing things to us, this campus. It’s working on us. The way it’s all laid out. They’ve put thought into this. Planning. It must be based on some UN model of population pacification. They know what they’re doing. This isn’t random. Perfect for social control, or whatever. Perfect for future lockdowns …

It’s working on us now. Can’t you feel it? The very architecture. The very layout of the buildings. The paving stones they use.

 

Do you think the lampposts are listening? Are we being monitored? Are the algorithms picking out dubious phrases? Are we being flagged as dangerous subversives?

 

The campus is vast. The spread of the campus. Its sheer extent.

There’s some weird topology thing going on. Strange pockets. Space isn’t normal here. It’s like they’ve manipulated space. As though they’d opened up some other dimension …

 

It’s demonic, this campus. It’s high tech, but demonic. It’s evil – but, like, Biblically evil.

That building should be called Inferno. That building should be called Beezelbub. That one should be called Heliogablous.

 

Campus pyramid. What is this doing here? It’s like the pyramid at Balmoral. Mysterious. The place where they sacrifice students to their obscure gods, I’d say.

 

This open space. What are they going to do with it? What are they going to use it for? What’s the reason for it?

What are they going to build here? A temple to Beezelbub? Some multistorey what? But they’re already built the other towers.

This cleared ground. There must be some reason for this. They’re going to build the piece de resistance here. The final piece of the Organisational Management campus. That will bring it all together.

It’s ominous. Some launch pad. Somewhere for the alien craft to land. Somewhere for space maniacs to touchdown.

 

Do they have space weapons? Are they aimed at us? 

Let’s paint ourselves blue, just in case.

Did you ever see Pierrot le Fou? He paints himself blue, and attaches explosives to his head. He wears them like a bandana. And blows himself up. He must have known something. 

 

Come on, Organisational Management – you’ll never take us alive! Or dead! Or anything!

 

What’s the opposite of the Organisational Management campus? What would a philosophy campus look like? What would the architecture look like?

It would look just like the city … the city of Newcastle.

 

What can you see from here? Can you see everything from up here?

Everything that matters to Organisational Management.

 

I’ve seen this place in my dreams. It was shown to me.

What was shown?

This campus and the end of this campus. The Destruction.

Look at them, these career academics. Look at them, supposed experts on the continental philosophical tradition. Alleged seers of the various European philosophy lineages.

Look at them, talking to each other. Laughing with each other. In good conscience!

Their attitude is wrong. Their good cheer. Their whole academics-at-play shtick.

Contemplate them, the mediocrities who don’t know their own mediocrity. Who never experience their own averageness.

No sense of stupidity. No sense of compromise. Comfortably left-liberal. Unshaken in their global citizenry. As manipulable as lab-rats.

Nothing extreme about them. Nothing uncompromising about them. Nothing fanatical.

They’re not deranged. They haven’t been changed by what they think. They haven’t been shifted onto other paths, dangerous paths. They haven’t gone mad. They’ve forgotten any madness that they might have had.

Mild types. Moderates. They’re on-the-one-hand-on-the-other kind. See-it-from-all-angles sorts.

God, the liberal left. Infinite duped. Identikit. All exactly the same. In their views. Their attitude. Programmed. Controlled. The controlled opposition, no different from the controlled establishment.

My God, is this what academia has produced! Is this what the university has made. Look at them – they’re even happy. With themselves.

They haven’t got visible mental illnesses. They aren’t drooling. They’re not prey to religious delusions. They’re well balanced. They aren’t in the grip of wild messianisms. They aren’t certifiable. Arrestable. They’re not drunk. They aren’t stoned. They aren’t eight miles high.

Do they really think they have anything to say? Do they really believe that their papers add up to anything?

They’re networking. Making connections. Advancing careers, maybe. Learning about job openings here and there.

And to think, we’re part of this. We’re just like them. They’re our mirror – our terrible mirror.

 

They show us what we need to do to ourselves. The cruelty to which we have to submit ourselves.

Terrible asceses are necessary. Self-cruelty. Self-destruction. We must hate more. And ourselves first of all. We must turn as howling wolves upon ourselves.

 

Too much sanity here. There’s too much sobriety. Too much reasonableness. Balancedness. Where are the black lipped? The red toothed? Where are the maniacs who have essentially jumped the track?

This is death – living death, but of the dull kind. Of the zombified kind.

 

Don’t they know shame? The shame of having succeeded in inverted commas. The shame of having got on – in this corrupted world? In this fallen world? Aren’t they thinking of the ones who failed? Who couldn’t adjust? Of otherworldly types. Non-careerists, who could never get it together. Who couldn’t come across well at interview. Who couldn’t speak the corporate shit.

The crash-and-burners. The never published. The fall-aparts. The maladjusted. Don’t they ever think of them?

 

They’re too alive. Too healthy. Too white toothed. Their eyes are too bright. Unbloodshot. God knows, they even exercise. They have gym memberships, it’s clear. They barely drink. They don’t even smoke. You used to be able to count on that: that academics smoked.

 

The ultimate horror: they do not hate themselves. They do not want to destroy themselves. They don’t see their own complicity – in this, in everything. They accept the world as it is. They accept themselves as they are.

They’re the sanest people who’ve ever lived. The soberest people who’ve ever lived.

 

No sense of geopolitical crisis. No sense of the continuous state of emergency. They aren’t panicked. Aren’t trembling with fear or rage.

So long as they’re able to go on doing what they do, such as it is. Writing their papers, such as they are. Busying themselves with their careers, such as they are. Performing their administrative roles, such as they are. Their managerial roles.

The most dreadful thing: They do no hate themselves. The most horrifying thing: They do not want to kill themselves. They think that they can go on exactly as they are. That they aren’t constantly wrestling with suicidal ideation.

 

Don’t they understand how deeply they’ve shamed themselves? And not just themselves. The humanities. Philosophy. Everyone. Humanity.

 

That they’re not exploring extreme political situations. That they’re not contemplating arming themselves. Taking to the hills. Setting up smallholdings. Beating a retreat to a freedom hub.

That they’re not panicked.

 

They’re polite. There are no fisticuffs. No disdain. No sang froid, not anymore. There are not even disagreements. Because they all agree. Because they all see the world in the same way.

There are no stakes to their philosophising. Because everything is agreed.

 

Looking around for someone to fuck. Wanting an affair-lette. A conference fuck. Why not? They’ve come here to mate. They’re on the prowl. That’s what’s on their mind.

Give your paper, then a fuck. Is there anyone willing? A postgraduate. Some early career researcher. And why not? It’s consensual. Everyone’s adults.

Doesn’t coming to a conference make you ashamed of being human? Because it’s our fault, too. Because we’re part of it, too. Because we’re part of the system – the academic system. The insulated-from-the-world system. The as-if-it-isn’t-happening system.

 

We come here, why – to find allies? To look for the like-minded. So stupid. Why bother? Why are we here? Isn’t that the most pressing question? The most terrible question? What are we doing here? What are we doing to ourselves by being here? By giving papers – here?

We’re no better than they are. We’re worse – much worse. Because we pose as cynical, as seen-through it-all, as undeluded, and we’re here. Because we need to see it all again, to learn the whole lesson again, and we’re here.

We’re here, looking on! Seeing it all again!

 

They know the division of labour in European philosophy: The French, German and Italian think, and the anglophone world comments crappily on what they think. And they’re happy with it!

You have to understand the eschatological significance of the campus. What it means.

For philosophy?

Beyond that.

For the humanities?

Beyond that, too.

*They’re discerning the global crises! And the opportunities! The global management solutions!

We can’t take care of ourselves. So they’re doing it for us. They have our backs. They ‘re securing our future! They’re watching out for us! For humanity! They’re saving humanity from humanity! Making sure we don’t hurt ourselves! And the planet! For our own sakes!

Such visionaries! Thinking only of the common future. With the whole world in their hands! As it should be!

*They’re identifying global risks. On our behalf! They’re proposing global solutions. For us, for our sake!  They’re controlling misinformation! For our benefit!

A global technological solution: that’s what we need. Digital IDs, probably. A central bank digital currency! The big money’s signed up! A veritable global brains trust! Pulling together the best, the brightest!

Maybe our false euphoria is a way of controlling the opposition. Maybe our drunkenness corrals us. Diverts our revolutionary energies. It’s how we’re sidelined … Contained …

Alcohol is just a refuge of the impotent: isn’t that the implication. They allow us this. We can still drink – for the moment. But for how long? No doubt they’ll allow us our ration of alcohol in the new world they’re creating. For a period of adjustment, at least.

It’s a safety valve. This is our permitted ranting. A little rumspringa before we get on with the real business of life. We’re just doing the things they allow us to do. But even this will be withdrawn from us in time.

 

The young don’t drink anymore, we know that, postgraduates. You’re entirely more sensible than we are. Which means entirely more conquered. Look at you guys, sober as judges. Wine, postgraduates! Wine! Let yourselves go! Free yourselves up!

Ah, but you’re probably high on substances of which we cannot conceive. Isn’t that right, you rogues?

Don’t count on it.

 

Wine has a history, postgraduates. A philosophical history! A philosophical dignity! It’s refined! It requires discernment. Judgement. You need to be trained to appreciate wine.

Look at us: do you think we were brought up with vino? Of course not. We come to it as aliens. But we learned something about it. We cultivated ourselves. As we are going to cultivate you.

Wine can be frightening, we know that. There’s a snobbery to the wine-world. Of course! But if we can develop a taste for wine, then so can you, postgraduates.  

 

Wine is a philosophical accelerant, postgraduates. It’s a thought-catalyst. There’s a culture to wine. It isn’t just about glugging. We’re cultured people. We’re part of a tradition of wine drinkers. Connoisseurship. Good taste.

It’s about the palate, postgraduates. There is a culture of wine. It’s not about alcohol count. We’re not just pissed, we’re wine pissed. It’s positively classical. Positively Greek. We might as well be intimates of Socrates, as we drink.

 

Of course it should really be mulled wine, on a night like this.

 

Wine, postgraduates! Get it down you! The frozen campus doesn’t seem so freezing, when you drink, does it? The world doesn’t have such a tight grip upon us. We’re not in a stranglehold, not for a time. We’ve been allowed some distance. We can breathe. Take a few moments. Look up from our labours. Release ourselves, for a time. Know some leeway. Some freedom. Pull ourselves out of the trap. 

 

You need to drink to numb the shock. The future shock. The present shock.

The blurred world far preferable to the lucid world. The smeared world. The soft-around-the-edges world. Even the Organisational Management world. It all becomes so much more bearable.

There’s even euphoria to be snatched from the ruin of the humanities. Of philosophy! Despair can be altered into joy. Hopelessness can be raised a notch, and then another notch. We don’t feel so utterly defeated. We don’t feel quite as crushed. We can crawl out from under our stones.

We’re no longer buried – not as deeply. We’re not completely lost in the wreckage. It isn’t quite the end of the world – not anymore. There’s life in death – imagine that! It’s not entirely horror. The world’s no longer screaming in our ears. We’ve gained agency – a strange kind of agency. We’re able to do something, even if it’s only vomiting up the world. Even if its just spewing all this up.

Death isn’t just pressing into death. Horror-world isn’t quite as horrible. We can open our eyes in Hell. Laugh at our revulsion. Everything seems laughable, that was previous unendurable. Even ourselves! Especially ourselves!

 

The possibility of drinking.

A life to death. Life midst destruction. Desolation is not quite as desolate. There’s a gap! A break! An opening. My God, we can breathe, if you can call this breathing. Some last, late gasp. Our negativity howling.

It's not revolution. It’s not the overturning of the world in blood and fire. But at least it’s a gasp. At least it’s something. At least we can see it all and hate it all and stand back from it all. At least we’re not entirely victims.

The Apex. Organisational Management tower.

We should feel something: awe, or something. But we don’t. The mysterium tremendum, or something. Awe at the sublime. We should feel dwarfed. Feeling humbled. But we just feel resentful.

 

Organisational Management has interstellar ambitions. It’s impressive, in its way.

They’re trying to contact alien civilisations. They want more civilisations to organise and manage. Or maybe to share Organisational Management secrets with other Organisational Management civilizations.

Are there other Organisational Management civilizations?

Once you get to a certain level of technology, it’s inevitable. Every civilization becomes a world civilization. With some attempt at global governance. You know how it is.

 

When did Organisational Management begin? Who first thought of it? Who brought the two together: organisation and management? You’d have thought organisation would be sufficient without management. Or management, without organisation. But taken together?

And Organisational Management isn’t even an oxymoron, supposedly. Organisational Management actually means more than Organisational Organisation or Managerial Management …

 

What were the conditions of possibility of Organisational Management? How did it reach take-off? What allowed it? Some civilizational turn? Some step-change in technology? In techno-science?

Was it inevitable, following the Industrial Revolution? The invention of the spinning Jenny, or whatever? Were its conditions set further back? Was Newton the key? Galileo? Earlier still? Was it Pythagoras?

Might we have ended up differently? Who could we have been? Was it always inevitable? Were we always essentially an Organisational Management people?

 

The last philosophers. The last gasp of philosophy. In the Anglo world, at least. We’re the last ones, or might as well be. And the last gasp of the humanities, too. Before it all came to seem insufficiently organised and imperfectly managed.

The far right, beyond the stony wastes. The conspiracy theorists, beyond the stony wastes. The people we’re allowed to hate, beyond the stony wastes.

The Despicable and the Despised. The Low and the Confounding. Where the processing hasn’t work. There, beyond the stony wastes.

Those who are not on board. Smokers, probably. Drinkers, definitely. Ingrates. Free-rangers. Who haven’t got degrees. Who are educating themselves, in their own way. Who are making up their own minds.

Vulgar people. Common people. Every kind of deplorable. Misinformers. Disinformers. Spreaders of mal-information. The rebarbative. The unsavable. The positively criminal – in thought. Who need a comprehensive re-education. There, beyond the stony wastes.

Raising ourselves above the plains, for a moment. Looking around. Surveying the landscape. Checking the lay of the land. What do we see?

The horror, the fucking horror.

 

To be allowed our horror. To be permitted our recoil. For a few moments. To know, with our disgust, that we’re not totally enclosed.

 

What choice do we have? What role can we have? What are we to do here?

Just to scream? To raise a cry? To protest? Against what they’ve done. At the world they’ve made and are making. Is that enough?

 

What do we call them, the enemies – the ultimate enemies?

The ones who are in charge of all this. The ones who are in charge of the redevelopment. The ones who raised this campus from the ruins. Who destroyed the old Newcastle Brown building …

The ones who planned this campus. The ones who cleared the ground. Developed it. The visionaries. The maniacs. Who moved us to Organisational Management. The puppetmasters of Organisational Management. Who are behind Organisational Management. Who are using Organisational Management. The secret controllers.

What do we call them? They, that’s all. Them. Our paranoid fantasy. Greater than our paranoia, which is something. Vaster than our agoraphobia. Limitless. The horror that cannot be contained – not even here. Not even on the Organisational Management campus.

 

Our protest. Our last cry.

We see it All and are appalled by it All.

 

We Realise. We’re Aware.

We’re battered, broken. We’re destroyed by this. But we sing, in our ruins. The drunken fragments sing.

Fiver sees into the future.

The nonfuture. There is no future for this world.

 

The truth will win.

Truth is death, in this world. Utter death. Truth can only mean the end of this world.

 

Death must join death. There must be a Solution.

A real death. A deeper death. The annihilation of All.

 

Truth is death. There’s nothing truer.

The Bug’s just some postgraduate student legend.

We should listen to their legends. We should take them seriously.

 

Postgraduates have a religion of the Bug. They’re Bug obsessed.

 

It’s some cult started by some suicided PhD student. Nimrod, he was called.

Freaky.

There’s so little chance of getting a job, they slit their throats on the day they submit their dissertations. Might as well die at the peak of the prime of their life, they figure.

Wow. Fucking hardcore.

They burn brightly, PhD students. But they don’t burn long.

 

Nimrod’s like this legendary postgrad. They say he’s dead, but some say he just went underground.

Underground where?

There are tunnels everywhere – according to the postgraduates.

Underneath the Organisation Management Campus?

I guess so.

So what does Nimrod do all day in the tunnels?

There are a whole bunch of postgraduates own there. Who never finished their dissertations. They have reading groups.

Like, tunnel reading groups?

Sure.

They read by candlelight.

And worship the Bug. And read a lot of Deleuze.

They’ve got some imagination.

 

The religion of the Bug is what happens when you’ve got very smart people with very little money. Or power. Who have nothing better to do than smoke … psychedelics. And have perverted religious instincts.

Why do they like someone who doesn’t like them? Who hates them?

You’ve got to believe in something. Even in the agent of your destruction.

 

So where do we find ol’ Bugsy Malone? Ol’ Buggers?

In hyperspace. You have to take special postgraduate psychedelics to get there.

Freaky.

 

The Bug’s supposed to be an interdimensional being. You can meet it if you take enough psychedelics. It’s pure evil. Pure malevolence.

So why would you want to meet it?

Curiosity, I guess.

 

Tell us about the Bug, postgraduates! We command you!

Postgraduates, silent.

Spill your Bug secrets, fuckers!

Postgraduates, silent.

 

So why does the Bug bother with us? What’s in for the Bug?

The Bug likes to create mayhem.

 

The Bug wants blood sacrifices. The Bug wants war.

 

What does, like, the Bug do all day?

The Bug’s not in time. Not in our time, anyway.

 

The Bug’s just a name for the international banking system. The Central Banks and the FED and all that. That’s what I reckon.