Work in Progress

Who is the Bug, anyway?

The more far-out postgraduates say that it works through frequencies, somehow. Controlling things. Steering things. And plans, like, a thousand years ahead of time.

Plans for what?

The elimination of us, I think. The Bug doesn’t like us. We’re too noisy. Too chaotic. And the Bug doesn’t like emotions. It can’t understand them, nor really.

So the Bug’s the, like, evil villain behind all the bad things in history.

The Bug’s just one force among many. It’s complicated. There’s a whole postgraduate cosmogony. A mythology.

I can’t believe this stuff has sprung up so quickly.

It was Nimrod’s doing.

Nimrod?

This rogue postgraduate. Who took more ayahusca than anyone.  He has this whole story about space aliens visiting earth thousands of years ago and trying to fuck with our genetics. To create GMO humans. Trying to domesticate us, basically. Making us dumber and more controllable. Just like we’ve done to cattle. They’re after our adrenochrome, some say.

Adreno-what?

This secretion from the vagus nervous complex. It comes from being afraid. Which is why they put us under a constant state of stress and fear …That’s what they want to harvest.

I thought the Bug wanted to eliminate us.

Yeah, I told you it was complicated. And there’s all this stuff about restricting our diet. You see in in myth. Like, the Devas from the Vedas. The Theoae of the Greeks, the Elohim, the Annunaki, the Baal, the Molachi have all these dietary prohibitions. You’re not supposed to eat pork. You have to avoid all these spices, which turn out to be antibacterial and antimicrobial.

The idea was to degrade the gut biome. Keep us in a constant state of low level anxiousness. With a sense of pending doom. Of something bad coming from the future. And, like, depressed. Full of all these negative thoughts. Negative emotions. Where you don’t believe positive change can ever happen. And mind fog – which means you can’t sustain thought. Can’t think clearly. You’re always confused. All this stuff is supposed to create high quality adrenochrome.

Trippy.

PhD student regression. PhD student past lives, with a twist.

Driss, explaining: It’s about who you were supervised by, who your supervisor was supervised by, and so on. You can travel upstream. Reach from supervisor through supervisor all the way back. To the ur-supervisor. To the first university where they had doctorates. And get them to speak through you. And it’s what’s really cool if there are some famous philosophers in the chain. Sure, your supervisor might have been Prof Shithead back at the University of Shite, she might have been supervised by Prof Bellend from the University of Fuckery. But Prof Bellend might have been supervised by Michel Foucault. Or Gilles Deleuze. Or Hans Blumenberg. Or Martin Heidegger.

Wow, so there could be channelling of some European great? Theoretically. I hope they speak English.

But there are dangers. It’s like taking ayahusca. The whole process needs careful supervision.

Is that right?

Things can go wrong. You can channel other forces.

Really?

Dark ones. There are all kinds of entities out there. Especially at the moment.

Wow.

A regressed PhD student, talking in German.

Is that real German or made up German?

I can’t tell.

It’s kinda like speaking in tongues.

It could the Bug.

The Bug?

Sure – this is where the legend of the Bug comes from. The Bug can totally take over regressing PhD students.

Studying’s for retards. You can just take these thoughts.

 

Who synthesised these?

Some former PhD student.

Enterprising.

Sells them all at European philosophy conferences. And Theory conferences.

 

This is the Deleuze pill?

Sure – Line of Flight.

Wow.

I didn’t know you could still get this. Very noughties, isn’t it? Everyone takes Badiou pills now, right?

I’ve got some old school stuff. The Levinas tab. Makes you all responsible. And tortured. And guilty.

Take some Blanchot – that’s deep, man.

And there’s some Heideggerian weed, man. Potent. Sends you down the forest paths. Puts you right in the fucking Lichtung.

 

Let’s fllyyyy ….

Where to?

Let’s get very far out. Very far.

 

No limits, motherfucker. No more finitude. No more lack. This is Desire, Deleuze style. We’re desiring machines, baby.

Is that what we are?

It fucks, it drinks, it … smokes … it looks up the sky. And we’re it.

Damn right.

 

That’s a Heidegger tab.

What, like Nazi Heidegger?

No – it’s later Heidegger. All Gelassenheit. Just fucking releasement.

Beautiful.

Only a God can save us now, right?

Beautiful but doomy.

 

Check it out: Difference and Repetition in pill form. So you don’t have to read it.

 

And there’s a Hegel suppository. Science of Logic. To be inserted anally.

Only place for it.

 

I’m a long term Blanchot addict.

 

What about the Bug. I want to snort some Bug.

No you don’t.

 

Tie on your Simondon bandana. It’s actually soaked into the bandana. So it enters the bloodstream via the forehead.

Handy.

It’s programming us. The whole campus. Every part of it.

It’s about making us a new kind of human being, right? The perfect fucking robotoid.

 

I think there’s something wrong. Terribly wrong.

You’ve heard of sick building syndrome? Well, there’s such a thing as sick campus syndrome. As sick fucking world syndrome. As sick universe syndrome.

We’re being literally poisoned. They’re poisoners. Poisoners of the body and poisoners of the head.

 

We should pray, or something.

Do you believe in God now?

I do here – on this campus. It’s so deeply, profoundly evil, there must be something good. It’s so wrong, there must be something right.

Is that your reasoning?

It’s .. .dialectical. Evil makes us see. Evil points a way. Out of this pseudo-world. This entirely captured world. Satan is real, Satan is everywhere. Which means God must be real somewhere else.

Maybe they want us turning away from the world. They want us without faith in any of this. Easier to control us in that way.

Not if we believe in something else.

Something impossibly remote, impossibly distant. That won’t have any effect on anything round here.

 

I just want to kill myself. To be free.

You think suicide is some kind of rebellion? Don’t you think your suicide is exactly what they want? You think you can escape in death – but that’s what they want. Reducing the population. Culling your kind … Our kind …

I don’t want to live in their world.

They don’t want you to live in their world. Unless you can be programmed.

I just want to write something that could get me a job at some proper university.

This is a proper university.

One where Philosophy has a future. Where it isn’t being moved to Organisational Management.

You should just edit a collection on some hot-button topic.  

Too much work. And I don’t have the contacts. The people I could ask.

So organise a conference. Bring the great and good to Newcastle. Get your name known.

Don’t be a fucking careerist, Driss. Anyway, editing collections is murder. Rounding everyone up. Keeping them to a deadline. Improving their English. Rewriting their work …

Just publish your PhD dissertation. Like everyone else.

Fuck that.

All this shit publishers companies will bring out anything from a Russell Group Uni lecturer.

I have, like, some integrity.

So propose a book some decent publisher.

I don’t have anything to say.

Just write something secondary. Something about some philosopher.

And commit to five years of graft. I don’t know.

Basically, you want to be a genius.

Basically, I do.

Basically, you don’t want to actually find out that you’re not a genius by actually trying to write something.

You might be right.

Which means you’re never getting out. You’re in Newcastle forever. With us! You’re stuck with us, Driss!

We’ve to buckle down. Get something written.

We’ve got to have ideas. We’ve got to be brilliant. That’s the problem: we’re not brilliant.

Speak for yourself.

Why: do you suspect that you might be brilliant? Do you? You do, don’t you? Driss thinks he’s a genius, guys.

We’ve got to think what only we can think. We’ve got to write what only we can write.

The main thing I think, that I keep coming back to, is that I’m really, really mediocre.

See, Driss: that’s modesty. Barbarossa doesn’t think he’s a genius like you.

So what is it that we and only we can write?

We have to write from where we are. What we are.

What are we Brits good at?

Music. We’re good at music.

Sure.

Films, sometimes.

Analytic philosophy.

Well, fuck that.

Come on, this European stuff isn’t natural to us – I’ve always said it. It has the thrill of the unknown about it. We’re not critical enough. Not sharp minded enough. We’re just grateful that it exists and that it kind of rescued us from our Britishness. The way that we’re, like, naturally empiricist and unspeculative and literal minded and unmetaphysical.

May I remind you that Alfred North Whitehead was British.

We should make European philosophy speak to analytic philosophy.

So reductive.

Where are we on the time-line? What life phase are we in? What are we supposed to be doing?

Heidegger wrote Being and Time at thirty-seven.

That gives us a few years. Wait – how old are you?

Thirty-three.

Better get going.

Heidegger had already give the History of the Concept of Time lectures by the time he was thirty-three.

Merleau-Ponty had already written The Phenomenology of Perception at thirty-three.

Simone Weil was writing her best notebook stuff. She was dead a year later. Kristeva published Revolution of Poetic Language …

Fucking Schelling was published at seventeen. Hume wrote his Treatise at twenty three.

Maybe we’re late bloomers.

Don’t bring up Kant – you’re going to bring up Kant, aren’t you?

I’m going to bring up Kant. He was fifty-seven when he published The Critique of Pure Reason. He began it age forty-six. When he woke from his dogmatic slumbers, or whatever.

We’re second rung, right?

Second rung? You wish. What about the great works of commentary – like, secondary stuff. How old was Hyppolite when he finished his Phenomenology of Spirit book?

Thirty-seven, I reckon.

And Derrida published those three books at thirty-seven.

They were hardly commentary …

Cixous published that enormous book on Joyce when she was thirty-one. That was her doctorat d’État. Much higher than a British doctorate.

And they do habilitations on the continent, don’t they?

Sure. Doctorates are for pussies: that’s what they think over there. Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study was supposed to get him his habilitation.

How old was he?

I don’t know. Twenty-nine, maybe.

We’ve to buckle down. Get something written …

A very mild nihilism. An ordinary nihilism. A nihilism that is utterly merged with life, that is identical with life. That’s raining soft blows on our heads, or whatever. Every day and forevermore.

 

A very slow vortex. Slowly turning. At the heart of everything. Sucking us all in.

 

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

 Who knows but that these aren’t their thoughts? Who knows but that they’re not thinking their thoughts in our heads? Who knows but that they’re thinking in our place? That we’re just thought-batteries for them. That philosophy itself – is nothing but a thought-battery.

 

They’re using us to work out their problems. To work on their questions. To find solutions. Like living thought machines.

They’re thinking with our thoughts. They’re philosophising – with us. With our lives. With everything we’ve read. They’re feeding us with issues that concern them. That they want us to think through …

No … headspace. No chance to think anything through. We can’t even begin to think. Just … panicked. Just rushed along.

Are we always this confused? Have we only ever been this confused? I can’t remember.

We can’t take stock. Everything … crammed in at once. We’re just reacting. We can’t step back. We can’t retreat.

So lost in whatever’s happening. Or whatever’s supposed to be happening. It’s all happening at once.

 

The deliberate crowding of events. They’re making all these geopolitical things happen. Flooding the zone with pseudo events. Stuff they orchestrate.

Stuff who orchestrates?

Them. The fuckers. The orchestrators. The reality-shapers. The nut cases in charge of it all.

 

All the stuff they’re hitting us with. All these events …

Pseudo-events, you mean. These things aren’t really happening. They’re staged. Orchestrated. Like almost everything is. They want wars They want conflict. They want trouble, for fuck’s sake. They want the great distractions.

But what are they trying to distract us from?

Ourselves. Maybe. Contemplation, maybe. Peace, maybe. Each other, maybe.

 

I feel like I’m reeling, always. That I’m being struck by blows. From all sides. And I don’t know how to defend myself.

Bewildered. Stunned. Staggering. Can’t stand upright. I’ve lost my footing … in life. I don’t know knowing what direction to go.

There’s got to be some … drug for this. Something we could take. A focus pill.