Work in Progress

We still have the sky. We can still look up.

Do you think that’s the real sky – honestly? Such naivete! Do you think those are real stars? Do you think those are real clouds? Is it even night? Is it even dark? Is it even snowing? Is it even winter?

Isn’t it eternal winter. Like in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe? Hasn’t it always been winter? Haven’t we always been walking across the campus?

It’s eternal. We’ve been walking forever. We’ve been doing this forever. It doesn’t change. This is our eternal present. We don’t remember the past. We don’t reach into a future. We will always have been doing this. We will always and forever have been lost.

What did she see in you, Shiva? What leadership qualities? Are you going to be like Kung Fu Panda: are you going to surprise us all at the final moment, when it really counts? When are you going to come into your own? Are you going to show what you’re for?

 

We’re not asking you to be Cicero, but … Come on. You must have some ideas.

We’re lost in the desert, Shiva, and we need a Moses.

You only feel it sometimes. It only really hits you sometimes. What they’re doing. What they’ve done.

Who?

Whoever rules the world. The self appointed elite. The global mafia, or whatever. Don’t you feel it?

 

They have big plans for us. There are big plans unfolding all around us. Everything that’s Happening, capital H …

The madness is deepening. The madness of the world. Of the technocratic plans for the world. The madness of order. Their order.

 

It’s not even that they’re stealing everything before the final collapse. They have Plans. They think they’re Doing Good.

Come on, they’re just looting, right – before it all goes down.

It’s more than that. They’ve got long term plans. They aren’t just reacting. They’ve got their eyes on the future. They always have had. They’re setting out their agenda. This was always the plan. It’s what they’ve always wanted.

Who?

Some elites. That’s what they call themselves anyway.

We just needed time … That’s what we thought. Time to think – time to work. Which really meant time in which to ruin our lives. To destroy ourselves in slow-mo.

It was a kind of torture, giving us time. It was mean, allowing us to learn how  mediocre we were. How far we’d fallen short. Of our dreams for ourselves! To think, we even had dreams for ourselves …

 

We were made to experience our stupidity all over again. In slo-mo, this time. Prolongedly, this time.

Do you think Cicero was laughing? Was she amused by all thus?

 

We were given all the time in the world. To humiliate ourselves. To excruciate ourselves.

Cicero was holding up a mirror to us. Cicero’s was showing us what we were. Cicero was making us feel our own disappointment. And she liked that. Cicero was cruel …

 

Sentenced to our mediocrity. What a punishment. A mediocre punishment. A punishment for mediocrities. Letting us just live out their mediocrity. Mediocrity forever!

Which is why we’re always waiting for an apocalypse – our apocalypse. Why we’re always waiting for it to end – for an end to time. But the end is endless, apparently. The end is taking forever in ending. Which is another part of the punishment.

 

The incessant cruelty of our condition. Our incessant enduring of our condition. On it goes! To forever and beyond! To the endless end. In our endless endtimes.

The whole one-day-and- then-another thing. The whole treading-in-water thing. The whole staying-in-place thing. Remaining in place. Our petty infinity. Our tawdry nothing-ing. The whole I-can’t-go-on-I’ll-go-on thing.

*Why do our lives need to add up to anything? Why do we think they should? We have … expectations. Despite everything. That’s the absurdity. If we didn’t If we actually thought we were mediocre, things would be different. But we don’t. See, we think we’re more than mediocre: that’s the terrible secret. We actually think we’re capable of something. We have hope for ourselves, despite it all.

Why haven’t we learned the lesson? What’s wrong with us? Hope betrays us, right? Hope is what’s wrong with us. We need to be cured of hope. Isn’t it disgusting: hope? Because it means we’ll always disappoint ourselves. We’ll never be actually resigned to our mediocrity. To how awful we are. Which means that we never really experienced it, our mediocrity. That we don’t actually think we are mediocre.

But Cicero saw something in us.

Cicero saw what we were. And brought us here because of what we were. It was some masochistic thing. Some self-sabotaging thing. The destruction of philosophy amused her. The self-immolation of European philosophy. That’s what she wanted to bring about. For her own entertainment.

What do they want with us?

They’re going to reverse engineer the whole of European philosophy. To find out how it works. What it does. Whether it can be useful.

Well, it can’t be useful – that’s the thing.

At worst, they’ll find it diverting – decorative. It’ll be a kind of recreation for them. A Sunday indulgence. Something to busy yourself with in your spare time. A hobby. For when the serious business of the day is done.

 

They’ll hijack philosophy – don’t you see? It’s like in AI: why try to replicate animal movement when you could just use animal movement. When you could just hijack it. That’s the smart move.

Philosophy’s unhijackable, that’s the thing.

 

They’re taking over philosophy from within. They’re going inside philosophy. They’re going to inhabit it. They want to think with the European philosophy brain. To use the European philosophy synapses. They’ll be literally the enemy within. We’ll be Organisational Management’s glove puppets. Meat puppets! They’ll wear philosophy as a skin suit.

 

Organisational Management isn’t arrogant. Organisational Management thinks it can learn from other subjects. Organisational Management is humble, in that respect. The youngest subject can learn from the oldest subject! Of course it can!

Organisational Management likes to learn new techniques. It likes methods – new methods. Which can be applied to this organisational managerial problem or that. And there are real problems, we must admit that. Real societal challenges. That we all face.

All Organisational Management wants to do is optimise procedures. To make thinking effective. Philosophy will finally become effective.

They want to probe the European philosophy mind. What produced us. What makes us tick. They want to understand the conditions of what it is that we do. And apply them elsewhere.

A new division of labour. Philosophy’s the blue sky stuff, and Organisational Management … well, Organisational Management’s concerned with how it can be applied. How it can make life better.

Organisational Management is a down and dirty subject. A real world subject. And Philosophy doesn’t have to be! Philosophy can do its thing. And so can Organisational Management …

 

They’re vampiric. They’re going to suck out our philosophy juices.

What juices? I’m fucking dry.

 

Even our delusions are useful. Even our paranoia. They’ll want to study those. Even our madnesses. Our dreams. It’s all of use to them.

Those bastards!

 

Creating a happy planet. That’s what Organisational Management’s about. We just want to make the world a happier place. They’re modest! They hold up their hands! They’re not full of grand philosophical ambition.

 

All there are are problems. Which need solutions. That’s what Organisational Management is about. Finding solutions. Truffling them out. From wherever they might be!

Organisational Management isn’t fussy. It isn’t snobbish. Organisational Management is workaday. It's happy to take what it needs from wherever it finds it.

And Organisational Management’s even curious. Open-eyed. On the look out. Even opportunist. Anything can be grist to the Organisational Management mill …

We were at our best when we were unemployed. After our PhDs. Looking for work. Utterly desperate. Prospectless.

With all our education and all our despair. About this far from suicide. Wasn’t it the best?

It was the worst.

Which is why it was the best. We were beneath everything. Beneath ourselves. Beneath anything we could do. Beneath work. Beneath writing. Beneath any kind of self-preservation. Good for nothing.

We’d learnt everything and had forgotten it all. We’d studied, and we’d forgotten what we’d studied. We read philosophy for years, and now we’d forgotten what we’d read. Every page.

Street wanderers. Street drinkers, nearly. Drawn to the margins. To scraps of wasteland. To puddles in the mud. To fenced off land, undevelopable. Unproductive. We barely existed! And wasn’t that what saved us?

From what? For what?

There’s some great thinker out there, beyond the stony wastes. Some genius. Some thinker of the workless, of the unemployed and unemployable, beyond the stony wastes.

Who will be self-taught. Or self-untaught, beyond the stony wastes. Who won’t have read a page of philosophy. But who’ll just be philosophy, beyond the stony wastes. Who’ll just live in the truth. And be the truth, beyond the stony wastes.

Someone homeless and shiftless, beyond the stony wastes. An organic intellectual. Untouched by the university. Unruined. Untutored. Uncorrupted. Undestroyed. Underanged. Unfucked by the system, beyond the stony wastes.

 

From out there, from beyond the stony wastes, will come our messiah. Our saviour.

Someone unemployed. Untutored. A pure philosopher. In a school all of his own. Like an ancient Stoic or an Epicurean, or something. Where you live your philosophy. Where it’s about life. Like a Cynic. Living truth. Being truth. In abjection. From beyond the stony wastes.

 

Will revolutionaries cross the stony wastes to tear the campus down? Will they come, the non working class? The class that falls below work? That isn’t even a class. Just a few ragged nobodies. Fuck ups. Mad people.

 

Only the sub-proletariat can save us now. Only the underproles, deplorables. Who refuse everything. Negate everything. Totally unorganisable. And unmanageable! Never planning their actions. Never thinking things through. Never thinking about the morrow. Of the rest of the day, even. Of anything in the future. Or anything in the past. Of anything except the present, and the explosion of the present.

 

Neocynics – that’s what we need. Living refusers of everything this campus is and stands for. Everything Organisational Management is and wants and will be.

 

It’s all disinformation and misinformation, beyond the stony wastes. And malinformation probably. They’re all conspiracy theorists out there. They’re all wackos and nutjobs, beyond the stony wastes. They’re not on board. They’re not with the programme. They’re not watching the BBC. They’re not with the narrative. Enemies of the people! Enemies of the campus! They’re not thinking of the common good.

 

But Organisational Management have plans. They’ll extend the campus. Push back the stony wastes. Until the whole world belongs to it, the Organisational Campus. Until there are no stony wastes.

A campus built in service of nihilism. Campus built to increase nihilism. There’s not enough nihilism in the world – that’s what they think.

 

How did we end up here? Are we supposed to here? Is this a karmic thing? Did we do something bad in a previous life?

 

What are we supposed to learn from all this? What is this for?

 

Our non lives. Our anti lives. It all went wrong somewhere, but where? Where did we take the wrong turn?

The void of our lives. The emptiness of our lives. But our lives have been voided. Our lives have been emptied out.

It’s been going on too long. It’s been going on all our lives … It is our lives. Nothing but our lives.

A process of … nihilisation. A slow dissolution. Until there’s nothing left but nihilism.

 

A complete dissociation. A gradual … distancing. Like our atoms are dispersing. Into the air. Like we’re just vanishing into the air. Slowly, very slowly …

Everyday nihilism. Quotidian nihilism. A super-nihilism. That’s so vast. That we’re moving through like a galactic cloud … Like a nebula. One of those places where stars form.

Only here, nothing forms. Here, everything deforms, or unforms, or whatever. Just disperses into nothing.

An unhappening. A dehappening. A hollowing out of events. A de-eventing. Until everything’s indifferent. Until nothing happens at all.

 

And nothing adds up. Nothing makes anything else. Significance is … failing. It’s like we’re being hypnotised by something.

By what?

By a great blind eye. Watching us, without seeing us … It’s like we’re in some great trance. That we could just snap out of, if we could ….