Work in Progress

Management training: the saddest words in the world. To think: being sentenced to Management training. What a fate, being forced into Management training!

 

The management training facilitators are working at the limits of their intelligence: remember that. This is them at their best, dull and earnest. Them at the brightest.

They’re actually trying, that’s the thing. They actually think they have something to say. That they’re delivering truths. They believe in this stuff – they really do.

And what of our fellow academics around us, taking notes? Looking attentive. Asking pertinent questions. How can we account for them? Are they stupid? Are they dim bulbs? Does academia no longer attract the brightest and the best?

What catastrophe has befallen the entire university that such academics could be taking notes in a session of Management Training? What disaster has taken hold of the entire world that they’re not man and woman uprising in shouting protest at this course of Management Training?

Something’s happened to their minds. To their souls. They believe in this. Our fellow academics believe in this. They actually think there’s something to be learned from Management training. Which is probably worse than the actual Management training.

No one to roll your eyes with. No allies, no friends. The loneliness is complete in Management Training. What human society there is merely forces you back upon yourself, in Management training. Merely shows you up as aberrant. As an Exception, in Management training. It’s your problem, not that of Management training.

Behold the compromised. Behold the complicit.

 

Corralled into Management training. Kettled into Management training. Destroyed by Management training.

There’s war on philosophy – real philosophy, not technical philosophy – analytic philosophy. The philosophy of the technate – that’s allowed. It’s even encouraged. It’s spreading everywhere. There’s virtually nothing else taught in UK Philosophy Departments. But real philosophy isn’t wanted in the new age, the technocratic age.

They’ve all but declared European philosophy misinformation. Or disinformation. They’ve all but deemed us misinformers. Or dissinformers. Or malinformers. We won’t be allowed to go on.

 

What books we’ve be close to! What books on our bookshelves! Books that will no doubt be shadow-banned and memory-holed. Books that might has well never have existed. Whole oeuvres that will be banished from the archive. That will be seen to have committed thoughtcrimes. Will be thought to be complicit in real crimes. Suspected of antisocial thoughts. Of offending public safety. Thought safety. Evidence of domestic terrorism …

We have to reach perfect hopelessness. Absolutely de fucking profundis.

 

Once we complete nihilism. Once we perfect it. Once we see things for what they are.

What then?

Then … then it will show itself.

 

The perfect nihilist can see that the world lacks nothing. That it’s self-enclosed. Integral. Full as it is. Completely saturated with itself. And that’s the problem. Because what it lacks is nothing. What it lacks … is what it’s not.

 

We cannot trust this world – can’t you see? We have to regard it as fallen. And ourselves as fallen. We have to see it in the worst possible light. And ourselves: In the worst possible light! Then and only then …

 

There’s a new faith … which is made from doubt and disbelief. Which creates itself out of nothing – the divine nothing. God has to spring anew from his nothingness.

 

There’s a … horrific vision. And that’s important. Creation stripped to the bone. Naked … facticity.

 

What there is as horror.

 

We have to nihilize the world. The whole creaturely realm. It’s not some holy gift. It’s not some magic …

 

There’s a use for disenchantment. It’s … demystifying. It shows the world as what it is: dead matter. Just … death. It shows that there can be no reconciliation between world and God. Between creatures and the creator. It shows that there’s … separation. There must be. Which means there can be no truce between you and the world.

 

Have to hold on to the nihilistic perception. Have to hold on to what creatureliness shows us. The worst the world becomes, the greater the chance for redemption. The stronger the messianic impulse…

 

Everything has to sink to the lowest level. The world has to be shown as being perfect guilty, perfectly culpable. As being worthy only of being destroyed. The redemption needs dread and ruin.

 

Fuck the beatific vision. God isn’t revealed through the world. God and the world are antagonistic. God doesn’t just shine through the world.

 

There’s a religious use that can be made of nihilism.

 

There’s a nihilism that arises from the rejection of reality. That knows the world as … disgusting …

 

As if meaning was just given in the order of things as they are.

The question of the meaning of the world has to be felt in its true acuteness. We have to know the world as illuminated by nothing, by no meaning, by no direction.

 

There’s a promise. A grain of meaning: that’s what I want. A turn … in nihilistic meaninglessness.

 

Exodus now – not apocalypse now. Exit now.

 

We have to pass beyond nihilism. To where? To what? To God, of course.

 

We need a spiritual awakening. We need to awaken from this world. From this hell.

It isn’t hell. Only someone mad would regard it as hell.

They're keeping us alive – face it. We're alive because they want us alive. They could just wipe us out, if they chose to. They want to see what we'll do. We're interesting someone, if not ourselves. 

 

We have some role in all this. I don't know what it is. They're using us, in their own way. For their own obscure purposes. They want to see what we'll do, for some reason. What we can be made to do. Or not do. They're keeping an eye.

 

They don't know what to make of us. How to frame us. How to contain us. Not really. They don't know why we do what we do. But they want to learn – to machine learn. They want to teach AI how to play the philosopher.

 

Don't think some kind of human unpredictability can save us now. Some kind of human unmanageability. Some perversity or twistedness. That's exactly wheat they want to learn – our supposed unorganisability. That's what to programme into their latest AI models. 

Suicide’s, like, our truest desire. Suicide’s our best desire. It’s us at our highest. Of course we should hate ourselves – our fake selves. Of course we should hate what we’ve been made to become in this world, in this timeline.

They’ve stolen it, our world. And they’ve stolen us. Who we could have been. What we might have been.

 

We want to kill ourselves in this world – of course! We want to kill what this timeline’s made us into. We want to suicide this world in us. Which is totally the right thing to want.

 

We hate this world, because we love another. Because we know there is another. Our hatred is just a form of our love …

 

We don’t want to be sober in this terrible world. We don’t want to be undrunk in this desecrated world …

Only drunk can we muster up the hatred of this timeline. Only drunk can we summon up the love for the real one …

 

We know that we should hate: we have that consolation. We have the right instinct, if nothing else. We hate this timeline, and we hate ourselves as what this timeline’s made us into. We hate this version of ourselves.

 

This is us at our best. This is us at our highest. Of course we should hate it: this world. Of course we should loathe all this. Of course nothing is right in this timeline. In their world.

 

Let us never adjust to this. Let us never accept this. Let it be a perpetual outrage. Let us never trust this world. Let it never be allowed to complete its work on us.

 

Emergency extraction, that's what we need. To be beamed the fuck up.

 

At what point will we actually kill ourselves? What stage do we have to reach? What are the limits of our toleration? How far do we have to go?

Do they know what they’re doing to us? I’ll bet they do. Was it on purpose? Of course! This is a special, bespoke torture.

 

They’re surrounding us with ugly things. They’re drowning us in ugliness. They’re trying to appal us. They want to push us into death.

Your Christian sentimentalism is really tedious. The way little baby Jesus makes you all weepy. The saviour of the world and all that. Helping you dress up your misery as something else.

It gives me comfort in my misery.

You can say the Lord’s Prayer however many times you like. You can kiss your fucking cross. I understand – you need to cope. You need to cope with the  daily horror. Whatever you need to get you through … But it’s still irritating.

Ooh, who’s afraid of the big bad atheist? So cutting-edge. So vanguard.

 

Gnosticism is so much cooler than Christianity. So much doomier.

I don’t see why that’s a recommendation.

I like religions when they have no content. When it’s just about the nothing of this world, or whatever. Just some empty transcendence. A gap where the light gets in, or whatever. Only it’s the darkness. Where the darkness opens. Where there might be some dark god or something – who knows?

Our apocalyptic names … fucking crazy.

We use them, don’t we?

The whole thing was Cicero’s idea of taking the piss.

Who was Shiva, anyway?

A Hindu god of destruction. Pretty cool.

Who was Barbarossa?

Google it.

Some … battle? What the fuck?

Who’s Driss, anyway?

That was always mysterious.

It’s like being part of a cult.

Kitten refused her name. She preferred Kitten.

Sensible woman.

What did Cicero want to call her?

Jean Grey. From the X-Men. Or Jesus.

Jesus!?

A female Jesus.

Cicero was a real fucking mystery.

Cicero was as mad as Colonel Kurtz. Lost up the river. In the heart of fucking darkness. She was just like Marlon Brando, mumbling into the darkness.

Except she was constantly taking the piss.

There was that.

So was she taking the piss out of us or not?

It’s complex. There are layers of layers of meaning to everything Cicero did.

She would have hated this. The whole campus

Sure.

She would have hated us being here.

Maybe. See, she might have wanted us here. Her agents. Behind enemy lines. Doing her bidding.

But what would be her bidding?

What would Cicero do?: ask yourself that.

Have you seen Wings of Desire? It’s about these angels who just drift around, listening to people’s thoughts – they’re telepathic or something. Just witnessing their lives. Their joys and their sufferings. It’s set in Berlin. Before the wall came down. The German title translates as Heaven Over Berlin.

So what do the angels actually do?

Watch over everyone. Comfort you without knowing you. Put an arm around you when you need it.

They have these pony tails, that’s what I remember. And it’s in black and white, the film. It has a real silent cinema feel. The cinematographer put a silk stocking over the lens, apparently. To act as a filter. A city symphony, that’s what they called it.

Are there angels in our city? On this campus? Like, Geordie angels? Toon angels?

If there are, they aren’t much help. They didn’t stop this campus being built.

Are there angels of the humanities? Angels of philosophy?

We need some angels, God knows …

The Bug … It’s some new cult among the philosophy postgraduates. I don’t know where it started. They blame everything on the Bug, basically.

Philosophy postgraduates are very credulous.

I always figured the Bug was just a name for all planetary AI. That postgraduates had fucking sensed …

Is there some kind of Bug exterminator who could spray it to death? Can we phone pest control?

 

What side is the Bug on?

What side are the postgraduates on: that’s the question? Are they pro Bug or anti Bug?

There are all these Bug stickers. The Bug sucks, one might say. The Bug socks it to the Man, says another. The Bug’s behind the Man, says still another. It’s confusing.

You see all the postgraduates making the sign of the Bug. And then there are others making the sign of the extermination of the Bug.

 

The Bug is the postgraduates’ dark overlord. Or dark saviour. Or something.

Well, when you’ve been studying as long as these guys have. As incessantly. As hopelessly. You cultivate certain … delusions.

 

How do we shunt the world back on the proper timeline? How do we shift it?

Maybe the Bug knows.

Are we going to ask favours of the Bug? Does the Bug grant favours?

How do we even reach the Bug?

Psychedelics, right. We have to get to hyperspace, or the ethereal plane or whatever it’s called. Where the Bug lives.

 

What does the Bug want? What are its plans?

I dunno. Evil plans. Organisational plans. Management plans.

No, the Bug’s above all that. The Bug’s bigger than that.

 

There are factions among the postgraduates. There’s Bug Club, and then there’s anti-Bug club. It’s like the crips and the bloods.

 

Do you think we should sacrifice Fiver to the Bug?

I think we should sacrifice someone. As an offering. In exchange for destroying this timeline.

Are they any spare postgraduates? Anyone volunteer?

This world isn’t real. It’s like The Man in the High Castle: did you ever read that? It’s a fake world. That split off from reality in some weird way. It’s a false timeline..

So what’s going in the true world? Are there versions of us?

I guess so.

When did the splitting off take place?

When they built the campus, I reckon. When they demolished the Newcastle Brown building.

 

Is there any prophecy about the idiots who come at the end of philosophy? About us – the twisted ones. The fuck-witted ones …

What role do we have? What are we here to achieve? Who will we save?

No one. Not even ourselves, I reckon.

 

We’re part of this. We were made by this. So paranoid! So deranged! So hyperbolic!

We’re as sick as this – the whole world. We’re as twisted as it is – the entire thing, this whole world. We’re no better … Probably worse …

 

Are we going to explode this world – this fake world? Are we going to destroy the abomination? This offshoot from real history?

Are we going to destroy ourselves – what this timeline has made us into? Will we have to kill our false selves? These shadows of what we really are?