Work in Progress

We’re everything European philosophy can be in the UK. We’re all it can be. Stunted. Like some dwarf species. Like some inbred species. Crabbed. Bad tempered. Unable to thrive.

These aren’t the right conditions for it, European philosophy. The soil of empiricism. And industrialism. And financial capitalism.

 

We’re its best ambassadors, European philosophy. The best it can be under these circumstances. In these times! In this place!

We’re it’s final, withered form, European philosophy. Pitiful, really. Embarrassing, really.

This is what it’s come to! And on this campus! Which is, by itself, the very opposite of European philosophy!

 

Oh I’m sure European philosophy it’s perfectly fine on the actual continent. In actual Europe. I’m sure it’s thriving over there. Pressing up to new heights and so on. But here? In the UK?

We do some things well: pop music. Film, sometimes. We do some things badly: philosophy. High culture in general. Intellectual stuff.

We embarrass ourselves when we try! It doesn’t suit us. We’re of the wrong temperament. We have no breadth of culture. No references. We don’t know very much. We’re not schooled in the greats, not really.

We have no reverence. Nothing’s sacred for us. We let it all go, if we ever had it, a long time ago. We don’t value it. We don’t know how to.

 Oh sometimes we’re possessed by mad enthusiasms for European philosophy. But when we read it, we inevitably reduce it. When we secondary-commentate on it, we turn it into nothing. When we start our own European philosophy thought movements, they’re inevitably embarrassing. Backward. Fumbling.

Do pop music and comment on pop music. Forget philosophy! Forget high culture. Forget intellectual stuff!

Organisational Management are part of the larger agenda. Part of the manage or cull agenda. Part of the organise or euthanise plan.

 

And they’ll be kind as they put us down. They’ll kindly inject us with whatever it is in their euthanasia pods. They’ll be gentle as they press the figurative pillow over our faces. They’ll all but sing us to sleep. They’ll kindly lead us to the slaughter.

 

There are too many of us: we accept that. We have to accept it. They’ll tell us, kindly. This is all because we are too many: yes, yes. We agree! We’re persuaded!

And the technicians of death will get to work. Painless! Gentle! We’ll barely notice. A kind euthanasia. A gentle cull. They’ll all but be stroking our hair …

 

And we’ll be doing it for the good of all. For everyone! Unselfishly! And isn’t it marvellous to be so unselfish! Isn’t it marvellous to be acting for the common good!

A gentle kind of heroism. Laying down your life for the sake of everyone. Out of sheer kindness. Helping out Gaia! Mother Earth! It’s not to great a price to pay, is it?

 

We’re too many! It’s quite obvious! There are too many of us on the planet! Everyone agrees. We shouldn’t be burdening existence. Imposing ourselves. Usurping the places of others to come. Others more deserving!

Our kind have had their chance. We’ve had a good enough run of it. Our day in the sun! Time to give the earth back to itself. To release it. To let go. We have to leave it to others.

 

It’s only ethical. It’s only right. Morality demands that some of us … lay our lives down. A bit like voluntary redundancy. But of life!

It’s the right thing. The unselfish thing. And it’s not like we were doing anything particularly significant with our lives, is it? It’s not as if we were putting them to good use.

We’re not serving humankind, or whatever. Serving the planet! It's not as if we’re good actors.  Really, we were just disturbing students, with all our teaching. We were discomfiting them. Unsettling them. Disturbing them. We’ve only ever spoiled the peace, the harmony with our questioning.

 

And really, they’re doing it for our own good, the world controllers. They’re culling us for our own good. To save humanity, you have to kill it, or large parts of it. It’s like pruning. So long as it’s done judiciously. There are too many of us. Hasn’t this been proven, scientifically? Isn’t quite uncontraversial?

 

And isn’t it a pleasure to serve? To be useful. Isn’t it a release to actually do something for the good of all – for everyone. And for everything, animate and inanimate!

We’re saviours, in our way. Laying down our lives. Going to our eternal rest. Laying down our heads forevermore.

 

The ultimate act of charity. The best we can do. The most selfless thing.

Not to live any more. Not to breathe anymore. Not to eat anymore. None of that.

There can only be so many of us. There are only resources for so many. And who will miss us, really?

To be … uncreated. As if we never were. To be unremembered. As if we never had existed. We should be forgotten. We deserve to be forgotten. To go under. Once we were lived, and now … There’s a beauty to it. There’s something glorious in being allowed to disappear. There’s a sweetness to it. A gentleness.

 

And the methods of death are so gentle now. We can choose our favourite song to die to. We can select something from the dial of our euthanasia-pod. Didn’t We Almost Have it All can accompany us we gradually lose consciousness. As we close our eyes. As the nitrogen is pumped in.

To fall asleep into death. To be released into it, death. What was ever so beautiful as that? The dream is over. The bubble pops. The leaf falls. It’s sunset! The end of the day! The earth will tilt into darkness. Evening is coming …

 

To die as insignificantly as flies, legs curled up in windowsill corners. All our struggling and striving done.

To sail gently into death. Happily. Calmly. The journey of our life done.

In the end, did we ever want to live? Were we ever really in love with life? Wasn’t life just agitation to us? Didn’t living make us fretful, discontent?

Why not sign our own death warrants, then? Why not request our own death sentences? Why not let ourselves be ushered gently into death.

 

Did we ever have a really tight hold on life? Were we ever sure that we really wanted to live? Weren’t our favourite artworks about suicide, about dying? Weren’t our favourite artists always dying for us? Weren’t we constantly looking to die by proxy? Haven’t we each died a thousand deaths already?

Our favourite music: death music. Our favourite art: death art. Our favourite films: death films. Our heroes and heroines: the death haunted. Those drawn towards death and lost in death.

No, we weren’t destined to live long lives. Wide lives. Lives of generosity and goodness.

 

We were fascinated by genius. By lives of transgression. Of escape. By venturers-out. Our culture heroes. Our spiritual ancestors. The predecessors we chose for ourselves.

The death-obsessed (like us). The death-hypnotised (as we are). The death driven (and to what are we driven, except death?)

No, we never wanted to live. We never saw ourselves as living on. We’d always and already missed the precise moment to die.

 

How many death scenes have we read? Haven’t we always flicked forward to the deathscenes in biographies? How many books on our bookshelves with death in the title? How many books of suicides. Of self-mutilators? Hasn’t our reading, our viewing, our listening always been our laboratory of death?

 

And if not death, madness. Haven’t we always been fascinated by madness? Have we not felt ourselves, too often, on the brink of madness? How many times have we trembled with madness?

Death and madness. And wild eros. That too! Wild affairs. Love that brings you to the brink of death. Tragic love. Doomed love. Lovers who drive each other to the brink. And over it! Double suicides. Love deaths. Wasn’t that the kind of love that fascinated us?

They’ll capture our DNA, our neurological functioning. It’ll be bio-neuro-techno-spiritual subjugation.

A slave caste: that’s what we’ll become. Neurologically and genetically controlled. We’ll only think what we’re intended to think. We’ll only believe what we’re conditioned to believe.

And without the ability to love. Without compassion, without empathy. Without any spiritual connection. Psychopaths.  Dehumanised human beings: that’s what we’ll be.

 

We’ll just be walking cyborgs, when they’re finished with us. Syn-bios. Borgs. And we won’t even be human anymore. We’re not human beings with human rights. We’re synthetic beings full of their weird shit. Cloud computer nodes. Just property.

 

Our bodies are being repurposed. We’re being hollowed out by synthetic biology. Made a receptacle for, like, dead spirits, for demons.

 

Our bodies will be shells. For weird … habitations. By aliens, fallen angels. God knows what else. Our bodies will be hollowed out for occupation by … disembodied entities. Demons. Cavitated synthetic entities – that’s what we’ll become. Our brains and bodies: clean slates for demonic possession.

 

They’ll hijack your brain, your central nervous system. They’ll merge their tech with your nervous system, nerve fibres, the synapses in your brain.

Those who survive will no longer be human. They’ll be humanoids.

 

Devices – that’s what we’ll become. Hosts for the new AI system. Infrastructures, nothing less. They’ll use our biology. They’ll programme our cells in the same way that we programme computers.

 

We’re biomachines. It’s in our blood. All this self-assembling shit. These weird conductive circuits. All this weird nanotech stuff inside us.

And they’ve deliberately fucked up the frontal cortex. It’s, like, a zombie preparation programme.

 

This self-assembling shit in us. Swarming through our bloodstreams. Crossing the blood brain barrier. Entering the brain.

We won’t have our brains, our minds, our souls.

 

It’s not about augmenting and enhancing human capacities. It’s about making us one with the quantum computer. About turning us into biological robots. Biosynths with warm blood.

As though a vast and subtle bomb had dropped. As if a soft explosion had blown through everything. Destruction – only without anything being destroyed. Ruination – but with nothing actually ruined.

Everything has been shifted, just a little. Moved sideways. Tilted, just a little. We do not live in the same world. The end has come and gone.

 

Exhaustion isn’t exhausted yet. The breakdown hasn’t itself broken down. The decay hasn’t itself decayed. Zeno’s arrow is still flying. Failure hasn’t failed – not yet. Dying hasn’t died. There’s farther to fall.

They’re probably listening to us now. Or some algorithm’s listening.

What could Organisational Management algorithms make us of us? The way we talk. With our bullshit and piss-taking and gallows-humour. Our irreverence. Our stupid in-jokes.

We’re not even philosophers, that’s what they don’t understand. Not even anything. Not even anyone. Not even … whatever. We’re not part of this, and not part of anything. We’re always lagging behind. Always lost. We’re never fully actualised. Never where we should be.

Yeah but what are we going to do with it: being not even philosophers?

Nothing. Just be.

And then what? How are we going to resist? Actually do something.

We just have to be ourselves. Or rather, not be ourselves. Not be anything.

It’s futile.

We’re futile. We’re for nothing. We’re useless … That’s our strength.

All this student accommodation – who’s it for? Not for students, surely.

International students, maybe … The ones who actually fund the university …

I don’t believe that, either.

They’ll put the new police forces in them. The guys they’re bringing from overseas. The one’s they’re training in secret.

Social housing – that’s what they’re going to be. They’ll be for people who can’t pay their mortgages. Or their rent. Once AI takes all their jobs.

Us, in other words.

Us!? Fuck that. They’ll be for the compliant. The ones who survive the great cull and the great poisoning. Who won’t be all populist. Who won’t pose any kind of threat. Who’ll do their bidding, whatever it is. Servants and servitors, right? Subsisting on Universal Basic Income. Eating ze bugs. Signed up for endless government re-education courses to make themselves useful …

Ah, the Newcastle Guidestones. Here they are: the centre of the campus. A geordie Stonehenge, built from granite. Well, a replica Stonehenge, built about five minutes ago. The spiritual centre of the campus, right?

They’re supposed to be able to survive nuclear war. Every kind of disaster.

And what’s written on them? Maintain the human population under five hundred million. Be not a cancer on the earth. Let there a world government to govern us all wisely … In all these different languages. That’s Cyrillic. And that must be Chinese. That’s Hindi, right? And Hebrew …

Why are they bothering with such a tiny department?

It’s symbolic.

But philosophy’s a joke subject now – everyone knows that. A boutique subject. A museum subject. Like when you visit dramatic re-enactment events and all these people play the roles of blacksmiths and tavern wenches or whatever. We’re playing a role.

I mean, most the departments of proper European philosophy have been closed or infiltrated by analytic types. Warwick and Essex have fallen. Dundee’s down to, like, three people. Or they they’ve been merged with daft departments. We’re not just an endangered species – we’re actually extinct. So why are they bothering with us?

 

We’re the last mad humanities outpost. The true humanities. Not the compromised humanities. Not the identity politics humanities. Not the theory-drunk humanities, frothing with self-righteousness. But the proper critical thinking humanities, that’s dead everywhere else …

 

The amazing thing is that our paranoia came in useful for something. Our sense of great forces working against us. Our apocalypticism. Our doomy temperaments. It all makes sense. Turns out we have our role in all this. We’re the only people who understand it in its proper dimensions. We’re actually perfectly equipped for the times.

Who isn’t tired of being alive? Are we too tired to be alive? Don’t we want to give up the fight, and all fights? Don’t we want to sink into sleep and sink into the depths?

Isn’t it too complicated being alive? Isn’t it too compromising, going on? Don’t we just deepen the corruption by living any longer? Don’t we just deepen the corruption of our souls by persisting in being? Don’t we just stir up the waters? Don’t we mix our darkness with light?

Wouldn’t it be simpler if we just died? If we could just sink to our knees and have life taken from us? Isn’t that what the world wants? And God wants? Our deaths, our deaths! And what we want! Wouldn’t it harmonize all the desires: our desire, the world’s desire, the desire of God?

Why should we live long lives? Why should we live beyond our thirties? Why should we have to grow any older?

If only the campus would kill us – just kill us. Just take our lives. Wouldn’t that make sense – and the greatest sense? We’ve lived too long – of course we have. We’ve gone on too long. Our studies … have led us into the interminable. Too far! We’ve wandered too far from home. When home is – death.

This is no time to be alive – not for us. We outlived the moment when we should have died. We shouldn’t be alive now. We shouldn’t be awake to see this. The time of the Abomination. Of which this campus is a part. The Abominable. The Terrible.

 

How come the organisational managers are so at home in the Abominable. They’re part of the Abomination. That’s what they should call this campus: the Abomination.

 

Where’s God when you want him? There can’t be a God if this is allowed to go on. This campus is proof of the death of God.

Is it? Or is it proof that the God exists. By drawing out the maximum of evil. By pushing dread and horror to the utter limit.

And then? What happens then?

Then God comes.

The apocalypse?

The end.

There is no end. That’s not what I believe.

The Lord is the killer – that’s how he should show himself. The vehicle of the end of times: that’s what he should be. That’s his role now.

The second coming is the coming in fire. In flame. The anti-campus. The kingdom of heaven is the kingdom of death of this world.

We need the touch of God as the touch of death. On our fevered brow. We need a cure – to life. The void has destroyed itself. Creation is its wound, or whatever. All that’s left of God is death.

Is that so? What about goodness and mercy?

The Organisational Management campus longs, despite itself. It longs in its non-longing. It aches because it does not ache.

 

Organisational Management paving stones. Organisational Management trees planted in a row. Organisational Management lights just blinking. Shameless. Brazen.

So itself. And so much of it! So vast! And yet, in its paving stones. In its martialled trees. There is a shame. A great longing to be other than it is.

The desire to shed its shame. To shake it off. To cry upwards to the heavens in praise and pain and joy and mourning and regret. To sink down on its knees and cry upwards in repentance.

It knows its wretchedness. It knows that it’s a bed of sin. That’s it’s lost in its own mire.

Even the campus prays. Even the campus yearns. Even the campus casts up its eyes to heaven.

 

This whole benighted campus seeks pity. It knows it shouldn’t be. It cries out for its death sentence. To be put out of its misery. It can’t bear its perpetuation. It’s endless going on.

 

The campus becoming conscious. The campus, opening its eyes. What does it see? Itself. And more and more of itself. The campus, appalled. The campus, in horror at itself …

 

Its desire for self destruction. For mercy. The mercy of destruction. The grace of destruction. The end, come flashing down. The lightning strike. It does not want to be spared. It does not want to survive.

 

It wants to be undone. Throbs with it. Calls upwards for it. Gurgles on its own blood. Who’s going to make it alright? Who’s going to wipe away the tears of the campus?

 

The error must be corrected. The lost timeline. That’s just been allowed to … go on. To roll on in its meaninglessness.

Time, opening into nothing. For no reason. Time, exposed. Time, yawning into what? Into nothingness. Into horror. Into the night.

Time, falling into the night. Without purpose. To no end.

This timeline, plunging into the night. Closed-eyed. And crying out. Time is crying out. As it plunges. As it falls, without reason.

Time is screaming. Time itself. As it rushes. As there’s more senselessness. More dying. As more things meaning NOTHING.

The madness of time. The time of madness. The delirium of time.

Time does not want to be. Being does not want to be.

 

And who will help us?

God.

God’s forgotten us. God’s not in this timeline.