Work in Progress

*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 But even this will be withdrawn from us in time.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.

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.