Work in Progress

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.

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.