Work in Progress

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 ….

The Organisational Management campus

We’re being exposed to the worst. To see if we can take it. To see if we can resist. To see if we’re still human by the end of it.

We know what they want. Total fucking mind control. This whole evening – this whole event is an exercise in black magic. In hypnosis. Can we take it? Can we survive with our hippocampuses intact?

They and their kind have been controlling us for thousands of years. They’re smart. They have the oldest techniques. They’ve been Organisational Managing since the year dot, that’s what we have to remember. They’ve been doing this since, like, forever.

Look, if we can’t resist, then we’re done as a fucking species. We’re the last best hope for humanity …

Are we?

If they can do it to us, they can do it to anyone.

 

We’ve come to the dragon’s lair.

We’ve been made to come.

They’re going to try to fuck with our heads. To do things to us.

We’ve resisted up to now, haven’t we?

But this is their place. Their zone. Where they’re at their strongest. They’re relocating us here. For a reason.

We should be sober – ultra sober. Free from all … vices. Our blood should run clean.

No, we should be drunk. Desperately drunk. That’s the only way …

But how can we stand up to this? These towers? This show of power.

But we’re not about power. That’s our strength. Our crapness. Our inability. Our failure. The fact that we have no stake in all this. That we don’t want to get on …

 

Come, disaster. Come tonight. Wipe this campus off the face of the earth, like God did Sodom and Gomorrah.

And let it destroy us, too. We volunteer. We want to be destroyed.

We’re all down our separate rabbit holes. We’re too used to supposing that nothing’s real. Driss is all but convinced the world is flat, for fuck’s sake. That the moon landings were faked. That we’re just floating about in a dream, or whatever.

If you think everything’s a psy-op, then nothing might as well be a psy-op. If you’re convinced by nothing, you might as well be convinced by everything.

 

They own the counter-culture. They set up the fucking counterculture. That’s how they get us. They want us lost down mad rabbit holes. Debating whether the world is flat, or whatever. About whether we really landed on the moon. About whether the Khazarians are in charge of everything.

They want our heads spinning. They want us half deranged. They want us afloat. Blown hither and yon by this wind and that.

Which means that we have to philosophy-up. We have a responsibility to our ancient subject area. We have to use our philosophical heads. Our philosophical training. We have to drawn on great books that we’ve read, or half read. Those oeuvres we know, if only through superior secondary literature.

You, Barbarossa are our Heidegger man. You, Furio, our Schelling exepert. You, Driss, speak for Arendt and the origins of totalitarianism. You, Fiver. all the Deleuzain stuff. Vitalism. Bergson in general. Kitten, of course, is Jewish modernism. And you, Shiva, all that foggy philosophy of literature stuff, which is of no use to anyone.

 

We need someone with expertise in economics, of course.

The philosophy of economics?

Just economics. Alternative economics. The history of economics, maybe.

We need a historian. Someone who knows the history of corporatism. Its links with fascism. The history of technocracy. Someone who understands the old feudalism, best to recognise the coming feudalism into being.

We really need a psychologist. An expert on control mechanisms. On behavioural psychology. Nudge units. Someone who understands the coercion cascades. How they reach down.

We need legal experts. Who can tell us how they prepared for tyranny. How they worked on it for years.

We could do with a scientist. Who understands the lies. A scientist who hasn’t ben fooled. Hasn’t been bought off. Where do we find someone like that?

Not in the university.

Face it: we’re thrown back on ourselves. On our own resources.

 

We should develop a Centre for Research into the New World Order.

A secret Centre.

We need to raise money. Bid for funding … 

They'll love that. 

It just takes too long to freeze to death. And it’s too cold.

Hey, postgraduates – do you want to die? Is it time to die? It’s a blessing. Life doesn’t hold out much hope for you.

Come on, they might actually get jobs. Lectureships. They’re Russell Group PhD students, after all. They’re not coming from the same place as we are. They’re not crawlers out of the primordial slime. They’re not creatures from the lower league table universities.

Yeah – they’re not twisted like us. Noting’s gone fundamentally wrong with the heads.

Which means they won’t write our mutant philosophy. Our fuck up philosophy –

– Which we don’t even write.

 

Our postgraduates aren’t as fucked up as we are. They don’t have our deep problems.

Maybe not. That means they’re temptable! Biddable!

Unlike us! Unlike our kind! The hysterical kind!

They’re calmer. Better, probably.

I mean, look at us: we’re not even philosophers. My God, how wretched we are.

And they don’t find their wretchedness funny: that’s a big thing. They’re not amused by their plight, as we are at our plight. We actually find ourselves funny. We actually entertain ourselves.

Destroy us, Organisational Management Campus! We’re consuming precious resources! We’re polluting the campus! The planet!

We’re useless eaters. This is our useless eaters revue. This is the surplus population show.

We volunteer ourselves for depopulation! We’re volunteering for the cull! Take us, we’re yours, motherfuckers!

 

We’re doing no good. Only eating up resources. Lock us up! Lock us down!

Turn on your sirens. Let the spotlights find us. Send in the guard dogs. Or the killer drones. Or the flying monkeys. We’re braced. We’ve lived enough! We’ve gone on too long!

 

You’re new normal isn’t for us, Organisational Management Campus. Your brave new world. We’re not and never will be good technocratic subjects. We haven’t got the temperament. We’re the wrong types.

We’re spreaders of disinformation. Of mal-information, probably. We’re not the sort you want around. We’re not going to be good global citizens. Your nudges aren’t work on us.

We’re immune to behavioural psychology. To mass formation. We’re not going to be obedient. It’s not even defiance. We can’t help it. We’re not drones. We’re not non-player characters. We’re not the type to kiss the ring.

So take our lives. What does it take to get executed around here? Zap us from the sky! Rain it down!

I wish you’d just stop this bullshit.

Oh, Kitten, always so critical.

Can’t you see how hungover we are? We’ve earnt the right to talk like this. We actually had an adventure, while you were writing your magnum opus. A misadventure. We descended. We went down. To the abject. To abjection.

And dejection.

We were fucking destroyed. By our own hands. Our own drinking hands.

You’ve been together too much. You’re finishing each other’s sentences. The way you guys live. It’s sick. You’re sick. This isn’t how you’re supposed to live. This isn’t what you’re supposed to do.

Sure, tell us Kitten. Instruct us. We need to know. How should we be living.

Not like this, anyway. The way you wallow in your so-called despair. Which isn’t despair at all.

So what is it then?

You’re mediocre and you suffer from your mediocrity.

Devastating, Kitten. But you’re so right, Kitten – we’re mediocre. MEDIOCRE.

We accept your judgement, Kitten, Your judgement is correct. No one knows it better than us. We disappoint ourselves. We’ve never stopped disappointing ourselves. This is our state, we accept it. After all, what can we do.

We’re not like you, writing your magnum opus.

And stop talking about my magnum opus.

 

We don’t drink enough, that’s our problem. It hasn’t become a way of life. We’re not alcoholics. Not yet.

Aspirant alcoholics. Maybe that’s what we are.

There’s a kind of self-cruelty we’ve yet to muster. So we’re outsourcing it to you. Be cruel, Kitten. We’re ready. Our chests are bare. Slip the knife in.

 

You’re a do-gooder – so do some good, Kitten. You know what’s best. Tell us: we’re ready to listen.

We’ve had enough! God knows!

 

Maybe there’s still hope for us. Our lives aren’t in a state of total collapse. We aren’t in total freefall. We’re not destitute. We’re not even alcoholics – not yet, at least. Our heart’s not even in drinking.

So where are our hearts?

It’s a mystery. What do we want? What can we do?

To write something, maybe. To think something. Are we any good at that? A single thought. A single idea. To write a single line that isn’t … secondary commentary. An idea of our own! God knows!